He Did a Job on the Mob

"I thought he was going to say something," Richard recalls, "but he didn't. He just started punching me, with both hands." Clein was twice Mel's weight. "I never had a chance to do anything. I was holding on to my briefcases. I don't know why I didn't sock him with the briefcases." At the hospital, a nurse asked him his address; still silly from the beating, he named the street he'd had moved from two years earlier.

"I went to a luncheon at the National Hotel, and [Miami Beach public relations man] Hank Meyer said to me, 'You know, you've got great potential, and you could really go places. But you always want to fight with people.' I said, 'I don't fight with anybody unless they do something improper.' I said, 'I don't fight with nice people.' He said, 'Well, you don't have to do it the way you do it.'

"I met him several years later. I said, 'You remember the conversation we had at the National Hotel?' He said he did. I asked, 'Have you changed your mind?' I said, 'I've done all right, in spite of your admonitions.' He said, 'Well, you may be an exception. Maybe there are some people who can do what you do and get away with it. But most of the time, it won't work.'"

One day Lee Powell, an old rival on the council who was elected Miami Beach mayor three times in the Fifties but who wouldn't talk to Richard for ten years, spotted him on Lincoln Road. "He came over to me and he shook my hand, and he said, 'I want to apologize for all the grief I gave you.'" Mel laughs. "He said, 'I think you did a good job as a member of the city council.'

"I told Janet, and she said, 'Everybody who thinks he's going to die wants to apologize to you.'