But in the back, wide rooms with high copper ceilings and tall archways looked onto a courtyard, a wading pool, and gardens where spotted horsemint, violets, and tickseeds grew alongside European fan palms. The stucco walls were covered in Algerian ivy. In the winter the bougainvillea flowered alongside a riot of yellow Carolina jessamine, both fading in the spring to be replaced by trumpet creepers as dark as blood oranges. The stone paths snaked around a fountain in the courtyard, then passed through the loggia archways to a staircase that curled up into the house past walls of eggshell brick.
All the doors in the home were at least six inches thick and sported ram’s horn hinges and door latches of black iron. Joe had helped design the third-floor salon with the domed ceiling and an azotea overlooking the alley that ran behind the house. It was a frivolous porch, given the second-story balcony that wrapped around the rest of the house and the cast-iron third-story gallery with a veranda as wide as the street, and he often forgot it was there.
Once Joe got started, though, he couldn’t stop himself. Guests lucky enough to be invited to one of Graciela’s charity fund-raisers couldn’t help noticing the salon or the grand center hall with the double-wide staircase or the imported silk draperies, Italian bishop’s chairs, Napoléon III cheval mirror with attached candelabras, marble mantels from Florence, or gilt-framed paintings from a gallery in Paris Esteban had recommended. Exposed Augusta Block brick walls met walls covered in satin paper or stenciled patterns or fashionably cracked stucco. Parquet floors at the front of the house yielded to stone floors at the back to keep the rooms cool. In the summer, the furniture was slip-covered in white cotton, and gauze dripped from chandeliers to keep them safe from insects. Mosquito netting hung from Joe and Graciela’s bed and over the claw-foot tub in the bathroom where they often gathered at the end of a day with a bottle of wine, the sounds of the streets rising to them.
Graciela lost friends over the opulence. These were mostly her friends from the factory and those who’d volunteered with her during the early days of the Circulo Cubano. It wasn’t that they begrudged Graciela her newfound wealth and good fortune (though a few did), it was more that they feared they’d bump into something valuable and knock it to the stone floors. They couldn’t sit without fidgeting, and soon they ran out of things they had in common with Graciela and so had nothing left to discuss.
In Ybor, they called the house El Alcalde de la Mansión—The Mayor’s Mansion—but Joe wouldn’t learn of the nickname for at least a year because the voices in the street never rose high enough for him to hear them distinctly.
Meanwhile, the Coughlin-Suarez partnership created enviable stability in a business not known for it. Joe and Esteban established a distillery in the Landmark Theater on Seventh and then another behind the kitchen of the Romero Hotel, and they kept them clean and in constant production. They brought all the mom-and-pop operations into the fold, even the ones who’d worked for Albert White, by giving them a healthier cut and a better product. They bought faster boats and replaced all the engines in their trucks and transport cars. They bought a two-seater seaplane to fly cover for the Gulf runs. The seaplane was piloted by Farruco Diaz, a former Mexican revolutionary as talented as he was insane. Farruco, a notable mess of ancient pockmarks as deep as fingertips and long hair as pale and stringy as wet pasta, lobbied to install a machine gun in the passenger seat “just in case.” When Joe pointed out to him that since he flew solo, there would be nobody to man the gun on those times that “just in case” occurred, Farruco agreed to a compromise, by which they allowed him to install the mount but not the gun.
On the ground, they bought into routes all over the South and along the Eastern Seaboard, Joe’s logic being that if they paid the various Dixie gangs tribute to use their roads, the gangs would pay off the local laws, and the number of arrests and lost loads would drop by 30 to 35 percent.
They dropped by seventy.
In no time at all, Joe and Esteban had turned a one-million-dollars-a-year operation into a six-million-dollars-a-year juggernaut.
And this during a global financial crisis that kept worsening, each shock wave followed by a bigger one, day after day, month after month. People needed jobs and they needed shelter and they needed hope. When none of those proved forthcoming, they settled for a drink.
Vice, he realized, was Depression-proof.
Just about nothing else was, though. Even insulated from it, Joe was still as bewildered as everyone else by the elevator drop the country had taken in the last few years. Since the ’29 crash, ten thousand banks had gone belly-up and thirteen million people had lost their jobs. Hoover, facing a reelection fight, kept talking about a light at the end of the tunnel, but most people decided that light came from the train barreling up to run them over. So Hoover made a last-ditch scramble to raise the tax rate for the richest of the rich from 25 to 63 percent and lost the only people left who supported him.
In Greater Tampa, oddly, the economy surged—shipbuilding and canneries thrived. But no one got the word in Ybor. The cigar factories started sinking faster than the banks. Rolling machines replaced people; radios supplanted the readers on the floor. Cigarettes, so cheap, became the nation’s new legal vice, and sales of cigars plummeted by more than 50 percent. The workers of a dozen factories went out on strike, only to see their efforts crushed by management goons, police, and the Ku Klux Klan. The Italians left Ybor in droves. The Spaniards started to move out too.
Graciela lost her job to a machine. This was fine with Joe—he’d been wanting to get her out of La Trocha for months. She was too valuable to his organization. She met the Cubans who came off the boats and brought them to the social club or the hospitals or the Cuban hotels, depending on what they needed. If she saw one she believed was suited for Joe’s line of work, she spoke to him of an even more unique job opportunity.
In addition, it was her instinct for philanthropy, coupled with Joe and Esteban’s need to clean their money, that led to Joe’s buying up roughly 5 percent of Ybor City. He bought two failed cigar factories and reemployed all the workers, turned a failed department store into a school and a bankrupt plumbing supplier into a free clinic. He turned eight empty buildings into speakeasies, though from the street they all looked like their fronts: a haberdasher, a tobacconist, two florists, three butchers, and a Greek lunch counter that much to everyone’s shock—none more so than Joe’s own—became so successful they had to import the rest of the cook’s family from Athens and open a sister lunch counter seven blocks east.