Bank heists with a side of smash burgers

A hundred years ago, the scene inside the Bank of Pompano unspooled like Hollywood cinema. At noon on a warm September day, a tall, handsome man — John Ashley, ringleader of the desperado Ashley Gang — entered the bank with a right eyepatch, a loaded rifle and a grudge.

Three outlaws shuffled in behind him, and employees Cecil Cates and T.L. Myers found themselves staring down the barrels of unfriendly guns. One gangster demanded the contents of the vault in a calm, charismatic voice, but the engraved bullet left on the counter conveyed a threat: There’s a round with Sheriff Bob Baker’s name on it waiting for him.

After relieving the Bank of Pompano of $5,000 in cash and $18,000 in securities, the Ashley Gang ducked into a stolen getaway cab and peeled off. But that loot proved to be their last. After a 40-bank robbing spree, the saga of South Florida’s most infamous gangsters ended with a midnight police ambush on a bridge over Sebastian Inlet that left Ashley and his cohorts dead. In the aftermath, Sheriff Baker reportedly bent over the gangster’s body, lifted the eyepatch and retrieved a keepsake: John Ashley’s glass eye.

All these years later, South Florida has its own keepsake from that robbery: the original Bank of Pompano vault.

It resides inside The Vault Bar & Restaurant, a speakeasy-style gastropub that debuted Feb. 27 in Pompano’s Old Town. The 3-foot-tall vault, steel-plated and heavier than a cannonball, is the centerpiece of the new joint at 61 NE First St., which fills the bones of the former Bank of Pompano.

Its crime-ridden past survives in the art-deco pediments and on the walls, which are covered in newspaper clippings, in the gang’s prison mugshots, in photos of John Ashley in a James Bond villain-esque white tux and of bird’s-eye views of the bank in its 1924 heyday.

The gang’s history has even influenced the menu, says restaurant owner Jessica Spill-Chaples, who spent two years deep-diving into the gang’s misdeeds, which also included shooting three cops, rum-running and killing a Seminole chieftain’s son, according to newspaper records.

“John Ashley escaped prison twice. Who even escapes once?” Spill-Chaples says. “Their whole story is wild, and I was just obsessed. This building was crying out to be a speakeasy, but it’s crazy how it all fell into place.”

As an homage to speakeasies, Spill-Chaples says the Vault’s menu is appetizer-heavy.

“If you look at real speakeasies from the 1920s, a lot of them served finger foods in the front to hide the illegal alcohol business in the back,” she says.

Dishes include Withdrawal Wings ($8-$15) and Raiford Egg Rolls ($7-$13) stuffed with buffalo chicken, a reference to Raiford Prison, from which John Ashley escaped in 1923. There also are “UpTheGrove” Shrimp Cakes ($9-$17), a nod to Ashley’s moll Laura Upthegrove, nicknamed the “Queen of the Everglades.” (Ashley and Upthegrove’s Bonnie-and-Clyde-style romance even inspired a 1973 movie, “Little Laura and Big John,” starring Fabian Forte and Karen Black.)

Banking on the Vault

The Vault is Spill-Chaples’ first restaurant and she says it landed in her lap “through serendipity” in late 2022. A mutual friend in the law office upstairs had added that second floor in 2006 and brought the building’s century-old plumbing and electricity up to modern codes.

The Bank of Pompano went belly-up in 1931, during the Great Depression, but wealthy retiree William Kester bought and renamed it Farmers Bank of Pompano in 1934. It later became Pompano Beach Bank and Trust in 1960 and, after it relocated, the building went vacant sometime in the 1970s before becoming a warehouse supply store.

“There was a long time when Old Town was a very sad, lonely, empty place,” says Patricia Rowley, executive director of the Pompano Beach Historical Society.

Rowley says another Historical Society member, Don Downey, stored the Bank of Pompano’s old vault in his garage for decades until his death in 2022.

“His widow wanted to donate it to the Pompano Fire Museum, so they wheeled it down the street,” Rowley says. “But the Fire Museum’s curator said it belonged in the bank, so we wheeled it down to the bank building and left it inside.”

So when Spill-Chaples first toured the 2,300-square-foot space in late 2022, that piece of history greeted her on the dirt floor: the steel vault itself, paint-chipped and caked in decades of grime.

“It was surreal,” Spill-Chaples recalls. “The old architecture was not only still intact, but the vault was still in perfect condition. We even managed to open the top-half of the vault with an old combination.”

What was inside the Vault’s vault?

“No money,” Spill-Chaples recalls, with a laugh. “Just some old bank envelopes from when it was called Farmers Bank,” which she plans to display in the dining room.

King of the Glades and ‘Giggle Water’

Inside the Vault’s gray-walled dining room, the sound system cycles through covers of Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” and Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” from Postmodern Jukebox, a band that turns modern-day hits into jazzy 1920s arrangements.

Much of the decor — white-checkered rattan chairs, marbled countertops framing an L-shaped bar — came from Spill-Chaples’ savings. The rest came from the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, which kicked in about $137,000 in grants, says Pompano Beach CRA director Nguyen Tran.

Entrees, created by head chef Percy Howard (South Bar & Kitchen, YOT Bar & Kitchen), feature the King of the Glades Sandwich ($16), a chicken parmesan handheld on sliced brioche; the First Bank Smash Burger ($16) with pepperjack and gruyère cheeses, sauteed mushrooms and bourbon peppercorn aioli; and We Got It All Short Ribs ($26), braised for four hours and smothered over cheesy baked mashed potatoes.

“As I read more and more about the King of the Glades, the more this restaurant felt like the middle of a movie scene,” Howard says. “The food really had to nail the crazy-cool atmosphere and the history.”

There’s also “Giggle Water” — the Vault’s Prohibition-themed libations ($12-$15) — including the Bee’s Knees and Flapper’s Fizz, as well as dessert cocktails such as a Chocolate Old Fashioned and a Pineapple Upside Down Martini. A 4-7 p.m. Monday-Friday happy hour features $10 cocktails and $4 domestic drafts and bottles.

Server Tristan Dufresne, an amateur history buff, says he applied to work at the Vault after learning of its connection to the Ashley Gang.

“I’m surrounded by history,” Dufresne says. “Broward was literally built on rum-running and gangs and bootlegging during Prohibition, and the Ashley Gang were the biggest criminals around.”

The desperadoes, the bank and the glass eye: An oral history

The sensational saga of the Ashley Gang spanned 13 years, from 1911 to 1924, and Florida newspapers captured it all in violent detail. Using archival newspaper reports and interviews with a local historian, here’s a blow-by-blow recreation of the Ashley Gang’s demise — from Sept. 12, 1924, the day of the Bank of Pompano robbery, to Nov. 1, 1924, the day police killed the gangsters.

• Opened in 1922, the Bank of Pompano became the beating commercial heart of Pompano’s original downtown, straddling both sides of the FEC tracks along Dixie Highway. Pompano began as a community of farmers who loaded harvested produce onto outbound trains, then shopped downtown, says Patricia Rowley, executive director of the Pompano Beach Historical Society. By 1924, that downtown included a boarding house, billiard hall, Florsheim Shoes, Pompano Drug, Ogden’s Hardware, the Bailey Hotel on Northeast First Street and, next door, the Bank of Pompano.

• John Ashley, the man The Miami Tribune dubbed the “Jesse James of Florida,” styled himself a Robin Hood-esque figure, giving to the poor what he stole from the rich while leading the Ashley-Mobley Gang — later the Ashley Gang. “The history of the Ashley-Mobley gang […] reads like the thrilling pages of a fiction masterpiece. Daring robberies of small country banks, flaunting messages to authorities, miraculous escapes from jails and prisons, mysterious murders tumble forth in weird tales that rival the picturesque crimes of the long-gone frontier days.” — The Miami Tribune; Oct. 19, 1924
• John Ashley began the morning of Sept. 12, 1924, by stealing a getaway car. First he “stopped a taxi in West Palm Beach and told the driver, a young man named Wesley Powell, to take him to Deerfield [Beach]. Along the way, John and two other gang members joined [Joe Tracy], tied Powell to a tree and commandeered his cab.” — Fort Lauderdale News; Jan. 22, 1984

• John Ashley, accompanied by cohorts Tracy, Ray Lynn and Clarence Middleton, parked their stolen taxi and entered the Bank of Pompano “at the noon hour and made away with money and securities while one member of the party held the cashier and his clerk at the point of a pistol.” — Fort Lauderdale News; April 28, 1925
• “After they had robbed the bank they are said to have made their escape in the motor car, going northward to Deerfield, a distance of five miles, where they turned west into the Everglades. Three and a half miles off the Dixie Highway their automobile is said to have broken down and they made their escape by swimming the Hillsboro canal.” – Fort Lauderdale News; April 28, 1925
• Bud Garner, Pompano Beach city historian who died in 2016, relayed an Ashley Gang memory shared with him by one of Ashley’s eventual killers, St. Lucie County Sheriff J.R. Merritt. For six weeks after the Pompano robbery, the gang hid out “in the swamps of Clewiston […] The people of Florida had just about had enough of them. One of the gang member’s girlfriends turned against them and informed the sheriff that the gang would be heading north on a certain day. She said they were planning on leaving the state and that they were in Fort Pierce.” — Bud Garner, “Tales of Old Pompano,” courtesy of Pompano Beach Historical Society

• Ashley harbored a grudge against Sheriff Baker — hence the bullet in his name — stemming from a police raid on the Ashley Gang’s campsite near Hobe Sound nine months earlier. “Baker and a posse located an Ashley liquor cache in a swamp on Jan. 9, 1924, and in a running fight [Ashley’s] Father Joe was killed. John got away, and far away, but now it was a blood feud he had with Baker.” — Fort Lauderdale News; April 1, 1953
• On Nov. 1, 1924, the Ashley Gang “ran into an ambush arranged by Sheriff J.R. Merritt of St. Lucie County, near the Sebastian bridge. They had stretched a log chain across the road and hung a red lantern on it. Ashley and his men came up in an automobile, later found laden with rifles and other arms, and got out to see what was up. They were called up to surrender but under the muzzles of the posse’s shot guns and rifles, Ashley gave the word to fight. He himself had his revolver drawn when he crumpled beneath the withering fire.” — Fort Lauderdale News; Sept. 28, 1925
• Baker, his deputies and Merritt approached the bodies in their black Ford touring car, guns drawn. Baker bends over Ashley’s body and peels back his eyepatch to retrieve a keepsake. “Sheriff Baker took the glass eyeball out of Ashley’s body,” Rowley says.

The Vault Bar & Restaurant is at 61 NE First St., Pompano Beach. Visit VaultPompano.com or call 954-218-3627.

Staff writer Phillip Valys can be reached at [email protected] or X @philvalys.

Originally Published: March 1, 2025 at 8:00 AM EST