NORTH MIAMI BEACH, Fla. -- Police issued a public appeal for help today in the hunt for the gunman who killed the designer of the Cigarette speedboat on the street near his office.
Donald Aronow, who won two world powerboat racing championships, was shot to death Tuesday as he sat in his car on a street lined with boat-building companies he had founded.
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Aronow, 59, who also owned a large string of race horses, died about an hour after being airlifted by helicopter to Miami Beach's Mount Sinai Hospital.
'Metro Dade homicide detectives are requesting anyone with information to call either homicide at 547-7456 or crimestoppers at 326-TIPS,' the Dade County police said today. 'All calls will be kept confidential.'
Witnesses said Aronow had just eaten lunch at a restaurant with employees and was heading to his office in his Mercedes when he was halted by a man in a black Lincoln.
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They said Aronow's car and the other car stopped in the street, facing in opposite directions.Aronow rolled down his window and spoke a few words. The other man then opened fire with a weapon police have not identified, then made a U-turn and drove off.
Bobby Moore, a longtime friend, reached Aronow's car first.
'He had rolled the window down on the driver's side and apparently the guy opened fire on him at close range,' Moore said. 'I could see that one of the bullets had gone through the car door. There was so much blood on him, it was hard to tell how many times he had been hit but I could see he had been shot in the neck and the jaw.'
Patty Lezaca, Aronow's office manager for 15 years, said she heard the gunfire and ran to him.
'I believe he took five bullets -- one in the wrist, one around the jaw, another right through his chest and apparently another through the car door.'
At least one bullet punctured the heart of the 6-foot-3, 220-pound Aronow, who would have been 60 March 1.
The motive for the slaying remained a mystery. Although Aronow had built the ocean-going powerboats favored by drug dealers, friends said he refused to sell them to people he suspected of being smugglers.
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He designed, built and raced the Formula, Donzi, Magnum and Cigarette powerboats and founded the companies that manufactured them. He sold all those companies, and currently owned U.S.A. Racing Team, said John Crouse, Aronow's public relations representative the past 20 years.
His boats have been sold around the world, to Australian and Italian sportsmen and Arab sheiks.
Aronow recently sold a fleet of high-performance 'Blue Thunder' catamarans to U.S. Customs for chasing drug smugglers. His Cigarette boats also feature prominently in the NBC television series 'Miami Vice.'
'I was hustled into buying a boat,' he told a newspaper reporter last May of his introduction to powerboats. 'I invented the Cigarette. I named it after a boat that during Prohibition, caught boats running whiskey and hijacked the cargo for resale. It seemed like the thing to do, naming the boat that.'
Aronow won the offshore powerboat racing world championship in 1967 and 1969, and was U.S. champion in 1967, 1968 and 1969, Crouse said.
He retired from offshore racing in 1969 when his son, Michael, was injured in an automobile accident. But he continued to build high-speed powerboats.
Crouse said Aronow was planning to drive his new 45-foot deep-V craft designed for his U.S.A. Racing Team company in the annual Miami-Nassau powerboat race in July.
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His boats won 300 international races, 11 world championships, 30 U.S. and foreign championships and set 12 world speed records.
In 1970, Aronow became involved in throughbred racing and last year his 3-year-old My Prince Charming won the $150,000 Tampa Bay Derby at Tampa Bay Downs and one leg of the Fountain of Youth Stakes at Gulfstream Park. At Aronow Farms, a 90-acre complex at Ocala, he owned 40 2-year-olds.
Born in the New York City, Aronow retired at 31 as a millionaire building contractor in New Jersey. He moved to Miami in 1960, Crouse said.
Aronow was married twice and had five children, two by his second wife, Lillian Crawford Aronow, a former New York fashion model.
Crouse said among Aronow's friends were Vice President George Bush, King Hussein of Jordan and King Juan Carlos of Spain, all of whom bought boats from him.
