On February 3, 1987, a well-built man a month shy of his sixtieth birthday lay bleeding to death in the front seat of his white Mercedes coupe in a scruffy, weed-choked stretch of North-east 188th Street in North Miami Beach known to ocean-racing fans around the world as Thun-derboat Row. The dying man, Don Aronow, had survived dozens of fearsome crashes, broken bones, and crippling internal injuries incurred while racing faster and harder than any of his competitors in the high-performance boats he designed and built himself under the brand names that, for 25 years, defined the powerboat industry: Formula, Donzi, Magnum, and, most notably, Cigarette. Aronow's Christmas-card list included such friends as King Hussein of Jordan, King Juan Carlos of Spain, the Prince of Kuwait, the King of Sweden, and George H. W. Bush, as well as a louche assortment of organized-crime figures and South Florida drug smugglers.
Even in such company, Aronow stood out. A former Coney Island lifeguard who was once in-vited to take a screen test for the role of Tarzan, Aronow was 6' 2'', weighed 215 pounds, and had the slightly dented good looks of a handsome prizefighter. His unruly dark hair and bushy eyebrows contrasted with the softness of his brown eyes and a smile that could ignite a room. Aronow's many friends bought his stylish, impeccably designed boats, learned to drive them fast, and found new girlfriends while vying for the favor of his companionship. His rivals hated him for the fierce drive that propelled him to a record two world racing championships and three American championships before he retired in 1970, and for his aggressive, in-your-face business practices.
The Speedboat King had been wounded by a drive-by assassin who rolled down the windows of a black Lincoln Town Car and exchanged a few words with him before whipping out a .45-caliber pistol and firing six shots at close range. Miami-Dade Homicide Detective Greg Smith arrived on the scene while Aronow was still alive.
"It was total chaos," Smith told me during a recent visit to Miami, which I spent tracking down Aronow's old racing associates, rivals, and romantic companions. The avatar of a vanishing breed of tough Jews, Aronow was also a boat designer with a love for clean lines and a streak of poetry in his heart—an unlikely amalgam that attracted my attention and admiration from the very first time I saw a Cigarette boat.
Like many of the people I spoke with, Detective Smith found it hard to believe that we were ap-proaching the twentieth anniversary of Aronow's murder. He remembered the scene on 188th Street like it happened yesterday. "They had just pulled him out of the car, and one guy was ad-ministering first aid," Smith told me. "There was a lot of blood, especially around his chest." A circle of about 10 to 20 people formed around Aronow, while behind them a crowd of onlookers, many of them in T-shirts and windbreakers bearing the names of Aronow's powerboat compa-nies, continued to grow as the police closed off the street.
Nearly everyone in the crowd had a personal story to tell about the man who had built Thunder-boat Row. And everyone who knew Aronow had a theory about who had killed him and why. "My first thought was that it was probably a jealous husband or boyfriend," remembered John Crouse, the Texan who worked as Aronow's publicist for two decades. Aronow's appetite for women, like his thirst for speed, went way beyond what most men are capable of sustaining. He had a false wall built in a closet in his office on Thunderboat Row, Crouse told me, which led to a hidden suite complete with a bed and custom-made shower. Friends said that he sometimes slept with three or four different women a day.
