by Noel Hynd
“Wow,” she said softly.
“Yes,” I said.
My wife said little more to me that night. The case didn’t seem like a good idea to her, money notwithstanding. She must have had an instinct. I should have known better, too.
Two days later, I left for Nassau.
CHAPTER 3
I took a train from New York to Atlanta, then another hot rattling wartime peasant wagon to Miami. I hated flying and feared for my safety every time I went aloft in a plane, but I had no choice. The murder of Sir Harry Oakes had already become the biggest story on the planet outside of the war. I needed to get to Nassau while there were still lodgings available, ahead of the rest of the world. To do that I needed to fly, at least part of the way.
I arrived in Nassau by air from Miami four days after Oakes had been murdered. Already all hell was breaking out, particularly on the Bahamian island of New Providence where Nassau sat as the colonial capital. On my way in from the airport, I was already sensing the mood. My taxi driver’s name was Felix, a pleasant man of about thirty with skin the hue of light coffee. He wore a noisy tropical shirt and a straw hat and smiled easily. I struck up a casual conversation with him and steered it to the death of Sir Harry Oakes.
Felix told me that Harry’s genitals had been mutilated by a blow torch, something I hadn’t heard yet and which was not part of any information that had been released to the public. But this was why I liked to talk to cab drivers.
“What did that suggest?” he asked me. “Destroying a man’s power center?”
“The obvious,” I said. “Jealousy. Revenge, maybe.”
Felix laughed. “Of course,” he said.
My driver took me to the British Colonial Hotel, a comfortable place that was aptly named. As I paid him and tipped him, he wrote out his three-digit phone number.
“You need any rides around the island,” he said, “I can drive you. I can be your guide.”
I thanked him again and booked into the hotel, carefully putting Felix’s phone number in my billfold.
The hotel was on Bay Street. I took a walk shortly after my arrival to familiarize myself with the area. Bay Street was the widest and toniest thoroughfare on this overheated island two hundred miles east of Miami. Bay Street was also where the money was and where the power resided. Bay ran from the hotel on its west end to the glimmering Yacht Club and beyond in the east. There were banks and government buildings. Lawyers. Real estate developers. Insurance agents. There were shops and bars jammed-packed one-by-one next to each other, few with entrances wider than sixteen feet.
Pastel-colored canvas canopies in pinks and blues and green, much of them faded and weathered, fluttered above the pavements and softened the look of the sides of the street. Some of the better canopies were tiled and more secure, or had iron pillars supporting them. The sun could be hard and so could the drenching rains. No merchant wanted to deter a wealthy shopper.
My new best friend, Felix, had told me just before arrival that some of these iron pillars had once been used as hitching posts for horses and then were reshaped and repositioned during the 1930’s when automobiles began to make their presence on the island. Felix appeared correct.
On the lesser end of Bay Street and around the corners, these same pillars were horizontal. Farmers and contractors who still drove buggies used them as depots to bring their wares into Nassau. To my eye, they gave the town the look and feel of the American Old West.
On each block, there were outdoor stairways that led to the second floors above the shops. I glanced upward, and saw that the doors on the upstairs landings bore cryptic names of discreet businesses. These were registered companies with non-descript names painted in gold letters on solid black doors. Anyone who was anyone in Nassau had a portal here—lawyers and accountants mostly, above the businesses. Bay Street was where finances took place, where you spent it, where you transferred it, where you protected it. The upstairs people, the financial operators, were like puppeteers above their storefront marionettes. Probably everyone behind these doors had known Sir Harry. Probably everyone had a theory as to what had happened and why. I knew already that no one was going to take very kindly to strangers, much less a busybody reporter from New York.
I was exhausted from travel, and so I retreated to my hotel for a six-p.m. dinner, then sat in the hotel bar. I listened to what people were talking about, and spoke to no one first. I didn’t want to seem too anxious. I would respond when someone asked my opinion of some aspect of the case, but mostly I listened and sipped rum Cokes with plenty of ice. I heard more stories and parts of stories than I could count, and many probably had some truth to them. It was hard not to hear stories, since the murder was all anyone was talking about.
Sir Harry had looked upon the world as his oyster and he had a gargantuan appetite. He was a ham-fisted gent and, despite his age, he packed a wallop. He delighted in bullying his presumed social inferiors. If a shopkeeper did something to displease him, he would clear his throat and spit on the man. His servant turnover was brisk.
Of course, he was known to everyone in Nassau. How could he not have been? On any given day, hot, tepid, rainy or sunny, he would walk along Bay Street, clad in high boots and a prospector’s rumpled jacket, hands buried in his baggy pockets. His hat was jammed on his head. He’d whistle tunelessly, nodding a greeting here, grunting a good morning there, striking up casual conversations in a sharp nasal voice. He could easily have been a gold miner—which he once had been—setting out for another day’s desperate prospecting. This was the image he wore like a suit of armor for decades.
I also heard that Oakes was in the habit of going down to the wharves wearing white pants and a loud sports jacket to cast an eye on the unattached females that came down the gangplanks from the tourist ships. When he saw something tasty, the chase was on. It was hardly a secret in Nassau that more than one fair tourist, after being spotted by the old huntsman, had experiences not mentioned in the tourist literature. The talk around Nassau was incessant: Sir Harry had dished out favors both financial and amatory to certain ladies in permanent residence on the island. Any one of these cuckolded men would have been a logical suspect.
I quickly caught on to something else. The islands were strictly segregated. White Bahamians had raised the old-time master-servant attitudes to an art form. Nonwhites on the islands had been consistently denied any political or economic power. The “colored,” as they were politely but condescendingly called, still constituted the classes who provided dirt-cheap labor. They lived at a lower standard of living than any whites on the island. In 1943, when I arrived, non-white people were routinely denied access to downtown hotels, restaurants and theatres. The Bahamas were an extension of the American south of the late Nineteenth Century, but with a British colonial accent, hotter weather, and worse insects.
Deep trouble simmered beneath the surface, as it often does in repressive places. The islands, I knew, had the potential to blow sky high. The white minority had the electoral power locked up because they denied voting to nonwhites. The geography of the island made subsistence farming almost impossible. The whites then used the non-white population as a captive market for the merchandise imported by traders from Europe and North America and other points around the Caribbean. As nonwhites were not allowed to be merchants, only whites could sell to blacks. Hence, white Bahamians arrogantly extorted generations of profits from their less fortunate countrymen with no hint of shame. Why would there have been? Many among them felt that the “colored” were incapable of living in a civilized way. The Bay Street Boys, the term for the white power elite on the islands, were doing something wonderful by exploiting them.
Despite the prevailing and rampant atmosphere of stuffy British colonialism, Nassau was a place unto itself. The standards of other British colonies didn’t always apply. Adultery, boozing, gambling, philandering, any combination of the aforesaid, was fair game.
***
Later that same night, I found a
favorite bar not far from the hotel. It was named Dirty Dicks. It became my new hangout. I spent my first few evenings there, falling into conversation with anyone who would talk to me. I didn’t initiate talk. I let others do it.
I wasn’t naïve about what went on in the West Indies, however. I’d heard plenty of stories from a man I knew named Bill McCoy, who was once the subject of one of my true crime articles but who had also become a friend over the years.
Bill McCoy had been one of the great “gentleman smugglers” from the Prohibition Era. Bill was a handsome bastard who liked to call himself, “The Real McCoy.” He stood six feet tall plus a couple of inches. He had a powerful build, a voice like a fog horn and genial Ivy League good looks.
Bill owned a twenty-foot boat called The Tamoka. Prior to Prohibition, Bill and his industrious brother Ben ran a boat yard and taxi boat service in Holly Hill, Jacksonville, Florida, but they weren’t having much success. Bill was a few weeks away from bankruptcy when he and his brother were approached by a friendly gangster—you can meet anyone along the coast, after all—and asked if they’d be interested in accepting a hundred bucks to sail a liquor shipment ashore through Rum Row, the Prohibition-era line of ships loaded with liquor anchored beyond the maritime limit of the United States. The maritime limit was three miles prior to April 21, 1924, and twelve miles thereafter.
They said no. But an idea was born.
Collecting together the last of his savings, Bill began his smuggler’s career by investing in the 90-foot schooner Henry L. Marshall, which he soon sailed to Nassau. There he loaded his ship with fifteen hundred cases of Canadian whiskey. Three days later the Marshall entered back into US waters via St. Catherine’s Sound, twenty miles south of Savannah, Georgia. They sold the booze for $15,000 in tax free funds.
It was early 1921. Bill McCoy had re-invented himself.
On a regular basis, McCoy began to smuggle whiskey into the U.S., sailing from Nassau and Bimini in the Bahamas to the east coast of the United States, spending most time dealing on Rum Row off New Jersey. After a few successful trips smuggling liquor off the coast of the United States, Bill McCoy had enough money to buy a 130-foot schooner named Arethusa, the “waterer” in Greek mythology. A man of sound business principles, and himself a teetotaler, McCoy soon expanded the operation. He hired a second captain for the Marshall and purchased a new flagship of his own and refitted it as a “floating liquor store.”
Recognizing the potential for legal trade just outside America’s three-mile marine border, Bill anchored his fully laden vessels just inside international waters and arranged for thirsty boating enthusiasts to make their way through Rum Row to purchase liquor from his floating stores.
McCoy took precautions, of course. Only two potential buyers would be permitted aboard at any one time. And all trading vessels would be under the scrutiny of a swivel machine gun on the Arethusa’s prow to deter anyone with funny hijacking ideas. Bill, a former US Navy man who had been aboard the Olivette in Havana Harbor in 1898 when The Maine exploded, employed Great War veterans behind his guns.
Despite the ugly security needs, Bill was a gracious host on board ship. He developed wonderful rapport with his customers, often inviting them to remain aboard for evening cocktails and parties.
Bill also developed the “smuggler’s ham,” an innovative way of transporting liquor between vessels. A “ham” consisted of a pyramid of six bottles arranged triangularly and bound tightly in straw and burlap. The bundles stacked conveniently and were easier to move between vessels than the stodgy old wooden cases of twelve. Most hams were stuffed with salt which, if Bill’s ship was about to be boarded by authorities, could be thrown overboard where they would sink with the weight of the salt, hiding any incriminating evidence. Later the salt would dissolve and the sack would float back to the surface when McCoy’s people came looking for it.
Bill was a busy man in the early 1920’s, zipping up and down the east coast of the United States with his contraband cargo. He transported eight-dollar cases of liquor from the Bahamas to Martha’s Vineyard on the Arethusa, making $300,000 in profit for each trip. It was a great business.
Bill’s first clash with the authorities occurred on August 2nd, 1921. The Marshall, along with its captain and crew, were nabbed off New Jersey by the US Coast Guard with fourteen hundred cases of whiskey aboard. The surprise was the vessel’s seizure in international waters outside of the legal three-mile boundary.
Authorities filed two writs against the vessel, dredging up an old Maritime Act of 1790 which implied a twelve-mile limit of approach for any vessels engaged in fraudulent pursuits. The discovery of the old act set a new legal precedent for the maritime border, causing a major blow to smugglers working on the Rum Row.
Initially the owner of the Marshall could not be identified, but once Bill was labelled responsible, he became one of the most wanted men of the Prohibition era. To safeguard against any further surprises, Bill re-registered the Arethusa under British sovereignty as the Tamoka and French sovereignty as the Marie Celeste. Foreign registration offered a degree of protection as US authorities were less likely to board international vessels in international waters.
For Bill, however, his smuggling days came to an end in 1923 while on a night run in November. The Tamoka with Bill aboard was seized six and a half miles off the coast of Seabright, New Jersey. The USCG flagship Seneca was the captor, the same ship as had busted Bill in 1921. Despite McCoy’s attempt to outrun the Seneca, a warning shot from one of her four 6-pounder guns convinced McCoy to surrender.
With plenty of connections and savings behind him, McCoy remained on bail for two years thanks to a sympathetic judge—a drinking man, no doubt—who allowed a monitored confinement in a New Jersey hotel room. Bill had freedom to come and go as he pleased. It was then that I met him and interviewed him over lunch at The Algonquin on West Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan. The interview formed the basis of a two-part piece I wrote on him for The American Mercury.
“I’m an honest lawbreaker, Alan,” Bill explained to me. “I’m somewhat like John Hancock and John Adams before the American Revolution.”
“Nonetheless, you may go to jail,” I said to him.
He shrugged. “So did David Thoreau,” he said. “What irks me is I was legally in international waters when the Seneca attacked me. Never trust your own government, hear me?”
Eventually Bill served nine months in a New Jersey jail after pleading guilty to all counts of illegal smuggling. Once his time was finished, having been out of the game for so long and with his savings eaten into due to legal fees, Bill decided it was best not to compete with the developing crime syndicates. He moved back to Florida, investing in real estate and a boat-building business with his brother Ben.
I learned some lessons from Bill McCoy that served me again these days as I watched the crowd at Dirty Dick’s.
When the rum running and smuggling was full blown during the Prohibition years of 1920 to 1933, business boomed in Nassau. Hotels and bars, notably the enticingly named Bucket of Blood, opened in Nassau to soak up the fortunes being made. Men gambled at dice for fifty dollars a throw. New luxury houses sprang up where there had once been beachfront farms, and each July brought the Bootleggers Ball, the centerpiece of the social season.
Between 1918 and 1922, as tonnage at the port went up tenfold, re-export duty on alcohol at Nassau leaped twenty-fold. The money was used to fund much-needed improvements to the islands’ communications and infrastructure. The harbor was dredged, electricity brought in and proper plumbing installed. Surplus funds were put towards the reconstruction of the British Colonial following a fire, and the building of a golf course—the precursor of Sir Harry’s links—to attract tourists and the Canadian distillers who had started to take advantage of the islands’ favorable banking regime.
Rum-running and bootlegging first established the potential of the Bahamas as a tax haven. The principal beneficiary of this bonanza, however, was not any ind
ividual, but the British Government.
I had learned more than my share of lessons over a career in reporting crime, particularly in the case of the affable Bill McCoy. Foremost among those lessons: It was always wise, when approaching a case, to look at where the money was going and where people were making profits.
CHAPTER 4
By the day after my arrival, the Nassau government had given official local authority to the cops from Miami, Melchen and Barker. The cops began nosing around for a suspect. They quickly filled themselves in on local scuttlebutt. I followed along in their path, posing mostly as a curiosity seeker and a tourist. There were plenty of those, so I could blend in well. For a while, no one paid any attention to me.
Melchen and Barker were already in charge of the investigation. The more the Miami cops listened, the clearer it became that if they were going to try to do a thorough checking job on everybody who might have had a motive for bumping off Sir Harry, they would be in Nassau for the rest of their lives.
Besides motives, the opportunity to kill Harry had been unlimited. Despite the palatial aspect of the Oakes home, guardianship of it was entrusted to a local watchman or two, casually making rounds through the night hours. The security, or lack of it, furnished by this arrangement was such that a prowler would practically have had to make an appointment with the watchman to get caught entering the place. Sir Harry, who could have afforded to maintain a standing army of guards, had never bothered. For most of his life, he had never had the slightest doubt that he was able to take care of himself.
Conveniently in the foreground of their inquiries was one suspect who might have been called “the natural.” He was Count Marie Alfred Fouquereaux de Marigny, a tall, thin, handsome fellow of thirty-seven, and Sir Harry’s son-in-law. Less than a year before the murder, he had married eighteenyear-old Nancy Oakes, the oldest of Sir Harry’s five children and the apple of Papa’s eye. The Count, a French native of the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, had never been Sir Harry’s favorite boy. He was not at all Sir Harry’s type. Nancy Oakes was his third wife, and before his second wife divorced him, he had borrowed a big chunk of money from her. The sum was reputed to have been more than a hundred thousand dollars and he had never got around to returning it. In the eyes of the cops and Sir Harry himself, the Count was a classic example of the oily no-good European fortune hunter.
