9 February 9-15, 2023 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | Cafe | MusiC | Month XX–Month XX, 2008 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | CONTENTS | LETTERS | RIPTIDE | METRO | NIGHT+DAY | STAGE | ART | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | with his biological parents and siblings. By 1963, Bo should’ve been in the 12th grade but was held back a year because of his poor reading skills — a common result of the substandard quality of education at under- funded, segregated schools. What he lacked in literacy, however, Bo made up for in speed. After school, he’d change into his baseball uniform and jog two miles along Florida City’s dirt backroads to the next town over. In Homestead, population 9,100, the St. Louis Cardinals operated a facility that also served as a spring training camp for many of its mi- nor-league affiliates. A year earlier, at 17, Bo had seen the players practicing and thought: “I can do that.” He walked up to a coach and announced he was faster than any of the current players, then raced around the bases against a stopwatch to prove it. “When can you start?” the coach asked. “Right now,” he said. Laster says he landed a spot on a team as an infielder, showed up every day for prac- tice, and began dreaming of the big leagues. On the weekends, though, he liked to drink. His uncle, a moonshiner, gave him his first taste of alcohol at age 15 and got him hooked. When he was drunk, he’d walk right into trouble: He got into fights, broke into a sandwich shop one night, and at 16, took part in an armed robbery. That last stunt landed him at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a state-run juve- nile reform institution in Marianna, in the Florida Panhandle, that would later gain in- famy for staff-inflicted beatings, rapes, and murders of students. Bo spent 18 months there. He says he received minimal academic instruction and that, in an upstairs room in a building on the Black side of campus, he was regularly whipped with leather straps for minor infractions. When he returned to Florida City, Bo went back to school, worked part-time for a grocer, and focused squarely on baseball. The Cardinals, he says, told him he was about to be offered a contract. All the while, he tried unsuccessfully to stay sober. His long-term girlfriend, a devout Christian who’d stuck by him while he was at the boys’ school, didn’t approve of liquor. She hoped they’d marry one day, according to Bo, and the bottle wasn’t part of her plans. The bottle, however, would put an end to those romantic dreams. Laster maintains that on the night of the rock pit attack, he walked his girlfriend home, kissed her goodnight, then headed to the Lucy Street Bar around 9 p.m. He’d already had a few drinks with friends earlier in the day. Now, he just wanted one more. At the bar, rhythm and blues poured from the open windows. Patrons danced. Laster shot dice out in the muggy air with Reid Bry- ant, a 21-year-old who worked as a bottle- capper at the local Coca-Cola plant. Laster had seen him around town, and they bonded that evening over the game. Sometime after midnight, they heard an argument erupt in- side and shots fired from a gun. The bar emp- tied as everyone scattered into the night, on foot and in cars. They weren’t just fleeing bul- lets. They were fleeing the cops, who they knew would show up and start throwing peo- ple into squad cars. The two men jumped into Bryant’s car and went careening down the road, around a bend, and straight past a parked Homestead cop. Moments later — at 12:26 a.m., according to a police report — they were sitting in the back of that squad car in handcuffs. Bryant was arrested for reckless driving, Laster for public drunkenness. MIA RETURNS Around 1:30 a.m., a U.S. airman stationed at Homestead Air Force Base was driving two miles north of the Florida City rock pit. He spotted a young woman walking along the roadside in the rain. She looked distressed, so he stopped to see if she needed help. She told him her name and said she wanted to go home. Mia’s husband was waiting at their Florida City home with detectives. Police records show that she told a terrifying tale. After Nicholas ran for help, the attackers caught her and carried her to their car, which was parked nearby. One man sat in the back seat with her. The other drove. When they reached a secluded area, the driver stopped and climbed into the back. He held her arms over her head while the other man pulled up her skirt and raped her. The driver then returned to his seat and began heading to another location. The back door, however, wasn’t securely shut and swung open. Mia saw an opportunity to es- cape and bit her rapist on the hand. He cried out and let go of her. She jumped out of the car and ran into a wooded area. The two men briefly searched for her, but she eluded them in the dark until they gave up and left. Dazed, Mia made her way to a main street, where she was spotted by the air- man and driven home. Based on the couple’s descriptions, police put out a BOLO (“Be on the lookout”) for the suspects, then took Mia to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami for evaluation. In a report submitted to police, a doctor noted a one- inch laceration next to her left eye. DNA and rape kits didn’t yet exist, so he was only able to determine that she’d recently had inter- course and listed her condition as “fair.” A CONFESSION Laster and Bryant spent the night in a municipal jail while detectives worked the rock pit case. In the morning, Bryant bonded out. Laster, however, was transferred 36 miles north to the county jail near downtown Mi- ami. He sat in a one-man cell for the rest of the day, wondering why he’d been sent up north on a simple charge of drunkenness. The following day, July 21, Laster recalls, two Metro-Dade detectives took him to an in- terrogation room and told him he was a sus- pect in a rape. (Police records show that Laster’s name had come up as a potential sus- pect during the night.) Their theory was sim- ple: Sometime before midnight, he and a friend left the Lucy Street Bar and made their way a mile and a half to the rock pit, spotted a lone car, and decided to rob the occupants. When they saw a pretty female, they ab- ducted and raped her, then returned to the bar until a gunshot sent everyone running. Nicholas, they told him, had identified him and Bryant from their mug shots. Laster denied any involvement in the abduction and rape. The detectives, he says, held a gun to his head, called him the N-word, and beat him so badly they knocked out four teeth and cracked a rib. The interrogation continued all day and late into the night until, at 12:50 a.m. Monday, Laster sat down with Metro-Dade Det. Larry Foreman and stenographer Gertrude Pfau and formally admitted his and Bryant’s guilt. Laster doesn’t recall the stenographer ar- riving to record his statement and it’s unclear whether she was in the same room with him. A surviving transcript of that wee-hours con- fession, however, confirms her participation. “I was scared, man. I said I did it ‘cause I wanted to stay alive,” Laster says. “At the boys’ school, kids got killed. If them teachers could do it, I figured the cops could kill me too.” In the morning, Laster’s father came to see him. “I know you didn’t do it,” Laster re- calls him saying. His dad asked the police to treat his son’s injuries. Laster says a sergeant provided gauze for his missing teeth, then shackled him and took him to the hospital, where he was given a wrap for his rib. (A 1975 prison document confirms that Laster had missing upper teeth and was provided false ones. It doesn’t specify when, or how, he lost them.) That afternoon, after his confession, pros- ecutors charged Laster and Bryant with rape, a capital offense in Florida at the time. A grand jury indictment followed a few weeks later. If found guilty at trial, the defendants could die in the electric chair. A “SCANDALOUS” SYSTEM Laster and Bryant needed a good lawyer. In 1963, however, capital crimes in Florida were not handled by vetted, salaried attor- neys from a professional public defender’s office, as they are today. Back then, if some- one facing the death penalty couldn’t afford counsel, judges appointed a private attorney to defend them. Those appointments were not highly sought-after. Attorneys were paid $500 per case (roughly $4,800 in 2022) — a small sum for the time and effort required to prepare a credible defense. Some of those appointed, in fact, weren’t even criminal defense attor- neys. “The judges selected court-appointed counsel from a group of mainly civil law- yers,” says veteran Miami attorney Roy Black, who has practiced civil and criminal law in Florida since 1970. “Most of them were not experienced in criminal defense [and] were greatly underpaid for the heavy responsibility they were asked to undertake. I don’t need to mention the irony of appointing the least-experienced lawyers defending the people charged with the most serious crimes.” In 1966, the Miami Herald reported find- ings by the ACLU, which had labeled Florida’s system of appointing subpar private attorneys to capital cases “scandalous,” and noted that the $500 appointment fee sometimes “doesn’t buy much defense at all.” Yet Laster and Bryant lucked out. They drew Philip Carlton, a talented 33-year-old who, after only four years in practice, had es- tablished a reputation as an excellent crimi- nal defense attorney. Through preparation, showmanship, and a commanding courtroom presence, Carlton had won acquittals Illustration by Brian Stauffer >> p10
