The two main mob operations in St. Louis were run by the Syrians and the Sicilians. The Sicilian operation was John Vitale’s realm. The center of mob control in the Midwest was Chicago—the province of Bernard Glickman and Glickman’s ultimate boss, Sam Giancana—and Vitale, as the St. Louis boss, always made sure to pay tribute to Chicago. Vitale was ostensibly the president of the Anthony Novelty Company, a jukebox and pinball machine concern that he left to his underlings; he kept himself busy in the construction business and in the world of organized labor.
Through Frank Mitchell, Vitale soon met Liston, and he gave him a job at the Union Electric plant in South County unloading firebricks. Liston was not called upon to unload bricks very often. His true employment was otherwise. Working alongside a three-hundred-pound goon named Barney Baker, Liston was put in charge of keeping black workers in line. Baker was a New Yorker who kicked around various unions and mob organizations, including Meyer and Jake Lansky’s operation in Washington, D.C.
“At any sign of trouble they’d send Sonny out and maybe he’d stare a guy down or just break his leg,” said Sam Eveland, Liston’s friend from prison. “In those days they didn’t make much of a secret of those things.” Liston had become, in the Teamsters parlance of the day, a head-breaker. Later, Liston admitted that yes, many of his new friends had been in jail or were headed there. “I never knew there were other kinds of people,” he said. “I’d heard of Negro doctors and lawyers and outstanding businessmen, of course, but how was I going to get with them? They were educated, refined people. I wasn’t educated and I knew I wasn’t refined.”
Officers of the St. Louis Police Department who testified at the Kefauver hearings were interested more in the assault than the sociology of the situation. “He whopped a few out in the country,” said Sergeant Joseph Moose. “He didn’t need to whop too many—just stared at them.”
Liston also did odd jobs for an associate of Vitale, Raymond Sarkis. “Mostly I’d drive his car, a white Cadillac,” said Liston. “I know they was jealous and they would even the score by pulling me in.”
Captain John Doherty was a tough cop in charge of what was known in town as the “hoodlum squad,” and it was not long before he identified Liston as precisely that, a hoodlum. He set out to cut off Liston’s relations with Vitale’s men and ordered his officers to carry out a policy of diligent harassment. “Every time we could jump Liston up, find him, we did,” he said. “We wouldn’t tolerate beating any citizens up, robbing them, which he was known for. I must have talked to Liston on twenty occasions. ‘Where you coming from?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Where you going?’ ‘I don’t know.’ We tried to treat him pretty good. I told him he had great potentialities, but if you’re going to associate with Vitale and them other hots, I said, you can’t make a decent living. He never accepted my advice. He’s dumb. He’s got a vicious temper.”
Liston said that not only was he picked up repeatedly and held overnight occasionally, his life was threatened. He said Captain Doherty finally told him to leave St. Louis, and if he didn’t, “they are going to find you in the alley.” The police denied that story in its particulars, but not in its general theme. James Chapman, the assistant chief, said, “Doherty got a bum rap on that. I’m the one that told him that.”
While working in his union slot, Liston also beat men up in the ring. He could hardly wait to avenge his laughing loss to Marty Marshall. In fact, he avenged himself twice, both vicious knockouts. Years later, Marshall said, “Nobody should be hit like that. I think about it now and I hurt.… I’ve got two parts of me that remember Sonny Liston—that ear he hit and my stomach. He hit me in the stomach with a left hand in the sixth. That wasn’t a knockdown. It couldn’t be. I was paralyzed. I just couldn’t move. I didn’t move enough to fall down.”
But for all his success, Liston continued to enrage the city police with his daytime employment. To anyone reading the local papers, it was obvious that the constant minor confrontations between Sonny and the police would escalate, and the police were not afraid to say so publicly. Sergeant James Reddick, a former Golden Gloves champion, said of Liston, “He hangs out with a bunch of dogs. I’d like to show him how bad he is. If he ever crossed me, I’d baptize his ass.”
One of the few good things ever to happen to Liston came about in a rainstorm in 1956. A young local munitions factory worker named Geraldine was soaked through as she stood out on the sidewalk waiting for a bus. Liston was driving by and saw her. What happened next had to count, in Liston’s book, as true chivalry: he threw the car into reverse, got out of the car, picked up Geraldine, put her in the front seat, and said, “You’re a very attractive lady. You shouldn’t have to stand out there and get wet.” They married later in the year.
But 1956 was also a year of disaster. On the evening of May 5, the Listons went out to a party. The night would end with Sonny beating up a police officer, an offense that brought him the better part of a year in a state workhouse.
Both Liston and his antagonist, Patrolman Thomas Mellow, agreed in testimony that their dispute began in an alley and centered around a waiting taxi. Mellow said that when he saw the cab idling in the alley, he told the driver, a black man named Patterson, to move along or risk a summons. Liston appeared and told Mellow, “You can’t give him no ticket.”
“The hell I can’t,” Mellow said, and took out his ticket book.
According to Mellow, Liston then snatched him up in a bear hug and lifted him off the ground. “I didn’t realize what was happening until he grabbed me. Kind of caught me off guard. After they got me in the dark part of the alley, Patterson says, ‘Get his gun.’ We struggled and all three of us fell. Liston got my gun out. Then Patterson says, ‘Shoot that white son of a bitch.’ Liston releases me and points the gun at my head. I’m pushing up on the barrel with both hands to keep from looking down the muzzle. They were walking all over me. I hollered, ‘Don’t shoot me.’ Liston let up all of a sudden, hit me over the left eye with either the gun or his fist. It took seven stitches.” Mellow’s arm and knee were broken “either from the fall or somebody stomping me.”
Liston’s version of the story has him protesting Mellow’s treatment of the cab driver and Mellow then turning to him and saying, “You’re a smart nigger.” “And when I say, ‘I’m not smart,’ he reaches for his gun and tries to take it out his holster, but I take it away from him,” Liston said. “Later the cop said I was drunk. Now how could a drunk handle a sober cop trained to make arrests and to pull his gun?”
BY EARLY 1958, LISTON HAD FINISHED HIS STINT IN THE WORKHOUSE and was fighting again. He was winning at a rate sufficient to attract the attention of mobsters bigger than the likes of Vitale and even Bernie Glickman. Liston acceded to a new ownership arrangement organized by New York—based mobsters (as if he had any choice) and moved to Philadelphia in order to be closer to the real action in boxing, which in the fifties meant New York and its ancillary cities.
The new contract meted out 52 percent to Frankie Carbo, the most powerful figure in boxing; 12 percent each to Vitale and Carbo’s liege man, Frank “Blinky” Palermo; and 24 percent to Joseph “Pep” Barone, another Carbo “associate” who would act, for public purposes, as Liston’s manager. According to an FBI investigator, William Roemer, the Midwest mobsters were outraged that they had lost a fighter of such enormous potential. A couple of years after the takeover, according to Vanity Fair, Sam Giancana flew from Chicago to Atlantic City for a meeting of the Commission, the ruling body of organized crime. Giancana appealed to Thomas “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese and Carlo Gambino of New York, among others, but he was rebuffed. Carbo himself was a member of Lucchese’s mob family. A potential heavyweight champion was too big a property to leave to St. Louis.
Liston was, in essence, the last in a long line, the last great champion to be delivered straight into the hands of the mob. It would take Cassius Clay, who was still finding his way as a contender, to break the grip of organized crime. For him, the Nation of Islam would f
orm that sense of protection.
Long before the rise of Frankie Carbo, a generation of Prohibition-era gangsters ran fighters, promoted fights, fixed fights, and bet on fights, such men as Owney Madden, Frenchy DeMange, Bill Duffy, Frankie Yale, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Boo Boo Hoff, Kid Dropper, Frankie Marlow, Legs Diamond, and Dutch Schultz. The underworld liked boxing because boxers themselves are outsiders. The saying in boxing is that only a fool or a desperate man gets hit in the head to earn a living. And since boxers come into the game from the margins, they are approachable by men from the margins of business. They are not likely to complain too loudly, for their life presents them with so few choices. Boxers don’t get scholarships; there is no alumni society waiting at the door, glad hand extended.
Paul John Carbo was born on New York’s Lower East Side in 1904 and grew up mainly in the Bronx. He did a great deal of that growing up committing petty crimes. At eighteen, he was arrested for assault and grand larceny. When he was twenty, he was charged with shooting a butcher to death in a poolroom on East 160th Street. Carbo and the butcher, a man named Albert Weber, were arguing over possession of a stolen taxicab. At the time, Carbo was known variously on the street as Frankie Carbo, Frank Fortunato, Frank Martin, Jimmie the Wop, and Dago Frank. (His choice of monikers would expand with his power. By the fifties, his aliases would also include, according to his police wanted poster, Mr. Fury and Mr. Gray.)
To avoid arrest on the shooting charge, Carbo relocated to Philadelphia, but was soon arrested there after a holdup and sent back to New York to confront the consequences of Weber’s demise. He was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sent off to Sing Sing. No rehabilitation seems to have taken place. When Carbo was paroled in 1930, he became a full-fledged triggerman during the Prohibition wars, working most prominently for the Brooklyn division of Murder Incorporated.
In the ease with which he avoided prosecution, Carbo proved a man of uncanny talents. On April 12, 1933, Max Hassel and Max Greenberg, two henchmen aligned with the beer baron known as Waxie Gordon, were found shot dead at the Hotel Carteret in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Several witnesses fingered Carbo. The police questioned Carbo and charged him with the killing. He was released on ten thousand dollars bail and nothing came of that investigation, either.
Carbo’s most notorious alleged homicide (and closest call) came on Thanksgiving Eve 1939 in Los Angeles. The victim was Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg, himself late of Murder Inc. and Louis (Lepke) Buchalter’s gang in Brooklyn. Big Greenie had been shot five times as he sat behind the wheel of his car on a quiet residential street. The grand jury handed down indictments against Carbo as the triggerman, Bugsy Siegel as the driver of the getaway car, and Emanuel “Mendy” Weiss and Louis Lepke, who was then in prison on a narcotics charge, as accomplices. The case seemed reasonably strong, especially against Carbo. Albert “Tick Tock” Tannenbaum, a Lepke henchman, swore he saw Carbo shoot Big Greenie; another hood, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, said he saw Carbo headed for the scene of the shooting and running away after. The first problem for the prosecution, however, came when Kid Twist, while under police guard at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island, sailed out his window and down five stories to his death. To this day, Kid Twist’s defenestration remains a mystery, if only to the New York City Police Department. Carbo, in any case, was not claiming credit. The case went to trial in 1942 (by now Carbo was the sole defendant), and the jury members decided that as much as they doubted the innocent mewings of Frankie Carbo, they could not entirely trust Tick Tock Tannenbaum as a stalwart witness. After fifty-three hours of deliberation, Carbo was acquitted.
Finally, according to the famous Mafia snitch Jimmy Frattiano, Carbo was given the job of murdering Bugsy Siegel in 1947 after Siegel failed to pay his debts to the Italian mob. “Bugsy had built the Flamingo Hotel out in Las Vegas,” Jack Bonomi told me, “but he made the mistake of welshing on his creditors. You’re not supposed to do that. So they gave Meyer Lansky the contract to collect or kill Bugsy. Frank Carbo got the call.”
BETWEEN COURT DATES, CARBO HAD BECOME THE MAJOR POWER in the boxing world. With the fall of Prohibition, boxing was fresh meat, an opportunity. In major cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles, there were boxing cards nearly every night of the week, and with the advent of television, a sponsor like Gillette, selling razor blades, was as eager to secure fight night as it would be to secure pro football a generation later. The mobster Gabe Genovese had given Carbo his first real opportunity by taking him on as a partner in managing Babe Risko, the middleweight champion in 1936. Carbo did not invent the Mafia way of running fighters, but he did refine the details and established such dominance in the field that especially in the years after World War II until his arrest in 1959, he was known as the “underworld commissioner.”
Carbo’s most important business relationship was with James Norris, the head of the International Boxing Commission, which was originally formed to buy up the contracts of the leading heavyweight contenders after Joe Louis retired in 1949. Eventually, the IBC gained control of the top fighters in every division as well as the Madison Square Garden Corporation. On paper, at least, Norris, and his associate, Truman Gibson, was the lord of prizefighting. For Norris, running the IBC was a kind of hobby; from his father he had inherited grain and real estate fortunes running into the hundreds of millions. And yet Norris hardly made a match without Carbo’s approval. When Norris was having trouble with fight managers who resisted his control of the game, he asked help from Carbo.
“Among other things, Jim Norris was a horseplayer,” Truman Gibson told me. “He kept a stable called Spring Hill Farms and was around all the New York tracks and knew the various Italian bookmakers. He was an inveterate gambler. The horse world is where he met Frank Carbo. Slowly but surely, Jim got close with Carbo. The big mystery that no one can solve is why he got that close to Carbo.”
“Actually there’s no mystery, no matter what Truman Gibson thinks,” said Jack Bonomi, the congressional counsel. “Norris and Carbo got close because Norris had Madison Square Garden and Chicago Stadium and all that money and Carbo had the fighters and the managers in his pocket. They needed each other, and together they had absolute power over boxing.”
With violence and the threat of violence, Carbo muscled in on hundreds of fighters. He installed shadow managers (men like Herman “Hymie the Mink” Wallman, Willie “the Undertaker” Ketchum, Al “the Vest” Weill, Joseph “Pep” Barone) and then took his piece of the action. If a fighter refused to go along, he had a hard time finding fights, much less title fights. The penalty for noncompliance was savage and inevitable. Ray Arcel, a well-known fight manager in his eighties, refused to deal exclusively with Carbo and was rewarded with a lead-pipe thrashing that almost killed him. Carbo left nothing to chance. He personally offered to gouge out the eyes of one West Coast promoter who resisted him. If he did not control both fighters in a match, he would dispatch an underling to bribe a judge and then bet accordingly. Carbo single-handedly controlled the lightweight, welterweight, and middleweight titles for twenty years as he kept a grip on such champions as Joe Brown, Jimmy Carter, Virgil Akins, Johnny Saxton, Kid Gavilan, and Carmen Basilio. Carbo also exercised varying degrees of control over many other fighters; his tentacles touched, and profited from, the likes of Sugar Ray Robinson, Jake LaMotta, and Rocky Marciano. Rather than add up the fighters he controlled, a better exercise would be to find the few he did not.
“Carbo had a house in Miami, but he lived out of his hat for the most part,” Bonomi said. “He was constantly on the move, going from one city to the next, one hotel to the next. He would come into a town, get together with his friends and business acquaintances, see ten or fifteen people, then repair to whatever nightclub he liked.” Carbo always wore a dark suit, white-on-white shirts, and elevator shoes, and, often, ties that hinted of the underworld: one of his favorites featured dice and five aces. He was five-eight and a ball of muscle. He loved to flash chubby rolls of hundr
ed-dollar bills and threaten his dinner companions with assassination. “What do you want?” he’d say. “A hit in the head?”
Carbo exploited fighters as thoroughly as he could and then, when they were through, he abandoned them. On March 5, 1959, Johnny Saxton, a former world welterweight champion and one of Carbo’s first big-name attractions, went before a judge in New York to face charges of breaking and entering, a crime that had yielded exactly five dollars and twenty cents. Saxton, who had earned in his time as a fighter more than a quarter of a million dollars in purses, was broke and owed sixteen thousand dollars to the IRS.
“Johnny, where did your money go?” the judge asked.
“I didn’t get much of it,” Saxton said.
“Why did you give up fighting?”
“They didn’t need me no more.”
Later, Saxton attempted suicide and was committed to Ancora State Hospital in New Jersey. He had gone mad. “I was supposed to have got the big money from fighting on TV but I never saw it,” he told a reporter who visited him in Ancora. “No one ever gave me more than a couple of hundred dollars at a time. Now I’m here in the hospital. That’s what boxing did for me.”
BY THE TIME CARBO’S SHADOW MANAGERS TOOK CONTROL OF Sonny Liston in the late fifties, Carbo was in his late mannerist phase. He had been so powerful for so long that one might have wondered when the decline would come. “Sometimes it’s not whether you really have the stick or not,” Kefauver would say later about Carbo, “but whether a fellow thinks you might have it.”
Carbo held court with all his managers and various flunkies at places like Goldie Ahearn’s, a restaurant in Washington, D.C., that had been thoroughly infiltrated by undercover detectives sent by Frank Hogan, a New York district attorney who had pledged war on organized crime. At one dinner at Goldie Ahearn’s in 1957, Carbo presided over a meeting attended by a range of managers: Tony Ferrante, the manager of middleweight champion Joey Giardello; Benny Magliano (aka Benny Trotter), a Baltimore promoter; Sam Margolis, Blinky Palermo’s restaurant partner from Philadelphia; and a young manager named Angelo Dundee. Angelo Dundee was the brother of Chris Dundee, who had set himself up as the leading promoter in the Miami area. In a few years, Angelo would get the biggest fighter of his, or anyone’s, life, Cassius Clay.
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