Vanderbilt Ranch in Southwest Florida

In Part One, we learned that the Vanderbilt brothers bought 35,000 acres of land in Sarasota and Charlotte Counties, Florida, for which they paid a whopping $700,700 in December 1951. 

Only three years later an adjoining tract of land was sold by the man they bought their acreage from for $2,300,000. Didn't anyone happen to wonder at the time who did the appraisals?

Maule Industries

Why would Maule Industries, Inc., affiliated with the Florida West Coast Development Co., pay $33,000 an acre for land worth only $20,000 per acre three years earlier?

What do we know about Maule Industries?

James Herman Buchanan, who lived at 77 La Gorce Circle in Miami, had been president of Maule Industries in June 1953 when it merged with  Alfred Destin, Co. The two corporations completed a merger by issuing new Maule stock worth about $2,000,000 and each corporation traded its old stock for shares in the new corporation. 

By 1959, the Miami directory listed him as the president of Ridgeway Corp. 

Born in a small town southwest of Dallas, Texas in 1898, Buchanan had grown up near Graham, in Young County, Texas, where he had worked as a bookkeeper for a bank before WWI began. He enlisted and spent six months training at the Naval Training School in San Pedro, CA before receiving a discharge in October, when his father died. The following January, 1919, he was named an assistant cashier at Beckham National Bank in Graham, where he was still employed in July when he married Helen Lawrence of Adams County, Illinois. 

The 1920 census shows the newlyweds and his mother living as lodgers in the home of a Graham building contractor. At some point during the 1920's Herman and Helen moved to El Paso, Texas, where he was a partner in Western Purchasing Co., which handled accounts for railroads and mining companies operating in Mexico. Employees had the use of a Mexican airline called C.A.T. which flew daily between El Paso and Mexico City's Toluca airport.

The purchasing company went into bankruptcy in 1930, but the Buchanans remained there for a time after that. In 1932 their only daughter Barbara Jean was born in El Paso, where Herman had found new work until at least 1935, but in 1940 they were living in Evanston, Illinois (just outside Chicago). Buchanan had begun working for Atlas Powder Co. there before 1940, being promoted to district manager by 1948.

Atlas was housed at 135 S. LaSalle Street, known by a variety of names, including the Marshall Field Building, LaSalle Bank Building, and Bank of America Building.

When daughter Barbara married in 1952, the Buchanan home had been Miami, Oklahoma, in the far northeast corner of the state, since early 1948 when they bought a lead and zinc mine in the area. As operator of the Nellie B. Mining Company, Buchanan was the owner of a lead and zinc mine sold in 1951 to American Zinc. After Barbara's wedding, the Buchanans moved to La Gorce in Miami Beach.

According to his 1976 obituary, he owned 19,000 acres of land in Florida and a 2,000-acre farm in California. His career had begun with Chemical Research Corp, which was linked with the Gyro Vapor Process of refining gasoline.

Alfred Destin company had been controlled by Max Orovitz, also from Miami, who acquired the stock in 1945 for $30,000. Orovitz had shortly before acquired a cement company in Broward County. 

New directors included Fred Hooper, a heavy construction operator and horse race owner; and Hubert E. Howard, a Harvard-educated attorney, Chicago financier, and former coal producer, who had served as chairman of the U.S. Munitions Board and of the joint NATO Munitions Board in the late 1940's.

At the time of the merger, the corporation's address was 1780 Purdy Avenue in Miami Beach, where Maurice Gibb Memorial Park is today. That location is 2.6 miles from where a man known as Billy Klein would be arrested in 1974 for conspiracy to import drugs. Also living within a one or two miles radius were the parents of Kenneth G. Burnstine, who would turn out to be a person of great interest.

Kenneth Gordon Burnstine

NACL Archives

As it happened, Klein's initial arrest was the result of a plane crash that had occurred the previous January near an airstrip just south of some land that the company which bought the Vanderbilt property had been attempting to develop since 1969.

The airplane that crashed was found to be ultimately owned by none other than Kenny Burnstine through an airline and corporations he controlled.

Kenny actually had made his home in Fort Lauderdale since about 1960, a few years after he returned from his enlistment with the Marine Corps (1954-1957). Rather than returning to Chicago, where he had spent the first years of his life, he settled first in Mobile, Alabama. There he married Ann Mitchell, daughter of real estate office manager Joseph Mitchell. She was the youngest of four children, including two brothers--Abe and Mayer.

Ann's brothers were about the same age as Kenny, and had also fought in the Korean War. Mayer Mitchell was a "go-getter, becoming president of Phi Epsilon Pi fraternity at the University of Pennsylvania and graduating at 20 from its Wharton School of Finance. 

"He married a Penn coed from Atlanta, Arlene Friedland, and served as an Army first lieutenant in Korea. The young couple settled in Mobile. Motivated by a personal philosophy of 'the harder you work, the luckier you get,' Mitchell founded a real-estate development firm, The Mitchell Company Inc., in 1958 with his brother and Bill Lubel. In his memoir, Mayer Mitchell wrote, 'We built over 25,000 houses, over 20,000 apartments and 175 shopping centers.' The company expanded beyond south Alabama, with Mitchell Company offices in New Orleans, Pensacola, Tampa, Atlanta and Raleigh, N.C.' "

 At any rate, Burnstine became engaged to Ann in June of 1956, having only recently mustered out of the Marine Corps, though he remained in the Reserves, attached to the Naval Training Center in Glenville, Illinois. The wedding took place in August, and he immediately found work with her family's real estate companies--Gulf Coast Realty Co., the Mitchell Company, and a variety of mortgage companies for the first several years of their marriage.

In either 1959 or 1960 the family relocated to Fort Lauderdale, where Ken and Ann created a series of real estate, land development and mortgage companies similar to those the Mitchell family was operating in Mobile. Their first home was located just north of E. Oakland Park Boulevard on NE 35th Court.

They became members of the Reform Jewish synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, then located at 1801 S. Andrews--about a mile north of the airport--where Ann was active in the Sisterhood in 1962. By 1963 Ken's name also appeared in the local paper as its president. By that time the congregation had grown to almost 500 families, too large for its existing facilities. When Temple Beth El was started in Hollywood, it attracted enough of the membership to leave 260 families in the Fort Lauderdale temple, of which Ken was president from 1963 until 1965. Ann Burnstine was co-chairman of the Sisterhood for Emanu-El. 

It is impossible to know at this late date whether those who were active in the congregation may have included members of the Jewish Mafi, but it is well known that Mayer and Jake Lansky had made their home in Hollywood for over two decades by that time. Jake's home was about 7 miles from Burnstine's temple. In a recent article Dan Sweeney wrote:

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.

“They raised and had families here, so they kept that somewhat clear of their doings and the clubs were in Hallandale,” said Hollywood historian Joan Mickelson. “[Vincent] Alo used the Hollywood Yacht Club as a meeting place, and they got together and played cards or something, but that wasn’t a major place....Alo lived in the 1200 block of Monroe Street in Hollywood. Alo operated the places in conjunction with Meyer and Jacob Lansky....Jake lived in the 1100 block of Harrison Street in Hollywood....

Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano served as point man in South Florida for the Genovese crime family. He lived at two houses on Palm Drive in Hallandale Beach from 1974 until his arrest in 1978. He died in prison 11 years later, serving a life sentence for murder and racketeering charges.

 The South Florida Sentinel in 2010 indicated that although many of the earlier mobsters had died, the criminal element was still active. 

By 1968, a state crime commission concluded, "South Florida, especially Dade and Broward counties, has become a haven for many known Mafia figures and associates, though their activities know no local boundaries within the state."

In more recent years, "The Teflon Don," Gambino boss John Gotti, maintained a residence in Fort Lauderdale. So did Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo, the brutal head of a Mafia family operating in Philadelphia and Atlantic City....

They still get involved in gambling, loan sharking, strip clubs, prostitution, drug dealing and extortion, but have gravitated toward more sophisticated crimes — such as stock and Medicare fraud — that don't carry the same risks.

They have faced increased competition from Israeli organized crime and Russian mobsters.

"The biggest change has been the Russian mafia," Mangan said. "The Russians started moving in after the fall of communism. They primarily set up in South Beach. They started opening banks in Antigua and Aruba."

The first corporation they had formed was the Kenann Investment Corporation in January 1960, set up for them by a young Miami lawyer, Burton Richard Levey, the son of Ben Levey--an officer of Sterling Equipment, a metal fabrication company founded in Miami in 1939.

Burton R. Levey

Burt Levey went to Miami High, then completed college and law school at the University of Miami, where he was elected president of the student body his junior year of law school. One of his fraternity brothers, Jerry Kogan, would later practice with him, along with another lawyer named Max Kogen.

Levey married an Ohio girl, Fran Bloom, who had attended college in Miami. The wedding was a Jewish ceremony held in September 1954, the same month Burt was licensed to practice law. His first office was in the Ainsley Building in Miami at 14 NE 1st St., #500. After a couple of years he had moved up to the 7th floor.

Burnstine's professional relationship with Levey would last for the next 16 years, until his death in 1976. 

There were five mortgage companies they were doing business under besides Kenann Mortgage Co., Inc. In 1961 he filed fictitious named certificates--called Assumed Name Certificates in Texas--for Burnstine and a partner named Jay H. Weiss, originally from Baltimore before he had participated in the Korean War.

Burton Levey had incorporated Kenann Insurance Company in 1960 very early in his legal career. Levey's engagement to Fran Bloom had been officially announced in June 1954 when he was a senior in University of Miami Law School. He had served in the Air Force prior to the engagement and his return to law school. His father, Ben Levey, also lived in Miami, but Fran was from Akron, Ohio. Levey died at age 81 in 2013.

In 1961 he also incorporated Consumer Finance Corp. of America for Burnstine and Weiss, whose address was given as 3000 N. Federal Highway, catty-corner from where they were building the circular building that became their headquarters, called the Kenann Building. At that time, Gate City Realty was located at the address, and in 1962 Kenny's brother, Irving Richard Burnstine, became an agent there.

Irving had been married in 1961 to the former Miss Massachusetts, Barbara Gale Feldman, a 1960 graduate of the University of Massachusetts. Irving, however, went to the University of Illinois and had a Master's degree from Wharton Finance in Philadelphia. So, how and where exactly did they become acquainted.

Kenny and Irving's parents had only recently relocated from Chicago to 1500 Bay Road in Miami Beach--the Flamingo Hotel, demolished that same year.

A 1963 article in the Fort Lauderdale newspaper filled in a few of the financial details, revealing that Consumer Finance Corp of America was a holding company for numerous subsidiary corporations. It had apparently bought the strip center located as 3000 N. Federal Highway, where Gate City Realty had its office and was providing financing for the construction of the round building to the northwesMost telling of all, however, is the strange fact near the end of the article stating that Consumer Finance had branched out into a Panamanian corporation--setting up a fish importing business. Seafood would be FLOWN into Florida from Central America by PESCADORES IMPORTADO INTERNATIONALES, S.A.

We've all done enough reading and research to recognize a CIA proprietary when we see one, especially one operating just outside Cuban territory in 1963.