Speed Kills: Who killed the Cigarette Boat King, the fastest man on the seas? (Harris True Crime Collection)
Brand: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Categories: Books, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense



Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.04 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-13: 978-1484091180
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1484091183
Print length: 416 pages
Publication date: June 7, 2013
subtitle: Paperback – June 7, 2013
author: Arthur Jay Harris
review: Editorial Reviews From the Author THE KEY MOMENT Crime stories, true or fiction, begin as jumbles. Something awful, scary, or unspeakable just happened, and to make sense of it will take every bit of skill from the investigator. Unless everything discoverable is found, the mystery will be imperfectly solved. As a journalist and book author, I investigate over and above what law enforcement has already done. What I look for that they don't is story structure. In literature, plot and characters have arcs; everything builds to, then descends from, a turning point. Because it is always buried, most of my investigation is taken up by searching for that key moment. But when I realize it, a story that had made only marginal sense suddenly reorganizes and flows. The key moment always is: the main character, by his actions or because it's been forced on him, finds he can't elude making an agonizing decision between alternatives that are only terrible and will have life-changing or fatal consequences. He's in No-man's land. Usually at this moment the story becomes a tragedy. But sometimes one of the choices is heroic, although at that point it doesn't look particularly attractive. SPEED KILLS opens with the stunning daylight murder in 1980s Miami of boat builder, boat racer, and wealthy bon vivant Don Aronow. He invented, raced, built and sold Cigarette boats, the fastest thing on the water. Everyone who worshipped speed and could afford one, wanted one; his clients were royalty, U.S. presidents, CEOs, intelligence services, and--most of all, eventually--dope smugglers. Don took everyone's money and traveled between all those worlds. You could also see it as Don playing all sides. When the Feds needed faster boats to keep up with the Cigarettes that Don sold to dopers, they came to him. It was sort of the same with his wife and girlfriend (and girlfriend and girlfriend). How long could anybody get away with that? Confidence men are known as con men; Don wasn't that, but he was a supreme self-confidence man, that is, he was his own victim. Finally he was cornered. Don's protégé in racing and boatbuilding was also the largest pot smuggler in America. The Feds needed Aronow to testify against him. For leverage, they apparently threatened Don with a tax evasion case. The quintessential free-spirit boat racer could go to prison--or he could risk the wrath of a major criminal organization. Aronow made his decision. Days later, he was killed. FLOWERS FOR MRS. LUSKIN begins with a flower delivery to the best house in the best part of Hollywood, Florida. Inside, Marie Luskin was cautious; her husband Paul used to send her flowers but those days had ended more than a year before when she filed for divorce. She thought it was safe to open the door just enough to accept the pot of azaleas. She was wrong. The delivery was a ruse; the man pointed a gun at her and demanded her money and jewelry. When he left, she fell to the floor, bloodied, thinking he'd hit her with the gun. Over 40 years, Paul's family had built a business called Luskin's from one store in Baltimore into a chain of consumer electronics stores in Florida. Coming of age, Paul was taking it over, to run. He'd already made his first million, and he and Marie were living a life their friends admired. But between them all was not well. Then Paul's high school girlfriend moved to town with her husband, and sparks rekindled. When Marie discovered it she threw Paul out of the house. For a moment it looked like they would reunite. She asked Paul to move back in at the end of the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest sale day of the year. But that was a ruse, too. That day at the store, her attorneys served him the divorce. Marie's attorneys were aggressive. Accusing Paul's parents of shielding his assets, they asked the judge for everything he--and his parents--had. A year later, it looked like Marie would get it all. The divorce was overwhelming and compound stress. Three times Marie had him arrested for not paying his very high support payments exactly on time; the judge had frozen his assets, and his dad had asked him to leave his high-paying job because he couldn't concentrate both on it and the divorce. Marie's attorneys wanted Paul's mom to testify for days about the business's finances, but because she had a blood clot that stress could loosen and become lethal, Paul's family asked them to lay off her. They refused. Not long after came the flower delivery. The Feds indicted Paul for attempted murder-for-hire. They told the jury: A Luskin's employee called his brother in Baltimore who was a mob guy, who got someone to come to Hollywood to kill Marie. Although she thought the gunman hit her with the gun, he really shot her--his bullet grazed her head. Paul was convicted and sentenced to prison for 35 years. In prison, Paul married his high school girlfriend. To me, they protested so insistently that there was no murder-for-hire that it seemed something was truly wrong. I eventually found there had been a murder plot--but the real question was, who had asked the Luskin's employee to call his brother in Baltimore? Testimony said "Mr. Luskin" ordered the murder; the prosecutor naturally assumed that meant Paul. But there was a better case that "Mr. Luskin" was Paul's dad. As a result of his son's divorce he lost his whole business, owed Marie $11 million he didn't have and was facing jail for contempt of court for not paying her, and so had to leave the country. At the story's turning point, "Mr. Luskin" had to choose between two untenable outcomes: the death of the elder Mrs. Luskin or the younger. But prosecutors also were forced to make a tragic choice. Without certainty of which "Mr. Luskin" it was, did they choose the wrong one? UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT begins with a night 911 call from a woman gasping her last breaths. When police arrived at the house they found her dead, stabbed, and her husband, infant, and father-in-law all shot point-blank. They would survive. Minutes later, a man also called 911, a gunman had released him from a robbery at the same house. He said he knew of no violence before he left. Yet he was the only one who the gunman hadn't tried to kill. Police instantly suspected him. That night and long after, police tried to shake the man, Chuck Panoyan, who insisted he didn't know who the gunman was. Police guessed right. A tip led them to the gunman, and that led to a trip Panoyan took to see him. Both were arrested, and prosecutor Brian Cavanagh won a death penalty indictment against them both. But in pretrial, Panoyan's attorneys unraveled Cavanagh's case against their client. No longer certain Panoyan was guilty, Cavanagh reached No Man's Land: his choice was to let the jury sort it out, or admit he was wrong about Panoyan for now three years. Cavanagh's dad Tom was a retired NYPD lieutenant who'd had a double murder he couldn't solve, then at another precinct a suspect confessed. Tom recognized it had been coerced and quietly asked his detectives if they could prove it wrong. When they did, the case became famous for police integrity. A TV movie renamed Tom's character: Kojak. Years later, son Brian was at a similar turning point. Like his dad, he would not leave it to a jury to unscramble. He moved to release Chuck Panoyan from jail. But Panoyan had to tell his story: he'd lied to police because the gunman had threatened to kill his family if he spoke up. Once before, the gunman had killed a small child and went to prison. Who was the only one could make Panoyan comfortable enough to talk? The old man, the real-life Kojak, Tom Cavanagh. From the Inside Flap ARTHUR JAY HARRIS IS ALSO THE AUTHOR OF THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF ADAM WALSH A two-book series The famous murder of Adam Walsh, the 6-year-old son of John Walsh of America's Most Wanted and other crime shows, more than 40 years later has a surprising number of unresolved questions. Did Ottis Toole, the low-IQ out-of-town drifter who confessed to killing Adam, and who police believed, really do it? Because from prison he confessed to something like 500 other unsolved murders that he didn't do. He presented himself as a serial killer - but was he only a serial false confessor? In 1983, when he first volunteered that he killed Adam, it was the weekend before a TV movie about Adam was to premiere. As the air date approached, NBC ran more and more promos for it. Toole confessed, recanted, confessed, and recanted - depending on who he was talking to. After a huge investigation that year, police couldn't confirm anything he said, or even anywhere he'd been in the days before or after Adam disappeared. Finally, they dropped him as a suspect. The best evidence that he had no idea what he was talking about may have been this: He said that when he took Adam, the child was wearing mittens. He thought it had been January. In Jacksonville, Florida, where Toole lived, there are winter days when kids may need to wear gloves. But Adam disappeared in 1981 at the end of July - in South Florida. Twenty-five years after Toole's confession, after he'd died in prison, a new chief of police announced at a press conference that Toole really did kill Adam. A reporter asked, Did he have any new evidence? No, he admitted. Still, the Walsh family and the country seemed relieved. And since Toole was dead, police would never have to prove their case in court at a murder trial. A year before the press conference, Harris had been in print and on TV, including on ABC Primetime and Anderson Cooper, with a much more compelling case for who took Adam: Jeffrey Dahmer. Sure that was crazy, but Harris had a lot of evidence: it began with seven separate police witnesses who'd seen Dahmer at the mall when Adam disappeared. Police had dismissed them all. Police could also not confirm that Dahmer had ever been in the area, but Harris found something they didn't: a Miami police report with Dahmer's name on it, dated 20 days before Adam's disappearance. Dahmer had worked 20 minutes by vehicle from the mall, and had access to a blue delivery van which wasn't monitored and was easily and often taken by employees and others. Police's first big lead in the case had been that the person who took Adam left in a blue van. In his documented murders, Dahmer severed heads; The child's head that was found and identified as Adam's had been severed, and a state forensic anthropologist found evidence that a scalpel had been used. Dahmer had medical training and knowledge of anatomy. He also, in the Army, had a history of pulling down his pants in front of small children. Harris thought he was done with the story until he found something that broke with the police and the Walshes' version of the story even more: After police closed the case, all its official records became public, and he was able to check the medical examiner's identification of the child's remains as Adam. An autopsy had been done - but where was the autopsy report? It wasn't in the M.E.'s file, the police file, or anywhere else. The state requires the presence of an autopsy report in the medical examiner's file when one is done. And in a homicide trial, it's essential evidence to prove the identity of the deceased. Without it, there couldn't have been a successful prosecution - not against Toole, Dahmer, or anyone else. Harris wrote about it in The Miami Herald, and asked the Florida state Medical Examiners Commission to do its own investigation. In writing, they confirmed its absence. Adam Walsh is the biggest murder case in the county's history, and there's no autopsy report? How could that be an oversight? And the public could never have known about it until after police closed the case - and on Ottis Toole? You would think that John Walsh, always so on top of the story of the murder of his son, would say something about this. Right? Because he never has. What does this all mean? The missing autopsy report turns out to be only the gateway to the problems of the identification of the child said to be Adam. Was it not him? Was it some other child? It all opens the door to the next question: What really happened to Adam? From the Back Cover He built the fastest boats -- for royalty, the rich, spies, smugglers, Feds and a former U.S. President. Then came six shots. It was the era of cool shades and Miami Vice , and Don Aronow's Cigarette boats were the symbol of the city's sun-drenched decadence. But faster than his speed boats was Aronow himself -- in races behind the throttle, in business deals and on the town with his collection of stunning women. And then, in broad daylight, someone in a dark Lincoln gunned him down. Who had Don double-dealt? A dope smuggler? The Mafia? The husband or boyfriend of one of his many paramours? After ten years of dogged work, did Miami police get it right -- or were they dead wrong? About the Author Arthur Jay Harris is a true crime author who has written about some of South Florida's deepest and hardest to penetrate murder mysteries from the Eighties. His reporting is original, extended investigative journalism. His books include Speed Kills , which was adapted into a feature film starring John Travolta, and is now streaming on Netflix and other services. He has also written Flowers for Mrs. Luskin, Until Proven Innocent and the two-book series with a Single Edition, The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh . He lives in Florida. For the Adam Walsh case, he has appeared on television many times: ABC Primetime; Anderson Cooper 360; Nancy Grace; Ashleigh Banfield; The Lineup; Inside Edition; Catherine Crier; Cold Blood, and on local TV in Miami and Milwaukee. He has also written stories on the case that have appeared in periodical print in The Miami Herald, Broward-Palm Beach New Times, and Miami Daily Business Review. In addition, Art has presented on television other crime stories he has investigated at length, including on the shows Snapped; City Confidential; Prison Diaries, Inside Edition, A Current Affair, and Hard Copy. Read more