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This photo, which appeared in the Miami News in June 1952, shows the castle in all its splendor, just a few years before it was demolished.
Photo courtesy of Historical Museum of Southern Florida
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Photo courtesy of Courtesy Miami-Dade County Library |
From the Miami Herald, March 15, 1954:
It wasn’t the first time Madam Sherry made news, and it certainly wasn’t the last.
 
The author, an architect, based these floor plans on Madam Sherry’s memoir and his analysis of photographs.
Drawn by Antolin Garcia Carbonell, R.A.
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By Antolin Garcia Carbonell, R.A
Special
to BT
Long before South Beach erupted as Sin City, the world’s oldest profession flourished in Miami, and one of its most colorful characters made her mark along the Biscayne Corridor. She was a redhead known as Madam Sherry, whose grandiose bordello graced a corner lot near Biscayne Boulevard and 54th Street for more than a decade.
By 1956, after a quarter-century in the flesh business, she was ready to spill her controversial tale. Through mutual acquaintances, she tracked down author Robert Tralins, based in Miami Shores at the time.
Tralins, who now lives in Clearwater, says their first meeting took place at the Church of the Little Flower in Coral Gables. After that, to reach Madam Sherry, he ran a two-line advertisement in the personals section of the Miami Herald. They rendezvoused to conduct interviews in many locations, including his office above the Shores Theatre and at the Miami Springs Villas. Often, he says, Madam Sherry brought along her “girls” to corroborate the events of the past 20-plus years, and their wine-fueled debates often turned rowdy.
Madam Sherry’s tale, as recounted in Pleasure Was My Business, begins in winter 1929. Meeting her old friend Zadel, a gentleman of indeterminate European extraction, for drinks at Sloppy Joe’s in Havana, Cuba, Madam Sherry confesses she wants to ditch the bootleg business. She tells Zadel she might open an antique store with items she acquired during travels with her recently deceased “papa,” but isn’t sure where to do it. Zadel suggests Miami -- and another kind of business altogether.
“Fine art shop! Oh, non!” he tells her. “A whorehouse is the only business in Florida.”
Apparently unaware that Gertie Walsh was already operating an acclaimed house of ill repute on the Miami River, Madam Sherry soon lands in Key West, lugging three trunks of bootleg liquor to finance her new venture.
Perhaps inspired by the Arabian Nights architecture of Opa-locka, Madam Sherry finds an architect after a few unsuccessful days of brothel-hunting, “threw a five hundred dollar bill on his desk and told him to design me a Moorish Castle,” her memoir relays. “Somehow he seemed to sense what I wanted the castle for and wisely said nothing as he worked. Several hours later, when he had gotten all of my ideas down on paper, I got up to leave.”
Madam Sherry then instructs her architect she’s going out to buy a lot.
“You’d better get an oversized one for these plans,” he replies.
In August 1929, Joseph L. and Ruth Barnes -- also known as Madam Sherry -- purchase a large parcel at 5400 NE 4th Ave. for “$10.00 and Other Valuable Considerations,” according to Miami public records.
Despite the stock market crash two months later, Madam Sherry’s Moorish Castle is open by Christmas. Its discreet location is ideal: a couple of miles north of the built-up city, in an area left desolate by the 1926 hurricane and the burst of the real estate bubble, yet still accessible to the newly opened 79th Street Causeway to Miami Beach and the Hialeah horse track.
The castle, located just across the railroad tracks from Biscayne Boulevard, boasts a coral-stone-encrusted tower and shiny, Hershey’s Kiss-shaped dome. “On the corner as you got over the tracks, there was a stucco house with a turret on it, and that was Madam Sherry’s whorehouse,” recalls “Mr. Waymans,” whose childhood home was just up the boulevard, according to a City of Miami Office of Historic Preservation interview transcript.
The April 1930 U.S. Census values the Moorish Castle at $8000 -- much less than the $25,000 construction cost ($325,000 today) the book claims. None of the “girls” are named as residents of the premises on the census. It lists Joseph as a ladies garment salesman. (Although Tralins describes Madam Sherry’s husband as a small man who resembled jockey Eddie Arcaro and says he accompanied her to some of their interviews, the memoirs don’t mention their marriage or any hand Joseph may have had in the castle’s extracurricular activities.)
Madam Sherry’s business plan, based on a model perfected by belle Èpoque Parisian courtesans, calls for her beautiful and elegantly dressed talent to show themselves on race days at the Hialeah track and distribute business cards.
“After church on Sunday afternoons,” states Waymans, “we would all go down there and line up on the coral wall, and watch all the prostitutes, beautiful women, with the big limousines pulling up.”
Clients would walk through massive front doors in the tower into a tiled vestibule illuminated by stained-glass windows. The spiral staircase led to six luxurious bedrooms. On the south side, the formal parlor was reserved for $20 customers ($225 today). It had a fireplace and was furnished with green and gold Regency furniture accented with Capo di Monte lamps and figurines on Italian travertine tables.
On the north side, the Victorian Room, worthy of royalty with its antique-white Louis XIV chairs upholstered in red, boasted a deep-purple carpet and elaborate draperies. It entertained the $100 trade ($1300 today) and important clients like Don Alfonso de BorbÛn. The former heir to the Spanish throne and the uncle of Spain’s current King Juan Carlos frequented the Moorish Castle with his bodyguard during their Miami visits. (A hemophiliac, Don Alfonso died in an automobile accident on Biscayne Boulevard in 1938.)
Next came the “Jockey Room.” With its hand-burnished copper walls adorned with racing pictures, it served as a social center for the sporting gentry during winter racing season. Behind the parlor, three auxiliary rooms, each in a different motif, enabled clients to get cozy with their playmates over cocktails or a buffet snack before consummating their business. These rooms, along with two upstairs bedrooms, included one-way mirrors for monitoring and were favored by a very select clientele. Tralins says a glass salesman on 36th Street told him he installed the castle’s one-way mirrors, a specialty item.
Aside from numerous socialites, jockeys, and one very kinky Catholic priest mentioned in Madam Sherry’s story, Tralins says he substantiated her claims that crime boss Dutch Schultz and Sir Harry Oakes, the victim of a notorious murder in Nassau in 1943, were among her clients and that Dr. Alfred Kinsey interviewed her for his now-famous research on human sexuality.
Most curious, Tralins says, is the case of “Mrs. Greenaway,” an insatiable Coral Gables society woman who initially comes to the Moorish Castle to drink and soak up the atmosphere, but later asks Madam Sherry to provide her with several male escorts for marathon sex sessions. While writing the book, Tralins couldn’t uncover the woman’s real name so he picked “Greenaway” from one of the streets on a Coral Gables map.
Despite the Great Depression, the castle thrives until the 1933 repeal of prohibition, with illegal liquor sales providing additional revenue. Although Madam Sherry has factored police payoffs (not necessarily in cash) and periodic arrests into her business plan, more frequent raids after 1935 seriously strain the castle’s cash flow. Bail increases from $50 to $1000 for Madam Sherry and to $500 for her girls, forcing her (allegedly) to ask Miami Beach winter resident Al Capone for a loan.
After defaulting on their mortgage, Joseph and Ruth Barnes bid $1700 at a February 1937 public auction to keep the Moorish Castle. With the build-out of failed boom-time subdivisions resuming, the exotic castle soon appears out of place in northeast Miami.
Finally, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. War Department puts Madam Sherry out of business to protect army and navy recruits from her evil charms. Three days after Christmas in 1943, Joseph and Ruth, now divorced, sell the castle. After 14 years, the sale price still lists as “$10.00 and Other Valuable Considerations.” With its sale, the once-striking castle’s condition declines and in the late 1950s it is demolished.
Meanwhile Madam Sherry -- said to resemble singer Kate Smith in girth -- moves on to other names and locations. She runs massage parlors during the war, and by the early 1950s, as Mrs. Anne Ellis, is again entertaining royalty, this time at the Rancho Lido, a four-bedroom updated version of the Moorish Castle with a swimming pool near Miami International Airport. The fun is short-lived though. A February 1953 raid on her Rancho Lido brothel at 3120 NW 41st St. shuts down Madam Sherry for good.
Andy Murcia’s account at TheColumnists.com has Madam Sherry (then calling herself Mrs. Rose Miller) flushing marked bills down the toilet after undercover cops flash their badges. Murcia identifies himself as the son of the officer who orchestrated the sting and says his father knocked the 200-pound Madam off the pot, on which she sat in an attempt to obscure the evidence.
Though the hard-won evidence is tossed out at Madam Sherry’s subsequent trial, she is caught lying during a grand jury investigation of prostitution in Dade County. The federal court convicts her of perjury in December 1954.
Released on bail, Madam Sherry is caught trying to board a flight to Caracas. Her attorneys contest the charges all the way to the Florida Supreme Court, but she flees again -- this time to Mexico. After she’s nabbed and extradited, her bail leaps from $5000 to $75,000.
A couple of years later, in 1956, Madam Sherry runs out of appeals and serves 30 days at a federal penitentiary in West Virginia, followed by a year in the Dade County stockade, a Miami Herald story reports. After her release, she disappears, and despite numerous attempts, Tralins loses contact with her, but she still has one more explicit shock in store: the 1961 publication of Pleasure Was My Business, the memoirs of “Ruth Barnes” as told to Tralins. (A year before the book came out, Rancho Lido, which became an office building after it was shut down, was bulldozed to make way for the Airport Expressway.)
Publisher Lyle Stuart sends advance copies of Madam Sherry’s book to all Miami newspapers, including The Voice, the newspaper of the Catholic Diocese. The resulting complaint prompts Dade State Attorney Richard E. Gerstein to ban the book immediately. Gerstein called it “disgusting, vulgar, and obscene,” claiming “it exploits illicit sex, passion, depravity, and immorality.”
Although the book is banned in Florida, elsewhere in the nation it garners sufficient sales for a paperback edition.
At a March 1962 obscenity trial, the court hears from a panel of six readers, including Miami Springs Lutheran Pastor Albert Schmidt and Clyde Atkins (a noted Miami lawyer and later a federal judge), who testify that the book conflicts with “contemporary community standards of morality.” The court also hears from former Dade County Sheriff’s Deputy Earl Venno, who arrested Madam Sherry numerous times (but none of her clients). Venno confirms the book’s accuracy in describing the activities and reputation of the brothels. The trial judge upholds the ban on Florida book sales in April 1962.
Later that year a disgruntled reader, former King Farouk of Egypt, files a $750,000 damage claim against “Ruth Barnes” and author Robert Tralins in Miami, and against New York publisher Stuart for $400,000, claiming he has been libeled by the memoir’s description of an unnamed royal personage with a taste for pornographic movies who frequented Rancho Lido. Tralins is able to document that Farouk’s yacht had been in the Merrill Stevens dry dock on the Miami River in 1947 and that Farouk visited a former U.S. Ambassador named Smith in Palm Beach around the same time. When the ex-king fails to appear in court to testify in May 1963, the judge dismisses the case in Miami.
Meanwhile appeals continue against the Florida ban of Pleasure Was My Business. Finally, in June 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court rules in the case of Tralins v. Gerstein, lifting the state’s ban on the book, along with a similar ban on Henry Miller’s erotic novel Tropic of Cancer. At the time of the ruling, it’s not clear if Madam Sherry is still alive. If she is, she doesn’t make a public statement.
When they first met, Madam Sherry told Tralins she wanted to write a book to give her side of events, to expose all the hypocrites who had persecuted her. Wherever she was that day the ban was lifted, her story was finally told.
Feedback: letters@biscaynetimes.com
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