King of the World

by David Remnick

  As undercover agents began to accumulate evidence on the IBC, Norris, and most of all Carbo, the entire organization showed signs of deterioration, slight at first. Cus D’Amato’s principled refusal to deal with Carbo may have been shaded with hypocrisy—he was not above having a friendship with a convicted bookie named Charley Black—but it showed that Carbo was not entirely invulnerable. At one of the dinners of Carbo’s guild of managers, Blinky Palermo announced in despair, “The trouble with boxing today is that legitimate businessmen are horning in on our game.”

  In July 1958, Hogan’s office handed down indictments against Carbo charging him with the “undercover” management of fighters and illegal matchmaking. Considering Carbo’s biography, the indictment, which centered on the illegal machinations surrounding a bout the previous March at Madison Square Garden between Virgil Akins and Isaac Logart, may have seemed insignificant. But according to Alfred J. Scotti, Hogan’s chief assistant DA, the bout “unequivocally established Carbo as the most powerful figure in boxing. Not only did he assert control over both contenders, but he also determined where and under what terms the match was to take place.”

  Carbo must have recognized the danger of his situation, because he immediately went into hiding. Police floundered until they finally tracked him down in May 1959 in Haddon Township, New Jersey, near Trenton. Carbo was holed up in a house owned by a mobster. When plainclothes police arrived, Carbo, thinking the Mafia had come to kill him, tried to jump out the back window. He was captured and taken in manacles to the local police barracks. The officers called Jack Bonomi, from Hogan’s office.

  “I’m not gonna say anything about boxing,” Carbo told Bonomi as soon as he arrived.

  “I figured,” said Bonomi. And so the two men talked baseball instead.

  “The troopers were awestruck by Carbo,” Bonomi recalled. “They asked if they could take him out to breakfast. I guess they thought they had this great celebrity on their hands. I had to tell them that not only would Carbo not be provided with full restaurant service, he would be handcuffed and kept under armed guard. He’d been on the lam for a year. All I kept thinking about was the famous picture of John Dillinger, just before he escaped, standing with that smiling prosecutor. I didn’t need that kind of publicity.”

  After all these years of successful wriggling in the courts, Carbo now saw he had no chance for acquittal. He pleaded guilty to three counts of “undercover managing and matchmaking” and was sentenced to two years in prison. His trials were now only beginning. In November 1959, federal marshals put him in handcuffs and flew him to Los Angeles to face felony charges of attempting to extort, with force, a share of the purses of Don Jordan, the welterweight champion. Carbo and his associates Joe Sica and Louis Tom Dragna, top members of the Los Angeles mob, had threatened Jordan’s manager, Donald Nesseth, and some promoters on the West Coast.

  “I was like a slave to them,” Jordan said years later about the mob. “When they disowned me, I said, ‘You’re no friends. You’re dogs. Now you’re my enemies.’ They said, ‘Talk and you die.’ ”

  Carbo was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison; he would spend time in Alcatraz and McNeil Island Penitentiary off the coast of Seattle. Blinky Palermo was also sent to jail in the same blizzard of convictions. Palermo appears to have spent his time in prison happily. He managed the Leavenworth baseball team.

  WITH FRANK CARBO IN PRISON, JACK BONOMI ACCEPTED ESTES Kefauver’s invitation to take charge of a federal investigation of boxing. Bonomi started collecting evidence on all the usual suspects, especially those who were not yet in jail. He soon discovered that one of the most compromised corners of the boxing world was the boxing press.

  Throughout the thirties, forties, and fifties, many boxing beat writers would line up at Madison Square Garden on Saturday mornings for a weekly envelope filled with cash—not a fortune, but just enough so that the promoter could be reasonably confident that the reporters would talk up and cover his bouts, just enough to keep them from asking the wrong questions. On some fight nights, the same beat writers might find an envelope on their assigned seats at ringside, too. The practice of organized graft was not limited to boxing, nor was it considered particularly wrong. It was just part of the business. Ball teams paid for writers to travel with them on the road; owners of racetracks and arenas sent around Christmas presents: televisions, washing machines, tea services. At big events, like a championship fight, publicists and promoters sometimes offered a selection of prostitutes: no charge for the columnists, discounts for reporters. Bonomi also heard that some of the bigger names in the press, columnists mainly, would accept free food and drink at nightspots like “21,” Toots Shor’s, and the Stork Club.

  “I had a lot of information, but finally I decided not to press it,” Bonomi said. “It was a prosecutor’s choice. I figured that if I was going to get anywhere with the hearings, I needed the press on my side, and the press has a long memory. What they were doing was pocket change compared to the big guys. To focus on the press would have been a diversion and counterproductive.”

  Predictably, not all the voices in the press were convinced that full-scale congressional hearings were necessary. “Outside the routine business of running the country,” Red Smith wrote in December 1959, “the United States Senate has nothing to worry about except the space race, atomic warfare, spiraling living costs, the world march of Communism, Fidel Castro, Bishop Pike’s views on birth control, the national debt, unrest in steel, and the 1960 elections. In the circumstances, anybody can understand why Sen. Estes Kefauver, a restless spirit, deems it necessary to relieve his boredom by investigating fistfighting.” Smith described Carbo as “the more or less benevolent despot of boxing’s Invisible Empire.”

  Carbo himself tried to undermine the enterprise with similar condescension directed at Kefauver. At a hearing he rebuffed Kefauver’s questions for nearly two hours simply by repeating the lyrics typed out on a sheet of paper for him by his lawyer, Abraham Brodsky:

  “What is your occupation?” Kefauver began.

  “I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that I cannot be compelled to be a witness against myself,” Carbo recited.

  “Notwithstanding your answer, the chairman directs you to respond to the question.”

  “I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that I cannot be compelled to be a witness against myself.”

  After some more of this, Kefauver looked up at his witness and said, “You look like an intelligent man. Are you understanding the questions I am asking?”

  “I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that I cannot be compelled to be a witness against myself,” Carbo said.

  Just before he was to be excused, Carbo broke from his script.

  “There is only one thing I want to say, Mr. Senator,” Carbo said.

  “Yes?”

  “I congratulate you on your reelection.”

  “That is very nice of you,” Kefauver said. “I appreciate that, Mr. Carbo.”

  Then Carbo’s lawyer, Brodsky, asked if his client, a diabetic, could have a glass of orange juice.

  “Orange juice?” Kefauver said.

  “I had no breakfast,” said Carbo.

  “All right. We are about to excuse you, Mr. Carbo.”

  “I mean I am trying to hold on as long as I can,” Carbo said.

  “Very well,” the chairman said. “You look like a pleasant man, Mr. Carbo.”

  “Thank you,” Carbo said.

  KEFAUVER NEITHER EXPECTED NOR REQUIRED REVELATIONS from Frankie Carbo. He began the hearings with Jake LaMotta’s admission that he took a dive in 1947 against Billy Fox. LaMotta testified that he had refused a hundred-thousand-dollar payment; he threw the fight, he said, because under the strictures of mob-run boxing it was the only way he could get a shot at the championship. And it was true. Once LaMotta fulfilled his part of the bargain, he was presented with Marcel Cerdan at Briggs Stadium in Detro
it and won.

  LaMotta, of course, had long since retired from boxing when he made his admission to the Kefauver panel. Sonny Liston, who was still on the way up, and was still owned and operated by the few underlings of the Carbo operation who had not been jailed or indicted, was not as forthcoming.

  In the end, the federal government did not intend to do much with the committee’s findings. Between 1958 and 1961, Frank Hogan’s office, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, and the Kefauver committee succeeded in publicly describing the state of boxing and indicting every major figure in the scandal with the exception of the IBC’s James Norris. In order to clean up the sport, Kefauver argued, the Justice Department would have to install federal controls backed up by the FBI. Robert Kennedy was attorney general at the time and met repeatedly with Kefauver and Bonomi, but he finally made it clear that neither his office nor his brother, the president, would get involved. Boxing was just too dirty; to take control would be to invite inevitable scandal.

  Kefauver, therefore, had no way to deal with a case like Sonny Liston’s other than to rely on his gift for moral suasion. After Liston finished his testimony before Kefauver, Dirksen, and the rest of the committee, Kefauver took the floor to give a paternal lecture, directing the heavyweight to get back in touch with his old prison mentor, Father Stevens, “or some good man of the clergy.… Tell him that you want to get a manager who is absolutely clean, no record, fully licensed; someone that you can trust without question, who will advise you correctly.

  “You are going to have to shake off the Palermos, the Vitales, and some of these people who have leeched themselves on to you,” Kefauver went on. “They have taken advantage of you and that has to stop if you are going to get a chance.”

  Later Liston joked about the hearings, saying, “I’m gonna have to get me a manager who’s not so hot—someone like Estes Kefauver.” Of course he never did. Through one false front or another, with a succession of ostensible managers, Liston never moved far from the shade of Frankie Carbo. The funny thing about it all, Geraldine Liston would say, was that if Sonny “was hooked up with the mob we sure were poor.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Stripped

  JULY 22, 1963

  LISTON FLEW OUT TO THE DESERT TO TRAIN FOR THE SECOND Patterson fight. The bout had originally been scheduled for Florida but was moved to Las Vegas when Liston needed time to recover from a twisted knee he suffered while playing golf. Las Vegas in those days was still an “all-the-steamship-roast-you-can-eat” town: no Spago, no pyramids or sphinx, no Statue of Liberty or Brooklyn Bridge. There were no “food courts” or baby strollers. The hotels were the Dunes, the Tropicana, the Hilton, the Desert Inn, the Stardust, and the Thunderbird. Except for the cocktail waitresses and the dishwashers, the mob guys and the iguanas, who really lived there? The promoters saw an opportunity in Las Vegas precisely because it was so empty. Television was killing off all the small arenas: Laurel Gardens and the Meadowbrook Bowl in Newark, St. Nick’s, Eastern Parkway, and Sunnyside Gardens in New York. The law, however, was that a fight had to be blacked out in the city where it was held until the arena was a guaranteed sellout. The networks were not quick to black out a market like New York or Chicago. If you held a fight in Vegas, whom were you blacking out? The armadillos? In exchange for some free publicity, the casinos were happy to provide discounted rooms, training facilities, a makeshift arena in a sunbaked parking lot. Las Vegas was a good deal.

  Liston’s latest manager, Jack Nilon (late of a Philadelphia food concessions business), wanted his fighter to train in isolation, perform the neighborhood in Fairmount Park. They saw a woman driving a black Cadillac, and Liston’s friend assumed the woman was a prostitute. Liston caught up with the Cadillac. The woman, who was actually employed by the board of education, pulled over, thinking Liston was a police officer. Just then, a squad car pulled up. Liston panicked and took off at sixty-five miles an hour. Time and again, since moving to Philadelphia, Liston had gotten in minor scrapes with the police; he had even been arrested for standing around on a street corner. Every police officer in the city had a picture of Liston on his sun visor. As it turned out, the case against Liston for the “lark in the park” was a bust—the various charges were either dismissed or ended in acquittal—but the publicity, especially in the local papers, the Inquirer, the Bulletin, and the tabloid Daily News, made him out to be, once again, an unrepentant thug. And so, after the fight, when Liston called home for a report on the attention he was getting, a friend read him Larry Merchant’s scathing column in the Daily News: “So it is true—in a fair fight between good and evil, evil must win.… A celebration for Philadelphia’s first heavyweight champ is now in order. Emily Post probably would recommend a ticker-tape parade. For confetti we can use shredded warrants of arrest.”

  Liston was scheduled to leave Chicago for Philadelphia the next day, and while he slept, McKinney stayed up half the night working the phones, trying to arrange for a decent reception. But after talking to a series of sources in City Hall, he realized that Mayor Tate had decided to stiff Liston.

  The next afternoon, on the plane, Liston asked McKinney to sit with him, and as they ate lunch, Liston described how he planned to conduct himself as champion and what he would tell the people and the press in Philadelphia. He talked about how he would listen to Joe Louis’s fights on the radio as a kid and how the announcer would say Louis was a credit to his race, to the human race—the old Jimmy Cannon line—and how that made him feel warm inside. He said he wanted to meet the president and win over the NAACP even though they had all been rooting for Patterson to win.

  “There’s a lot of things I’m gonna do,” Liston told McKinney.” But one thing’s very important: I want to reach my people. I want to reach them and tell them, ‘You don’t have to worry about me dishaps at some quiet desert camp far from the city. Liston would have none of it. If there had been a time when he wanted to be a model champion, a well-behaved and well-trained gentleman like Joe Louis or Floyd Patterson, he had gotten over it. In Las Vegas, Liston came to know a gambler and bad boy named Irving “Ash” Resnik, the “athletic director” of the Thunderbird Hotel. Resnik had grown up in Brooklyn and was a basketball star. But he was the sort of basketball star who practiced missing foul shots, should the need ever arise to shave a point. According to one of his close friends, Resnik came out to Las Vegas largely because he owed more than seven thousand dollars to Albert Anastasia and was slow in paying up. The debt was now so old that Anastasia had put a contract out on his life. He was saved only when a friend in the meat business, Milton Berke, paid off the marker and another friend, Charlie “the Blade” White, a partner in the Capri in Havana, helped set him up with jobs in Las Vegas—first at El Rancho, later at the Thunderbird. The casinos, in those days, were almost all mob-run.

  Resnik was a big guy, over 250 pounds, and he reacted to losing at the craps table by lifting up the table and pitching it over. “Ah, Ash was a great guy, but he was a guy with a temper,” Lem Banker, a friend and a well-known Las Vegas handicapper, told me. For publicity and for his ego’s sake, Resnik wanted Liston to stay and train at the Thunderbird, and he went about seducing him. At one of his first meetings with Liston, Resnik arranged to have one of his flunkies come over to him, interrupt, and say that his tailor was in his suite awaiting his presence.

  “Oh, I forgot all about that,” Resnik said to Liston. “Sonny, would you come with me? I gotta get fit for some suits. We can keep talking there.”

  Once they were in the room, Resnik invited Liston to look at the swatch book, feel the cashmeres and the silks, pick out some material for himself.

  “Go ahead,” Resnik said. “Have a few suits made. On me.”

  By then Liston was so disgusted with his treatment back home in Philadelphia and in the press that he accepted, taking it as his due as champion of the world.

  When Resnik and Liston were finished with the tailor, they went back to the casino floor and found Geraldine, who was ju
mping up and down, screaming with delight.

  “Charles! Charles! You won’t believe what happened! I hit the jackpot! I hit two jackpots!”

  One of Resnik’s flunkies was standing next to Geraldine smiling knowingly.

  Liston understood what was going on, but who else was making offers? When Nilon insisted they go off to the desert and begin training in ascetic isolation, Liston cut him off.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he told Nilon. “We’re stayin’ here.”

  And so it was that Sonny Liston accepted the hospitality of Ash Resnik. Having dispensed with Patterson last time in two minutes and six seconds, he did not betray a great deal of worry in training for the rematch. He went through his usual rituals in the gym—skipping rope to the tune of “Night Train,” hitting the speed bags and the heavy bag—but he did not spar very much or very hard. If a boxer trains for every fight full out, he won’t last long, and Liston, even though he had not yet defended his championship, was prepared to enjoy himself. Liston generally ate the same dinner every night: shrimp cocktail, at least one big steak, baked potato, and cheesecake. Liston loved cheesecake.

  It would not be easy to arouse interest in the rematch. Jerry Izenberg, a thoughtful columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, developed an unusually trusting relationship with Liston and dared to ask him the question that was on every reporter’s mind.

  “The guy didn’t hit you in the first fight,” Izenberg said. “Can this fight be any better?”

  Liston paused a long time, a conversational tic, and then said, very distinctly, “Anybody who pays to see this fight is stupid. This fight will be worse than the first.”