Lawyer who took on vice got a dark message in 1929
James F. Bickers paid a price for battling gamblers, rumrunners and a sheriff he suspected of corruption.
By SCOTT TAYLOR HARTZELL
Published June 16, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - His wife and children watched on a Sunday in April 1929 as armed men abducted lawyer James F. Bickers. He was driven miles away, stripped and beaten, and told to leave Florida because of his war on vice.
"The underworld has made its first move (here) to capture control of the rum-running business and other rackets," the Evening Independent warned.
For a day, the event placed St. Petersburg on a violent par with other Roaring Twenties cities. Two men were found with their throats slit in a New York speakeasy that Sunday. The third female victim of a torch killer was discovered in Scarsdale, and a Chicago saloon keeper and a gunman died in a gang war.
"America's crime wave over Sunday became a deluge, with its roaring tide stretching from New York and then westward to gang-ridden Chicago," the St. Petersburg Times wrote.
Starting in 1892, when the Anti-Saloon League's David Moffett defeated founding father J.C. Williams in the city's first mayoral election, the forces of moderation clashed with bootleggers and organized crime. The Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Women's Town Improvement Association continued the war against vice into Prohibition (1920-1933).
About 1926, Bickers moved his family here. In Shelby County, Tenn., he was an attorney general. Working here as an independent lawyer, he took on gamblers and rumrunners. Paid by local churches, he briefly stopped dog racing. In papers sent to Gov. Doyle Carlton, Bickers accused Pinellas Sheriff Gladstone Beattie of corruption.
On April 28, 1929, the underworld struck back. Bickers was returning home to 2801 Tangerine Ave. from church. His wife was watching from a window. Their five children played in the yard.
Five men with pistols approached Bickers. Police Chief B.B. Chesney, who was waiting outside the house for Bickers, witnessed the abduction from his car.
"Get in, get in," Bickers, 54, was told before being thrown to the floor of the Buick sedan and blindfolded. Beattie formed a 50-person manhunt. Aviator Johnny Green searched from the sky.
The gunmen took Bickers to a jungle morass about 4 miles north of New Port Richey. They tied a cover over his head and put a noose around his neck.
The lawyer's ring was taken along with $2,000 that he had received the previous day in a divorce case. He was stripped of his trousers, handcuffed, gagged, and beaten with a knotted rope after being placed over a log. Before the gunmen left, they told him to leave town by sunrise Wednesday.
Bickers flagged down two tourists, who dropped him off at Mound Park Hospital.
"I'm quitting," Bickers told reporters and Sheriff Beattie. He refused to offer any clues. "I've got my instructions (to leave). I can't live here anymore. . . . I don't want to live in any community where the same men who race up and down the street . . . will do and permit an act of this kind."
Beattie told Bickers: "I want to work night and day until this affair is cleaned up."
Armed guards escorted Bickers out of town Wednesday at 2 p.m., amid reports that the kidnappers might use Bickers' $2,000 "to get two other attorneys." Bickers, who was known to bury a bottle behind his law books, later talked about Sheriff Beattie with Gov. Carlton in Tallahassee.
In early May, Bickers returned, promising to name names at a "tell-all rally" organized by the Rev. Dr. Lincoln McConnell, a former Baptist crusader. Most of the crowd of 2,000 left early when Bickers offered no new information. After collecting only $100 to offset his $2,000 loss, Bickers left the next day to practice law in Memphis.
In February 1930, Carlton replaced Beattie for "maintaining a collection system to secure protection money from bootleggers and operators of gambling houses." Beattie ran Beattie National Detective Agency here until his death about 1942.
In 1967, Bickers died in Tennessee at age 88.
"A sensational kidnap and flogging mystery case," the Independent wrote in 1967. "Never solved."
