Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

be pulled from the sack was the winner. Depending on who was running the game, the payoff was roughly from 70–1 to 90–1. Bolita thrived in Hispanic and black communities, a fact that wasn’t lost on McCall. “Just as long as you got a little handful of ’em together,” he said of the blacks of Lake County, “you gonna have a little bolita , a little moonshine, and a whole lot of sex. Anybody that don’t know that, don’t understand ’em.”
    The game also lined the pockets of politicians and law enforcement officials wherever it was played, and bloody turf battles frequently erupted over who controlled the game and who got the payoffs—from the “cracker mob of Central Florida” right up to the king of bolita , Santo Trafficante Sr., the renowned Mafia boss from Tampa.
    Some of McCall’s critics and political opponents accused him of turning his back on the bolita business and allowing it to thrive. Others argued that the amount of money generated—supposedly under the nose of a sheriff who liked to boast of his awareness in regard to every activity in all 1,100 square miles of Lake County—would not be possible unless McCall had reached some kind of financial understanding with moonshine and bolita racketeers. Indeed, one of McCall’s deputies later acknowledged that the sheriff and his deputies controlled gambling in Lake County “from the back door of the county jail.” It was no surprise to McCall’s foes and critics when the Tampa Tribune reported that nineteen slot machines seized by state beverage agents had turned up in various Lake County Elks Clubs where McCall had active memberships. And a past president of the county’s branch of the NAACP admitted that his own mother was a bolita collection agent for McCall.
    What is certain is that Sheriff Willis V. McCall, from his first day in office, understood that citrus was the engine that drove Lake County’s economy, and he focused nearly all his efforts on issues surrounding labor. With so many young men serving in the military and the demand for citrus products increasing with every month, growers were scrambling to find enough hands to work in the groves. Every able body was needed, and in January 1945, Florida governor Millard Caldwell sent letters to all sheriffs in the state, urging them to “use their good offices” to take vigilant action to enforce “work or fight” laws that were designed to “prevent loitering, loafing and absenteeism.” To further incentivize Florida law enforcement, Caldwell’s statute allowed sheriffs to pocket all of the fines they collected up to a yearly maximum of $7,500. McCall had his mandate. Still, despite the additional money collected from fines, journalists wondered how the sheriff was able, on a mere four-digit salary, to accumulate the vast stretch of land on which he later built his ranch in Umatilla.
    Despite the chronic labor shortage in the groves, wages were kept low, and with the new sheriff enforcing the work or fight laws, citrus barons had in the blacks of Lake County “a ready pool of [cheap] involuntary labor that could be tapped whenever whites faced any sort of labor emergency.” Within days of receiving Governor Caldwell’s letter, McCall arrested forty citrus pickers for vagrancy when they did not show up to work on a Saturday. The next month, another picker, Mack Fryar, similarly failed to appear on a Saturday after having put in a full week’s labor. McCall, without a warrant, entered Fryar’s home and placed him under arrest. Fryar protested, but McCall was in no mood to explain: “None of your damn jaw, come on with me,” the sheriff said and, unprovoked, whipped out his blackjack and knocked Fryar out cold in front of his wife and fourteen-year-old son. McCall then dragged the supposedly delinquent picker to his car and hauled him off to jail in Tavares, where he was held for days before receiving any medical treatment.
    Pickers like Fryar were assessed exorbitant fines, which trapped them in debt peonage, a condition not unlike slavery. The “Florida bail bond racket” was, according to a former Orlando newspaper editor, the “most lucrative business in the state.” The bondsmen worked hand in glove with employers to secure labor in exchange for fines and bond costs. Citrus grove foremen informed bondsmen how many men were needed, and workers were “secured from the stockades.” If workers attempted to flee across state lines, they could be recaptured