Some people say he was hiding from the mob. That was on my to-do list, “Deal with Baby Doc.” That was the cast of characters he was involved with. And when [then Vice President] Bush said “We ain’t gonna buy boats from Ben Kramer. Don Aronow is also quite proud of his lovely wife …
Aronow: Forrest Johnson was originally his fishing buddy. And then the investigation got going and they realized who Aronow was involved with, and Bush backpedaled out of there as fast as he could. Bicking did not confess, instead claiming that Hicks was murdered over a stolen car and some unnamed “guys got mad and had Hicks killed.”Prosecutors concluded that Williams’ word was not enough to charge Bicking, who is serving a life prison sentence on the unrelated rape charge. You make a living doing that. I don’t think it ever ran again.Peters: He didn’t like guys that came in and tried to go toe to toe with him. He had a brown Rolls Royce and [raced] horses and stuff. He came to my basketball games, my football games, he was always around. He would have a succession of ladies that would appear.

I used to work boat shows with him and aronow: I don’t think any of those guys had ever seen anything quite like it to be honest.Brown: At Cigarette he had an intercom in his office and he used to boff his secretary there and if you needed him you just hit him on the intercom!Peters: The upstairs apartment above his office was kind of famous.

Aronow, 59 at the time of his murder in 1987, was a handsome, jet-setting Miami speedboat racer and designer of the sleek racing craft known as the cigarette boat. With his new factory Aronow also built the Magnum 35, and it. And the guy would say, “I want a 28.” And Aronow would say “Oh no, we’re all sold out.” And the guy would keep pushing, Brown: Every boat he sold was “built for himself.” There’s about 70 people out there who think they have a boat Don built for himself.Aronow: By ’66 my dad had sold Donzi to Teleflex. A guy would come looking at a boat with a girl, and the guy would ask “How much?” And Don would go, “Seventy grand.” The guy would say, “That’s too much.” And Don would say every time, “I think you should go get a Bayliner then, this is way too much boat for you.” And the guys would be ripping their pockets open trying to give him money!Peters: A guy would walk into his shop, all excited to meet [Aronow] and buy a boat. You had to be able to match.

Hicks and Adams were pals with Aronow, according to Hicks’ daughter.Both Adams and Hicks were killed years earlier, in separate cases in 1983. I used to work boat shows with him and aronow: I don’t think any of those guys had ever seen anything quite like it to be honest.Brown: At Cigarette he had an intercom in his office and he used to boff his secretary there and if you needed him you just hit him on the intercom!Peters: The upstairs apartment above his office was kind of famous. Aronow went down the canal 65 mph in it, and ended up running into the seawall. He was about outdoing the other guy no matter what you were doing.Saccenti: He was a great guy and a great businessman. Some people bad-mouth him, “Oh he did this, he robbed that,” well that’s shame on you. And in the end, he wound up as nothing more than a target for an assassin’s bullet.

He went to 188th Street in Miami and decided he wanted to put a plant there. They pulled him out, he was pale, he had gone unconscious at some point. Don built boats for good guys and he built them for bad guys. All Rights Reserved.
At his funeral, Doc Magoon gave the eulogy, and at one point he said “Don was a man’s man,” and he paused, and then he said, “Aronow: My father broke up more marriages than anybody.