THE DEVIL LOOKS AFTER HIS OWN
Perry Wall’s children all grew into successful adults, but none more successful than John P. Wall. Wall became a doctor and served the Confederacy during the Civil War. He did not favor the Confederacy’s cause but felt he couldn’t turn his back on wounded soldiers simply because of their political beliefs. When the war was over, he turned to research and, in 1873, became the first American doctor to conclude that mosquitoes carried yellow fever. He later founded the first hospital focusing solely on serving yellow fever patients.
Wall was also a successful writer and politician. He was associate editor of the Sunland Tribune, which later became the Tampa Tribune; served as mayor of Tampa from 1878–1880; mapped out many of the routes through the Florida wilderness that is used by the Florida highway system today; and assisted Vicente Martinez Ybor in establishing Ybor City. With such credentials, it’s easy to see why Wall won the heart of Matilda McKay, a member of the famous McKay family, one of the wealthiest families in the state of Florida, and a founding family of Tampa. Wall and Matilda McKay were married in 1872. Shortly after that, Matilda McKay’s sister married into the Lykes family, another of Tampa’s founding families, uniting three of Tampa’s most powerful families–the Walls, McKays, and Lykes.
John and Matilda gave birth to one son–Charlie, in March 1880. With his family’s money and credentials behind him, Charlie Wall had the world at his feet. But, unfortunately, his would-be-perfect life took a turn for the worse early on.
Matilda passed away in 1893, and John P. Wall married his housekeeper, Louise Williams, just six months later. Wall’s career as a doctor and politician often took him away from home for extended periods, leaving young Charlie with his new stepmom, a woman he grew to hate for her lavish spending of his father’s money. Then, in April 1895, John P. Wall passed away. Louise Williams was now Charlie Wall’s official guardian. Upon inheriting a portion of the Wall fortune, her lifestyle became even more extravagant–she’d wear ostrich-feathered hats and adorn herself in jewels. The more she spent, the more obstinate young Charlie became towards her.
To avoid her altogether, young Charlie began staying away from home for days and weeks at a time, sleeping in ditches by night and hanging out in saloons, gambling houses, and whorehouses–the only places that would allow a young runaway to stick around without lecturing him. Some of the criminals who were regulars at these establishments of ill-repute grew fond of the scrappy young kid who hung around the adults. They began teaching him their trades, and Charlie Wall’s life in crime began.
At age 12, tired of his stepmother, he shot her with a .22 rifle and wounded her. His uncle sent him to Bingham Military School in North Carolina. A romanticized story about young Charlie claims he was expelled for hanging around gambling and whorehouses in North Carolina. While he was removed during his first year at the military school, according to school records, it was for the unromantic crime of cheating on a test.
Upon expulsion, he returned to Tampa and, with no consistent parental supervision, also returned to the seedy establishments that took him in before his stint in military school. By 14 or 15, young Charlie was dealing craps in a casino in Fort Brooke and running numbers for some of the larger bolita dealers in Tampa who saw great potential in a criminally minded boy with white-collar ties. With the last name of Wall, Charlie could get into places common criminals could not–country clubs, five-star restaurants, upscale bars, and even City Hall–and sell bolita numbers.
Though he lacked a formal education, Charlie Wall was an intelligent businessman, even as a teenager. He saved every penny he could, and as his bankroll grew, he ceased working as a runner for bolita dealers and began bankrolling bootleg liquor operations and his bolita games.
