The Day Leon Goetz Died

I don’t know what happens to us when we die, but I heard an interesting theory professed by the late spiritualist Eddie Burks. According to Mr. Burks, a ‘spirit guide’ helps each one of us examine our lives starting from the end and working backwards towards childhood. The purpose of this is backward-analysis is to help us understand our motivations and the consequences of the choices we made so that we can learn from our mistakes.

Following Mr. Burks’ philosophy, today I’m going to jump ahead and look at how Leon died.

Leon’s father worked as a “merchant tailor” in Monroe prior to retiring and moving with his wife to Miami, Florida in 1934. At some unspecified time— but no earlier than the mid 1930s— Leon moved to Miami too and began working as a real estate dealer. Leon’s marriage to Bertha, who had purchased Leon’s share of the Goetz’s Monroe entertainment holdings when his 1921 legal troubles began, had by this time ended. It seems there may have been another short marriage in Florida, and a third to a lady named Claudia which was intact when Leon died unexpectedly. None of the marriages produced children.

By the time Leon came to Florida, he’d spent nearly a decade working with underworld figures in Chicago, like Sint Millard, who had ties to international organized prostitution. Another one of his business partners was a man named Newell Mecartney, a fascinating figure, who J. Edgar Hoover personally tried to frame as a German spy during WW2. Long story short, Leon’s Chicago lifestyle was edgy and intertwined with mob connections which had their roots in Austro-Hungarian state-sponsored organized crime.

This excerpt comes from the South Florida Sun Sentinel:

Florida has something of a reputation for grifters, fraudsters and assorted other crooks, so it’s no surprise that organized crime has a long and sordid history in the state. Alleged members of La Cosa Nostra have lived and played here for the past century…

1930-1950

Capone’s mansion may be the larger-than-life example of mobsters living in South Florida, but in terms of numbers, Hollywood may take the title. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, Hallandale Beach was filled with casinos — “carpet joints,” they called them. Broward County Sheriff Walter Clark, who held his position through most of the two decades despite being thrown out of office by Florida’s governor in both 1939 and 1950, turned a blind eye to the gambling dens. But while their business was in Hallandale, the mobsters lived in Hollywood.

Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo was one of several gangsters that operated the casinos. His places included the Colonial Inn and the Barn, according to Mickelson. Alo lived in the 1200 block of Monroe Street in Hollywood. Alo operated the places in conjunction with Meyer and Jacob Lansky. (Meyer’s last home in South Florida was on the second floor of the Imperial House, a condominium that still stands at 5255 Collins Ave. in Miami. His brother Jake lived in the 1100 block of Harrison Street in Hollywood.)

Meyer Lansky next to a parking meter in Hollywood, FL. South Florida Sun Sentinel.

But as pointed out by Mickelson, who wrote the book “A Guide to Historic Hollywood” and volunteers at the Hollywood Historical Society, Alo and Lansky were not the first to open casinos in Hallandale Beach. That honor belonged to Julian “Potatoes” Kaufman.

According to his 1939 obituary in the Chicago Tribune, Kaufman had been a lieutenant in the gang of Dean O’Banion — the same gang that lost seven members in the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. [This would make Kaufman a lieutenant for one of Al Capone's chief rivals in Chicago.]… Kaufman brought casinos to Hallandale Beach in the 1930s and 1940s…

Kaufman opened the Plantation casino, and the others swiftly followed. Kaufman lived in the 1200 block of Tyler Street, … on Tyler Street was the home of Benjamin Eisen, who kept books for the Lansky brothers and also served as chief financial officer of Gulfstream racetrack.

Although Kaufman died of a heart attack in 1939, the good times rolled on for the Lanskys and Alo until Sheriff Clark was dragged before a Senate committee holding hearings on organized crime. When he told the committee he had no knowledge of gambling in Broward County, the audience broke out in laughter. In 1950, Clark was removed from office for the second and final time. Although Lansky and Alo continued to live in South Florida, they turned their attention elsewhere, to Cuba and Las Vegas.

As far as commercial sex goes, Cuba ended up with an even worse reputation than Chicago, though I think Palm Beach in South Florida can challenge both in the wake of Jeffery Epstein and his kompromat factory.

State-sponsored, statistically-sophisticated casinos like the ones Lansky ran were honed a century earlier in German Confederation (formerly in union with Austro-Hungary as the Holy Roman Empire) spa towns such as Baden-Baden. These gambling destinations were governed by ‘enlightened absolutist’ princes whose ambitions always needed more money than local aristocrats/representative bodies were willing to lend.

From Britannica.com:

By 1936 Lansky had begun to develop gambling operations in Florida and New Orleans and also in Cuba, where he arranged payoffs to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. He also financed Bugsy Siegel’s casino developments in Las Vegas (and ordered Siegel’s execution in 1947, when Siegel welshed on the syndicate). When Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, Lansky turned to the Bahamas, building casinos on Grand Bahama and Paradise islands in the 1960s after nurturing government cooperation. He also extended his gambling empire to other areas of the Caribbean and even across the Atlantic to London. He was also into narcotics smuggling, pornography, prostitution, labour racketeering, and extortion and had control of such legitimate enterprises as hotels, golf courses, and a meat-packing plant.

Lansky’s portfolio of business interests reflects the profile of state-backed organized crime in Central and Eastern Europe. Encouraging tourism and accompanying vice was one way Archduke Franz Ferdinand attempted to keep his father’s empire together. Besides gambling, towns like Baden-Baden were meccas of migratory prostitution: the expensive women masqueraded as guests— what these women wore was promoted in fashion press and ultimately developed by designers like Lady Duff Gordon. On the other (and far more typical) side, the cheaper prostitutes served as maids or waitresses in nearby hotels. Sometimes these positions were nonsalaried, in the expectation that the women would earn wages by servicing hotel customers. More entrepreneurial prostitutes, and their madams in particular, dealt in pornography to supplement their income. Starting in the 1920s, South Florida became heir to some nasty traditions which Leon had become familiar with in Chicago.

So how did Leon die? On August 14th, 1958 Leon was mowing his yard when a car swerved off the highway and hit him. This freak accident was reported in local Miami papers and by The Capital Times of Madison, WI.

The Capital Times, Madison, WI. August 18th 1958.