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Miami Herald January 31, 1988
A YEAR LATER, ARONOW MURDER STILL A MYSTERY
The speed demon called Donzi was gunned down a year ago Wednesday. Whoever ambushed race-boat builder extraordinaire Don Aronow is still out there. So are enough hypotheses to fill a shelf of pulp suspense novels. |
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Take your pick: Jealous husband. Nervous smuggler. Vengeful mobster. Or a fellow boat builder who felt Aronow had stiffed him. Homicide detectives are as stumped as ever. So are the private investigators hired by Aronow's widow. One lead after another has self-destructed. Cops thought boat racer Ben Kramer, indicted on drug charges last August, might be their man -- but nothing shook out. The lead detective had a sneaking suspicion about a certain jealous husband who might have ordered the hit. But beyond a gut feeling, zip. Here was Donald Joel Aronow, 59, the self-made millionaire; the acknowledged guru of the offshore powerboat set who built and named the celebrated Donzi after himself; the rich and handsome deal-doer who was adored by friends and family, killed on Northeast 188th Street in broad daylight. When the stranger in the dark Lincoln Town Car calmly shot Aronow in the chest, blasting his way down to the groin, on a street lined with boat companies the victim had founded, he killed one legend and created another -- bestowing upon Don Aronow even more intrigue in death than he had in life. "Everybody has a story," says Dr. Bob Magoon, Miami Beach eye surgeon, offshore racing champion and one of Aronow's best friends for 20 years. "That's the problem with this thing -- the further the cops got into, the more rumors they'd hear. You've got 50,000 stories, and still, every lead has led no place." Metro-Dade homicide detective Mike DeCora has followed "easily 1,000 leads." He has spoken with everyone from a space case on the Beach who claimed to be Elvis Presley's daughter to yes men of George Bush, vice president and good pal of the victim. "I have a list of people we haven't eliminated yet," DeCora says. "Less than a dozen." Yet despite a $100,000 reward offered by Aronow's widow Lillian, a composite drawing of the murderer and a description of his car circulated across the United States, police say they have no idea who killed Aronow -- or why. Investigative paperwork abounds: For example, to try to track down the suspect's car, cops got a computer printout of 2,000 Town Cars sold in Florida. It has taken a year to check out half. Ambition was Aronow's middle name: "He could be your best friend, but in business, he was all business," detective DeCora says. With a vengeance, Aronow bought and sold racehorses. He sold high-tech boats to the world: the Israeli government. Baby Doc Duvalier. King Hussein of Jordan. He designed and built a line of sassy speedboats nicknamed Blue Thunder for the U.S. Customs Service. He sold George Bush a boat and Aronow took a lot of calls in his kitchen from the vice president. And he sold the sleek, super-fast Cigarette boats to characters, as DeCora put it, "with doper written all over their face." When Aronow was murdered, Bush's office called DeCora to check on things. "Can I help?" King Hussein also asked. "I don't think we ever even scratched the surface of the world he moved in," DeCora says. "We still don't have a solid motive. And without a motive, we can't focus on one person." Last week in Miami, though, with the anniversary of the boat builder's death approaching, motives were still washing ashore. Here are just four: The Angry Husband Theory A high-performance ladies' man, Aronow reportedly once leaned over at a large dinner party and whispered to a friend: "I've had every woman at this table." His wife Lillian insists her husband was true to her. "And I think she really believes that," DeCora says. "But his first wife, Shirley, told me: 'I used to think he was true blue, too, when I was married to him. Only later did I find out that that wasn't the case."' No one doubts Lillian's assertion that Aronow came straight home after work each night. After a year's silence about the murder of her husband, Lillian told The Herald last week: "It was the happiest time of his life. We were moving into a wonderful phase, with the new house, the new baby. The horses were winning. Everything was just wonderful. It was really a total fantasy." Could her husband have had a paramour? "The man was home at six o'clock every night for dinner. He was reaching into the refrigerator and I'd say, Honey you have to wait. He was so Father Knows Best, you wouldn't believe it." But daytime was another story. People say Aronow would come and go -- to the office, the track, the magnificent waterfront home he was renovating on North Bay Road in Miami Beach. He'd travel alone to his stables in Ocala, DeCora says. He was a very hard man to trace. "There were allegations," DeCora says, "rumors that he had extramarital affairs. Three women were named. We talked to them and they all vehemently denied it, said they were just friends of Aronow's." "That's ridiculous," says Magoon, the eye doctor. "He may have had girls here and there, but that's not the reason he was killed. He was such a dynamic guy -- he was into all sorts of things." Don Soffer, Turnberry developer and a friend and customer of Aronow's, said: "If that were the case, it would have surfaced long ago. Had there been another woman involved, people would have known about it. Don was not the kind of guy to sneak around corners. I'd discount that theory completely." The Mob Hit Theory Did Aronow have ties to organized crime during his years in the construction business in New Jersey? He made a fortune building homes and shopping centers; by 28 he was a millionaire. Some say he "retired" to Florida with $2 million. Some say he was fleeing. Others say he continued to work with the mob while he opened one successful boat-building firm after another. A man who calls himself an "old friend" of Aronow's: "I heard it was a mob-type deal and they'd been trailing him for 17 days to do it in some bizarre place. That two guys were involved. "The fairy tale," he says, "was that the second car was a crash car, someone acting like an innocent bystander who would run into whatever car tried to give chase. The story about his retiring from New Jersey was bull. He was in the mob up there -- he wasn't a builder. He grabbed his wife and kids and blew down here, stayed six months in a hotel. Up there it was pretty unwholesome. And he had tremendous mob ties down here." DeCora doubts it. "We checked out the mob theory," he says. "He had friends in New Jersey -- quote mobsters unquote -- and we talked to them and to authorities and he didn't owe anybody anything. He was really a self-made man." Says Aronow's son Michael, 37: "He had no mob connections at all. He made it on his own, did everything by himself. No one helped him. He worked for his father-in-law in New Jersey. I've heard it all before." But people say Aronow was a pal of gangster Meyer Lansky. "Don knew all sorts of people," eye surgeon Magoon says. "But so what? I knew Meyer. He was a patient of mine. I'd see him once a year for a checkup. I used to love talking to him. I thought of him simply as this nice little old Jewish man. I don't know what that means." Turnberry's Soffer on the mob link: "That's a total lie. That's a Disneyland movie." The Kramer Theory Detective DeCora wonders. "From early on, Ben Kramer was one of the more promising suspects. All I can say is that he has not been eliminated as a suspect." Kramer, a world-class powerboat racer, built boats at Fort Apache Marina, just down Northeast 188th Street from Aronow's USA Racing Team. Aronow was gunned down moments after visiting Kramer's dealership. Kramer is in jail, awaiting trial on charges he distributed more than a million pounds of marijuana nationwide. He and his father Jack also were indicted last year on federal money- laundering charges in Miami. Kramer's lawyers have denied their client was involved in Aronow's murder. The Kramer-Aronow link still bothers DeCora: "Kramer was the big one we looked at on the street. Because of his background" -- Kramer was convicted of marijuana smuggling in 1978 -- "and because of his dealings with the victim, there maybe was some animosity between the two." The detective says Kramer had bought USA Racing from Aronow for $600,000 in 1985. But when the U.S. government said it would withdraw from its Blue Thunder contract if Kramer kept the company, Aronow bought it back, DeCora says. "It appears Kramer lost on the deal." Mike Aronow: "Kramer has nothing to do with nothing." Lillian: "I've never even met the Kramers. That's just nonsense." The IRS/Drug Theory Goes like this: Aronow was selling fast boats to drug dealers for cash. Federal authorities, unable to beat the smugglers at their high-speed offshore game, decide instead to go after the profits. As a straight-up, everything-by-the-book businessman, Aronow not only talked to the feds -- he talked too much, some people think. "The IRS was trying to catch them like they caught Capone," says an Aronow associate, "and Don was the only guy who could testify that yes, I sold so-and-so 10 boats for a million in cash." Turnberry's Soffer: "That's my theory. A lot of these guys buy stuff for cash. Don was an honest businessman and reported all his stuff. Now we know these drug guys are all crazy and don't care if a life can save them 10 minutes. Someone was afraid Don would testify for the government against some guy who doesn't even have a green card and is buying a $150,000 boat with cash." Detective DeCora tends to discount this theory. He says Aronow agreed to testify only once for the government -- and that was only on public records in Virginia. DeCora says there were no hard feelings between the parties. There's a variation on the IRS/Drug Theory. Some say Aronow allowed his boats and facilities to be used by smugglers. Son Mike doesn't buy it. "No one knows what happened," he says. "But it's not related to Kramer or drugs in any way. That's the biggest joke of all. That's stupid. That's No. 1 in stupidity. My father was the cleanest guy in the world. He had nothing to do with those idiots. He owned the street." A year after the murder, Mike clings to his own explanation about his father: "I treat it like he's away on vacation and I'm just waiting for him to come back." Herald boating writer Eric Sharp contributed to this report. |