“Quit your whining, you pussy son of a bitch,” the party chief said.
John Ashley turned to tell him that if he said another word without permission he’d break his jaw—and in that instant Phil Dolan broke for the trees and Roy Matthews shouted, “Watch it, Johnny!”
All in one motion John Ashley whirled and raised the revolver and fired. The pistol blasted an orange streak and bucked hard in his hand and a chunk of Phil Dolan’s skull jumped off his head and Dolan lunged forward with his arms out to his sides like he was flinging himself into the surf. He lit on his face and lay still.
A pair of shotguns boomed almost simultaneously and John Ashley spun in a crouch with the revolver ready and saw Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews jacking fresh shells and both of them looking to the edge of the woods where the party chief lay in an awkward tangle a few feet shy of the trees which was as far as he’d gotten before the buckshot took him down. In the hazy lantern light his left forearm was ripped open to the bones and his back looked scooped of a spadeful of flesh and rib to expose to the indifferent stars his mutilated organs. The air smelled of gunsmoke.
Everyone held mute. John Ashley slowly lowered his gun and turned and walked over to Phil Dolan and stared down at the lanternlit spill of blood and brainmatter around his broken skull. You dumb cracker, he thought—it wasnt no need. He wasnt sure if his thoughts were directed at Phil Dolan or himself or both. He stood perplexed by his own angry sorrow.
He saw Clarence Middleton looking serious and Hanford Mobley grinning widely at nobody in particular. Roy Matthews was squatting beside the shotgunned man and now looked over at John Ashley and shook his head. The men of the shore party had all put their hands up high. They looked terrified. “Put your hands down,” John Ashley said to the shore party, and some did, and some put them back on top of their heads, and some seemed reluctant to bring them down at all.
“I said put them
John Ashley sighed heavily and put the revolver in his waistband and rested the shotgun barrel against his shoulder and rubbed his face hard. He regarded the frightened men before him, then walked up and looked closely into every man’s face in turn. Then he directed Clarence Middleton to give each man five dollars. As Clarence dispensed the money, John Ashley told them they had until sunup to get out of Palm Beach County. They could not go back to Dade. They could not go south at all. They could go only north to at least Jacksonville or north-westward to at least Pensacola. “Be best if you get all the way out the state,” John Ashley said. “Now I know what all you look like and I never forget a face. I ever see any of you anywhere in Florida outside of Jacksonville or Pensacola, I wont even ask you what you’re doin. I’ll just shoot you where you stand. Do you all believe me?”
They nodded, all of them quickeyed and tightfaced. John Ashley told them to get on the trucks, he was taking them to the train station. The men loosened the tarp covers and clambered aboard and positioned themselves carefully so as not to upset the hams. When every man of them was on the trucks, John Ashley and Hanford Mobley drew down the tarps and tied them tightly in place. Then John took Roy Matthews and Clarence Middleton aside and told them to dispose of the bodies where they wouldn’t be found.
An hour later John Ashley and Hanford Mobley were watching the Midnight Flyer pulling out of the West Palm Beach station with its whistle shrieking and its smokestack huffing high black plumes and tossing sparks as the train headed for Jacksonville and points north with all ten men of the shore party aboard. At the same moment, Clarence Middleton and Roy Matthews, with a pair of dead men stretched at their feet, were on an eighteen-foot launch cutting through the ocean and heading for the Gulf Stream under the high half-moon. When they reached the Stream they would cut back the motor and the boat would rise and fall on the silvery swells as they tied concrete blocks to the dead men’s feet and cut their bellies open with a buck knife and felt the boat bottom go slick under their shoes. They would roll the bodies over the side to plunge into the dark fastrunning depths with blood billowing and intestines uncoiling and sharks closing fast to rid the world of all mortal evidence that these men did ever exist.
SEVENTEEN
February—June 1921
OVER THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS THEY HIJACKED NEARLY OF DOZEN truckloads of booze coming through on Palm Beach County roads and another half-dozen shipments that landed at various beaches along the county shoreline. The word was out among rumrunners in Florida: you paid the tribute the Ashleys demanded or you risked having them hijack your load—or you found some roundabout route to bypass their territory and get your stuff to Miami. Some of the runners coming through Palm Beach were smalltimers trying to build up their portion of Miami trade and most of them grudgingly paid off the Ashleys rather than lose their cargoes. But Nelson Bellamy steadfastly refused to pay for the right to move his product through Palm Beach County. Now and then one of his crews managed to sneak a load through Palm Beach without being spotted, but the Ashley Gang continued to intercept most of his truck imports and beach drops and cut deeply into his profits.
From the time of their first hijackings Gordon Blue had pleaded with them to desist from stealing Nelson Bellamy’s booze. “Take anybody else’s stuff but not his,” Blue told them one afternoon at Twin Oaks. “He works for the Chicago organization, for God’s sake. I represent his legal interests down here. He knows I represent you too, but he says he doesnt hold me responsible for your actions. That’s what he
“If he’s so mad at us, why aint he done nothin about it when we’re in Miami?” Frank Ashley said. “We’re down there all the time—dancin at the Elser, eatin in restaurants. We do a little gamblin in Hardieville, we stay in hotels. It aint hard to find us. If he’s so made why aint he tried to shoot our ass off like he tried that one time with old Roy here?”
“Believe me, Frank, he would if he thought he could get away with it,” Gordon Blue said. “But the chief of police told him if there’s anymore public violence he’ll come down on him and his organization with both feet, no matter how much they juice him. Too many citizens have complained to him about the rough stuff in the streets. No, you boys are all right in Miami as long as you stay together so he cant take you down one at a time. But
Joe Ashley said he didnt see what Gordon was so worried about if Bellamy wasnt holding him to account for the Ashleys. “It’s between him and us,” Old Joe said. “Got nothin to do with you, so you got nothin to fret about.” He dismissed with a handwave any rebuttal Gordon Blue might have thought to make.
Bill Ashley had sat in on the meeting but said nothing, knowing well when his father’s position was adamant. But he had earlier argued in private with Old Joe that the hijackings were bad business and could only lead to greater troubles, that the wiser course would be to seek some sort of accommodation with Bellamy. The look Old Joe gave him was rawly scornful. “You dont go askin for
Most of the hijackings during those four months went fast and smoothly—but on three occasions Bellamy’s truck crews made a fight of it. In both of the first two scraps, a truck guard got wounded but neither was killed. The sole Ashley Gang casualty came in the second fight, during a hijacking in March and less than a mile south of Boynton Beach. Albert Miller had been pleading with John Ashley for weeks to take him along on a job, and in this, his first one, he got his ring finger shot off. “To hell with this Jesse James stuff,” he said on the drive back to Twin Oaks, holding tight to the bloody bandanna wrapped around the finger stub that Ma Ashley would cauterize and bind properly. “You boys can have it.”
The most recent skirmish came on a moonlit night in April. They’d stopped a truck loaded with Jamaican rum
