Walter Gaudnek Maeder Fortress NSB

The Mafia House

Long before condominiums popped up along south New Smyrna Beach there was a lone house that was built on 127 acres of sand dunes overlooking the ocean. This was a very remote area in 1969 and people began wondering why anyone would want to built a house. The strange house covered 6,000 square feet and was more like a fortress with double-pane bullet proof windows, armored-plated doors, ten inch thick steel reinforced concrete walls, and a helicopter landing pad on top. If that was not enough to feed gossip, there were machine gun mounts on the roof and an underground shooting range.

The builder added to the mystery when he put up a chain-link fence around his property with no trespassing signs and refused to allow interviews or photographs of his house. The house sat on pilings and had two electrically operated drawbridges and an elevator that could lift a vehicle into the house.

Large utility pipes were placed across the sand roads for extra protection against intruders. Locals could take their pick of rumors about the mysterious owner, some claimed he was part of the Mafia, or that he was the son of a wealthy doctor, or he was a rich oil company executive. Other stories say that he was running from something or that the house had connections to a government spy operation.

It was an impenetrable fortress, in other words. In the middle of nowhere.