Charlie Wall

Wall was born into a distinguished Tampa family; his father was a prominent doctor who served as mayor. But tall, talkative Charlie became one of the kings of crime in Ybor City in the 1920s and ’30s. He bootlegged booze and fixed elections and ran brothels and bolita, an illegal lottery. Several of his rivals ended up mysteriously dead.
Legend has it that during a strike by cigarmakers, he spirited money to the strikers to keep their families fed. That earned Wall, who often sported white linen suits, the nickname that gave Atkins the title of his new novel: White Shadow.

One April day in 1955, long after Wall had been pushed out of the rackets by the Sicilian Mafia, his wife called a horde of lawmen and reporters to his rambling bungalow in Ybor. They found the old man in his nightclothes on the bedroom floor. His throat was cut, and he had been badly beaten. On the carpet, they found one bloody footprint and a scattering of buckshot and birdseed.