Bernard Barker Deadend

Tying Up a Loose End 

My research into the ancestry and background of the Rebozo family was done in order to get a picture of where Bebe grew up in Florida and what kind of work his family members did; details were inserted into The Great Heroin Coup - Chapter 16  as editor's notes. One item which piqued my interest was the fact that Rebozo's older sister had married a man named Barker when Bebe was a child. My first thought was whether he may have been a relative of the Bernard Leon Barker, Jr. from Cuba whom E. Howard Hunt befriended in Coconut Grove years later. I researched both Barker families' ancestries and discovered, however, that  there was absolutely no connection between Bebe's Uncle Harold and the Bernard Barker family.

Flamingo at top left.

Harold Barker, Jr. and his mother the former Margaret Rebozo, in 1951 lived in Miami Beach on SW 21st Street, and she was a secretary at the Chase Federal Savings, which, like many of Miami's other first buildings, was designed by Carl Fisher's main architect, August (Gus) Geiger. Charles L. Clements had been a Miami banker associated with founder, Frank A. Chase, who lived at 5787 Bay Road, across the street from what would eventually become the La Gorce Golf Club. "Fisher’s ocean-front residence was the first edifice erected on Lincoln Road in 1915. It was followed in quick succession by his office on the corner of Lincoln and Washington in 1917, and by his star attraction, the Lincoln Hotel." Lincoln Road was where Chase Federal Savings was built near the Drexel intersection.  

Miami Beach grew quickly and was incorporated as a separate town in 1915 and as a city in 1917. Then Prohibition became law of the land in 1919, and revelers found Cuba to be a friendlier alternative. The crash of the real estate boom in 1926 not only brought bankruptcy to Fisher, but it brought Al Capone from Chicago in 1928 to oversee his bootlegging empire out of his mansion on Palm Island.  Carl Fisher had developed Miami and built the Flamingo Hotel in 1920.

Margaret Rebozo's father-in-law, Leon O. Barker, was a stone mason who moved to Miami from Michigan around 1907 and lived in the original part of Miami.

The Watergate burglar Barker's father, Bernard Sr., was born in Columbia, TN in 1890 to Jacob and Jeanette (Gundersheimer) Barker, the Russian-born son (or perhaps grandson) of an American shipowner for whom he was named, who supplied oil from Russia to American lighthouses in the early 1800s. In 1885 Jacob, who was in the coal business, married Jeannette, a girl of German descent, who had been born in Florida and as a teenager moved with her family to New Orleans. Bernard Sr. was born in Cuba in 1890 and there he married Alicia or Alice with whom he had two children in Cuba. 

He and Alice returned to Cuba in 1917 on an American passport to manage the Cuban Coal Co. In 1940 he traveled from Cuba to Florida with the entire family, including his second wife, Rosa Cobos Barker and his son Bernard Jr. By this time he gave his occupation as "contractor;" their names were listed on the alien manifest, which gave their address in the U.S. in care of Standard Dredging Co. at 80 Broad Street, New York. Their closest relative was her mother in Cuba, Mercedes Becerra at 20 Santa Catalina in Marianao. 

Standard Dredging had a contract "between July 1941 and January 1943 dredging of the seaplane landing and takeoff area" for the U.S. Naval Air Station in Key West, a seaplane base established by law in mid-December 1940. The Barkers may have been anticipating that project when Bernard Barker Sr. brought his family from Cuba to Key West in August of that year. The Standard Dredging Co. would still be working in Florida in 1956. The sole building contractor from June 1941 to July 1943, however, was Mackle Leach Construction Co. of Miami, but Standard Dredging company had a separate contract for the seaplane portion of the station. The Miami directory for 1942 shows the Mackle Co. address was 2818 SW 22nd Street (in or near Coconut Grove), while the three Mackle brothers each had a residence in Coral Gables, about three miles from their office.

The Mackle family came to Florida in 1908, and in Jacksonville Francis Elliott Mackle started a construction company, the Southern Erecting Company, but remained only three years. They lived in Atlanta for ten years, followed by numerous moves until settling in Florida permanently in 1938. The father died in 1941 after building a home in Coral Gables. He had just negotiated a contract to build 200 homes at Opa Locka for the men who would be stationed at the new naval air station.

In 1958 the Mackles merged their construction company with General Development Corp., controlled by Lou Chesler. Chesler's company had previously been known as Florida Canada, and before that Alan-H Investments, Ltd. of Toronto. 

In 1960 a lawsuit involving the allegedly defunct Ridgeway Corporation was decided in Delaware in which Chesler and two corporations (Florida Canada Corporation and Yellow-knife Bear Mines, Limited) were defendants. One of the plaintiffs was J.H. Buchanan.  Chesler and Maxwell Goldhar, his associate, were also involved in litigation that began when they were sued in Delaware by plaintiffs, who were stockholders of P. R. M., Inc., also known as Associated Artists Production Corp.   

The men had acquired a 1920 company, founded as American Bushings Corporation (name later changed to Pressed Metals of America, Inc.) in 1956 and adopted the name Associated Artists Productions Corp. to engage in the principal business of owning and managing libraries of motion picture films produced by Warner Brothers. Also included in the corporation's film library were a number of 'Popeye' cartoons produced by Paramount. The two men owned 41% of the stock of Associated Artists, whose assets were bought by United Artists Corporation under very unusual and complicated terms.

Chesler and Maxwell Goldhar, his associate, were also involved in litigation that began when they were sued in Delaware by plaintiffs, who were stockholders of P. R. M., Inc., also known as Associated Artists Production Corp. The men had acquired a 1920 company, founded as American Bushings Corporation (name later changed to Pressed Metals of America, Inc.) in 1956 and adopted the name Associated Artists Productions Corp. to engage in the principal business of owning and managing libraries of motion picture films produced by Warner Brothers. 

 

Also included in the corporation's film library were a number of 'Popeye' cartoons produced by Paramount. The two men owned 41% of the stock of Associated Artists, whose assets were bought by United Artists Corporation under very unusual and complicated terms.

Who Was Chesler?

A blog article called "An Informal History of the Grand Bahama Port Authority, 1955-1985" tells us: 

Louis A. Chesler, born in Belleville, Ontario in 1913, made his first million through Canadian mining stocks such as Loredo Uranium Mines between 1942 and 1946, before shifting his base of operations to Miami, Florida. Using the same sort of “corporate shell” financial shenanigans that had brought Wallace Groves low, he parlayed his way to control of several corporations. The General Development Company, for example, was involved in the infamous “Florida land deals” of the time, but it also constructed actual developments at Port Charlotte, Port Malabar, and Port St. Lucie, and was perhaps a model for what was to follow in Grand Bahama. However, it was the theatrical corporation that Chesler controlled, Seven Arts, that would play the primary role in the history of Freeport.

By the time Chesler was moving from Florida to deals in the Bahamas, both areas were the focus of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was much more concerned with communism (i.e., anti-capitalism) than it was with the dangers of organized crime. Meyer Lansky had lost his control of his Cuban casinos when Fidel Castro took them over, and he sought to move his gambling operations to the Bahamas with help from Chesler and possibly the CIA itself. During the Bay of Pigs operation planning, the CIA's JMWAVE headquarters was based in Coral Gables. Its office cover name was Clarence A. Depew.

Coral Gables 

Land development south of Miami is a fascinating subject involving the master craftsman George E. Merrick, who had hired two scam artists with intriguing connections to the Canadian mafia, as we mentioned previously:

Newkirk gave a brief biography of his life up to 1960, revealing that he was enticed into Coral Gables real estate sales by a man he met in Jacksonville--Telfair Knight--and says he went with Knight to work at George Merrick's Coral Gables development just outside Miami as early as 1921.

According to Arva Moore Parks' excellent book, George Merrick's Coral Gables: Where Your 'castles in Spain' are Made Real, Merrick began his real estate career at Realty Securities Corp. and then set out to develop land surrounding the family plantation into a Spanish village. Assisted at first by his mother's relatives, the Finks, Merrick used visionary vistas of Spanish residential scenes painted by his uncle, Denman Fink to attract buyers to Coral Gables. 

The landscaping and homes would be designed by architects Frank Button and H. George Fink, a cousin. The real sales campaign got into gear in 1921, and a year later he employed at least a hundred salesmen to sell the properties, as well as more architects to design the homes. Merrick had lived with his uncle Denman for a times in New Jersey, where he was an illustrator of stories published by Harper's magazine in 1913 and worked on propaganda campaigns for the U.S. government during WWI. His art was also selected in 1920 by the Interchurch World Movement, sponsored by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. 

In the middle of the plans for his development of Coral Gables, Merrick married Eunice Peacock, daughter of the owner of Peacock Inn in Coconut (or Cocoanut) Grove, a hotel which overlooked Biscayne Bay and touted itself to be "the most southerly hotel" on the U.S. mainland. They were, in fact, among the first residents of Coconut Grove:

A pioneer was "Jolly Jack" Peacock, an Englishman who settled in the south part of the Grove. He persuaded his brother Charles, then owner of a wholesale meat business in London, to join him. Charles Peacock, his wife Isabella and their three sons eventually settled in Coconut Grove and in 1882 opened the Bay View House, later called the Peacock Inn, the first hotel in the area.

Other original settlers of that area included the Trapp and Rhodes families, whose history is set out in a Report relating to the designation of the Trapp House located at 2521 S. Bayshore Drive as an historic site, giving us insight into how Merrick began acquiring land to the east of his father's fruit and vegetable farm, which was to become Coral Gables. 

Another pioneer in the area was Ralph Middleton Munroe, whose property is also a designated historic site. The question is how Bebe Rebozo began to get his hands onto the keys outside the mainland, and whether there are links back to the developers who worked with Merrick decades earlier.

As George Merrick became a large-scale developer, he needed more and more cash flow coming in to pay for the elaborate landscaping, infrastructure and attractions. One of those attractions was a "flying circus" show put on by an aviatrix named Mabel Cody.

We traced Maude Cody Fowler, who claimed a connection to Buffalo Bill Cody, to Jacksonville, Florida in 1913. As we explored the history of Florida's development, it took us back to oil baron Henry Flagler:

In the late 1890's Flagler [after building several hotels and a huge mansion for himself in Palm Beach] decided to keep going farther south to Miami. The mansion built for Mary Lily Kenan Flagler was completed in Palm Beach a year after their marriage.  By then Flagler envisioned more wealth through Cuba and Panama, former Spanish possessions acquired as a result of the Spanish American War which ended in 1898.

Henry Flagler's death in 1913 ended his contribution to Florida's land boom, but there were many others to take over his dream of making millions out of the shoreline leading to Florida's southern tip.

Mary Lily's father,  William Rand Kenan worked at the port in Wilmington, N.C. as an insurance agent and, like Paul Helliwell's father, a customs collector. Her brother, a student in Chapel Hill, was later employed by Union Carbide. Flagler hired William Rand Kenan, Jr. in 1899 as a consultant for all his Florida enterprises--including Miami Power and Water Company (later Florida Power and Light), and Flagler's will appointed him a trustee of his estate. 

 

Kenan soon became president of the Florida East Coast Railroad, Florida East Coast Hotel Company, Florida East Coast Car Ferry Company, Model Land Company, Miami Power and Water Company, West Palm Beach Water Company, and P. and O. (Peninsular and Occidental) Steamship Company.

Flagler's fortune was valued at between $60 and $100 million, and, within two years of his death, his widow married Robert Worth Bingham--on November 15, 1916. Ferdinand Lundberg wrote in The Rich and the Super-Rich, p. 143:

In 1968 the president of the Peninsular and Occidental Steamship Company was William Rand Kenan, Jr., the son of a founder of the Union Carbide Company. He was also president of the Florida East Coast Railway, Hotel and Car Ferry Companies, Perrine Grant Land Co., Florida Power and Light Company and numerous others, in addition to being chairman of the board of the Niagara County National Bank and Trust.