When White Russians Invaded Florida

Bertha Palmer

A considerable area of western Florida was once owned by a Chicago woman, born Bertha Honoré in 1849. Married to a wealthy retailer and hotelier named Palmer Potter, twice her age, Bertha used her wealth to connect with some of the most powerful people in finance and politics. When in 1874 Bertha's sister Ida married Frederick Dent Grant, the son of President Ulysses S. Grant, she attempted to make Chicago an international center of influence, and her personal contacts ranged as far afield as London and Paris. 

Ida Grant's daughter, Julia, whom Bertha had taken under her wing, in 1899 was married in Beaulieu, the William Waldorf Astor cottage in Newport, R.I., which her aunt Bertha Palmer had leased for the summer season. In a small, private Russian Orthodox ceremony Julia was wed to Romanov Prince Michel Cantacuzene of Russia, a diplomat who became Chief of Staff to Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, according to a book Julia published called Revolutionary Days Including Passages from My Life Here and There 1876-1917.

Julia and her husband then settled in the Ukraine until Bertha's dream of royal fame was destroyed by the Bolshevik revolution. The Cantacuzenes fled from Russia to live in Sarasota, Florida. There they remained for some time following Bertha's death in 1918. Julia's mother, Ida Grant, lived in "The Acacias," a residence built by an uncle, not far from Bertha's home in Sarasota, "The Oaks." Although Julia divorced the Russian prince in 1934, her son still went by the title Prince Michel Cantacuzene, as he was engaged in selling real estate in Chicago in 1930.

The elder Prince Cantacuzene, whose kingdom was seized by the Bolsheviks in 1917, would also work with his wife's cousins in their real estate company, even after he cheated on their sister with a Sarasota bank clerk Jeannette Draper, who got a job at the Palmer National Bank in 1929. He divorced Julia Grant and quickly married Jeannette in 1934. The Cantacuzenes' home at 870 S. Palm in Sarasota is now the museum building for the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.

Cantacuzene was also involved in the Palmer brothers' bank. While his ex-wife moved back to Washington, D.C., her former husband continued working in the real estate development company with Bertha Palmer's sons, Potter Palmer, Jr. and Honoré Palmer, who inherited the personal estate of $1.6 million with the balance estimated at $20 million held in trust. Who managed all that money for the Palmers? A good guess would be an investment manager connected to Brown Brothers, related to Mrs. Grace Brown Palmer.

Grace Greenway Brown Palmer's Family

In 1903 Honoré had married Grace Greenway Brown, one of the daughters of George "Brook" Brown. Whether or not young Palmer knew about the shameful scandal brought to the Brown family by Grace's late grandfather, Alexander Davison Brown (known back in Maryland as Col. A. D. Brown), probably didn't really matter because of the banking importance of the family as a whole, which was written up in the Peerage and Baronetage of Great Britain and Ireland, compiled by Henry Colburn in 1880.

The Colonel, who stabled his racehorses on his Brookland Wood estate, about seven miles outside Baltimore, had been known to race against August Belmont and Pierre Lorillard at Pimlico and seemed to keep himself out of the limelight until, following his wife's death in 1879, he appalled the local Presbyterian congregation of which he was a member by making the notorious Laura Hobson his second wife in a ceremony held a block from the White House at the St. John Episcopal Church facing the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C., no less. Laura, allegedly the daughter of his father's lodgekeeper, ran a house of ill repute in Baltimore. 

Grace Potter's father, George "Brook" Brown (click to enlarge)

Eight years later he filed a divorce suit against her, which also made headlines, and the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote on June 14, 1889 that A. D. Brown had himself been indicted on a charge of "keeping a disorderly house." That was not to say he was untidy; he was being called a pimp! A legal separation became final in 1891, only a year before her grandfather's death which occurred when Grace was ten years old. 

Grace was one of eight children born to George Brown, who married in 1866, more than a decade before the scandal erupted. They had remained at A.D.'s Brooklandwood estate , a historic mansion lost by Grace's brother, H. Carroll Brown. A broker who married the daughter of Marcus Daly, often referred to as "the copper king," of Anaconda mining fame, Carroll Brown was forced to convey it to his brother-in-law, Marcus Daly, Jr. because of debts he owed to his estranged wife and her family.

The Chicago Connection

Grace Brown's sister, Fannie, had earlier married Chicagoan Walter Woodruff Keith in 1896. Walter, whose name appeared in the Chicago Blue Book as a resident of the Prairie Avenue district, (George Pullman, Philip Armour, and Marshall Field--both Sr. and Jr.--also lived on the same street) was a grain merchant and member of the Chicago Board of Trade. 

Walter was a long-time friend of  Honoré Palmer and swore on a passport affidavit he had known Walter for more than 20 years, having grown up with him in Chicago, in the Winnetka area, where they were members of the same clubs, such as the Baltimore Club. By 1906 both Palmer and Keith were also listed in the Baltimore Blue book, where their wives had lived. 

Walter Keith died before 1940, and his widow Fannie moved in with her sister, Grace, in Sarasota, where six live-in servants took care of the three adults. The home they had in Chicago was even more magnificent, having been created by Potter Senior years earlier after the Chicago fire, and it remained until 1950.

Palmer Castle in Chicago

Another Brown sister, Sara Carroll Brown,  married Stanley Field, nephew of Marshall Field of Chicago. According to one website:

Stanley was close to his uncle, often playing golf together. When Marshall Field died in 1906, Stanley assumed management of the company. He also served as President of the Field Columbian Museum of Chicago, created by a one million dollar endowment from Marshall Field. The museum, now known as the Chicago Museum of Natural History, has sponsored research and exploration, catalogued thousands of species, and continues to be a museum of world-class distinction.... [The Palmers'] Sarasota estate, known as “Immokalee,” took in the land that would become the Field Estate. Sister Fanny married Walter Keith and built a mansion south of Immokalee on Philippi Creek. A niece of the Browns, Harriet Wentworth, built a mansion on Sarasota Bay just south of the Field Estate called “Kimlira.” A niece of the Keiths, Katherine, was married to architect David Adler, who designed the Field Estate. Mrs. Potter Palmer’s estate (now demolished) was further south in Osprey, and is now the historical and archaeological research center Spanish Point at the Oaks.... Adler designs for wealthy Chicagoans included the homes of William McCormick Blair, Albert Lasker, Marshall and Stanley Field, Potter Palmer, and Cyrus McCormick.

In 1920 Stanley filed suit for divorce, but the couple reconciled. Newspapers claimed he filed again in 1923, charging her with desertion, but we read nothing further after that. Most likely Stanley was not happy having his wife living in England while the children were there for their educations. The eldest daughter left in 1920, followed by Daphne in 1921.

Stanley had been chosen in 1906 to run the department stores upon the death of his uncle. The dry goods business had originally been founded by Potter Palmer in 1852, but only 13 years later the tycoon sold shares to Marshall Field and Levi Leiter. One of Potter Palmer's sons was given his mother's maiden name, Honoré Palmer, and married Grace Greenway Brown, a sister of Sara Carroll Brown (Mrs. Stanley) Field. Not only did the families live near each other in the gold coast section north of Chicago, but they socialized together and intermarried with their "class" of wealth.

But who would have thought there was so much wealth in mere retail? 

Maybe they were selling something that became illegal in 1920 with passage of the Volstead Act, the same act which gave birth to a national crime syndicate? Only more research will tell.

Three Degrees of Separation from the CIA?

Paul Helliwell could have boasted, much to Kevin Bacon's chagrin, that there were closer to three degrees of separation between himself and every known money launderer or land fraud artist in Florida.


It would be impossible to dispute such a claim, as we attempt to show here. Possibly by examining the earliest of Helliwell's relationships, we can understand the later ones where he serves as the link between U.S. intelligence agencies, drug running and money laundering.

NY Evening Post, 1909

One Degree of Separation

The earliest fraudster linked to Helliwell was Maude C. Fowler, mentioned in an earlier post. With only one degree of separation from Helliwell, Fowler's biography often states she was known in Kansas City, Mo. as the head of the Women's Athletic Club. Pure hogwash, as we can see here. The actual founder and head of that club was Viola Dale McMurray. In fact, Maude Cody Fowler never even lived in Kansas City!

Maude Cody was married in rural Shelby County, Tenn. in 1890 and moved with her husband to Oklahoma in 1901 when their son Cody was nine. Orin Scott (O.S.) Fowler, her husband, had grown up in St. Louis (not Kansas City), Missouri, where he and his father, Napoleon Fowler, both worked first for John V. Lewis and Co., a pioneer cottonseed oil producer, and later for the American Cotton-Seed Oil Company, known as the cotton trust, which bought Lewis' company.

O.S. Fowler seems to have lost interest in cotton oil after moving to Tennessee. Instead, he moved the family to El Reno, OK in 1901, started a bus line there, and then got into motor cars, founding "Fowler Auto Livery" in Oklahoma City. From there he spent some time in the Texas panhandle before he and Maude settled in Jacksonville, Florida by 1913. Their son had in the meantime attended law school in St. Louis, located 250 miles east of Kansas City, where the land scam connected to Security Underwriters allegedly originated.

Fowlers in Miami 1921

Maude and her husband moved to Florida from Oklahoma and resided in Jacksonville, Florida, as early as 1913, managing the Artesian Farm Land Co., owned and operated in 1910 by Sherman Bryan Jennings, a cousin of often-defeated presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

Governor Jennings helped to pass laws granting land to people who would promise to drain and develop what was then mostly swampland. To disguise his own ownership of corporations set up to hide his name, he hired advertising companies to handle the sales on his behalf.

Maude and Orin Fowler's names appeared in the Miami city directory in 1921, as shown above. That happens to be the same year they showed up in Tampa, leaving in their wake the brewing scandal involving the Florida governor.

Enter the Palmer Family

Cody Fowler home built around 1921

Maude Fowler moved to Tampa around 1921 and became one of the founding developers of Temple Terrace, according to photos and history in Temple Terrace, a book by Lana Burroughs, Tim Lancaster, and Grant Rimbey:  

"... On May 25, 1925, the City was incorporated, with D. Collins Gillette, one of the founding developers, serving as the first mayor, and Maude Fowler, serving as vice mayor. Her son Orin Cody Fowler relocated from Oklahoma City with his wife, also named Maude, at or before 1925, when his name appeared in Tampa’s directory, and he practiced at the firm of Fowler, White in Tampa. Maude Fowler died suddenly in Tampa on April 7, 1942."

Temple Terraces, Inc. was incorporated in 1920 to develop the land that had previously comprised Bertha Palmer's hunting reserve in Hillsborough County. She bequeathed the lands to her brother, Adrian Honore, who also acted as trustee for the trusts covering her Sarasota County lands left primarily to her sons.

The earlier history of Tampa was centered around the families who founded the law firm of  MacFarlane, Pettingill, MacFarlane--which hired Cody Fowler when he relocated to Florida from Oklahoma. It was while a member of this firm that Fowler and Paul Helliwell worked together in 1933 at Cuban Rum.

Palmer Development of Sarasota and Tampa Area

When Bertha Palmer visited southwest Florida in 1910, she purchased what she would name Riverhills Ranch in Hillsborough County for a hunting preserve. She left the acreage to her brother Adrian Honore in her will before her death in 1918. He wasted no time turning 7,000 acres of it into Temple Terraces, Inc., incorporated in 1920. 

The men associated with that company then recruited the Fowler family to move to the area. Adrian sat on the Temple Terrace board with all of them for years, at the same time he lived in Sarasota and supervised his development of citrus grove farms and residential subdivisions.

Honore was also named as trustee over all the other lands she owned in the area, most of the trusts created for his sisters two sons, but others for grandchildren and other family members. He was also president of the Sarasota-Venice Company.

Bertha had her winter mansion, called "The Oaks" near Osprey in Sarasota County, which passed to a trust for her two sons, Honoré Palmer and Potter Palmer, Jr., and their wives. Bertha's sister, Ida Honore Grant, also had a home nearby, called "The Acacias," located just north of what is now called Centennial Park on Sarasota Bay, west of 10th Street downtown. Ida died in 1922, survived by her daughter, Princess Cantacuzene, and a son, Ulysses S. Grant III.

Bertha's brother, Adrian Honore, was trustee for the estate, and it was he who sold the Hillsborough County land to Burks Hamner, Vance Helm, D. Collins Gillette, and Maude Cody Fowler (mother of Tampa Attorney O. Cody Fowler). Adrian kept a seat on the corporate board of Temple Terraces, Inc., so we can assume the Palmers and Honores retained stock in the company. 

They wanted to "foster the realization of Mrs. Potter Palmer’s citrus and golf course community vision," and make a few dollars in the process.

According to one historical website of the area, the new owners developed a golf course with residential areas surrounding it, as well as 5,000 acres of orange groves. 

Within that enclave, in 1922 Cody Fowler, son of Orin Scott Fowler of Oklahoma City, built for his family a five-bedroom home, where they resided until a similarly styled home was built on Davis Island's Baltic Circle, looking out on Hillsborough Bay.

The Fowler law firm (MacFarlane, Pettingill, MacFarlane and Fowler) was located at 706 Franklin in Tampa, on the 10th floor of the Citizens Bank Building. Fowler subsequently formed a firm with Morris White, now called Fowler White Burnett.

Mayor Gillette, a Tampa associate of Maude Fowler, thus had three degrees of separation from Paul Helliwell, who worked with Maude's son, Cody, in the Cuban Rum importing firm. Could there be a political or intelligence connection Helliwell may have acquired at this early point in his career? That question spurs us to dig deeper into the Palmer family.

Alchemy, or Turning Swamps to Gold

Coral Gables Developer of the Early 1920's
Linked to Uranium Scam of the 1950's

Admiral Telfair Knight, a lawyer from Jacksonville, Florida, became an associate of a man previously researched here in connection with uranium stock scams of the 1950's in Canada to Robert Kennedy's nemesis Roy Cohn. This 1950's-era Canadian uranium stock broker Bryan W. Newkirk, appeared in a 1925 William Fishbaugh photograph, tagged 'portrait of real estate salesmen in Coral Gables, Florida.'

The QJ post from August 2011 contained a hodgepodge of information centered around Roy Cohn's indictment by Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department in October 1963, only a month before JFK's murder. Another QJ entry that same month delved more into the uranium stock scams being run out of Toronto, in which the following excerpt from a syndicated Red Smith sports column appeared six months prior to Kennedy's election as President:

APRIL 6, 1960 -DUCK KEY, Fla. — This is a sunny blob of coral and money 95 miles from Miami down the Overseas Highway toward Key West. The coral was here when Blackbeard sailed the Spanish Main; the money was trucked in by Bryan W. Newkirk, the wolf of Canada's penny stock market, who had a hand in developing Coral Gables, has one foot in Canadian gold mines and another in uranium. With his remaining hand he directs the Florida-Southern Land Corp., which has transformed this pelican roost into a flowering hideout for the over- privileged, complete with yacht harbor, fresh and salt water swimming pools, a nine-hole long-iron golf course, and a spang new hotel of simple elegance.

Shifting Gears

Following money trails mandates that a researcher have the ability to shift gears. When we first discovered Bryan Newkirk, the penny stock king of Toronto, involved in Roy Cohn's Florida empire at Duck Key, we were primarily concerned with figuring out how Florida land development fit into all the uranium hype in Texas the decade prior to the JFK assassination, if you recall, as we peered into the ins and outs of the Torbitt Document. At that time we researched David Copeland, alleged author of the document, pursuing what he knew and when he knew it about nuclear power in the Dallas and Fort Worth region and focused, in particular, on the Byrd Uranium Corporation, whose president, D. Harold Byrd, had sold stock in his corporations to Toronto scammers with whom Newkirk was somehow linked, before Newkirk returned to his established roots in southern Florida.

In the back of my mind, however, even before the curiosity about who killed JFK, there has always been the question of who engineered the savings and loan scandal in Texas in the late 1980's--the seminal series of events which led QJ's blogger into her initial conspiracy research. The two interests seemed inextricably intertwined; solving one would help to solve the other. It's the money behind the scene which lights up the trail. The conspirators are those who control the money, the knowledge about its illicit sources, and the plan for its ultimate use.

Click image to enlarge.

Since Bryan Winslow Newkirk II connects several sites of where such illicitly generated money emerged, it is helpful to track his entire life to see with whom he made contact. 

He had been born in 1888 in Wilmington, N.C., where he worked for awhile for the Atlantic Coast Railroad. He went to work in advertising for an Atlanta newspaper, married Lucile Rebecca King, a Georgia girl, in about 1913, and before long was handling financing for a car dealership in Atlanta (Newkirk-George Motor Co.), which sold Chalmers and Chandler cars--two up and coming models quickly submerged into the General Motors brand. 

 In today's digital economy, it's difficult for us to visualize the days when hardware was the king of modern technology. Car bodies, though designed by many different "brands," were almost all manufactured by the Fisher Body Corporation--60% of whose stock in 1919 was controlled by General Motors. William C. "Billy" Durant had advised GM to buy Fisher, just as John J. Raskob, who worked for E.I. Du Pont de Nemours, had advised his boss, Pierre S. du Pont, to purchase Durant's GM stock when the GM executive needed an infusion of capital just as World War I was ending. The du Pont family was loaded with cash from selling munitions throughout the war years.

In 1923 Pierre du Pont, who then held the controlling shares of GM, removed Durant as president of the company and replaced him with DuPont minion Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. It was during these transition years, we have been told, that Pierre's cousin Alfred was so incensed with his family's machinations that he moved all his many assets to Jacksonville, Florida.

Intriguingly, Bryan Newkirk left Atlanta for Jacksonville at about that same time. He switched from Chalmers-Chandler cars to Hupmobiles--acquiring  Black-Newkirk Motors (eventually called Thompson-Newkirk Motor Co.), located at 314 W. Monroe in downtown Jacksonville, facing the big federal Post Office Building across from the City of Jacksonville's office building, which bears the name of Alfred du Pont's brother-in-law, Edward Ball. (We found it by googling the address and looking at the street view, which makes one feel just like an NSA analyst sifting through its own software.)

Newkirk's interest in Hupmobiles apparently waned even before the Hupp Corporation, under its post-WWII chairman, William S. Knudsen (who had moved from Ford to General Motors in the early 1920s) diversified Hupp into electronics and kitchen appliances before its name faded away completely. 

Newkirk and Telfair Knight--
Land Sales in Florida

In the McLemore article inset above, 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. But he apparently kept up his interest in his car dealership (see 1924 ad to the right) while he says he had 4,000 real estate salesmen working for him!

Coincidences like this make one wonder: Is there one overriding factor connecting Telfair Knight, George Merrick, Chalmers, Chandler, Hupmobile and Jacksonville, Florida? Of course. It's money, and Alfred I. duPont, who had more money than he could spend from munitions sales during WWI, suffered a brief dip in fortunes as a result of family disputes and business setbacks. Only five years after his third marriage, to Jessie Ball, he shifted from war to peacetime activities in Florida:

In 1926 Alfred and Jessie decided to move their principal residence from Nemours [in Delaware] to Epping Forest in Jacksonville, Florida. He opened offices in Jacksonville and founded Almours Securities, Inc. At this point his assets were reported to total over $34,000,000 and his business enterprises virtually dominated the economy of Florida [emphasis added].

Adm. Telfair Knight

Jacksonville attorney, Telfair Knight, to work for him. Merrick had become involved in land development after growing up on a citrus plantation and fruit packing plant, run by his father, which Merrick subdivided for residential development beginning in 1913, the same year Maude Fowler and her husband relocated from Oklahoma to Jacksonville, Florida. The Fowlers began selling real estate for Artesian Farms, a company linked to the Securities Underwriters corporation set up to finance the sale of swamp land in the Florida Everglades. 

There were several phases of development in Florida, and waves of investors from various locations who descended upon Florida with hopes of making many times their initial investment in marshy, virtually worthless lands. We have previously shown how Paul Helliwell's father had settled in Tampa, an area that grew before 1900 from the manufacture of cigars, to work as an inspector for U.S. Customs.

Flagler's Alchemy, a Model for
Turning Swampland into Gold

The land development model was set up in 1888 when Standard Oil magnate Henry M. Flagler completed Hotel Ponce de Leon in the northeast part of Florida. With the success of the hotel, he envisioned further travel along Florida's east coast by building a railroad down to West Palm Beach, across from the island of Palm Beach, where another hotel would be built--forming an American "Côte d'Azur," as it were. 

At the time the Royal Poinciana opened in 1894, soon supplemented by another hotel on the beach, called The Breakers, Flagler had become acquainted--possibly through Henry Walters, president of with the the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad--with the Kenan family from Wilmington, N.C., the city where the railroad was then headquartered. William Rand Kenan, Jr. was an 1894 graduate of the University of North Carolina and his sister, Mary Lily was 24 in 1891 when she and Flagler first met in Newport, R.I., while he was still married to his second wife. In 1901, two years prior to the death of her father, a Wilmington, N.C. broker, they were married.

Alchemists must have seen Florida as a way to turn, not lead, but swamp land into a gold mine. However, as Flagler quickly learned, the railroad was a necessary step before his hotels could be enjoyed by the wealthy vacationers in search of luxurious holidays without traveling abroad. After building the first two hotels Flagler moved into railroads as a means of bringing more travelers to them. One essayist in 1925 described the initial development in this way:

The unknown firm of Carrer and Hastings, New York, was awarded the job of building the Ponce de Leon and the spot Flagler picked for its location was typical of his developments along the East Coast. It was a swamp.
 
So his first hotel was rapidly built from below the ground up. Before it was completed in 1888 he had the Alcazar under course of construction. Two mammoth hotels, gorgeously appointed, were springing up in the marshes and no means by which the tourist might reach them except by river steamer, ocean voyage or over the ramshackle, narrow-gauge line running into St. Augustine from Jacksonville.

With $2,000,000 tied up in what he had announced would be the world’s finest hotel and another million being sunk in the Alcazar across the street, Flagler was precipitated by the course of events into railroad building. And it was in this field that he won fame as great as that of any captain of industry, not excepting James J. Hill, termed the empire builder of the West.

All negotiations with the owners of the Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Halifax River Railway Company failed to convince these men that their road should be standardized and enlarged to meet anticipated traffic requirements. So Flagler bought the road outright, made it standard gauge, rebuilt the track system, added better equipment and made a railroad of what had been a streak of rust through the wilderness.

Flagler's residence in Palm Beach

Construction of the hotels helped make the lumbermen of the Jacksonville area--which included most of Telfair Knight's relatives--wealthy. In the late 1890's Flagler 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.

W. M. Walker wrote in The Greatest Men of Florida, the essay quoted above:

Miami then had no port, and that was what Flagler sought--an outlet to the sea and a line of communication with South America. He also anticipated the construction of the Panama Canal several years. Key West was the nearest deepwater port--a key to the National defense and a communication point within six hours of Havana... In May, 1886, he had bought his first railroad in Florida; in 1888, the St. Augustine and Palatka line, with a twelve mile branch leading to Tocoi. The same year he acquired the St. Johns and Halifax running from East Palatka to Daytona--a narrow-gauge road which he standardized in 1889. The same year he bridged the St. Johns river at Palatka and the following year he spanned the same stream at Jacksonville with a bridge which is now being rebuilt and double-tracked....On January 22, 1912, the Key West extension was opened to traffic-with Flagler’s special train running from Jacksonville to Key West where a gigantic celebration had been prepared for “The Chief’s” birthday, celebrated twenty days late.... In May, 1913, Mr. Flagler died....

All the money that built his dream had been created out of air, of course--in the form of paper sold to others in the form of stock or bonds. It is not unlike the theme of the Kevin Costner flick, "Field of Dreams," which imparts the ideal: "If you build it, they will come." And of course the implication is that, if they come, they will bring money to pay off what you spent to build it.

Flagler and wife

It should be remembered that Henry Flagler had no formal education, but he did have "educated" friends. When he died, he also had an extremely young wife, his third, Mary Lily Kenan, whom he met in Newport, R.I. in 1891 while still married to second wife, Alice Ida Shrouds, his children's nanny, whom he married when the first wife died. 

Mary Kenan's family lived in Wilmington, N.C., then headquarters of the Atlantic Coast Railroad, operated then by Henry Walters, and later by Lyman Delano, whom we will return to shortly.

Flagler's marriage to Mary occurred in 1901, and as his surviving widow, she and her siblings in Wilmington were the chief recipients of the Flagler estate (apart from $5 million) that went to Kentucky attorney, Robert Worth Bingham, whom she married in 1916. Author David Leon Chandler in a book delayed by a copyright dispute with Bingham's son:

The Binghams of Louisville: The Dark History Behind One of America's Great Fortunes, theorizes that family patriarch Robert Worth Bingham founded the family fortune in 1917 when he "murdered his second wife for money," according to a statement by Crown [the publisher].

A second book, written by William Ellis, "charges that he contributed to the death of his second wife, an heiress whose bequest of five million dollars helped purchase the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times, followed him to the grave."

According to a blurb for the Ellis book:

In some accounts, Bingham drove his first wife to suicide and gave syphilis to the second before murdering her to gain control of her inheritance.

The things some people will do for money! But we digress. We'll attempt a new start in the next post.

Helliwell's First Employer in Tampa

We will recall from a prior post that CIA paymaster Paul Helliwell in his youth was listed as the manager of a liquor distribution company in 1934, the same year Prohibition ended. The treasurer of this enterprise was a Tampa attorney, Cody Fowler, who had arrived from Oklahoma some 12 years earlier.

Cuban Rum, Inc.'s Cody Fowler

Pettingill fired by Pres. T. Roosevelt

Employed by Cuban Rum, Inc. as Secretary and Manager, attorney Cody Fowler, whose mother was a real estate developer who came to Tampa from Jacksonville, was the treasurer for Cuban Rum, Inc. The address for the rum distributor was in the Citizens Bank Building, 706 Franklin in Tampa, coincidentally, where Fowler’s law office (MacFarlane, Pettingill, MacFarlane) was then housed in room 921. The building was torn down in 1978, the same year Cody Fowler died.

One of that firm's senior partners, Noah Brooks Kent Pettingill, came from a family which first moved to Tampa in 1884. He had been appointed Law Judge of the United States Provisional Court for the military district in Puerto Rico during the end of the Spanish-American War. Following that, he became U.S. Attorney in Porto Rico, as it was then called.

He was, however, summarily fired by President Theodore Roosevelt in late 1906 after it was learned he had privately taken a case against other "colleagues" within the insular court system, whose names were not revealed. 

It is possible, however, that what led to his dismissal was a scandal in 1903--a smuggling indictment involving naval officers in a court within Pettingill's jurisdiction--a scandal which saved the careers of the officers by throwing Pettingill under the tracks. We can only wonder what Pettingill learned from this experience.

Macfarlane family

Pettingill eventually retreated to western Florida to practice law in the firm Cody Fowler joined in 1924. 

Pettingill's sister had married Scotsman, Hugh Campbell Macfarlane, who had helped organize the Tampa Board of Trade in 1885 to create a port at Tampa Bay and to lure cigar manufacturers to the area. He purchased 200 acres of marshy land on the west bank of the Hillsborough River, which he developed into West Tampa, a city originally independent of Tampa itself. 

The city included at least 2,000 Cubans as early as 1895. Howard Street in West Tampa was named for Macfarlane's son, Howard Pettingill Macfarlane, a third partner in the law firm. It is, therefore, not surprising that Fowler, or possibly even his partners--Macfarlane and Pettingill--through their investment company, may have been interested in setting up a business to import rum from Cuba to take advantage of the end of Prohibition in December 1933. 

It is not known how long the relationship lasted between Paul Helliwell and the lawyers of the firm, or even whether they may have made use of the strategic position of Paul's father in the Customs house in Tampa, but the question is worth considering. 

 

 

Maud Cody Fowler

Click to enlarge. Maude the only woman.

Cody Fowler’s mother, Madeline Maud Cody had been born in March 1871 in Fayette, Tennessee to Joseph L. and Harriet Adeline Cody. She married Orin Scott Fowler in 1890, and their only child, son Orin Cody Fowler, was born in Arlington, Tennessee in 1892. 

Arlington, a few miles northeast of Memphis, was home base for the first few years of their marriage, while O.S. (as he was commonly known) worked as a traveling salesman. In 1897, we learn from the Salem, Missouri, newspaper that O. S. had been aboard a street railway car in that city with Maud's father, Joseph L. Cody, when it was struck by a loose coal car that had come unhitched from the Illinois Central's main train. Neither man was permanently injured but undoubtedly quite shaken up.

O.S., the son of Napoleon Bonaparte Fowler, grew up  in St. Louis, Missouri, and in El Dorado, Kansas, where his parents moved in 1883. Napoleon died there in 1901, while O.S. was living with his wife, Maud and young son Cody Fowler in the Panhandle Plains of Texas. The grocery store they operated was in a small community 30 miles northwest of Charles Goodnight's home. The only means of transport at that time were horses and trains. One train actually, the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad.

If You  Build It, They Will Come...

It's not known who or what enticed Joseph Cody and O.S. Fowler to this barren land, which only a few years earlier had been the domain of the J.A. Ranch, a partnership between John George Adair (and his wife Cornelia Wadsworth Ritchie Adair) and Charles Goodnight. Adair had been an Irish securities broker who moved to Denver by way of New York, who began purchasing what would eventually become, we've been told,  "1,325,000 acres in parts of Randall, Armstrong, Donley, Hall, Briscoe, and Swisher counties," by the time of Adair's death in 1885. 

It was all left to his wife, who continued the partnership with Goodnight for a few more years. It is not clear whether she still owned the ranch when she died in 1921. However, it most likely became part of the New York and Texas Land Company consisting of millions of acres all over Texas, or the Francklyn Land and Cattle Company (White Deer Lands Trust Company) in the Panhandle.

"From 1882 to1886, N Bar N leased range in Carson and neighboring counties from the Francklyn Land & Cattle Company, a British syndicate backed by Cunard Steamship Line. Afterward this range belonged to White Deer Land Company. The N Bar N outfit left here because White Deer Land Company wanted the range cleared of large herds.

Joseph Cody's family members were settled into Carson County--including two daughters, Ola and Elsie, who were working as school teachers--where he ranched. Not far away, Maud and O.S. operated a grocery store. From advertisements that later appeared in Oklahoma newspapers, we get the sense that it was actually Maud who was mostly in charge of the grocery store operations. 

Newspapers reported in 1903 that O. S. Fowler had a ranch in Stratford, Texas, and that he ran for election for County Judge of  Sherman County (not Carson, where they lived). 

Though we gleaned all our resources, it was totally unverifiable at this time. If he was a candidate in Sherman County, he lost. Neither could we find reports of his candidacy in Carson County.

By 1903, however, they had relocated to Oklahoma, just a few miles west of Oklahoma City. Maud was clearly in charge, and she didn't hesitate to let everyone know it.

Her sister, Ola Edna Cody, married in 1906. Son Cody Fowler was sent off to military school. The N. B. Fowlers moved east of Oklahoma City to make a homestead claim, which they accomplished in 1909, the same year N.B. Fowler died. Things began to change after that. The O. S. Fowlers sold their grocery store in El Reno and relocated to Kansas City. Before July 1910 Maud and O.S. had seen advertisements for land for sale in Florida, and, just as so many others had done, they bought a few tracts. 

 Florida Drained Land Company

Unlike most, however, they actually visited Florida that year to talk to people onsite about buying more land in the Everglades. The people they saw apparently signed them up as agents to help sell the land. Maud (always called Mrs. M.C.) Fowler was being written up by commercial newsman Gilbert D. Leach in October 1910 as having been engaged in sales of Florida lands only a few months, revealing she had a unique ability to resell the land almost instantly at a much higher price.

Maud was soon on the payroll of the Florida Drained Land Co. with the job of entertaining passengers being taken by train to visit Florida to hear a sales pitch from the company. Articles were placed in Missouri and Kansas papers that mentioned a certain Mrs. M. C. Fowler, also known as "Mother" Fowler, who made the trip so enjoyable for prospective buyers.

In the meantime, O.S. had found his niche as a hotel manager for the Elsmere Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri. The 1911 Kansas City directory listed Maud's name (M. C. Fowler) as vice-president of the Security Underwriters Corporation that year. 

Florida history sites have stated Maud had lived in "Kansas City where she became one of the most successful women of the business world in that city and, as Vice President of the Security Underwriters Corp. of Kansas City, she was one of few strong businesswomen of that day and also headed the Kansas City Women’s Athletic Club." In fact, Maud's name did appear in Kansas City newspapers as "Mrs. M. C. Fowler," president of the Women's Athletic Club, in 1913.

She somehow avoided being tainted by the white-collar scandal that began to hit the news in 1912. Some of the land buyers panicked when they noticed the monthly checks they were sending to Plantation Lands or Florida Farm Land Co.--there were other similarly named companies as well--were being deposited into accounts held in New York by an octopus-like entity known as Security Underwriters Corporation. 

It was reported that this company's stock was controlled by a syndicate of engineering companies which had allegedly contracted with the original owners of the land engaged in selling it off by agent companies to dredge laterals and canals in connection with the work previously done by the State of Florida, as promised by the Governor.

Without using that language, the reports alleged the sales companies were engaged in a ponzi scheme. The buyers' payments were being spent as rapidly as they were received, and none of those funds were being used to drain the land. It was fraud, pure and simple, attorneys for the buyers claimed. 

When their lawsuits rendered them no recovery in the form of damages, by the end of 1912 they filed applications for receivership under state laws akin to federal  involuntary bankruptcy. That seemed to  have put a halt on Maud Fowler's cash cow for the time being.

The Fowlers--Hotel Managers

 

Orin S. and Maud C. Fowler's names cropped up as managers of Artesian Farm Land Sales in the 1913  Jacksonville, Florida, city directory. They were then living at the Hotel Jackson at 206 Main, but in 1915 their names appeared in connection with the Seminole Hotel in Jacksonville, Florida. Son Cody was also in Jacksonville in 1913, but living at the YMCA while practicing law at Miller & Fowler.

Oklahoma City addresses 1918

The Fowler, however, moved back to Oklahoma City, apparently to care for Maud's mother, Harriet Cody, who died in January 1917. The city directory listed their names as proprietors of the Martinique (112 NW 7th) and Hadden Hall (215 N.W. 10th)  hotels in Oklahoma City.  A year later they were managing the Hotel Lawrence at 15 West Grand Avenue.

Cody Fowler married in 1915, two years after graduating from Cumberland University in Tennessee with a law degree. He and his wife, the former Maude Stewart, lived with her parents--Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Stewart, Sr., a wealthy lumber man in Arkansas before relocating to Oklahoma City, where his office was in the Insurance Building, 114 No. Broadway. 

 

In 1917 he began two years of military service during WWI and, after returning, was elected Department Commander of the American Legion of Oklahoma, serving until August 1924. At that point he set out for Tampa, Florida, where he already had a job, working for the Macfarlane, Pettingill law firm.

 

Even after moving to Florida, Cody Fowler continued his involvement with the American Legion and also became active in the chamber of commerce. In 1950 he was named president of the American Bar Association. He was about as conservative politically as one could be at that time, according to a write-up about him in the Tampa Daily Times.

 

His father had long since died, but his mother was then still living in Tampa, Florida, involved in selling real estate.

Artesian Farms had been incorporated in 1910 by a partnership of the Bolles Trust Co. and the son of former Florida governor, William Sherman Jennings. Governor W. S. Jennings moved from Chicago to Florida in 1885, settling in Jacksonville after serving as Florida's governor 1901-05. William Jennings Bryan's mother, Mariah Jennings, was a sister of William Sherman Jennings. She married her brother's law partner, Virginia-born Silas Bryan, in 1852. Silas had moved west to Illinois after his parents died. His own death occurred in Marion, Illinois in 1880. At that time the Bryans' eldest son, named for the future Florida governor, was a young student of 20 with four younger siblings.

In 1881 William Jennings Bryan began law school in Chicago, spending much of his time at the home of former Senator Lyman Trumbull. In 1883 he began practicing law in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he married in 1884, but by 1887 the newlyweds had moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. He was first elected to Congress as a Democrat and from Nebraska and began serving in Washington in January 1891.

His mother's brother, William Sherman Jennings, had since moved to Florida. In 1900, Jennings was elected governor of Florida for the term from 1901 to 1905. While governor, Jennings is credited with coming up with the idea of draining the Everglades by cutting the natural rock dams in the rivers and allowing the water to run out. His successor as governor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, a gunrunner between Jacksonville and Cuba during the Spanish-American War, continued the effort to drain the Everglades until his term ended in 1909. He died the next year.

Early in 1909 an ad campaign began throughout the Midwest, begging for sales agents on behalf of Florida Fruit Lands Co., one of many companies controlled by Richard Bolles.

"On December 26, 1908, the trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund [of the State of Florida] signed a contract with Richard Bolles, conveying to the latter 500,000 acres of overflowed state lands for two dollars an acre. As part of the deal, the State agreed to use half the proceeds of the sale for drainage and reclamation purposes. Dicky Bolles became the second million-dollar purchaser of lands from the State of Florida (matching Hamilton Disston's investment in the 1880's)."

"Bolles' land promotions reached a feverish pitch in March, 1911, when his Florida Fruit Lands Company held a giant land auction in Fort Lauderdale. When representatives of the potential bidders realized that no auction was to take place; that they were expected to execute deeds already designated by the Company; and that the purchased lands were still under water, they brought suit against Dicky Bolles and the Florida Fruit Lands Company. The case was settled in November 1913, with the court allowing Bolles to keep the $1,400,000 already paid him, but prohibiting him from collecting any further funds until the State had fulfilled its contract to drain and survey the Everglades lands." 

 

At the same time the civil settlement was reached, however, a federal indictment was issued for fraudulent use of the mails and using the mail to conduct an illegal lottery after the defendants lost in their petition to be able to present witnesses before the grand jury that they had proceeded legally. Even so, those charges were dismissed in April 1914, stating the company and its officers were guiltless.

But it had been a harrowing two-year period for the sales agents, who had no means of making money. In Tampa, for example, the Daily Times reported about one agent who was so desperate for money he had  bought a typewriter on credit and sold it for $20. The buyer was suspicious, investigated, and found out the typewriter was not legally owned by the seller. Police were called and arrested the man in his hotel room. 

 

He died in a Tampa cell that night after drinking a vial of carbolic acid carried in his shoe. Police and reporters were curious about the man's real name and residence. A card found in his pocket bore the name Florida Land Co., with an address at the Chemical Building in St. Louis. On investigation it was learned that Mrs. M. C. Fowler had rented an office in that building for two months the previous summer; her real address, however, was in Kansas City. 

 

When passing through Tampa, she had talked to railroad officials about a man in the Jacksonville office who had committed suicide with a gun a week earlier than the Tampa suicide. Sounds like sales agents were dropping like flies while sales were being held up by the courts.

After leaving the governorship in 1905, Jennings became "very active locally, promoting the sale of real estate for George Merrick, the founder of Coral Gables."

 
The Artesian Farm Land Co. was at that time housed in the Dyal-Upchurch Building, at 4 East Bay in room 310, next door to the Atlantic and East Coast Terminal company--near the corner of Main and East Bay years before the Main Street bridge was constructed.

Church near old Hadden Hall in 1917

Directories for 1917 and 1918 also show the O. Cody Fowler family living in Jacksonville at 721 West 15th Avenue, though simultaneously claiming to be a resident of Oklahoma City, at Hadden Hall, on West (now NW) 10th Street (between N. Robinson and N. Harvey avenues), only a half block from First Christian Church.

A duplicative listing in the 1920 Census, however, showed Cody and his wife living with her parents in Oklahoma City.

National Registry of Historic Places

 

At some point prior to 1920 the elder Fowlers bought a house in Jacksonville, Florida, as the U.S. Census for that year shows Orin S. and Maude C. Fowler living on Edgewood Avenue. Maude's younger sister Elsie Lee Cody, an unmarried school teacher, moved to Florida from the Texas panhandle and later lived at 1860 Oak in Jacksonville, later relocated to Tampa.

The Fowlers listed their occupations that year as a druggist and truck garden farmer.

 
Perhaps the lies had something to do with the massive fraudulent schemes which had already been occurring in Florida as early as 1912. One newspaper, the Miami Metropolis, had traced the fraud to Wall Street and to some land investors operating all over the country at the time, in particular the Security Underwriters Corp. of Kansas City mentioned above.

Click image to enlarge.

 We'll examine these allegations in future posts.

[Originally published 5/16/2013]


Next, see:
When White Russians Invaded Florida