"We didn't have the heart to tear it down," he said. The developer plans to restore the cabin and use it as a community building, at a cost of about $50,000, Anderson said. Development moved the cabin to another part of the property to make way for the assisted living facility.
"We don't discourage it, but there really isn't any proof he was here." "It's a little bit exaggerated, but it's a lovely thing," London-Prace said. Still, she said, people love the juicy piece of folklore. "West Pasco certainly would have fit the bill in those days."īut the West Pasco Historical Society has found no proof Capone was ever here, curator Midge London-Prace said. "It's not inconceivable that after he got out of prison (in 1939, Capone) wanted a nice quiet hideaway for a little while," Dayton said. Sliz suspects people began associating Capone with the nearby cabin because it had the same kind of cypress walls and limestone fireplace as the ritzy ranch.
Local historian Bill Dayton said a man who once worked at the Moon Lake Gardens and Dude Ranch later told people Capone was a visitor. "It sounds good," she said, chuckling, "but it's not really true." "The beautiful cypress wood and that stone fireplace _ you don't see that type of structure any more," she said. Sliz lived in the cabin from 1972 to 1973 while her parents' house was being built next door. The Spindlers bought it from the Dunns, first for use as a farm, and later as their home. Petersburg built the cabin and used the surrounding woods for Boy Scout camping trips, she said. Her grandparents, Robert and Mary Spindler, owned the property from 1952 to 1987. Holly Sliz doubts the cabin was ever used by outlaws. Of course they always went under assumed names.Ĭapone was careful to hide his connections to the properties used by himself or his associates, so "it would be quite difficult to establish that link (to the cabin) based on public records," Panamerican Consultants reported. Mafia types, including Capone, were rumored to frequent the nearby Moon Lake Gardens and Dude Ranch, an opulent retreat that featured illicit casinos and a hunting preserve stocked with exotic game. The 1,200-square-foot cypress cabin was built around 1945, when the gangster's failing health kept him close to his Palm Island home.īut it's possible some of his shady associates might have used it, according to Panamerican Consultants Inc., an architectural history firm hired by L.H. Development, the company building The Lodge at Hudson, a 168-unit assisted living facility on the property.Īnderson is the first to admit the Capone link is unlikely.
#State property 2 capone plus#
"It's just a plus for us in terms of preserving it, and it helps in terms of marketing," said Fred Anderson, one of the partners of L.H. If those things happen, pretext cases will become less common, and the justice system will be healthier.Now the company developing the site wants Pasco County to place the cabin on its list of historic places, in part because of the mythology. A variety of forces are pushing in that direction federal courts could help speed the process along with appropriate jurisdiction and statutory interpretation doctrines.
The solution is to make the federal justice system more accountable. That is no surprise: Pretextual charging is primarily a phenomenon of the federal criminal justice system, where law enforcers are less politically accountable than in state justice systems. The Justice Department has struggled with those problems as it has used Capone-style strategies against suspected terrorists. Meanwhile, prosecutorial strategies of the sort used to "get" Al Capone can create serious credibility problems. Charging criminals with their "true" crimes makes criminal law enforcement more transparent, and hence more politically accountable. Far too little attention is given to the strong social interest in non-pretextual prosecutions. Most analyses of pretextual prosecutions-cases in which prosecutors target defendants based on suspicion of one crime but prosecute them for another, lesser crime-focus on the defendant's interest in fair treatment.
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