Publishers of book SEARACE, column SEATALK, offshore photos
A half century ago offshore powerboat racing was brought back to life by Florida's answer to circus impresario P. T. Barnum...the 275 pound carrot topped Irisher Capt. Sherman "Red" Crise who founded the 184 mile Miami-Nassau race. A seasoned hand at hustling motorsports after creating the Trenton New Jersey race track where he talked his friend WWI fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker into doing his public relations and the Nassau's Speed week which was famous for its famed drivers and wild drinking parties.
Not known for counting on heavenly help, Crise relied more on luck than the Lord. Which worked out fine for his inaugural Nassau race where the Lord served up
seas blown hellacious by 40 knot winds and four inches of rain that made the notoriously capricious Gulf Stream especially frightful to the crews huddled in eleven modified wooden pleasure boats. Despite the fact that there were few churchgoers in the argosy, there was no loss of life and eight of the starters finished!
Crise also had something going for him that always seems to bless the sport. From the beginning it attracted participants who were already famous. The winning crew of four of the first five Miami-Nassau races was the world famous yachtsman Dick Bertram and the celebrated soldier of fortune and WW II hero Sam Griffith. And Indy car racer Jim Rathmann ran in the inaugural event, breaking his leg minutes after the start!
Actually, both Crise and Griffith were heavily decorated aviators in WW II after serving as pilots flying materials to the Chinese over the hump and later in the Army Air Force. Crise carried a huge U shaped scar running from his back to his upper chest as a result of bailing out over the Burma Hump and slamming into a tree.
Griffith got some of his top honors after he remained in the twin engined bomber he was navigator for, after the pilot ordered everybody else to jump when its engines gagged on sabotaged fuel, to herd the frightened younger crew members out of the plane. By the time he jumped there wasn't enough height for his chute to open. He landed in an African lake and suffered only minor injuries then walked to the wreckage of the plane where the pilot was alive! For that and many other acts of bravery, Griffith was awarded many Allied medals.
Just before he was died after a cancer operation in 1963, I visited him at his office at the Bertram Yacht Brokerage firm in Miami I saw a large frame on his desk filled borer to border with military medals. Someone had brought to him after he walked off and forgot about it!
At the time of the '56 Nassau race I was the newest member of the Miami (Fla.) Daily News sports department who's editor Morris McLemore rode in one of the boats. A huge man who once played for the Vanderbilt college football team, McLemore later wrote that he felt like "...a potato in tea cup" after being pummeled for nine hours and twenty minutes at sea.
Being elevated to being the paper's' boating editor by the following year's race was more because of the beating my bulky boss had taken, the fact that previous boating writer had quit, and that someone heard that I'd spent time at the U.S. Naval Academy.
After covering the sport for three decades at the Miami News job, free lancing for international boating publications, two decades as associate editor and offshore and Unlimited hydroplane columnist of Powerboat magazine, serving as executive secretary of the Unlimited hydro commission, creating the Sam Griffith World Championship for offshore racing, and founding and staging three of the Miami-Nassau-Miami Sea...at 363 miles the longest non-stop sea non-stop offshore powerboat racers in the world, I took time out to write my book SEARACE...THE HISTORY OF OFFSHORE POWERBOAT RACING which I published in 1989. At 685 pages, 27 index pages with 57,000 references it is the most complete literary work on any motor sport.
We are now in the middle stages of writing SEARACE...THE LEGENDS, ETC. Where the first SEARACE book concentrated on wrapping up decades of offshore racing statistics where I was the only one who had them, SEARACE...THE LEGENDS, ETC., will delve into the intriguing human side of a very colorful group of people...rich ones, beautiful ones, heroic ones and unfortunately some very bad ones who turned Greater Miami into the drug center of the world and ignited the eventual drug epidemic in America which has infects the entire world!
The 80's would see 14 deaths in the sport, eleven in racing and testing accidents and four by assassinations, the most notable being the fatal shooting of the sport's tall, handsome icon Don Aronow by a gunman allegedly hired the racer-boatbuilder grand nephew of the four decade Mafia boss of bosses Meyer Lansky.
Ironically, the 59 year old two time world and three time US Open class champion who was a friend of Lansky's who died several years later at his nearby South Florida home, was gunned down in broad daylight on the very North Miami Beach, Florida street his swift Formula, Magnum, Donzi and Cigarette hulls made world famous. After his death, several books on his death would reveal that Aronow's clientele included a flock of top mobsters.
Incredible as it seems four racers...high school dropouts Ben Kramer...Lansky's grand nephew and the world's biggest marijuana smuggler...Cuban immigrants Sal Magluta and Willie Falcon, labeled by the US Feds as the number one international cocaine smugglers after hauling in 78 tons of cocaine worth a street value of two billion US dollars and Columbian George Morales whose 16 year US prison sentence was dropped after working out a deal with the US CIA.
Morales would later be found tied to a tree slashed to death san s his head which was allegedly sent to his widow after talking like he was bullet proof before a nationally televised US Senate hearing.
In 2000 we revived our pre Internet SEATALK newsletter and got back into visiting some Florida based US offshore races which had just begun their existence under the rule of St. Petersburg, Florida attorney and ex-boat racer Michael Allweiss who'd leased the American Power Boat Association's offshore division and set it up as an LLC or in layman's terms, an limited liability corporation.
After initially being impressed with the large turnouts being generated under the rule of the young Florida barrister, I began hearing that the new US offshore boss was bringing down the hammer on some of the racers and their crews and then picked up that the new LLC wasn't paying its bills or all of its prize monies. I verified what I'd heard by talking to the people who were either getting beaten up with his dictates, drivers whom weren't getting their prize monies and people and organizations who weren't getting paid.
Then after he lost his cool at the Key West World championships after I had quietly asked him about the wisdom of his insistence of shortening the length of his race courses down to about 100 miles at a time when almost all of the race boats were capable of 100 mph speeds, he lit into me and threatened that if I told one more person about my concerns and what he had said about a longtime figure in the sport being caught repeatedly cheating, he publically threatened me with legal action if I continued.
Then a week or so after our head to head discussion at Key West he posts on the Internet that I had threatened his life in front of witnesses during our argument! Which amused myself and some of bystanders since there was no cheering or clapping!
Then comes the mail. After months of my observations of what myself and others in the sport saw as flaws in his leadership Allweiss fired his favorite weapon...a lawsuit. Not one of his own make but from the largest law firm in all of Florida charging me with libel and slander.
Which had an negative effect on me...not because I was guilty of any of his charges. After almost a half century of critiquing than bigger men than this little man, I know two things...it's going to cost me more than I can afford and that sin every thing faulted him on was true and truth is still total defense against libel and slander charges, there was no way that he could beat me in court especially against the major league law firm representing me that was working with hard cold facts and not wild charges.
Then on two and a half years later Allweiss' law suit was dismissed by the Florida 6th Judicial Circuit Court for "lack of prosecution"
During the interim, one of his LLC's has folded leaving a flock of unpaid bills and the second on e was purchased for one dollar by a solvent racer who reportedly paid up a lot if not all of the LLC debts he inherited.
As it was intended to do, the lawsuit cost me a lot money but probably not near what it cost the plaintiff. And unlike Mr. Allweiss, my reputation came out better than when it went in.
The most disappointing twist in the entire event was that when Allweiss filed suit against me POWERBOAT MAGAZINE, where I loyally served as an associate editor and columnist for two decades, ran a half page PR release from his PR man.
Then refused to run one word after it was thrown out of court because It's editorial staff reasoned that word of the lawsuit's dismissal reached too long after its date of dismissal!
I wonder how its editors would handle an announcement of of a man's innocence after he's been falsely charged with murder because it came too long after the crime!
Although it's not quite the same, falsely labeling a man who has made his living for 50 years as an internationally respected journalist, author and publisher and is listed in Marquis' Who's Who Of The World in literature, as a libeler and slanderer, is a vile act that should be corrected where possible.
And in the case of POWERBOAT'S handling of the situation, it was more than possible!
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