THE KEY TO THE CITY IN KEY WEST, WHERE FANTASY OFTEN RULES, VOTERS FOR MAYOR HAVE A CHOICE BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION

Miami Herald, The (FL)
October 22, 1989
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

The next mayor of Key West will be either:

(1) a man who bears the name of a fictional character, or
(2) a man who admits he is a fictional character.

The first is Tom Sawyer -- as in The Adventures of. Unlike the kid in the novel by Mark Twain, this Tom Sawyer is sober, serene, businesslike. As a boy, he probably liked to help with chores and always ate his vegetables. As an adult, he has been a banker and now owns a trophy shop. As a campaigner, he focuses earnestly on such nod-off issues as millage reduction, garbage- collection contracts, property leases and -- his specialty -- sewage treatment.

Some might say he's a trifle dull.

The second is Anthony "Captain Tony" Tarracino -- as in Captain Tony's Saloon, in the heart of the Key West intoxication district. No one would ever call Tarracino dull. But some would be loathe to call him mayor.

Tarracino has made a career of being a living legend. He is a riveting storyteller, outrageous braggart, shameless Lothario and swears like a sailor, appropriately enough. At age 73, with a craggy face, baggy eyes and perpetual cloud of smoke from a Lucky Strike, he looks more than ever like the Official Real-Life Character of Key West.

The most common journalistic description of Captain Tony is that he's "like a character out of a Hemingway novel." Except that Hemingway never wrote about publicity hounds. What makes Tarracino unusual among media-mongers is that he fully acknowledges the extent to which his character is an artifice.

Indeed, he was complicit in his own invention.

The process began years ago. In 1962, Tarracino, then a charter fishing-boat captain, took over the saloon at 428 Greene St. Out-of-town journalists on vacation or a junket would be hanging out in the bar, looking for a story to justify the expense account or tax write-off. Captain Tony says, "I would bail them out. I'd give them the story. I'd be the character. They'd say, 'a character out of a Hemingway novel.' They created Captain Tony, and I played the part well."

The question is whether the voters want that character running the city commission meetings. Sawyer and Tarracino stake out similar positions on the environment, rising taxes and crime, so the decision for voters in the runoff election Nov. 7 will likely hinge on the issue of personality. Not just that of the candidates, but the city's as well. On the one hand, Key West wants to be seen as a wild, uninhibited place. But it doesn't want to descend into farce. For some voters, Sawyer might be the safe choice for mayor, and Captain Tony might be the choice after they had a couple of beers.

Some randomly sampled campaign rhetoric:

Tom Sawyer (referring to sewage treatment): "It's not an exciting issue, no one wants to talk about it, but my concern is the health and welfare of the people who live here."

Captain Tony (on oil drilling off the Keys): "Those mother ------s want to put wells out there!"

Tom Sawyer: "I think from day one we need to start preparing for the next budget year, streamlining expenses, making it more cost-effective."

Captain Tony: "You can tell he's got no imagination. If I'm mayor, I'll tell you, we'll make the papers at least once a month. We'll find some way to make the s--- fly. That's what brings the people here."

Tom Sawyer: "If you have a business, you cannot continually increase your prices. . . . We have to look at that the same way in running the city. We cannot increase and increase and increase (taxes) just because you can add another mill to the assessment of your property and have more revenue come in."

Captain Tony: "Sexually, I turn women on. I dunno, it's eye contact or something."

It's a stark choice, in other words. One candidate says he'd run the city like a business, the other talks as though he'd run it like a bar. One radiates competence, the other concupiscence.

It will be a close election. This is the common wisdom, and it's based on history. This whole show is a rerun. In 1985, Sawyer and Tarracino faced off in an election that received national publicity -- because of The Legendary Captain Tony, of course.

On election night, Tarracino ended up with 33 more votes than Sawyer, out of more than 8,000 cast. But the captain sensed an unfavorable wind and, indeed, the next day, when the elections department counted the absentee ballots, Sawyer vaulted to a 52-vote victory on the strength of the kind of sober, serene, businesslike people who cast absentee ballots.

Captain Tony was gracious in defeat. He had gotten national publicity and won the hearts of a lot of people who had always thought he was just the town jester. He wasn't discouraged. In fact, he announced he was running for governor. (He didn't win.)

Sawyer did not seek a second two-year term in 1987, because his superiors at First Federal of the Florida Keys, where he was vice president for marketing, thought the allegedly part-time mayor's job was taking too much of his energy. Tarracino did run for mayor again in '87, but didn't survive the primary.

When Mayor Richard Heyman announced his retirement this year, Sawyer quit his job at the bank and announced he would seek a Grover Cleveland-style second term. The mayor's job pays only $10,000, but Sawyer says he can support himself with a small business he started a few years back, selling trophies and specialty advertising.

Then Captain Tony decided to try again -- his sixth attempt, establishing him as the Harold Stassen of Key West.

Tarracino has been stating publicly that this is his fourth attempt. He should demand a recount. Records at the Supervisor of Elections Office show that he ran in 1967, 1969, 1975, 1985 and 1987.

His recollection of those earlier elections is fuzzy. Asked if he remembers the '75 race, he said, "Vaguely. You have to realize in them years I didn't think I could win. They put me down as a clown, looking for publicity, but I had a lot to say in those campaigns. A lot of things I fought for were done. My platform was always adopted by the other candidates before the campaign was over. I was way ahead of them mentally. To me, they were like amateurs."

In this year's primary field of four candidates, Sawyer received 39 percent of the vote, Tarracino 33 percent. The big question will be what happens to the 25 percent of the electorate that voted for the third-place finisher, free-lance writer Marsha Gordon.

Almost anywhere else, Tarracino might be considered a fringe candidate instead of a contender. But perhaps it's only natural that a semi-fictional character like Captain Tony draws so much support in Key West. The town at Mile Zero on U.S. 1 is itself part fiction, increasingly so as it expands its tourist industry, hyping the town's authenticity.

Like all tourist towns, it threatens to lapse into self-parody. The question for Tarracino is whether he would reverse that trend or simply confirm it.

The new, touristy version of Key West is full of self- conscious fun. For example, there's the phenomenon of the restaurant-based-on-the-song. On Truman Avenue is Kokomo's, from the Beach Boys song about a mythical island off the Florida Keys. On the main tourist drag, Duval Street, you can buy a Cheeseburger in Paradise at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville Cafe, based on the song about a mythical town where people are wasting away and looking for their lost shaker of salt, etc.

The famous sunset gathering at Mallory Dock has turned into a schlockfest. It used to be that people went to the dock for purely aesthetic reasons, e.g., to watch the sun go down behind Tank Island. Now you can buy frozen drinks and cheap jewelry and see cats jumping through hoops and whatnot. It's nature-as- carnival. Tourists have long since crowded out the locals. ("Are we laid back yet, Marge?")

Even geography is tainted by make-believe. One obligatory stop for Key West visitors is the Southernmost Point in the U.S.A., which has a slight flaw in that it isn't even the Southernmost Point in the city of Key West. The real Southernmost Point is several stone's throws away in the Truman Annex military reservation.

Artifice here is nothing new. For years, Sloppy Joe's on Duval Street has advertised itself as "Hemingway's Favorite Bar." Hemingway never set foot in the place. He drank a few doors away at the original Sloppy Joe's, which is now Captain Tony's Saloon, though one might note that even Captain Tony's Saloon isn't really Captain Tony's saloon anymore -- he sold it to a doctor in Fort Lauderdale. Tarracino now draws a modest weekly check for handling the bar's public relations. The Tarracino life story has finished its arc -- from Jersey gambler to boat captain to saloon owner to PR agent.

Still, to many voters, Tarracino represents the authentic Key West. Rob Chrust, a downtown store owner, said, "Captain Tony's heart is in the right place. There's just fewer and fewer people around who can value what a town like Key West used to be."

Dan Simpson, a local musician, said, "I like Captain Tony for his entertainment value. Tony doesn't have too many times left to run. Give it to him."

Gary Barker, a cab driver: "I didn't like Tom Saywer when he was mayor before, but Captain Tony, I dunno, he's kinda far out."

Proving that the electorate has an inexhaustible supply of bizarre reasons for voting as it does, one woman who wouldn't give her name as she sat in the Margaritaville Cafe said, "We have a very literary society here in Key West. . . . So the name Tom Sawyer fits in real nice. And Key West is a young boys' town, they can be almost like a Tom Sawyer."

Sawyer grew up in Key West and at one point was Tarracino's paper boy. His first act as mayor four years ago was to push through a 60-day building moratorium. He also worked to stop the dumping of sewage into the waters around the island, a practice that had brought huge fines from the federal government. Like Tarracino, he wants to limit further growth in the city, saying Key West has reached maximum build-out.

Still, as a chamber of commerce leader, Sawyer has old-boy-network connections and is generally seen as more likely than Tarracino to side with business interests. And he wasn't a very exciting mayor. Some voters say he had his chance already. So Tarracino is likely to get many votes from people who don't like the direction Key West is heading -- becoming a crowded, touristy, expensive resort town.

Key West used to be a fishing village and military enclave. Tourism was a side industry. The military presence was cut back in the mid-1970s, and by the early 1980s, tourism came to the city's economic rescue.

The boom over the last decade has led to tangible improvements: The hotels are fancier, there are more fine restaurants, and many of the Conch Houses in Old Town have been restored. Along with the success comes a price: Rents have tripled, taxes have increased due to rising property values, and Conch families have been fleeing upstate.

John Parks Jr., an accountant who is president of the chamber of commerce and a close friend of Sawyer, says he cannot hire accountants from elsewhere to move to Key West and join his firm. They can't pay the price.

Pritam Singh, who is turning part of the old Truman Annex into a private resort community that Singh says will eventually account for 20 percent of the city's tax base, thinks the Conch exodus has been overstated. He also notes that the mayor has little to do with the cost of living. This is another common thought in the mayor's race: Who cares who wins?

One of Tarracino's old fishing buddies once said he didn't know if Tarracino had ever told the truth in his life. A reporter with limited time and resources cannot begin to confirm either the foundation of the captain's reputation (being beaten to the point of death by mobsters in New Jersey, hitching a ride on a milk truck to Key West in 1947, running guns to Cuba during the revolution, cavorting with shadowy CIA types in Caribbean misadventures, assisting in a plot to kill Castro, winning tens of thousands of dollars in one sitting in Vegas, and so on) or the smaller little boasts, like "I have a fan club in Sapporo, Japan" or, pointing to a reproduction of an acrylic air-brushed portrait of him on the wall of his campaign office, "That is hanging up in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City."

His tales proved persuasive enough -- or at least commercially viable enough -- to a Hollywood filmmaker, who made an unfortunate low-budget 1980 movie called Kill Castro (originally titled Cuba Crossing), starring Stuart Whitman as Captain Tony. The encyclopedic Motion Picture Guide gives the movie zero stars, stating that it's "vile and worthless from all vantage points." The movie reaches a climax when one of Captain Tony's mates falls off a houseboat into the Gulf of Mexico and is eaten by a giant turtle.

Tarracino relishes his notoriety and outrageousness. He never says anything insipid or mild -- he is the anti-Bush. "The reason the public loves me -- I'm being egotistical -- they never know what the f--- I'm going to say."

The captain has 13 children by five women, three of them wives. His attitude toward women might be termed Neanderthalic -- nay, australopithecene. For example, "A woman has much less conscience than a man. A woman is a born cheater." The remarkable thing is that he will offer his porcine comments not in some late-night drunken stupor or to a poker partner or to himself in an angry funk, but to a journalist taking notes for a story about this man running for mayor. Reporters just can't get material like this anymore.

While one normally would assume that an egomaniac cares nothing of other people, Tarracino manages to make everyone like him. When strangers stop him in the street, he always greets them warmly and asks where they're from. "I love being alive," he says.

Sawyer has little hope of closing the charisma gap. But he says it's not important for the mayor to get a lot of media attention.

"It's fine to have a quote in the newspaper, but that quote in the newspaper doesn't solve the issues that are facing us. . . . I'm concerned with the issues. Publicity is fine. But I want to get the job done."

He adds: "Mark Twain had a quote. He said, 'You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.' "

For his part, the captain says that, if elected, he'll depend on advisers.

"As mayor, I want a good think tank," Tarracino said. "Five or 10 guys I can sit down with and say, 'OK, what the f--- is going on?' When I get elected mayor, the first thing I'm going to do is sit down with the city manager and the city attorney and the department heads and say, 'All right, where do we stand?' "

Would he be a good mayor?

"I will be the greatest mayor that Key West ever had," he said. "We just need someone up there with (the right anatomy)."

He added: "Life is one big f---up, and I've taken advantage of it."

He means that as a boast. But maybe it's a warning.

Edition: FINAL
Section: LIVING TODAY
Page: 1G Copyright (c) 1989 The Miami Herald