After decades relative discovers truth

We’re starting our 12th year of Post Time. Thank you!

We’re reminded that history is about real people. On Jan. 16, 2005, we ran a feature on the slayings of two federal agents in West Palm Beach. We’d found relatives of Robert Moncure thanks to his surname, but not Frank Patterson. This past November, I received this email:

A week or so ago, while browsing the Internet, I discovered a copy of your article, dated January 16, 2005, and titled ‘75 Years Ago: Murder and Moonshine.’

While I am not sure what may have motivated you to write the article or the newspaper to publish, some 75 years after an event that most people might view as an insignificant bit of history, I wish to personally thank you and the paper for doing so. Otherwise, I might have never learned the details of the death of Frank Patterson, who was my grandfather.

After my grandmother moved to Tampa to raise her children, the details of those days were not often discussed by her. She died in the 1950s, while I was still a child, and growing up, all I learned from her children, my father, aunt and uncles, was that he died from a shotgun blast while attempting to serve a warrant during Prohibition. Even my Uncle James Patterson, who is Frank Patterson’s last surviving child and who is a retired schoolteacher living in California, knew very few details, other than that, as he was an infant at the time.

I have shared your article with my uncle, his daughter and my own children and grandchild, and they are also grateful for your efforts in researching and writing of those events so long ago.

You might find the following a bit ironical…A fact that I never knew was that I was born in 1951 on the anniversary of his Jan. 18 death. Likewise, the fact that, after I closed my real estate and civil law practice in Tampa, in 1986, I moved to Houston,where I have since practiced law exclusively as a criminal defense attorney — something my grandfather might have looked on with displeasure.

Thank you…for your efforts as they have reached across time and space and touched more hearts, in a positive way, than you could have imagined.

Richard Steven Patterson

Click on the image to read the Jan. 19, 1930 account of the shooting as published on the front page of The Palm Beach Post.

Tags: notorious crimes, Prohibition, West Palm Beach

Palm Beach police foiled plot to kill JFK

Last week, we told you about retired postal worker Richard Paul Pavlick’s plot to murder president-elect John F. Kennedy in Palm Beach in December 1960.

Pavlick had driven to Florida with the idea of ramming JFK’s motorcade as it headed for Mass at St. Edward’s Catholic Church.

He’d aborted one attempt after seeing Kennedy’s wife and two small children.

Authorities following a tip had been watching for the 1950 Buick with New Hampshire plates.

Lester Free, an officer with the Palm Beach police, spotted it on the North Bridge at 9 p.m. Dec. 15, and fellow officers, along with Secret Service agents, swarmed it and pulled Pavlick out.

It turned out the “grandfatherly type” with white hair had filled his trunk with seven sticks of dynamite and a detonator. A Secret Service photo (below) shows the Buick and its deadly cargo.

Photo provided by Secret Service

Pavlick had three more sticks and more detonating equipment in his motel room.

“He talked very rationally. He had it all planned. I’m certain he was capable of doing it,” Free told The Palm Beach Times in 1972.

Free later would leave Palm Beach to become part of a four-man force in Juno Beach.

Pavlick had been convinced the Kennedy family had bought the election, and in his car was a letter to the American people, saying in part, “I decided that never would the presidency of the United States be up for sale.”

Pavlick later was found incompetent to face charges and was sent to a medical center in Missouri. He bounced around psychiatric hospitals for six years until charges eventually were dropped.

By then, another man, Lee Harvey Oswald, had accomplished from the window of a Dallas schoolbook warehouse what Pavlick had failed to do.

In the 1970s, Pavlick still was sending dozens of letters proclaiming his innocence to everyone from the White House to Congress to the media. Pavlick died at 88 in 1975 in a veterans’ hospital in Manchester, N.H. He’d outlived by three years Lester Free, the police officer who’d saved the life of a president.

Read more about the incident in an article by Stuart writer Alice L. Luckhardt in the October 2010 edition of Florida Monthly Magazine.

Tags: notorious crimes, Palm Beach, police, presidents

Kennedy almost slain in Palm Beach

Two years from this week, expect an avalanche of news coverage. It will be 50 years since that day in Dallas when a young president died and a country lost its innocence.

Far less known: A man tried to kill John F. Kennedy in 1960, just weeks after he even was elected and before he even was sworn in. And it happened right in Palm Beach.

While the “woulda-coulda-shoulda” of Kennedy’s assassination has been picked apart more than probably any murder in American history, smart police work — and the providential appearance of JFK’s family — averted tragedy in 1960. Or at least postponed it.

On Sunday, Dec. 11, 73-year-old Richard Paul Pavlick sat in his 1950 Buick across from the Kennedys’ Palm Beach home. The retired postal worker was violently anti-Catholic and believed that the Kennedy family had bought the election.

Pavlick’s plan: Wait for Kennedy to leave for Mass at St. Edward’s Catholic Church, then ram the presidential car. Inside Pavlick’s Buick: seven sticks of dynamite.

But then Jackie Kennedy came to the door, along with Caroline, 4, and “John-John,” all of 16 days old, to see the president-elect off.

“I did not wish to harm her or the children,” Pavlick (above) would say later. He decided to wait for a better opportunity.

He didn’t get one. Pavlick had sold his Belmont, N.H., home and had made one trip to case the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. But he also had let slip his plans to a Postal Service colleague, who told authorities.

The Secret Service posted a bulletin describing Pavlick and saying he might have explosives.

So four days after Pavlick’s almost attack, at 9 p.m., Palm Beach patrolman Lester Free (above) spotted the Buick crossing from West Palm Beach on the North Bridge. He stopped it at Royal Poinciana Way and North County Road. In seconds, Palm Beach officers and Secret Service agents had surrounded the car and one had pulled Pavlick out.

“We hit the grass,” former patrolman Nick Mancino recalled in a 1983 Palm Beach Post story. “I didn’t know what was in that car, but my reaction was that it was going to go, ‘Boom!’ ”

NEXT WEEK: He had it all planned.

On Dec. 15, 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy and Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, hold a news conference at what would become known as the ‘Winter White House’ in Palm Beach. (Photo by Mort Kaye Studios)

Tags: notorious crimes, Palm Beach, police, presidents

Teenagers Will Be Teenagers — even in ‘prim’ 1950s Palm Beach

By Bill McGoun

The so-called Silent ‘50s were not without their teenager pranks, ranging from cherry bombs to wooden Indians.

The cherry bomb, illegal in Florida, was a firework of choice. In Lake Worth a favorite place to plant one was in the banyan trees lining the Lucerne Avenue side of City Hall Annex. The building then was City Hall and the Police Department was in the northwest corner of the ground floor.

Teens would put a lighted cigarette over the fuse of a cherry bomb and place it in the tree. That gave them enough time to find a hiding place before the bomb went off, bringing officers scurrying out of their quarters to the amusement of the hidden teens.

When I was in Lake Worth High, one student’s final day in school was the one when he rolled a cherry bomb down an auditorium aisle during an assembly.

This isn’t the Stewart Pontiac wooden Indian, but it’s one of several cigar store Indians that can be found in and around Palm Beach County. (Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post)

In West Palm Beach, a favorite target of pranksters was the large wooden Indian at Stewart Pontiac, on the northeast corner of Dixie Highway and Flamingo Road. The Indian was “borrowed” with regularity and deposited at various places around the county. Once it wound up gracing the entrance to The Breakers in Palm Beach.

Weekends were when most “borrowing” took place. On many a Monday, employees of the agency would get a call from someone or other saying, “Your Indian is at our place. Come get it.”

One story around town concerned the occasion when, tipped off that the Indian was about to take a trip, a police car was circling the block. Unfortunately for the police, the pranksters saw them first and swept the Indian into their vehicle just after the cruiser had disappeared around the corner.

A couple of youths who had hidden themselves to watch reported the cruiser coming to a screeching stop when the officers saw the Indian was gone.

Palm Beach, probably because it had the image of being prim, was a favorite target of pranksters. One night, Worth Avenue was festooned with borrowed signs, such as the one in a potted plant in front of Peck and Peck which said “Moose Picnic,” with an arrow pointing toward the front door.

Less benign was the practice of “borrowing” from upscale homes such things as stone lions and ersatz hitching posts featuring a livery-clad figure holding a ring. A couple of incidents I remember concerned the “frat house” used for a while by our social club at what then was Palm Beach Junior College (fraternities were not allowed).

The house, just north of where Palm Coast Plaza would be built in West Palm Beach, apparently belonged to a relative of one of our members. I’m not sure what got us kicked out of it first, the desire of the owner to sell or the discovery by Florida Power & Light that we had bypassed the electric meter.

Anyway, I arrived at the house one evening and another member said, “See what we got.” He opened the closet beneath the stairs and pulled the tarp away from a concrete lion of the sort that decorate many homes.

“Don’t tell me where you got it,” I said. “When the police come around I want to be able to look them in the eye and say, ‘Officers, I don’t have the slightest idea in the world how that lion got here’.”

On another occasion, someone decided we needed one of those ersatz hitching posts in our front yard. Several members proceeded to “borrow” one after another member said he had seen a good one in Delray Beach. When the borrowers arrived, the other member took a look and said, “That’s not the one I meant.”

The borrowers informed him that if he thought they were going to back to Delray Beach and make an exchange, he was not playing with a full deck.

The hitching post was in place only a couple of weeks or so. Then someone stole it.

Nothing in Palm Beach County was as organized or regularized as the tradition in Hallandale, Broward County, of depositing an outhouse on the steps of city hall on Halloween. It became a rite of passage for Hallandale teens; many future civic leaders participated. In later year, outhouses having become extinct, the pranksters had to use Porta-Potties.

I’ve often heard the ‘50s described as a decade of silence between World War II and the Roaring ‘60s. That’s not really the case. The seeds that would sprout into full-scale rebellion already had been planted. Besides our pranks, we had our pegged pants, our ducktail haircuts…and our rock-and-roll music.

Bill McGoun is a retired editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. He is the author of four history books, including Lake Worth High School: A History and Southeast Florida Pioneers, which tells the history of Palm Beach County, the Treasure Coast and the Lake Okeechobee region through the lives of noted individuals. He is working on a history of the Palm Beach County school system.

Tags: notorious crimes, schools

Decades later, Ashley part of local lore

More than eight decades after he and his crime partners died in 1929, John Ashley continues to be one of the most intriguing figures in Florida history.

Many a relative of an Ashley Gang member has written to defend, or at least try to explain, the long-dead gangster.

Clyde Middleton wrote in January to tell us of his uncle, Clarence Middleton (pictured below):

“He was the second oldest son of Steven and Margeret Middleton, my grandparents. He had four brothers and three sisters living in Jacksonville; all are deceased now.

“His oldest brother, Jack, owned the Embassy Club and the Peacock Club in Jacksonville.

“Cecil, Clyde and Bruce all served honorably in World War II and became successful businessmen in Jacksonville after the war.

“Clarence probably got involved in rum running in the early ’20s and met up with some of the Ashley Gang in prison then fell in with them.

“He was one of the four men murdered on the San Sebastian bridge in 1924. He is buried beside his father in Jacksonville.”

Clyde refers, of course, to the evening of Nov. 1, 1924.

Deputies stopped Ashley and Middleton, along with Hanford Mobley and Ray “Shorty” Lynn, on a wooden bridge over the St. Sebastian River in what was then St. Lucie County.

They later said the men were shot trying to escape. But many believed they were assassinated by lawmen tired of being humiliated from Stuart to Miami by robberies, moonshining and murder.

In 1997, Ada Coats Williams, a retired teacher of creative writing at Fort Pierce’s Indian River State College, completed Florida’s Ashley Gang, the first book on the Ashleys since 1928.

A retired deputy who’d been on the bridge that night had confirmed to her in the 1950s that the men were shot while handcuffed, after John made a sudden move.

He had told her on the condition that she keep the secret until after all those involved had died.

Williams, profiled in this column in September on her 90th birthday, never has publicly identified her confidant.

The Notorious Ashley Gang, by Hix Stuart, is a 1920s book about the infamous gang that terrorized South Florida in the early 20th century. (Palm Beach Post file photo)

Tags: Ashley Gang, notorious crimes