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Interesting read...
Liquid Smoke
(an article from MEN'S VOGUE- with permission)
On February 3, 1987, a well-built man a month shy of his sixtieth birthday lay bleeding to death in the front seat of his white Mercedes coupe in a scruffy, weed-choked stretch of North-east 188th Street in North Miami Beach known to ocean-racing fans around the world as Thun-derboat Row. The dying man, Don Aronow, had survived dozens of fearsome crashes, broken bones, and crippling internal injuries incurred while racing faster and harder than any of his competitors in the high-performance boats he designed and built himself under the brand names that, for 25 years, defined the powerboat industry: Formula, Donzi, Magnum, and, most notably, Cigarette. Aronow's Christmas-card list included such friends as King Hussein of Jordan, King Juan Carlos of Spain, the Prince of Kuwait, the King of Sweden, and George H. W. Bush, as well as a louche assortment of organized-crime figures and South Florida drug smugglers.
Even in such company, Aronow stood out. A former Coney Island lifeguard who was once in-vited to take a screen test for the role of Tarzan, Aronow was 6' 2'', weighed 215 pounds, and had the slightly dented good looks of a handsome prizefighter. His unruly dark hair and bushy eyebrows contrasted with the softness of his brown eyes and a smile that could ignite a room. Aronow's many friends bought his stylish, impeccably designed boats, learned to drive them fast, and found new girlfriends while vying for the favor of his companionship. His rivals hated him for the fierce drive that propelled him to a record two world racing championships and three American championships before he retired in 1970, and for his aggressive, in-your-face business practices.
The Speedboat King had been wounded by a drive-by assassin who rolled down the windows of a black Lincoln Town Car and exchanged a few words with him before whipping out a .45-caliber pistol and firing six shots at close range. Miami-Dade Homicide Detective Greg Smith arrived on the scene while Aronow was still alive.
"It was total chaos," Smith told me during a recent visit to Miami, which I spent tracking down Aronow's old racing associates, rivals, and romantic companions. The avatar of a vanishing breed of tough Jews, Aronow was also a boat designer with a love for clean lines and a streak of poetry in his heart—an unlikely amalgam that attracted my attention and admiration from the very first time I saw a Cigarette boat.
Like many of the people I spoke with, Detective Smith found it hard to believe that we were ap-proaching the twentieth anniversary of Aronow's murder. He remembered the scene on 188th Street like it happened yesterday. "They had just pulled him out of the car, and one guy was ad-ministering first aid," Smith told me. "There was a lot of blood, especially around his chest." A circle of about 10 to 20 people formed around Aronow, while behind them a crowd of onlookers, many of them in T-shirts and windbreakers bearing the names of Aronow's powerboat compa-nies, continued to grow as the police closed off the street.
Nearly everyone in the crowd had a personal story to tell about the man who had built Thunder-boat Row. And everyone who knew Aronow had a theory about who had killed him and why. "My first thought was that it was probably a jealous husband or boyfriend," remembered John Crouse, the Texan who worked as Aronow's publicist for two decades. Aronow's appetite for women, like his thirst for speed, went way beyond what most men are capable of sustaining. He had a false wall built in a closet in his office on Thunderboat Row, Crouse told me, which led to a hidden suite complete with a bed and custom-made shower. Friends said that he sometimes slept with three or four different women a day.
Husbands weren't the only people whose feelings were bruised by Aronow's outsize competitive appetites. "I found him to be a difficult person to deal with," Ted Theodoli, the boat dealer who bought Magnum from Aronow, said after the boat designer was murdered. Aronow's genius for designing innovative speedboats was matched by his proclivity for starting new companies, building them up, and then selling them. His habit of manipulating the noncompete agreements that invariably came with these deals—which prohibited Aronow from creating similar designs—left his buyers feeling humiliated. Playing both sides of the street was part of the boat builder's nature. At the height of the drug wars, some of South Florida's most notorious drug smugglers bought Aronow's fast boats, as did the United States Customs Service in order to run the smugglers down. Nearly everyone in Miami, it seemed, knew him, loved him, or had a rea-son to want him dead.
Aronow's particular gift as a boat designer lay in his determined marriage of form and function: His passionate attention to detail ensured that nothing about his boats was ever ordinary or extra-neous to their purpose, which was to go faster than anything else on the water. "To me, speed is the product of beauty," Aronow said in 1983. "They were beautiful because they were fast." His first important boat, the Formula, a 24-foot beauty that could go upward of 50 miles an hour, was acclaimed by Esquire in 1964 as an instant classic of maritime design. Aronow per-sonally took all four Beatles for a ride in a Formula when they visited Miami. His second boat, the Donzi, a bantamweight 19-foot version of the Formula, went even faster. The Cigarette, the rakish 32-foot speedboat that Aronow introduced in 1969, was named after a famous liquor-hijacking boat that ruled the coastal waters off New York during Prohibition, and could reach 80 miles an hour on the high seas. The Cigarette became the favorite offshore speedboat of King Hussein and Bush, as well as the generic term for the fast vessels preferred by smugglers who raced cargoes of marijuana and cocaine to shore from freighters parked in the Gulf of Mexico.
Those who saw Aronow's murder as a parable for the degeneration of the speedboat industry that he built didn't have far to look. Across the street from the spot where Aronow was shot was the home of Apache, the powerboat company built by Ben Kramer, a young racer who idolized Aronow. But lately, animosity between the two men had been running high. As Aronow lay dy-ing, a worker from Apache named Tony Palmisano rushed to the scene and pocketed Aronow's treasured gold Rolex Presidential. Later, after failing to find a buyer for the watch, which Aronow had won in a race, Palmisano melted it down and sold the metal for $600.
Before I went down to Miami, I met Aronow's eldest son, Michael, a practicing attorney and former horse-breeder, for lunch at a restaurant in Long Island. I wanted to know how his father had gone from being a successful contractor in New Jersey to designing and racing the world's fastest boats, becoming arguably the greatest ocean racer of all time and the father of the modern speedboat industry. (Most of the companies he founded during his prime are still doing business today.) As Michael described it, the life that Aronow built for his family in South Orange was a picture-perfect example of the suburban dream. It was so perfect that his father's business was featured in Suburban Life magazine, in a lavish spread that showed Aronow in a cowl-neck sweater with his arms crossed over his broad chest, looking every inch the proud sub-urban dad.
Michael traces his father's evolution to the miserable winter of 1960?61. "The snow was terrible that year. My father said, 'If we get another storm, we're out of here.'" Finally, one day in August 1961, Aronow, who was still new to boating, sailed his pleasure craft, the Tainted Lady, up the Hudson to retrieve Michael, his little brother, David, and his sister, Claudia, from summer camp and announced that they would not be returning home. With the money from his construction business, Aronow bought a house in Bay Harbor, Florida, across the causeway from the gentiles-only community of Bal Harbour. At the age of 34, the prospering contractor who grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and built houses and supermarkets across the bur-geoning suburbs of New Jersey was officially retired. In Miami, he began hanging out at the lo-cal marinas and talking to men who raced boats.
"He knew nothing about nautical stuff. He wasn't a seaman at all," remembers Allan Brown, a racer who helped launch the Tainted Lady into Biscayne Bay and later became one of Aronow's leading drivers and competitors. In 1962, Aronow entered the Claudia, a speedboat powered by two custom Chevy 409s, in the Miami?Nassau ocean race and finished a surprising fourth.
"He was very ballsy and athletic, and he could drive a boat in a race as good or better than any of us," Brown adds. Aronow, who had been named the most outstanding high school athlete in Brooklyn, had the strength of a wrestler and an indomitable will. His way with women was equally impressive, if a bit scary. Traveling to the New York Boat Show with Aronow and his wife, Brown was cornered by the boat designer, who asked for the key to Brown's room. "I asked him, 'What are you going to do in my room?' He says, 'Guess.' I give him the key, and he walks up to this pretty girl on the floor. Two hours later, he gives me the key back. He also hands me 50 dollars and says, 'Give this to the maid.' He didn't have to waste time with small talk." One of Aronow's best friends in Miami was a young attorney named Al Malnik. Now a multimillionaire who owns the largest title loan business in the United States, Malnik built a multi-layered corpo-rate empire that reputedly enabled organized crime figures affiliated with the legendary Jewish rackets boss Meyer Lansky to put their money into licit investments.
Malnik first met Aronow in the early sixties. "Don became part of our group," the preternaturally youthful investor told me when I visited his seaside mansion in South Florida. "We were all mar-ried, and had kids the same age. We would go to the Mona Lisa Room at the Eden Roc. We all had this wonderful 'let's pretend' life—'let's pretend we're happy,'" Malnik remembers with a smile. "The guys would sit together and talk about women, and how we were all going to get rich like Bobby Rautbord, our friend who inherited 20 million dollars from his dad. The first one to leave his wife was Bobby, then Don, and then me."
The ocean-racing fraternity that Aronow would lead throughout the sixties was made up of a cinematic assortment of ex?fighter pilots, professional roughnecks, race car drivers, horse jock-eys, dissolute European royals who had cheated death during World War II, and rich hotshots from across the Atlantic. United by their love of speed, this seafaring rat pack torqued their en-gines and took off over Biscayne Bay with little regard for the weather or the white-glove nice-ties that governed sailboat racing. The leading organizer of the sport in Europe was Sir Max Ait-ken, the British fighter ace whose father was the Canadian press baron Lord Beaverbrook, one of Winston Churchill's closest advisers. Having shot down 16 German planes during the Battle of Britain, Aitken was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and he later inherited his father's newspapers, including the Daily Express. In 1961 the Daily Express sponsored the first Cowes?Torquay race, which would become the most prestigious speedboat race in the world. Among the competitors were Tommy Sopwith, a race car driver whose father made the Sopwith Camel, one of the deadliest Allied fighter planes in World War I; Billy Shand Kydd, a steeplechase rider and the future step-uncle of Princess Diana; and Lord Lucan, a tall, charming man whose great-great-grandfather, the third Lord Lucan, had ordered the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Aronow would soon become notorious on both sides of the Atlantic for racing with a wide-open throttle from the beginning to the end of a race, refusing to wear a protective helmet, and daring his high-powered Mercury engines to burn out or his experimental fiberglass hulls to splinter into pieces, each of which happened at least once. His first victory came in 1964 in a Formula that he raced around the island of New Providence, traveling 52 miles at an average speed of 43.3 miles per hour. Formula boats—which Aronow had begun producing in 1962—also fin-ished second, third, fifth, and sixth.
Liquid Smoke
(an article from MEN'S VOGUE- with permission)
On February 3, 1987, a well-built man a month shy of his sixtieth birthday lay bleeding to death in the front seat of his white Mercedes coupe in a scruffy, weed-choked stretch of North-east 188th Street in North Miami Beach known to ocean-racing fans around the world as Thun-derboat Row. The dying man, Don Aronow, had survived dozens of fearsome crashes, broken bones, and crippling internal injuries incurred while racing faster and harder than any of his competitors in the high-performance boats he designed and built himself under the brand names that, for 25 years, defined the powerboat industry: Formula, Donzi, Magnum, and, most notably, Cigarette. Aronow's Christmas-card list included such friends as King Hussein of Jordan, King Juan Carlos of Spain, the Prince of Kuwait, the King of Sweden, and George H. W. Bush, as well as a louche assortment of organized-crime figures and South Florida drug smugglers.
Even in such company, Aronow stood out. A former Coney Island lifeguard who was once in-vited to take a screen test for the role of Tarzan, Aronow was 6' 2'', weighed 215 pounds, and had the slightly dented good looks of a handsome prizefighter. His unruly dark hair and bushy eyebrows contrasted with the softness of his brown eyes and a smile that could ignite a room. Aronow's many friends bought his stylish, impeccably designed boats, learned to drive them fast, and found new girlfriends while vying for the favor of his companionship. His rivals hated him for the fierce drive that propelled him to a record two world racing championships and three American championships before he retired in 1970, and for his aggressive, in-your-face business practices.
The Speedboat King had been wounded by a drive-by assassin who rolled down the windows of a black Lincoln Town Car and exchanged a few words with him before whipping out a .45-caliber pistol and firing six shots at close range. Miami-Dade Homicide Detective Greg Smith arrived on the scene while Aronow was still alive.
"It was total chaos," Smith told me during a recent visit to Miami, which I spent tracking down Aronow's old racing associates, rivals, and romantic companions. The avatar of a vanishing breed of tough Jews, Aronow was also a boat designer with a love for clean lines and a streak of poetry in his heart—an unlikely amalgam that attracted my attention and admiration from the very first time I saw a Cigarette boat.
Like many of the people I spoke with, Detective Smith found it hard to believe that we were ap-proaching the twentieth anniversary of Aronow's murder. He remembered the scene on 188th Street like it happened yesterday. "They had just pulled him out of the car, and one guy was ad-ministering first aid," Smith told me. "There was a lot of blood, especially around his chest." A circle of about 10 to 20 people formed around Aronow, while behind them a crowd of onlookers, many of them in T-shirts and windbreakers bearing the names of Aronow's powerboat compa-nies, continued to grow as the police closed off the street.
Nearly everyone in the crowd had a personal story to tell about the man who had built Thunder-boat Row. And everyone who knew Aronow had a theory about who had killed him and why. "My first thought was that it was probably a jealous husband or boyfriend," remembered John Crouse, the Texan who worked as Aronow's publicist for two decades. Aronow's appetite for women, like his thirst for speed, went way beyond what most men are capable of sustaining. He had a false wall built in a closet in his office on Thunderboat Row, Crouse told me, which led to a hidden suite complete with a bed and custom-made shower. Friends said that he sometimes slept with three or four different women a day.
Husbands weren't the only people whose feelings were bruised by Aronow's outsize competitive appetites. "I found him to be a difficult person to deal with," Ted Theodoli, the boat dealer who bought Magnum from Aronow, said after the boat designer was murdered. Aronow's genius for designing innovative speedboats was matched by his proclivity for starting new companies, building them up, and then selling them. His habit of manipulating the noncompete agreements that invariably came with these deals—which prohibited Aronow from creating similar designs—left his buyers feeling humiliated. Playing both sides of the street was part of the boat builder's nature. At the height of the drug wars, some of South Florida's most notorious drug smugglers bought Aronow's fast boats, as did the United States Customs Service in order to run the smugglers down. Nearly everyone in Miami, it seemed, knew him, loved him, or had a rea-son to want him dead.
Aronow's particular gift as a boat designer lay in his determined marriage of form and function: His passionate attention to detail ensured that nothing about his boats was ever ordinary or extra-neous to their purpose, which was to go faster than anything else on the water. "To me, speed is the product of beauty," Aronow said in 1983. "They were beautiful because they were fast." His first important boat, the Formula, a 24-foot beauty that could go upward of 50 miles an hour, was acclaimed by Esquire in 1964 as an instant classic of maritime design. Aronow per-sonally took all four Beatles for a ride in a Formula when they visited Miami. His second boat, the Donzi, a bantamweight 19-foot version of the Formula, went even faster. The Cigarette, the rakish 32-foot speedboat that Aronow introduced in 1969, was named after a famous liquor-hijacking boat that ruled the coastal waters off New York during Prohibition, and could reach 80 miles an hour on the high seas. The Cigarette became the favorite offshore speedboat of King Hussein and Bush, as well as the generic term for the fast vessels preferred by smugglers who raced cargoes of marijuana and cocaine to shore from freighters parked in the Gulf of Mexico.
Those who saw Aronow's murder as a parable for the degeneration of the speedboat industry that he built didn't have far to look. Across the street from the spot where Aronow was shot was the home of Apache, the powerboat company built by Ben Kramer, a young racer who idolized Aronow. But lately, animosity between the two men had been running high. As Aronow lay dy-ing, a worker from Apache named Tony Palmisano rushed to the scene and pocketed Aronow's treasured gold Rolex Presidential. Later, after failing to find a buyer for the watch, which Aronow had won in a race, Palmisano melted it down and sold the metal for $600.
Before I went down to Miami, I met Aronow's eldest son, Michael, a practicing attorney and former horse-breeder, for lunch at a restaurant in Long Island. I wanted to know how his father had gone from being a successful contractor in New Jersey to designing and racing the world's fastest boats, becoming arguably the greatest ocean racer of all time and the father of the modern speedboat industry. (Most of the companies he founded during his prime are still doing business today.) As Michael described it, the life that Aronow built for his family in South Orange was a picture-perfect example of the suburban dream. It was so perfect that his father's business was featured in Suburban Life magazine, in a lavish spread that showed Aronow in a cowl-neck sweater with his arms crossed over his broad chest, looking every inch the proud sub-urban dad.
Michael traces his father's evolution to the miserable winter of 1960?61. "The snow was terrible that year. My father said, 'If we get another storm, we're out of here.'" Finally, one day in August 1961, Aronow, who was still new to boating, sailed his pleasure craft, the Tainted Lady, up the Hudson to retrieve Michael, his little brother, David, and his sister, Claudia, from summer camp and announced that they would not be returning home. With the money from his construction business, Aronow bought a house in Bay Harbor, Florida, across the causeway from the gentiles-only community of Bal Harbour. At the age of 34, the prospering contractor who grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and built houses and supermarkets across the bur-geoning suburbs of New Jersey was officially retired. In Miami, he began hanging out at the lo-cal marinas and talking to men who raced boats.
"He knew nothing about nautical stuff. He wasn't a seaman at all," remembers Allan Brown, a racer who helped launch the Tainted Lady into Biscayne Bay and later became one of Aronow's leading drivers and competitors. In 1962, Aronow entered the Claudia, a speedboat powered by two custom Chevy 409s, in the Miami?Nassau ocean race and finished a surprising fourth.
"He was very ballsy and athletic, and he could drive a boat in a race as good or better than any of us," Brown adds. Aronow, who had been named the most outstanding high school athlete in Brooklyn, had the strength of a wrestler and an indomitable will. His way with women was equally impressive, if a bit scary. Traveling to the New York Boat Show with Aronow and his wife, Brown was cornered by the boat designer, who asked for the key to Brown's room. "I asked him, 'What are you going to do in my room?' He says, 'Guess.' I give him the key, and he walks up to this pretty girl on the floor. Two hours later, he gives me the key back. He also hands me 50 dollars and says, 'Give this to the maid.' He didn't have to waste time with small talk." One of Aronow's best friends in Miami was a young attorney named Al Malnik. Now a multimillionaire who owns the largest title loan business in the United States, Malnik built a multi-layered corpo-rate empire that reputedly enabled organized crime figures affiliated with the legendary Jewish rackets boss Meyer Lansky to put their money into licit investments.
Malnik first met Aronow in the early sixties. "Don became part of our group," the preternaturally youthful investor told me when I visited his seaside mansion in South Florida. "We were all mar-ried, and had kids the same age. We would go to the Mona Lisa Room at the Eden Roc. We all had this wonderful 'let's pretend' life—'let's pretend we're happy,'" Malnik remembers with a smile. "The guys would sit together and talk about women, and how we were all going to get rich like Bobby Rautbord, our friend who inherited 20 million dollars from his dad. The first one to leave his wife was Bobby, then Don, and then me."
The ocean-racing fraternity that Aronow would lead throughout the sixties was made up of a cinematic assortment of ex?fighter pilots, professional roughnecks, race car drivers, horse jock-eys, dissolute European royals who had cheated death during World War II, and rich hotshots from across the Atlantic. United by their love of speed, this seafaring rat pack torqued their en-gines and took off over Biscayne Bay with little regard for the weather or the white-glove nice-ties that governed sailboat racing. The leading organizer of the sport in Europe was Sir Max Ait-ken, the British fighter ace whose father was the Canadian press baron Lord Beaverbrook, one of Winston Churchill's closest advisers. Having shot down 16 German planes during the Battle of Britain, Aitken was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and he later inherited his father's newspapers, including the Daily Express. In 1961 the Daily Express sponsored the first Cowes?Torquay race, which would become the most prestigious speedboat race in the world. Among the competitors were Tommy Sopwith, a race car driver whose father made the Sopwith Camel, one of the deadliest Allied fighter planes in World War I; Billy Shand Kydd, a steeplechase rider and the future step-uncle of Princess Diana; and Lord Lucan, a tall, charming man whose great-great-grandfather, the third Lord Lucan, had ordered the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Aronow would soon become notorious on both sides of the Atlantic for racing with a wide-open throttle from the beginning to the end of a race, refusing to wear a protective helmet, and daring his high-powered Mercury engines to burn out or his experimental fiberglass hulls to splinter into pieces, each of which happened at least once. His first victory came in 1964 in a Formula that he raced around the island of New Providence, traveling 52 miles at an average speed of 43.3 miles per hour. Formula boats—which Aronow had begun producing in 1962—also fin-ished second, third, fifth, and sixth.
