White Shadow Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I - THE DEVIL’S OWN

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  II - THE DECEIVERS

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  III - SIXTEEN TONS

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  DATELINE: HAVANA

  Acknowledgements

  BEHIND THE STORY

  Teaser chapter

  “Ace Atkins has done a superb job of re-creating old Tampa, a place whose underworld was as dangerous and debauched as Chicago’s in its prime.”

  —Carl Hiaasen

  “It’s atmospheric stuff, spit out in staccato bursts like a rewrite man pounding a Remington on deadline.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “Ace Atkins makes 1950s Florida as cool and hip as tomorrow in this outstanding novel. It’s a stunning achievement and sure to be a book of the year.”

  —Lee Child

  “A delicious slice of noir . . . The dark, twisted plot of White Shadow and its complex, often surprising characters make it a fine example of hard-boiled crime fiction, but for anyone who remembers Tampa before the days of chain everything and metastasizing development, it’s a fabulous piece of time travel . . . White Shadow will give you an extra serving of thrills.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “It’s not hard to tell when an author has an affinity for the place, time, and people he’s chronicling, and such is the case with Atkins’s fictionalized take on real events that occurred in Tampa, fifty years ago . . . How these characters and stories converge to make a history of their own is the heart of a book that is obviously a labor of love . . . If you don’t end this book wrapped up in their lives like tobacco in an old-time Tampa cigar, you have missed the glory in the tale.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “White Shadow is a big, poetic, and muscular novel, as sleek and tough as the stylish characters that inhabit its pages. Ace Atkins writes like a crime beat reporter jacked on passion and ambition. A bravura performance.”

  —George Pelecanos

  “In what is sure to be one of the most talked-about crime novels of the year, Atkins returns to his old haunts in Tampa, FL, to reopen a case buried for nearly fifty years. White Shadow is a stunning look at the 1955 murder and investigation of retired gangster Charlie Wall. The prose and feel of the novel suggests that Atkins stepped into a time machine to capture the atmosphere and nostalgia of Tampa and Havana, Cuba, in their heyday . . . The cast is engrossing. The feel of old Tampa is as real as it gets . . . Captivating and breathtaking.”

  —The Clarion-Ledger

  “The book’s alive. Open the cover to release the Florida subtropics, 1955: a ceiling fan, brew of Cuban coffee, blood on brick, the scent of a woman’s stockings, fried eggs at a midnight diner as young Fidel rants. Ace Atkins nails it: his hard-boiled detective Ed Dodge rivals Marlowe; his Tampa rivals Chinatown.”

  —Randy Wayne White

  “A terrific story with a breakneck plot and a rogues’ gallery of lusty characters ranging from Mafia gangsters to Cuban revolutionaries to crooked cops to endearing circus freaks to a firebrand of a girl who just about steals the show. This marvelous weave of fact and fiction brings Tampa, Havana, and the 1950s to robust, hot-blooded life . . . Atkins’s best book yet.”

  —James Carlos Blake

  “A rich, powerful novel that is to south Florida what Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential is to Los Angeles. Combining fiction with meticulous historical fact, Ace Atkins has given us a layered, complex work that re-creates a Florida when Meyer Lansky fought to control Cuba even as a young Fidel Castro preached revolution along the Tampa coast. The tough cops and obsessed reporters who risk everything to uncover the truth behind a murder, even as they battle their own demons, pulse with authentic life, as do the pages of this book. You will taste the salty ham in Cuban sandwiches, smell the cigar smoke in Florida’s humid air, and thank Mr. Atkins for writing this tour de force.”

  —Robert Crais

  “Ace Atkins has always been one of crime fiction’s most interesting and passionate voices, and White Shadow is his most ambitious work yet, a sweeping page-turner anchored in a beautifully wrought time and place.”

  —Laura Lippman

  “Think L.A. Confidential, but even more emotionally complex. Atkins gives us an era evoked with stunning detail and panoramic richness; a Florida no one has seen before, created with a rare dimensionality and juiciness. White Shadow has real historical characters, a real crime, a real world brought to life, an exotic corner of America lit up before our eyes. I’ve enjoyed Ace Atkins’s work before, but this is a whole new ballgame—the big leagues.”

  —James W. Hall

  “White Shadow, based on the unsolved, real-life throat-slashing of a retired bootlegger named Charlie Wall, succeeds both as a first-rate historical novel and as a superb crime story. The book packs the emotional wallop of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. It is as gritty as James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. And yet, the prose is as lyrical as James Lee Burke’s Crusader’s Cross . . . With White Shadow, Atkins has found his true voice.”

  —The Associated Press

  “Reminiscent of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, Atkins’s fictionalized account of the unsolved murder of real-life Tampa crime boss Charlie Wall in 1955 admirably re-creates a time and a place . . . Atkins, who unearthed the story in connection with a reporting assignment for the Tampa Tribune, puts his extensive research to good dramatic use.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  PRAISE FOR

  WICKED CITY

  “Well told.”

  —The Washington Post

  “The author paints a visceral portrait . . . Atkins is a proud torch-bearer of a literary tradition that includes William Faulkner . . . There’s nothing derivative about this novel, only the emergence of a great new voice in American fiction.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “[Atkins’s] unflinching, graphic storytelling echoes the best of James Ellroy and James Crumley . . . A solid piece of crime fiction, not a history lesson.”

  —South Florida Sun-Sentinel

  “Atkins has been making a name for himself with highly descriptive, noirish tales set in the Deep South and based on real events. With his latest taking place in the real Phenix City, he has conjured up a time and setting that literally smells of swamps and sweat, tobacco, and gunpowder.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “A gritty, well-plotted story that makes for fascinating fictionalized true crime.”

  —Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

  “You don’t just read Wicked City . . . You absorb each highball of bourbon, each plume of smoke, each peek at a pastie-covered nipple until you’re woozy off words that dance and dart and catch you cold, like a sucker punch to the chin . . . It would be hackneyed if it weren’t true, but to his credit, the historical accuracy isn’t what elevates Atkins’s prose to greatness. It’s his ability to let these characters breathe in a way that few authors could ever imagine. He doesn’t so much write them as unleash them upon the page.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  Titles by Ace Atkins

  Crossroad Blues

  Leavin’ Trunk Blues

  Dark End of the Street

  Dirty South

  White Shadow

  Wicked City

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2006 by Ace Atkins.

  Interior photos: Charlie Wall, the Wall crime scene, Santo Trafficante, Jr., and Fidel Castro courtesy of the Tampa Tribune.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-15173-0

  White shadow / Ace Atkins.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15173-0

  1. Wall, Charlie, d. 1955—Death—Fiction. 2. Mafia—Fiction. 3. Reporters and reporting—Fiction. 4. Tampa (Fla.)—Fiction. 5. Havana (Cuba)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.T49W

  813’.6—dc22

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Bob, Leland, Ellis, and Al

  And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us.

  —ROBERT PENN WARREN,

  All the King’s Men

  The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER,

  Requiem for a Nun

  Much of the following story is based on true events, with a narrative constructed from police and court records, newspaper accounts, crime scene photographs and reports, and mostly from the memories of those who never forgot the Charlie Wall murder, lawless Havana, and those days and nights in 1955.

  DATELINE: TAMPA

  When I think of Tampa, I remember the tunnels winding their way under the old Latin District of Ybor City; unlit, partially caved-in airless holes beneath Seventh Avenue, where the steady stream of Buicks and Hudsons overhead has become the pounding bass music from flashy sedans and tricked-out trucks. Most people will tell you the caves are the stuff of urban legend. Others will tell you they were, without doubt, the passageways for bootlegger Charlie Wall to run his liquor to bars during Prohibition. In back booths of West Tampa Cuban cafés, you still might hear hushed conversations about Charlie: the white linen suit, the silver dollars he threw to poor orphans, the old bolita racket, and the jokes he told to U.S. senators during the Kefauver hearings of 1950. (That’s when every elected official was on the take and right before I got out of the army and headed out to work for Hampton Dunn at the Times with a single gray suit, a studio apartment, and barely enough change for cabs.)

  When I knew Charlie Wall, he was the old-timer sitting at the edge of the bar—The Dream or The Turf or The Hub—holding court, telling us about the old days and all about running the sheriff and the mayor and the newspapers. He’d punctuate the tales with a sip of those big bastard Canadian whiskey highballs, and launch into another one.

  All those stories we wrote about Charlie were cut into clips and have turned yellow and brittle if they exist at all. Maybe they are in landfills or stacked in forgotten warehouses or rotting barns among the molded dung heaps or wrapping Christmas ornaments or just disintegrated into the dirt. But I still remember putting out those tales, and how the energy and pulse of the Times newsroom was like nothing I’d ever known.

  The old King, the White Shadow as he was called by the superstitious Latins, was dead. His throat cut. Birdseed left splattered on the floor by his favorite reading chair in that big bungalow on Seventeenth Avenue.

  Being someone who sits and talks in cafés, I know how the conversation always winds back to Charlie Wall, Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, and the murders during what we called the Era of Blood. Shotgun attacks in back alleys, restaurants, and palm tree-lined streets. You were there? Weren’t you?

  The names: Joe Antinori, JoJo Cacciatore, Joe “Pelusa” Diaz, Scarface Johnny Rivera. The places: the Centro Asturiano, the Big Orange Drive-In, the Sapphire Room, Jake’s Silver Coach Diner.

  I tell them it’s all gone now. They’re all gone now. That was another lifetime ago.

  But, inside, I know that on certain times of night and in certain neighborhoods, it’s as if the old world still exists. You have to use your imagination and watch Tampa through a patchwork of images and places, but those ghosts still live.

  In the old Ybor cemetery, a marble bust dedicated to a long-dead waiter stands with carved napkin folded across his forearm—still ready to serve the city’s elite. But instead of orders and the clatter of plates and silverware, the only sound comes from the interstate overpass or the occasional gunshot or crying baby from inside the barred windows of the faded, candy-colored casitas where cigar workers once lived.

  Nearby, you still hear that lonely train whistle as the phosphate cars rumble along the track from the old Switchyards. And you can see Santo Trafficante Jr. in the corner of the Columbia Restaurant, down the road from the tunnels, sipping on a café con leche—the waiters afraid to refill his cup for fear something hot would spill on the mob boss’s hands.

  On the other side of the peninsula of Tampa, separated by old Hillsborough Bay, the other ghosts live in postwar neighborhoods like Sunset Park and the Anglo world of Palma Ceia. You remember how they all would meet on the neutral ground of the grand hotels downtown—now replaced with anonymous glass office buildings—where jazz piano seemed to fill every street.

  You think about driving down to the Fun-Lan on Hillsborough and watching Grace Kelly or Gregory Peck or Richard Widmark light up the drive-in screen while those green-and-white electric thunderstorms rolled and threatened far off in the bay, and the city streets smelled of ozone and salt.

  That world gone now.

  Both sides of Charlie Wall’s tunnels are sealed, deemed too dangerous for the curious. But you’ve often wondered where they now lead, how many others link the little caverns of the city.

  You sometimes open the old files, read their voices, and talk to friends who remember the way it once was in such a wonderful poetry of class, manners, and violence. But to see it, to see that clarity of light on the old brick of Ybor City where shotguns rang out to settle the feud after Santo Trafficante Sr. died, or feel the excitement of driving to the next murder scene or bank heist or two-bit shoot-out, you must strip away everything you see today.

  You must walk to the corner of Franklin and Polk and not look back, for fear that you will only see the soulless glass-and-steel place Tampa has become, but look at that dead corner of five-and-dimes, the Woolworth’s and the Kress’s, and over their roofs from the old Floridan Hotel, where we all used to drink at its big bar called the Sapphire Room and where Eleanor broke your heart at least twice. br />
  You must ignore the black vultures roosting on the mammoth sign spelling out the hotel’s name in metal as wind beats into broken windows and derelicts sleep on the floor of the grand old lobby. You have to drive down to Seventh Avenue and remember how it used to be with the Sicilians and Cubans going down to the Ritz Theatre and shopping for twenty-dollar suits and guayaberas at Max Argintar’s or the way that yellow rice and black beans would smell on the heavy wooden tables of Las Novedades where Teddy Roosevelt had once ridden a horse through the kitchen.

  Or see the shadows in the old Italian Club where the killings were discussed and where the Shabby Attorney came with his fiery words of revolution.

  It’s all cigar smoke and light and shadows and ticking Hamilton watches and the smell of the salty bay blowing over forgotten crime scenes.

  The story of the Shabby Lawyer, the Girl who was protected by the Giant, the hidden tunnels, all begin with Charlie Wall and that night in April 1955.

  And that’s where you must begin, too. Because the tunnels are open, and the cigar factories are no longer burned-out shells with plywood windows but working brick warehouses. Ybor City is filled with shoppers in straw hats and two-tone shoes, and the cops walk the Franklin Street beat from Maas Brothers department store up to Skid Row and the drunks and derelicts and burlesque shows.