The Matchcover Storyteller

Sometimes a match cover tells a story, but sometimes, you wind up with more questions than answers.   So it is with this cover from Tony Sweet’s in Miami Beach, Florida  — more questions than actual information.   This is the kind of place whose story would take a lot of very deep digging and easily lead you very far from the match cover itself.    Here’s what I mean:

Who was Tony Sweet?   He was Anthony Charles Sweet, born in 1916 in Massachusetts.  But the restaurant Tony Sweet’s was principally owned by New Jersey born Armand Cerami.   There is little more about Sweet himself until some police records show up regarding an illegal gambling house in ’51 and liquor law violations in ’53 and more in ’64.

Which leaves us, for the moment, with Armand Cerami, born in 1920 in Hackensack, New Jersey.

Why did Armand Cerami get kicked out of the La Gorse Country Club (he was apparently a founding member) in 1954 and why did he feel the need to go to court to be heard by its board of directors?   The reason was “sufficient cause” and courts ruled the board didn’t need to publicize them as internal matters. The court eventually upheld Cerami’s argument that he failed to get due notice and was not given a chance to defend himself.  The court ordered his reinstatement and the case is a Florida landmark in the realm of procedural fairness

But I’m burying the lead here.   Why does Armand Cerami’s name keep popping up in FBI Files related to the John F. Kennedy Assassination?   Here, there’s even more confusion as the FBI files are released under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1987, but the notes I came across are dated on January and February 1963;  Kennedy was not killed till November of that year.

As far as I can tell, Cerami, the owner of a few Miami Beach eateries including Tony Sweet’s, just “knew” someone.  He seems to have been “known to major gangsters and hoodlums in the Miami area” and as such, was associated with someone else the FBI was interested in.  You have to remember that in these days (and going back 30+ years), the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was a pretty vicious information gathering racket; similar types of FBI files have turned up as I was searching out other restaurant matchcover stories.

So more questions than answers, and frankly very little about the restaurant itself.  There are certainly more stories about Sweet and Cerami doing wrong things

I do know there are at least two different covers for this Tony Sweet’s .  I’ve seen one for Tony’s Fish market, also in Miami and owned by these two.  This restaurant was said to be a great steak house and an attractive elegant place to eat.  But when it opened, closed and who ate there….our digital world is just not giving up those parts of the story  —  not yet and not easily, at least!