Dade County's Public Enemy No. 1 and gambling gambits of the 1940s

Greater Miami 1940
Florida State Archives/Fishbaugh/Florida Memory

By Jane Feehan

Greater Miami during the 1940s was wide open for mobsters who endeavored to get into the gambling business.  One of them, Joseph “Jack” Friedlander, elbowed his way from Newark, NJ into Florida rackets as early as 1940. By 1948, he was declared Public Enemy No. 1 by Daniel P. Sullivan, director of Miami’s Crime Commission.

Sullivan claimed Friedlander brought the New Jersey mob element to Miami through his association with Abner (Longy) Zwillman, kingpin of the numbers, bookmaking and bootlegging business in the Garden State. He was probably right. That association evidently gave Russian-born Friedlander the confidence to ally himself with Harry Russell of the Capone gang and to work his way into the territory of the local SG syndicate by playing one gamer against the other. Friedlander soon became a partner in every gambling house in the Miami area.

Friedlander made life tough for the houses that did not play along with him; he would drop hints to law enforcement who then raided the uncooperative establishments. By the mid- to late 1940s he managed the Blackamoor Hotel in Miami and owned pieces of the famed Island Club, Little Palm, and Club 86. He was the bag man for officials who gladly took money from him to look the other way when they came upon illegal gambling.  Friedlander later admitted that his “Little Syndicate” influenced elections for Dade County sheriff in 1944 and 1948 that set up James “Jimmy” Sullivan (who was later arrested) as the county’s top law enforcer.

In 1949 investigative reporters wrote about a $1.5 million-a-year  numbers racket Friedlander and ex-con David Marcus ran out of two offices. One, operating as Aircraft Equipment Company, was located  at the Aviation Building at 3240 NW 27^th Ave.; the other ran out of 719 NW 2^nd Ave. They employed between 250-300 people to run the numbers racket or bolita. Friedlander was known as the bolita king.

Director Sullivan said Friedlander had no fear of law enforcement. Things changed in 1950. Friedlander was indicted that year for a list of transgressions involving gambling. He testified in 1951 at the Kefauver hearings held in Miami where he admitted to many illicit activities but claimed he might have been Public Enemy No. 999, not No. 1. After the hearings, he, along with other Miami mobsters, were soon out of work. It was the beginning of the end for a $100 million industry that involved operations at 200 hotels and scores of enterprising gangsters.

Friedlander’s descent from glory was rapid. In April of 1952 it was reported that his house on posh Pinetree Drive was ransacked. Friedlander reported $275 in cash and a ring were stolen. The government placed a $14,696 lien on that house a few months after the Kefauver hearings. Friedlander went on to own the Dade Boulevard restaurant but times were tough.  Despondent over his finances, he attempted suicide in 1957 via an overdose of sleeping pills at his Miami Beach apartment on Byron Avenue. His wife, Sally, discovered him unconscious when the telephone rang at 2:30 a.m. and he did not stir.

He survived the suicide attempt (age 56 then) but news accounts of what happened to Jack Friedlander after that and when he died are nonexistent. If you have any information on his death, please post  comment below. Copyright © 2014 All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

 Sources:

Miami News, Apr. 23, 1947

Miami News, Dec. 12, 1948

Miami News, Mar. 13, 1949

Miami News, May 11, 1949

Miami News, Sept. 27, 1950

Miami News, Oct. 22, 1950

Daytona Beach Morning Journal, Feb. 17, 1951

Miami News, June 29, 1951

Miami News, Apr. 7, 1952

Miami News, May 14, 1957

Tags: Gambling in Miami, Jack Friedlander, Abner Zwillman, Miami in the 1940s, film researcher, Miami history

Wig wags bring big bucks to bookies - SOFLA race parks 1940s

By Jane Feehan

Gulfstream Park 1948
Florida State Archives

It was estimated that 2,000 bookie joints operated in the Greater Miami area (including Fort Lauderdale) in 1948-49. 

“Wig wag” men helped ensure success of the popular but illegal gambling industry.

These men traveled the country from track to track to communicate through hand signals the new line, or post race odds, while horses ran. Signals included smoothing hair, raising arms with fingers outstretched, running arms down their sides, patting their heads, scratching and more. Wig wags, brightly attired so they could be picked out in a crowd in front of the grandstand, were observed by scanners, or people located about a half-mile away.

Gulfstream Park probably 1940s or 50s

State Archives of Florida

In Miami, scanners were situated at a large two-story house at 7701 Bird Road. They used powerful military binoculars to track the changing odds. Changing odds were important to bookies; it insured that favorable odds would not be beaten down by bets going through machines legally at the track.

The house on Bird Road (long gone and now part of a highway) was the nerve center for Miami’s bookie industry. During the 40s, most bookies operated in Miami under mob-run and intentionally misnamed Continental Press Service. Press services needed telegraph and telephone banks.

Investigating reporters in 1948 visited the house where they found a “motherly-looking woman” on the first floor, knitting. The clicking of her needles ostensibly drowned out telegraph tapping on the floor above. (Phones had been pulled out after prior police investigations.) Bookies also used short wave radio or “mobile automobile radio” from a locked car to hear a race in progress. A microphone would be suspended beneath a car located near the track.

The most favorable swindles were those involving out-of-state locations with lag times in telegraph communication. Last minute odds—whittling odds—was the lifeblood of bookie operations; without them, 95 percent of their business would disappear. In 1948, bookies raked in between $250 million to $300 million from Hialeah, Tropical Park, and Gulfstream race parks in South Florida, and Sunshine Park in Tampa while about $98 million went through the same tracks legally.

Eight percent of legal betting revenues went to the state in taxes. Five percent was divided among Florida’s 67 counties where it sometimes subsidized an entire county government.  The remaining three percent went to an old age assistance fund matched by federal money. Illegal off track betting probably cheated the state out of $10 million a year then. Tax losses served as some of the fodder in the campaign against illegal gambling in the late 1940s. Arrests of wig wag men were routine by 1949.

Betting continues to be big business in the Sunshine State, but today it’s predominantly legal. Gambling revenues from six South Florida state-operated casinos (not Seminole establishments) jumped more than 12 percent in 2013 netting the state $162 million in taxes; the national average was a 4.8 percent increase.  Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

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Sources:

Miami News, Dec. 12, 1948

Miami News, Dec. 13, 1948

Miami News, Dec. 14, 1948

Miami News, March 8, 1949

Sun-Sentinel, May 7, 2013

Tags: Gambling history, racetrack gambling in the 1940s, Continental Press service, wig wag men, film researcher

Gran Casino Nacional - "Monte Carlo of the Western Hemisphere," run by mobsters - for awhile

Photo by nurzumspass,
CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>,
via Wikimedia Commons

Gran Casino Nacional 

Hotel Nacional de Cuba

www.hotelnacionaldecuba.com

  

By Jane Feehan

There’s a scene in Godfather II depicting a meeting of  underworld characters at a Havana hotel during the late 1940s. It was a re-enactment of a summit held at the Hotel Nacional attended by mobsters Meyer Lansky*, Lucky Luciano, Santo Trafficante, Jr., Frank Costello and others. They came to discuss, among other mob interests, expansion of  their gambling world. Trafficante ran the hotel’s famous casino, Gran Casino Nacional. The law (if not politicians) was making it difficult to run gambling houses in South Florida. Cuba was a ripe opportunity.*

They had a lot to work with at the Havana hotel. It had an elegant reputation, drawing the upper crust from all over the world.  Designed and built in 14 months by two American companies, McKim, Mead and White (architects), and Purdy and Henderson Co., Hotel Nacional opened in December 1930 to wide acclaim. Its Hispanic-Moorish architecture with Art Deco accents provided an elegant setting that drew the rich and famous for years before it caught the attention of Lansky and friends.

The Miami News ran a story (Jan. 17, 1932) extolling the hotel’s guest list and sumptuous opening festivities of its third season.  “Havana has an attraction to offer the tourist which no resort in the United States can offer – a casino,” the reporter wrote. “Its beauty and splendor rivals the hotels of Europe and it is called the Monte Carlo of the Western Hemisphere.”

Opening night that third year, the ballroom was converted into a setting for a “Spanish fiesta,” with “intriguing lighting effects of Spanish and American lanterns,” priceless shawls and appropriate formal dress for such an occasion. Guests included American notables Harry F. Guggenheim and wife, A.J. Drexel Biddle and wife, and the British Duke of Manchester and his actress wife Kathleen Dawes (married there). They were joined by prominent South Americans and European royals. 

Fast forward nearly two decades to when Trafficante managed this casino and others in Havana. Some say he ran it into the ground but not before drawing movie stars and other celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway and assorted world figures such as Winston Churchill to the hotel. Fidel Castro chased Trafficante – and the rest of the mob – out of Cuba a year or so after he overthrew Fulgencio Battista in 1959. (Mobster Jimmy Fratianno claimed Castro sent Trafficante to Florida to spy on Cubans there; later Trafficante was linked to a plot to assassinate Castro.)

The 457-room, eight-story hotel has had its ups and downs over the years during Castro's cash-strapped regime. It was restored during the 1990s in a bid to attract more tourists. Most of its glamour belongs to history, not the present. See link above for more photos.

* Ben "Bugsy" Siegel's Las Vegas dream, the Flamingo Hotel, opened in 1946.

Tags: Casino history, mob history, Meyer Lansky, Sandi Lansky, gambling casino, organized crime in Cuba, film researcher,

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Hotel_Nacional_de_Cuba_-_panoramio.jpg

Colonial Inn - east U.S. gambling hub in the 1940s

By Jane Feehan

Opened in Hallandale (a few miles south of Fort Lauderdale) in December, 1945, Colonial Inn* was one of the plushest gambling spots in the eastern United States. 

Gambling wasn’t legal but Broward County officials turned a blind eye on the operation as it drew in millions of dollars for its owners.

Gangsters thought to have been involved in its operations included Joe Adonis, Meyer Lansky, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo and perhaps, Frank Costello (Kefauver Committee Hearings Interim Report #3, 1951). “Gambling Baron” Mert Wertheimer operated the place when it first opened and later moved to Las Vegas to oversee the popular Riverside Hotel Casino in Las Vegas.

During its short life as a casino, the Colonial Inn, which was located near today's Gulfsream Park, hosted big-name floor shows. Some of the entertainers included Carmen Miranda who headlined weekly for $11,000 with comedian Joe E. Lewis as master of ceremonies for $6,500 a week (Miami News, Feb. 13, 1948).

Fort Lauderdale’s Dwight Rogers Jr., Florida’s assistant state attorney 1948-1952, closed casino operations in 1948. The inn later served as a television studio and was then sold for conversion into a hotel in 1951 (Miami News, Jul. 30, 1951, p. 14). 

Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

* This is NOT the Colonial Inn of Motel Row in North Miami - no connection.

Meyer Lansky buys Colonial Inn, see:
http://janeshistorynook.blogspot.com/2013/04/meyer-lansky-buys-colonial-inn-from-lou.html


For information about Sheriff Walter Clark and gambling in Broward County during the 1940s, see: https://janeshistorynook.blogspot.com/2020/09/sheriff-walter-clark-broward-gambling.html

See index for more on Lansky.

Tags: Miami gambling in the 1940s, casinos in Miami Beach in the 1940s, Meyer Lansky, Hallandale history