The White Shadow

People walked into the Federal Building with their shoulders hunched, hands jammed into pockets, and their collars turned up against the late December cold. Old-timers couldn’t remember a colder December than this one in 1950, when Senator Estes Kefauver had brought his crime-investigating committee to Tampa to sort out the crime and political corruption of Hillsborough County.
The crowd at the door parted as a tall man in a straw hat and well-pressed dark suit made his way to the door. He smiled as the crowd recognized him and called to him.

Give ‘em hell, Charlie.
Don’t tell ‘em nothin’, Charlie.
God bless you, Mister Wall.

A bemused smile never left his face as he entered the meeting room and took his place facing his inquisitors. In Tampa, the Kefauver Committee was chaired by Senator Lester G. Hunt; Kefauver had opted to stay with his family during the Christmas holidays. It was common knowledge in the coffeehouses of Ybor City that Senator Hunt had volunteered to chair the Tampa meeting so that he could get a free ride to the Gator Bowl, where his college team was playing. To a Latin population used to noblesse oblige, it was an understandable reason.
I was on Christmas holiday from the University of Florida, and as a keen observer of the Ybor City crime scene, I was in daily attendance at the hearings. There was no play, no movie or book that could compete with the Kefauver investigation for pure entertainment value. It had an Alice-in-Wonderland quality. The evasive double talk used by politicians and crooks matched anything Alice found when she fell down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. There was an element of real pleasure in hearing the old sheriff Hugh Culbreath, explain how he had amassed a huge fortune in several bay-area banks when his salary was a modest $7,500 a year.
For years I had heard stories about the legendary Charlie Wall, who lived in my neighborhood when I was a child living in my grandfather’s house on Columbus Drive. Occasionally I would see him driving his big Cadillac, and he would always wave back at us sitting on the stoop. Sometimes a small man drove him. Everyone knew that was his bodyguard, who was named Baby. Charlie never sat in the back seat, but always next to Baby in the front seat.
In the coffeehouses the life of Charlie Wall was told and retold many times. He began life at the top, being the son of a prominent Tampa surgeon, Dr. John Wall, who had served as a Confederate Army surgeon and directed Richmond hospitals during the War Between the States. He accumulated further fame for his work on yellow fever. Charlie Wall’s childhood was a happy one and his start in life boded a successful course.
His teen-age years saw a reversal of the family fortune. At thirteen, his mother died. His father remarried, and two years later he died unexpectedly at a medical meeting. This left the troubled teen-ager with only his stepmother, whom he heartily disliked. Charlie Wall promptly shot her. Fortunately she did not die. Charlie was sent to a juvenile detention center, where he learned all about how to circumvent the law. To further instill a healthy respect for law and order, he was then sent to Bingham Military School. He managed to get himself expelled by being caught in a whorehouse.
Charlie Wall returned to Tampa determined to make a success in gambling. By 1910, he had a reputation for both cleverness and toughness. His family was prominent in government at both the local and state levels and Charlie proved a nonstop embarrassment for them, so it was decided to back him in his ventures in Ybor City. At least an Anglo, backed by police and city politicians, could impose his will on the warring factions and turn a nice profit while he did.
This led to three decades of relative order as Charlie Wall rose to become the head crime figure in Ybor City. He was a peacemaker, an ombudsman, a man who opposed violence. It was then that he became known as the White Shadow. So in a city where arguments were often settled at gunpoint, Charlie, backed by the establishment, brought the city an uneasy peace.
Not that Charlie Wall was not a target of those who hated being told what to do by an Anglo. The oddity was that Charlie chose to build a big house on the corner of 17th Avenue and 13th Street, in full view of his enemies. He did not pick the safety of Palma Ceia, the Anglo section, but built his castle in the heart of Ybor City.
I would often walk by his house hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous man. Every afternoon he would sit on his porch reading the Tampa Times, an easy target for an assassin. I could see his bodyguard waxing his big black car, while his two gigantic mastiffs slept peacefully next to his rocking chair, lifting their huge heads when anyone walked by the front of the house. How many days I had hoped he would notice me and talk. What a coup if I were to be invited to sit and drink a Coke with the crime overlord of Tampa.

Charlie Wall put his straw hat on the table, pulled the hard chair back, and sat at the desk facing the senator. His face was wreathed with the beatific smile of a man who had survived three decades as the Top Man. At seventy years of age, retired from the rackets, he felt beyond danger. What he would be telling the senator was ancient history, well beyond the statute of limitations. Charlie Wall was sworn in.
After some testimony about his history and a description of the game of bolita, the senator got down to the number of times Charlie’s life had been threatened.

SENATOR: When did the first one occur?
WALL: 1938. I imagine.
SENATOR: According to our records, it was in 1930.
WALL: It’s possible. I don’t remember.
SENATOR: You mean there have been so many times that you
don’t remember? It didn’t make an impression on you anymore?
WALL: No, I wouldn’t say that.
SENATOR: Well, the first time you remember . . . tell us about that. That certainly must have made an impression.
WALL: Oh, yes. First is when I came out of my garage. My wife was with me, a little in front, and I came out on the sidewalk to
my front gate, and some folks came out in an automobile, and a fellow started shooting with a pistol.
SENATOR: Shooting at you...
WALL: But I didn’t realize he was shooting until the thing hit me, and then, of course ...
SENATOR: Hit you in the back?
WALL: (Laughing): Well, it kind of. As the negro says, it glimpsed me.
SENATOR: Glimpsed?
WALL: Then, I fell down, and somebody shot a shotgun, but of course, I was down when they shot the shotgun, and the buckshot didn’t hit me. Then, as the car drove off, I shot at it. I think maybe I had a pistol too.
SENATOR: There were two men? One with a shotgun, one with a pistol?
WALL: I thought there were three.
SENATOR: After the investigation, was anyone ever arrested?
WALL: No, sir. Not that I ever heard of.

A tittering went through the courtroom. No one was ever arrested in gangland shootings. Everyone knew that Charlie Wall knew perfectly well who his assailants had been. Obviously, the score had long since been settled. The senator was amazed at the cool way Charlie Wall accepted being shot at as part of his life in Ybor City.

SENATOR: Have you done anything to remedy that situation out there between the garage and the main house?
WALL: Well, the last time they did it, a friend of mine, a businessman, came out and built an entrance from the garage to my bedroom. Now, I can drive into my garage, even in a driving rain storm and never get wet.
SENATOR: Even if it were a storm of bullets or whatnot?
WALL: (smiling, as the crowd laughed out loud) Well, it would help, Senator.

The Senator took a healthy drink from a coffee cup and continued.

SENATOR: When was the next time?
WALL: In ‘38 or maybe '39. I was going home in my car and a fellow with a shotgun shot out of the back of a truck. I saw the barrel of the gun sticking out of the back of the truck.
SENATOR: You were alone? You were driving?
WALL: I was driving and when I heard the shot, and didn’t hear the sound when the pellets hit, why these things went around me . . . they didn’t hurt much, just burned a little.
SENATOR: (smiling) Just glimpsed you again?
WALL: Yeah. So I began to dodge and try the best I could until I saw that thing go down in the back of the truck. So I started to go on by the truck.
SENATOR: And then?
WALL: Another gentleman climbed in on the front seat with a shotgun and I thought maybe he wanted to shoot me. (Loud laughter from the crowd. Wall’s eyes were twinkling.) And I guess he did, too, because about the time he shot, I ducked down and he tore up my car pretty bad, so I took my foot off the accelerator, and the car was moving, and I don’t know... I guess kind of outguessed him, and turned the wheel to the right and the car went up on the sidewalk and wobbled a bit. I heard the truck leave, and I was very glad to part company with them and drive on home.
SENATOR: Did you have any threats or warnings?
WALL: I wouldn’t have been out on the street if I had had any warnings.

Once again the litany of a fruitless investigation. No arrest. No grand jury investigation. Another gangland shooting unsolved.
I was eager to hear about the most recent attempt because it entailed a bit of derring-do by Baby and a colossal bit of driving. A car had approached Charlie Wall’s car on Nebraska Avenue and as Baby saw a man aim a pistol at them, he slammed on the brakes and threw his car in reverse. The traffic was heavy, and Baby’s maneuvering as he backed up while firing in response was a feat told over and over again in the Ybor City coffeehouses. The pursuing car had crashed into another.
Charlie Wall claimed that these three attempts on his life were the only ones he could remember.

SENATOR: Just to clear things up, Mr. Wall, were there five or three attempts?
WALL: I don’t think I remember the other txvo.
SENATOR: You probably would have remembered. .
WALL: Oh, yes sir!
SENATOR: Was there any reason anyone would want to make target practice out of you?
WALL: (innocently) No, sir.
SENATOR: The situation goes beyond coincidence when it
occurs three times. Would you want to guess the reason why, or the identity of them?
WALL: No, sir.
SENATOR: Could it be because you are very influential in the gambling underworld?
WALL: I couldn’t rightly say. Of course, it could be.
SENATOR: Is it perfectly all right with you for someone to take a
shot at you every year or two?
WALL: Quite the contrary.
SENATOR: You haven’t had adequate protection?
WALL: Well, there was nobody right there behind me looking after me, but every time this occurred, an officer would come and ask me if I wanted to cooperate and see if we could find the people. But it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. I wasn’t much interested in finding who it was that was doing it. I was more interested in keeping from getting killed.
SENATOR: But when things settled down, you are interested in seeing that the person responsible wouldn’t try it again, are you not?
WALL: Very much.
SENATOR: And that situation has never been taken care
WALL: No, sir.
SENATOR: I think that is all.

The crowd smiled and nodded as the tall, dapper crime boss of Ybor City shook the hand of the bewildered senator. Once again the elusive Charlie Wall had done his slip, slide, and glide and passed another inquiry, providing his inquisitors with nothing more than a history lesson.
Charlie Wall had only one weakness. It was a big one. He had become addicted to morphine. In his last years, summoning his fierce will power, he broke himself of the habit, going cold turkey at home.
One night in April of 1955, after having a drink at his favorite spot on Franklin Street, he was offered a ride home by an Italian gambler he knew very well. Time and age had dulled his normal awareness of potential danger.
That was the last time anyone saw the affable, personable Charlie Wall alive. He was found brutally beaten with a baseball bat. His throat had been cut.
The gambler reported dropping Charlie off early in the evening, and from then on, the gambler’s whereabouts were meticulously proven. His alibi was air-tight, and Charlie Wall’s name now heads a list of unsolved gangland murders. With the death of the White Shadow, one of Ybor City’s most colorful chapters ended.

Social Clubs

Life in Ybor City, from cradle to grave, was irretrievably enmeshed in its social clubs. My life from birth revolved around the Centro Español and the Centro Asturiano, but the other clubs were well-known to me.
The most important one in my life was the Centro Español on 7th Avenue and i6th Street. When I was small its members were always at my grandfather’s home, which was the Spanish Consulate. It was when I swung into the teen years that the Centro Espanol took on a new meaning. On Sunday from three to seven o’clock, a tea dance was held. Anyone who could walk, let alone dance, would be there. It was the swinging, dancing equivalent of the singles’ bars of the eighties. The Matinee, as it was called, was the place to be if you were breathing on Sunday afternoons. It took place on the top floor of the Centro Espanol building. The admission was nominal and guys that were broke snuck in. There was a bar which served mostly beer and Cokes although many a well-heeled citizen smuggled in a pint of firewater to lubricate his dancing parts.
Dancing was taken seriously. It was the best fun you could have, and it served the very real purpose of being able to crush a lively girl to your body who ordinarily wouldn’t let you hold her hand in a movie theater.
The Don Francisco Orchestra was well-rehearsed and depended heavily on Glenn Miller stock arrangements. It would also whip into a Latin piece in a minute, and bring forth a delighted roar when it would play a pasodoble. The pasodoble, a traditional Spanish dance, became a contest in no time. This dance became a combination dance-a-thon, Kentucky Derby, and Roller Derby. The entire floor would be filled with swirling, twirling couples. The dance is a basic promenade with fancy spins at each corner of the dance floor. It was up to the expertise and ingenuity of the dancers to embellish what was already a joyous dance. If a girl had not been asked out she would dance with her girlfriend or alone. Even the chaperons, the duenas, would momentarily lose their composure and fling themselves among the spirited dancers. If you weren t out on the floor when a pasodoble came around, you xvere either in a full-length body cast or dead-drunk.
The balance of the pieces Don Francisco chose were masterful. A set consisted of three slow pieces, such as At Last, Serenade in Blue, and What’s New, mostly Glenn Miller arrangements. A Latin piece was next, a rhumba or danson, Amapola, Perfidia, or Yours, all of xvhich were Latin favorites with English lyrics. The lesser dancers then cleared off the floor because the last piece of the set was a killerdiller, an up-tempo Big Band jazz arrangement which could vary from a medium-tempo jump tune, In the Mood or Chattanooga ChooChoo, to Benny Goodman’s Sing, Sing, Sing at a wild tempo.
The dancers were so good that unless one was lucky enough to have a great partner it was better to watch than to dance. Every dance hall had a big fat guy with light feet, and he was the best. Armando El Gordo was a man with a John Candy body and Fred Astaire feet, and he was easily the finest dancer at the Matinee. When the war was in full swing, dancers like Macaco would bring new steps and styles from the Palladium or Roseland in New York. The pace was frenetic, and it was the most fun a teen-ager could ever have for a quarter.
When the dance was over, and the last tune, Adios, played for the lovers and stags, the crowd would disperse. Those boys lucky enough to link up with a girl, and to have a car and a dollar, would head for the drive-in to sit in their cars, eat a hamburger and drink a shake, and park. Park was a euphemism for neck which was a nice word for make out which really meant. . . oh, you get the picture.
It was probably because I was so young and inexperienced, but the Matinees filled me with an excitement and anticipation I have not felt since. Oh, maybe the first Ali-Frazier fight matched it, but the Matinee happened every Sunday. The girls felt the same, although they acted blasé. They spent the week making new dresses on their Singer sewing machines, thinking of new ways to disguise old dresses, and curling their hair. The boys could only make sure their old shoes were shined and their hair neatly cut, and if their fathers weren’t looking, show up with a new tie.
When I revisit the Centro Español, my heart sinks to see it in disrepair. I want them to start the Matinees again, but then I realize that disco music and hard rock do not belong in this beautiful building. That teen-agers are no longer in need of cheap entertainment. Affluence brings about too many choices. All good things in their time, my father always said.
Well, thank God, the Matinees were a good thing, and thank God, they were in my time.
The other club which played a big part in my growing up was the Centro Asturiano on Palm and Nebraska. It was an opulent building, boasting a theater, dance hail, banquet room, bowling alley, billiard hail, a café and gaming room. It was the most popular club in Ybor City and the only one named for a province of Spain, Asturias. Across the street was a good restaurant, El Boulevard, and next to it Gaspar’s Barber Shop. In front was popular Henry Garcia’s gas station.
What I am describing is a compact little world. Within a few square yards there were sufficient diversions and services to keep a man from wandering. And this was my undoing, for my father J.B. never saw the need to go elsewhere. It was here that I learned a personality trait that was to serve me well in life. I learned to be patient.
My father was a demon card-player. He loved gin rummy, and favored the game hearts. With a great capacity to retain numbers and a gambler’s sharp instincts) he loved to lose himself for hours in the cool cellar of the club sipping expresso coffee, smoking Old Golds, and playing cards. It was my unfortunate lot in life to wait for him to decide when to quit playing so I could drive him to La Economica, and then keep the car. I was late to almost every appointment and date. My father did not judge being late by the hour but by the day. Many a hot Sunday I missed going to the beach because my father played through sunset.
His other undying passion was playing dominoes. While researching this book I ran into Pendas the foreman. He is now ninety-three, and did not seem surprised to find that he was pictured in the painting which serves as the cover of this book. When he found out that I was J.B.’s son he chuckled compassionately.

It was your father who helped me pass the nights during the Big Strike.
How so?
He would play until two or three in the morning. I’d have to throw him out of the house. He was a man who was never in a hurry to go home.
Or to get to work, I added, thinking of those painfully long waits at La Economica.

The Circulo Cubano building was unquestionably the biggest and best. I went to dances there on Saturday nights, and saw many a prize-fight, but somehow it did not have the cachet of the Ccntro Espanol. Once they even staged a bullfight there, but it was not a success. The bull lived.
The Unione Italiano on 7th Avenue was called the Italian Club. I know nothing about it except I was never inside the place. Italians were great men of commerce, and understood business. Italians learned Spanish and spoke it well. They ate in Spanish restaurants, and generally got along very well with the Spaniards. They came to our dances, and integrated smoothly. We did not go to their clubs, spoke no Italian, and I can’t remember a first-class Italian restaurant. When I was dating on a budget, the place to go eat was a small Italian restaurant, because they were the cheapest, and because I never met a human being who didn’t like spaghetti. Italians soon became the economic backbone of Ybor City. By 1945, Tony Grimaldi owned the Columbia Bank; Nick Geraci and Valenti had organized the produce dealers into a wildly successful cooperative; the Italian Mob dominated the lucrative bolita business, and, in general, were in command.
The Italian Club also ran the Broadway Theater but it was every bit as awful as the Casino at the Centro Español, and I didn’t go in there either.
In view of the fact that one of my closest friends, Frankie Accurso, was Italian, and my next-door neighbors, the Spanos, were Italian, I wonder why we never went into the Italian Club.
I blame it on Benito Mussolini.