The bellhop would bring it up to your room.
That is the detail that tells you what Miami had become by the middle of the twenties. Not the mansions and not the machine guns — the bellhop. In a city where every hotel ran on tips and every guest was leaving on Sunday, the man who carried your bags could get you a bottle, and did, and everybody knew it, and nobody much minded.
Prohibition was the law in Miami exactly as it was everywhere else in America. It simply meant less there than almost anywhere.
A city built to receive people
Miami in the 1920s was in the middle of one of the strangest land booms in American history. The railway had come down, the automobile had arrived, and a swamp on the edge of the continent was being sold in lots to people from Ohio who had never seen a palm tree. Orange groves and mangrove flats turned into hotels. Whole neighborhoods were drawn on paper and sold before they were built.
Hundreds of thousands of tourists came, and the entire economy reorganized itself around making them feel welcome.
Think about what that means for a business that needs to sell something illegal. A resort city is full of strangers, and being a stranger there is not remarkable — it is the point. Nobody asks where you’re from. Nobody notices you didn’t come back next season. The money moves fast and in cash and in small amounts, through hotels and clubs and cabarets, which is precisely the kind of traffic in which a great deal of liquor can be concealed.
And the geography was extraordinary. Bimini sits about fifty miles off the Florida coast; Nassau a couple of hundred. Cuba was a boat ride, and later a short flight. Every one of those places sold liquor perfectly legally to anyone with cash, and none of them was interested in what happened afterwards.
That is the whole of it. Rum Row off New York and New Jersey has the famous name, but the southern end of the trade — the short, warm, well-supplied end — ran into Florida.
The man on Palm Island
Al Capone bought the house on Palm Island in 1928, and there is a story people in Miami still tell about how he made himself welcome: that on an early visit he went into a shop belonging to a man with civic standing and spent a thousand dollars on silk shirts, and that a productive relationship followed.
I can’t source that one to anything contemporary, and I’d treat it as folklore rather than fact. But it survives because it describes something true. Capone in Miami was not hiding. He was a rich man buying his way into a town that wanted rich men, and for several years the arrangement suited everybody. He was photographed on the beach in bathing trunks. He gave parties. He was, in a sense the city never quite admitted to, a tourist.
He was not the only one. Men from Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and New York all came south, and the striking thing about Florida in those years is how little they fought there. What happened in Miami was not much like what happened in Chicago — fewer bodies, less noise, less press. Operators who were rivals elsewhere seem largely to have left one another alone in a place where everyone was making money and nobody wanted the attention.
The same logic had been on display at the Atlantic City conference in 1929, hosted by Nucky Johnson — the recognition that open warfare was expensive and cooperation paid better.
Tobacco Road
Some of it is still traceable. There was a bar on South Miami Avenue, on the south side of the river, that held a liquor license going back to 1912 — one of the oldest in the city, in a building that had started life as a bakery. During Prohibition the upstairs room worked as a speakeasy, which is the kind of arrangement that was hiding in plain sight all over town: a legitimate business downstairs, a door at the back, a staircase.
Tobacco Road outlived every gangster in this post. It stayed open, more or less continuously, for a hundred years, and closed in 2014 when the land underneath it became worth more than the bar. Four thousand people came on the last night.
That is one way to measure what Prohibition did to a city. The speakeasy upstairs is now a footnote in the history of a bar that people cried over when it shut.
What Edith walks into
Here is the part the popular version leaves out.
The boom did not last. In September 1926 a hurricane came through Miami and destroyed a great deal of it, and the land market — already wobbling — collapsed. Then the rest of the country’s economy followed in 1929. By the early thirties, Florida’s frantic decade was over and the state was as broke as everywhere else.
And Al Capone was gone. Convicted on tax charges in 1931, in federal prison by 1932. The house on Palm Island stayed; the man in it did not.
So when Edith Duffy arrives in Miami in 1932, she is not arriving in the paradise of the newsreels. She is arriving in the aftermath — a resort city with too many empty hotel rooms, a bootlegging economy running on habit, and repeal already visible on the horizon. Prohibition had fourteen months left, though nobody could be certain of that yet.
That is where I wanted her. Not at the top of a boom, where the money is easy and the decisions are obvious, but afterwards — a widow with no capital and one marketable skill, walking into a place where the good years have already happened to somebody else.
She buys a speakeasy on the edge of the Everglades called ‘Gator Joe’s. It burns. She rebuilds it bigger and calls it Goodtimes.
The mobsters in these books are real enough and dangerous enough, and they are not the subject. They’re the weather. What I keep writing about is the woman standing out in it doing arithmetic — one of the women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America, in a place where the rules had gone soft and the money had already left.
Philadelphia is as much Edith’s world as Florida is. She’s there through the whole of the Bootleggers’ Chronicles — Maggie Barnes’s series, and a city’s — living inside Mickey’s rise and the corruption that grew up around it. The historical record on his death is thin and stays thin: shot in a hotel suite in Atlantic City in August 1931, nobody ever charged, the likeliest theory being his own people. That silence is where fiction gets to work, and by the final book I had let myself wonder something the record will never answer. It’s a novelist’s question, not a historian’s, and I want to be plain that I invented it.
The trade she walks into afterwards was built by people like Bill McCoy and Cleo Lythgoe, both of them out of it before she arrived. Her Florida years are the Rum Runners’ Chronicles. And Mickey’s own story — Grays Ferry to the house with the black metal palm — is its own post.
Edith’s story starts in Red Sky at Night, a free novella set twelve miles off Miami in 1932. It’s yours if you’d like it — download your copy.