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City's hard-boiled past comes to library

Bill Leavengood will discuss his play Florida Crackers, which is based on one of St. Pete Beach's more renowned events.

By PAUL SWIDER
Published March 29, 2006

ST. PETE BEACH - Roberta Whipple used to think St. Pete Beach was "a little podunk town" until she noticed the interest writers take in the place she grew up.

Next month, the city's library administrator will bring one of those writers to a discussion about one of St. Pete Beach's more renowned events, the arrest of the Steinhatchee Seven, which was the inspiration for Bill Leavengood's play Florida Crackers.

"We've had some really interesting times for being as small as we are," said Whipple, who was in college in 1973 when some beach residents were arrested near the Steinhatchee River with nine tons of marijuana, the largest bust on record at the time. "It's an event a lot of people don't want to remember, but people ask about it all the time."

With a $2,000 grant from the Florida Humanities Council, Whipple will have Leavengood talk to visitors about his play, as well as host actors doing readings from the hard-boiled tale of ordinary young men succumbing to easy money and running amok.

"On TV, drug dealers are always mafioso, city guys, foreigners," said Leavengood, who now teaches at Shorecrest Preparatory School in St. Petersburg. "To me, they were middle class, regular guys."

Leavengood was 13 at the time of the Steinhatchee Seven bust, but his older brother, Joe, knew some of the perpetrators: James Maslanka, Walter Ercius, Michael Knight, Steven Lamb, and David Strongosky, all of St. Pete Beach, and Barry Korn of St. Petersburg. He said they were not exotic criminals but mostly average young men from fishing families.

"They found this as a better way to use the family assets," Leavengood said. "They became people with millions of dollars stuffed in coolers in their garages."

Leavengood's play uses the drug case as a point of departure to tell a "cautionary tale" about three brothers growing up in a beach community at the time. He said it shows how "making the easy choice over and over can eventually suck you down into the mire so you can never come up again."

"Nobody thought they were doing anything bad," he said. "They weren't violent at all. But the money got so big that the tougher fish came in and swallowed them right up."

Florida Crackers played off Broadway in 1989 at the Circle Repertory, a renowned theater workshop. Over the years, Leavengood said, there has been occasional interest in making a movie of the story. He is also the author of Webb's City and Crossing the Bay.

Whipple said the library will make available fresh copies of the play for people to study before Leavengood's April 9 appearance. She will hold a similar event in May with Richard Alfieri to discuss his play, Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, which also is set in St. Pete Beach.

Whipple said these works and others referencing St. Pete Beach and vicinity have given her a new respect for her city's place in literature. She was at a libraries conference last week in Boston and ran across another writer setting his next work there as well.

"Things are being written about this place that I thought were only written about New York City," she said.

Paul Swider can be reached at 892-2271 or pswider@sptimes.com or by participating in itsyourtimes.com

[Last modified March 29, 2006, 01:23:20]