Word: levies
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...garage-apartment, rented his house for the winter season); 2) the city of Miami, lovely in segments but raw-ugly in sum, with its own tolerant government and its flamboyant, perennial "reform" Mayor E. G. Sewell; 3) Miami Beach, with its own City Council, its Mayor John Hale Levi. The city of Miami is a city, much like other booming U. S. towns; Miami Beach is a unique U. S. phenomenon...
...Mayor Levi pronounces his name lee-vie, is distressed when he hears it called lee-vee, regards his ancestry as Anglo-Saxon. He is friendlier to the Jewish influx than was Founder Fisher, whose companies' hotels still bar Jews...
...John Levi actually looks as if his name should be Paddy O'Rourke. He also looks and lives like what he is: a well-off, semi-retired businessman who has softened with the easy years. But in his town's peculiar politics, he is as hard as a stonecrab...
...communal autocracy is his Miami Beach. Shy, able, $10,000-a-year City Manager Clyde Renshaw tends to the mechanics of city government. John Levi and a close little sodality of realty operators, builders, bankers, other local businessmen tend to politics. They comprise, employ, or otherwise control most-of the voting population (4,043 in 1932; 8,552 in 1939). And they perforce are tolerant realists, balancing and catering to the wants of the 200,000 winterbirds who flit in and away, the small but growing number who choose to dwell in Miami Beach...
Brothels are taboo in Miami Beach because 1) they are bad for the home trade, and 2) there are plenty just across the bay in Miami. Gambling flourished until 1936. Then Levi & Co. concluded that gambling racketeers were also bad for business, banged down the lid on everything except one legalized dog-track (which pays the city $50 a day during the season...