A Dark and Lonely Place (33 page)

After a good meal and a long chat, John said goodbye and disappeared, alone, into the night, headed south.

His reunion with Laura and his parents was just the beginning. Soon after, Joe Tracey was released from Raiford. Then Ray Lynn and Clarence Middleton escaped from a road camp in Marianna, up in the far northwest section of the state. All three found themselves free close to the Georgia and Alabama borders, but all three beelined back to South Florida, the Everglades, and John Ashley.

And when Hanford Mobley heard from relatives that John and the boys were back in business. He quit his job to race south and join them.

The newly regenerated gang expanded operations into a number of counties. They stole so many cars to haul moonshine and bootleg whiskey that Sheriff J. R. Merritt up in Saint Lucie County recovered thirty-five stolen automobiles in less than a month, courtesy of the Ashley Gang, who left them parked when they no longer needed them.

Business boomed, and John decided to give Laura a diamond ring. In fact, he thought, all the gang’s women deserved diamonds. The gang members all ordered rings sent COD from a fine New York jeweler. Notified that their packages had arrived and could be picked up, the gang picked them up. They broke into the express office that night and took only the packages addressed to them. Yankee insurance companies could cover the loss.

Shortly after the gang reunion, the three hijackers in John’s death dream about Ed and Frank also vanished at sea. Like Ed and Frank, no one ever saw them or their boat again.

Laura wore a new sparkler on her finger and drove a seven-passenger Lincoln with wooden wheels, an open car with a green body, a black hood, and an aluminum radiator.

The gang robbed stores and banks and hijacked boat-and carloads of liquor. Their escapades made the newspapers regularly, along with the more mundane news about ice cream socials and tea dances and the obituaries of local luminaries gone to their reward.

The gang hijacked so many shipments of illegal whiskey being smuggled in from the Bahamas that they nearly put out of business the big-city bootleggers whose importation and distribution of foreign liquor
had undermined local moonshiners. Ashley and his men proved so effective that rum-running on the Florida coast virtually ceased while they were active.

The gossip in barbershops, pool halls, and bars revolved around the gang’s latest crimes and sightings. Support leaned in their favor. Newspaper editorial writers railed against the lawlessness, and one Florida politician said John Ashley was the greatest threat to the state since the Seminole Wars. But most people rooted for the local bad boys. Why not? They made the Yankees pay, poked fun at the law, and kept the whiskey flowing despite the overbearing and paternalistic federal government.

John Ashley had become a folk hero to poor Florida crackers, a symbol of resistance to Yankees, big banks, and the law. He and his gang enjoyed warm public support and were treated with respect when they appeared unexpectedly in one town or another to play pool, have their hair cut, their cars serviced, and dine on good restaurant meals.

Sheriff Bob Baker doggedly stalked them. One night he received an inside tip that John and the gang were expected at the Ashley homestead for supper. He and several heavily armed deputies hid their cars in brush off the main road at dusk, walked a distance, approached the house on foot, and settled in to sit surveillance in the woods that surrounded the place.

The winding, unpaved road that led up to the house from the main drag was half a mile long. While they watched, waited, and swatted mosquitoes, Leugenia Ashley, the family matriarch, appeared several times. She swept the front porch, carried a burlap sack out to the barn, then went to the well, but never looked up, or around, or noticed a thing. The tiny gray-haired woman had aged, they noticed, as had her husband, after losing three sons in the prime of their lives. She doddered about, focused on household chores.

“She doesn’t suspect a thing,” Sheriff Baker chortled to his most trusted deputy, T. W. Stone. It was just a matter of time now. They had their guns at the ready.

They’d been swarmed by mosquitoes and worried about snakes and fire ants for hours when a telltale splash of headlights suddenly reflected off the towering pines and oak trees. A car swung onto the shadowy road to the house.

“This is it,” Baker muttered. “We got ’em. Here they come!” Eyes glued to the road, they paid scant attention to Leugenia, who had stepped back out onto the porch. They didn’t even notice her until she raised her arm high above her head, and fired a pistol into the air three times. Then she doddered back into the house, closed the door, and never looked back.

The deputies hit the ground at the sound of shots. Down the road, brakes screeched, a powerful engine roared in reverse, and tires squealed as the car bounced back onto the paved road and peeled out. The stunned deputies ran for their own cars hidden in the brush a half mile away. But by the time they reached them, the fleeing car was long gone.

Bob Baker had underestimated Leugenia. She was no harmless old woman, no sad and grief-stricken matriarch of a doomed and dwindling clan. A true Ashley, she had sensed their presence, seen the deputies squatting in the bushes from the start, and had protected her own. Sheriff Baker now hated her with as much passion as he hated John and the others.

Baker received a bullet, delivered the next day. In the accompanying note John wrote that he had another one just like it, with Baker’s name on it. Baker, apoplectic, sent back a note in which he swore that he’d soon wear Ashley’s glass eye on his watch fob. He released it to the press as well, to be sure Ashley got the message. A local paper even played it on the front page.

On a bright November day in 1923, Joe Tracey hired a taxicab and had the driver take him out to a remote area, where the rest of the gang emerged from the woods to join them. They shared their picnic lunch with the driver: fresh boiled shrimp, slices of just-picked tomatoes, homemade potato salad, and lemonade. They passed around a flask, practiced target shooting in the woods, then tied the cabdriver to a tree. The man begged John not to take his taxi. He said he needed it to earn a living.

“So do we,” John said. He explained that they planned to use it in a bank robbery and told him exactly where to find it later.

“If we’re lucky,” he said, “it won’t be damaged. No bullet holes. And
this is for you.” John counted out a stack of bills for use of the cab. “And this”—he placed a rifle bullet on top—“is for Sheriff Baker. Give it to him and tell him that John Ashley is still waiting for him in the ’Glades.”

An hour later, the gang robbed a bank in Pompano of five thousand dollars cash and eighteen thousand dollars in negotiable bearer bonds. As they fled, John tossed the cashier a rifle bullet. “A souvenir,” he said, “of my career.”

The cashier later told reporters that John “seemed a little wistful,” as though robbery had not been his first career choice. The press speculated that maybe he had wearied of it after taking nearly one million dollars from at least forty banks between 1915 and 1924.

The cabdriver eventually struggled free, hitched a ride to town, and found his cab, undamaged, with no bullet holes, exactly where Ashley had promised.

Sheriff Baker took Ashley’s message personally and waited to make his move. In February, another inside tip informed him that Ashley and his family were camped overnight at one of their stills. Baker moved quickly. He borrowed high-powered automatic rifles from the National Guard armory, and without warning, at dawn on January 10, 1924, Baker’s brother, Fred, led a dozen deputies who opened fire on the Ashley camp.

John’s dog, Shine, detected the intruders first. He left his master’s side and ran out barking furiously to raise the alarm. Hit by rifle and shotgun fire, he was the first to die.

Shine’s barking and the shots that killed him woke John and Laura, sleeping under a tarp stretched across a dry ditch nearby. Joe Ashley and other gang members were asleep in a tent near the still when the shooting started.

John held off the deputies with a handgun as he pulled up his pants. “Run!” he told Laura, and sent her to the tent for shelter with the others. “Stay with Pop,” he said, and picked up his rifle. “I’ll be there in a minute. Tell him it’s Baker’s men, looks like about a dozen. Go! Now!” He used both guns to fire a barrage at their attackers as she ran to the tent.

She stumbled inside as Joe, his rifle beside him, sat up and began to pull on his boots. “Get down!” he told her, as the gunfire continued. The others scrambled for their clothes and weapons.

“John said there’s a dozen deputies! They killed Shine!” Laura said
breathlessly, her eyes wet. She looked for John, then turned back to Joe as a large piece of his skull flew through the air and landed near her feet.

She saw his brains and blood splattered across the pillow, and began to scream. Then she was hit by a spray of shotgun fire.

John heard her cries and sprinted to the tent, firing back toward the deputies, who dove for cover. Inside the tent he saw her struggling to her feet, her clothes bloodstained, her arm and both legs bleeding, and rushed to help her.

“No! No! No!”
she screamed. “It’s Joe. Pop! Your father!”

He turned in time to see his father stop moving, and his eyes roll back in his head.

John paused, then walked out of the tent in full view, and took careful aim, as the deputies scattered. He killed Deputy Fred Baker with a single shot.

“I killed the son of a bitch,” he told Laura as he ducked back into the tent. “I killed Baker’s brother.”

The others had slashed an opening in the back of the tent and were fleeing into the swamp. “Let’s go.” He took her arm.

“I can’t. I can’t.” The wounds from the buckshot in her legs, thighs, and arm bled profusely and made it too painful to walk.

“I’ll carry you.” He moved to sweep her up into his arms.

“No! You go, I’ll be all right. You shot Baker’s brother! Run! Now!”

“I won’t leave you.”

“You have to. I need a doctor. I’d slow you down. You can’t carry me all over the swamp while they’re chasing us. You’ll be caught and it will be my fault, all for no reason. Baker won’t do a damn thing to me. You’re the one he wants. And”—she turned to look at Joe, sprawled on his back, with one boot on, his rifle across his thighs, half his head gone, his blood spilling into the hungry earth, then averted her eyes—“I need to be with your mother now, John. You can’t, but I can.” She looked deep into his eyes. “This is how it has to be, John. You know it. So go now.”

He did.

Her arrest was worse than she’d anticipated. Manhandled by deputies, she was held for more than twelve hours before a doctor was called to treat her painful injuries.

But worse than that, Fred Baker, a more popular man than his father or brother, had a host of caring relatives, friends, and neighbors. Furious
at what Sheriff Baker described as his brother’s brutal murder, a large crowd rushed to the shooting scene. They attacked the moonshine still with sledgehammers, got drunk, torched the camp, then piled into cars and wagons and raced off to attack first the Ashley and then the Mobley homesteads. Both were burned to the ground. Leugenia, rescued by her daughter Daisy and son Bill, lost both her husband and her home in a few short hours.

The newspapers condemned the mob violence toward innocent family members, and their homes were rebuilt with the help of neighbors and volunteers. But Joe’s sudden, violent death struck the hearts of both the family and the gang. Their luck had begun to run out.

CHAPTER THIRTY

T
he gang paid top dollar for a load of whiskey on a Bahamian run and discovered too late that the bottles contained water, not whiskey. John called in every available gang member for a retaliatory raid on the liquor warehouses in the village of West End on Bahama Island. They planned their ambitious strike for a brief window in time, after the bootleggers had all paid cash for a week’s supply but before the money was sent to the bank.

Heavily armed, adrenaline-charged, and ready to go to sea, the gang learned, again, that Sheriff Baker had advance knowledge of their plans and a posse was waiting in ambush at their departure point. Impatient to go, they had to outwit Baker’s men as time ticked away. In a major change of plans, they departed instead through Hobe Sound and used the Jupiter Narrows for access to the sea. They sailed undetected, but the detour cost them dearly in time. Then bad weather delayed them more. Luck was not on their side.

They were late, and the regular express boat had arrived early at West End. It had departed ahead of schedule shortly before the gang arrived, taking with it $250,000 in cash for deposit in a Nassau bank. The gang’s take was a paltry $8,000. But their efforts could not have drawn more attention.

For the first time in more than a hundred years, American pirates had attacked a British Crown colony. The United Kingdom struck back with a vengeance. The Brits declared Ashley an international pirate and sent warships to capture him and his gang or blast them out of the water.

John laughed, thumbed his nose at the British, called them “a pack of thieves,” and retaliated. He robbed their bank in West End and outran their warships.