Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion

by Gianmarc Manzione

  The sport that action bowlers like Schlegel knew was entirely the same sport known to the tens of millions of bowlers who hit the lanes across the United States each year by the early 1960s. Nothing about the game itself was different. The lane was still sixty feet long from foul line to headpin and nearly forty-two inches in width, the bowling ball still twenty-seven inches in circumference and a maximum weight of sixteen pounds, the pins still twelve inches apart and ranging in weight between 3.2 and 3.10 pounds. Like Schlegel, the vast majority of action bowlers—or adult male bowlers generally—threw sixteen-pound bowling balls at the time. Women and children might be more likely to throw lighter bowling balls; the lighter the ball, the less hitting power it had when it collided with the pins. Some tournament directors, such as John Vargo, who ran the famed Vargo Classic in New York City, ensured the pins themselves would be harder to knock down at his tournament by filling them with lead. That brought the weight of the pins closer to four pounds. It also made them bottom-heavy, as he planted lead in them through a hole he drilled in the bottom of each pin. The pins sometimes responded by behaving as though they were anchored to the pin deck. A bowler who won Vargo’s tournament knew he had earned it.

  The lanes themselves still were made of wood in the early 1960s—maple for the first fifteen feet of the lane followed by forty-five feet of pine, a softer wood, and then maple again for the pin deck, where the pins stood. Maple, a stronger wood, helped the front part of the lane withstand the bruising it sustained as bowlers threw ball after ball. It also helped the pin decks survive the pounding of pins as bowling balls blasted them around.

  Scoring, too, was the same for action bowlers as it was for any bowler. A strike still counted for ten points plus the total pin fall accumulated over the next two shots; a spare counted for ten points plus the next shot. A strike on the first shot of the tenth frame allowed a bowler two more shots; a spare allowed one more. A 300 game required twelve consecutive strikes. Bowlers who stepped over the foul line got a score of zero for that shot. Electronic foul lights, invented in the late 1930s, buzzed when a bowler stepped or slid over the foul line and had long-ago eliminated the need for foul line judges by the 1960s. Not every bowling center had installed them, however, and those that did would not always turn them on.

  The thing that elevated these ground rules to the realm of “action” was gambling. And the thing that distinguished action bowling from those pot games Schlegel bowled as a kid was the head-to-head match—one guy putting his money down against another’s for a game to see who truly was the best. Gamblers behind the lanes—a part of the action bowling scene colloquially referred to as “the back”—placed their bets on the bowler they thought had the best chance of winning. If enough gamblers in the back put money on a particular match, the bowlers themselves could end up bowling for many thousands of dollars in a night.

  “Action” itself had nothing to do with bowling; gamblers found action in many forms. Those not bowling a match or betting on one were laying their money down on a game of dice in the parking lot, holding poker hands close to their chests in the lounge, or itching to head out to Yonkers Raceway and bet on the ponies. They made money pitching pencils at parking signs or flipping matchbook covers. Steve Harris and his buddies placed bets on who would have the most attractive woman sit next to them on the subway when they headed back home at dawn. If a large older lady sat next to one of them, they would fall on the floor laughing. Taking the bet was the rush.

  Even when gamblers found the action they were looking for in the bowling alley, it was not always as simple as just betting on the guy they thought would win. The bowling alley was not the racetrack. Some matches featured one guy using only two fingers while the other used only his thumb; others featured bowlers who were blindfolded or threw balls between their legs or between chairs arranged on the lane. Action bowlers were gamblers first and bowlers second, and they found the action anywhere they looked for it. The action itself was the objective, regardless of what form it took.

  This was the early 1960s, when Atlantic City’s rise as a gambling mecca still was years away, no one really spoke of going to Vegas because it felt so distant as to be somewhere on the other side of the world, and even the Meadowlands Racetrack was yet to be built. Off-track betting (OTB) had not yet been legalized. Hustlers may have scratched the gambler’s itch in pool halls back in the 1930s and ’40s, but by 1962 the bowling alley was the place where they found what they were looking for. And they looked for however long it took to find it.

  Schlegel may or may not have known it then, but any time he headed to a bowling alley looking to score some dough, he embraced a heritage that went back hundreds of years. Bowling’s dalliance with gambling actually dates back many centuries; bowling did not just become the locus of gamblers and shylocks in Schlegel’s New York City youth. In fact, King Henry VIII of England banned bowling in 1511 because of the sport’s appeal to society’s underbelly. Bowling alleys then were called “alleys” because that is exactly what they were—outdoor alleys usually attached to saloons, taverns, and other places gamblers frequented. As versions of the sport made their way into Germany in the third century and later throughout Europe, bowling continued to be an outdoor activity. America would not see its first indoor bowling alley until 1840, when a place called Knickerbocker Alleys opened in New York City with lanes made of baked clay. King Henry VIII’s 1511 ban still was in effect then—it lasted until 1845—even though members of his own court, as well as his successors over the centuries, partook nonetheless. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of bowling’s origins in ancient Egypt, and evidence also suggests that a version of the sport was played in the Stone Age. Given the sport’s longstanding affiliation with gambling, it would hardly be surprising if archaeological evidence someday proves that even bowlers in those early societies could not resist the urge to place a bet.

  Bowling resumed as a magnet for gamblers in Schlegel’s New York City youth because of a boom in bowling center construction hastened by the advent of automatic pinsetters in the early 1950s. Until then, bowling alley proprietors relied on pinboys to keep their doors open. If they had no one to set the pins, they had no customers. Pinboys tended to be sewer-mouthed street urchins proprietors hired while holding their noses, covering their ears, and looking the other way. The bruised, fractured, or bleeding shins pinboys suffered on the job served as evidence of the gruff ilk they represented. World War II ensured that pinboys were in short supply, forcing bowling alleys to reduce their hours of operation or shut down altogether. The American Machine & Foundry Company (AMF) successfully designed and manufactured the first automatic pinsetters, and the Brunswick Corporation later followed suit. The elimination of pinboys completely revolutionized the sport by ushering it into a glittery new era. Women felt welcome in the bowling alley more than ever before now that pinboys were gone and lavish, space-age decor replaced the dingy, claustrophobic, and poorly lit bowling alleys of subway stations and bar basements with spacious, inviting establishments. Bans placed on bowling by local governments in Connecticut and New York—for the same reasons King Henry VIII did so hundreds of years prior—now were lifted, allowing young people to frequent bowling alleys again. Suddenly, the bowling alley was a place to take the family, and soon neighborhoods throughout the United States featured many places to bowl. Most crucially for the action bowling scene, many of these new bowling alleys stayed open around the clock. When the families headed home, the gamblers headed in.

  Schlegel enjoyed the fruits of this development himself when Manhattan Lanes, a massive, 62-lane bowling alley, opened on Broadway and Sherman Avenue in Inwood. It was one of the larger bowling alleys in the country at the time. Many other bowling alleys speckled his neighborhood; he hardly could walk a few blocks without passing at least a couple of them. With their abundance and proximity, bowling alleys fulfilled a craving that was not always easily satisfied in an era before Atlantic City casinos or OTB. They ensured that the next be
t always was just a block away, if not right across the street. And in the bowling alley, unlike a game of dice or cards, you truly were in charge of your own destiny. You could arrange to bowl a match against a guy you knew had the same average as you; or you could hustle an opponent into underestimating your skill and then bleed the sucker’s pockets dry. It also helped that bowling offered a particularly cheap option for gamblers—a game of bowling was just fifty cents in 1962. A pair of rental shoes might set you back twenty cents.

  By the time Schlegel discovered Manhattan Lanes around the corner from the Sickles Street apartment he lived in with his parents, bowling was becoming the way for him to live up to something his father told him in 1958, something that would stick with him for the rest of his life.

  “The Schlegel name is our name! It is your mother’s name! And you better not ruin it!” Schlegel’s father told him after standing beside his son in court while a judge administered jail terms to his pocketbook-snatching friends. Schlegel had been caught hanging with the wrong crowd in Inwood. One day, he joined a few neighborhood kids as they waited in the subway tunnel at 190th and Broadway. As soon as they spotted an old lady, one of the kids Schlegel was with—a guy named Charlie who was known as “The Beak” thanks to a sizable nose—would do his best to scare the shit out of her. Then two other kids, Wally and his sister Holly, would grab her pocketbook and they all would run.

  “What the fuck am I doing here?” Schlegel thought. “What the hell am I doing?”

  But there was nowhere left to run the day Charlie scared one old lady well enough to give her a heart attack. They ran all the way to Sherman Avenue and Broadway, down to Jimmy’s Candy Store. And that is where they ran into the cops who were looking for them. Charlie got a year-and-a-half. So did Holly. Then the judge turned to Wally. Those sentences might have been a lot longer had the woman not survived.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself, teaching your little sister to behave this way!” he said. “I should take you out back right now and whip you myself.”

  Wally got three years; twice what his sister received. Then, as the judge turned to Schlegel, Schlegel’s father had a word for his son.

  “No Schlegel has ever gone to jail,” he said.

  Schlegel’s father was a barrel-chested superintendent of the apartment building where they lived, a hard-working man stuffed into a stocky frame of five-foot-six known to treat the local garbage men to a free shot of scotch when the weather got cold. He had a thick, German accent and bulging biceps he liked to flex once in a while just to make sure Schlegel knew he could kick his ass. One day he discovered a particularly subtle way of discouraging drug use in his son’s life. He opened a closet that contained a shotgun, pointed at it, and explained the following:

  “You see this gun,” he said in his gruff, German accent. “It’s got a two-round load. One for each eye. I blow your fucking brains out if you ever touch drugs.”

  That was the father Schlegel feared in court that day, the one who made eminently believable threats involving guns and brawn. He had met with the judge beforehand and persuaded him that he could hand down no justice in court worse than the justice his son would face at home.

  “It seems your father will be taking care of this himself,” the judge said.

  The judge probably had a good ass-kicking in mind, too.

  But it was the shame that hurt Schlegel more than any ass-kicking, this negative way of seeing his family’s name that meant something more than skin deep. That was the way Schlegel’s father had of “taking care” of things—making Schlegel feel ashamed of himself. For Schlegel, no ass-kicking could hurt more than that. From that day on, he had a notion that to bear your family’s name is to bear the responsibility of representing it with honor and dignity. That day, perhaps, was the first day he saw himself not just as another kid on the streets, but as a Schlegel. It would be years before Schlegel fully appreciated the extent to which his father spared him that day from the life that might have awaited him had he been hauled off to Juvie.

  By then, Schlegel and Harris were on their way out of their parents’ apartments and into the lives that awaited them. They both had figured out that they would butter their own bread in life, and that the type of talent Schlegel possessed was not the stuff you put on a resume. No, this was the kind of raw gift that either made you or broke you. This was survival. Now, as life nudged them into their twenties, they had no needling mothers to answer to, no one back home worrying about where they were and asking questions when they finally returned. Here was the freedom they had waited for forever. And tonight, that freedom would be found at a Philadelphia bowling alley just off Route 1.

  Hours before Harris hopped into Nagai’s Cadillac to head down to Philly, he called up Schlegel and said, “Ernie, we got a fish in Philadelphia!”

  A “fish” in action bowling parlance was a sucker whose money was easy because he either didn’t know his competition or he had an exaggerated sense of his own abilities. And if he did know his competition and chose therefore to keep his money to himself, well, there were remedies for that: You could ask him to please confirm he still had a pair of balls between his legs, show up on crutches and say you had the gout to put on the airs of easy prey, or start a match with a few thrown games before stunning the poor bastard with enough strikes to make him beg to keep enough money for the bus. You did whatever it took to get him on the lanes and make his money yours. That was the bottom line. Schlegel’s bait to catch these fish included the shot of bourbon he downed and the extra splash he rubbed behind his ears, and the long-sleeved shirts he wore to perpetuate rumors that they concealed heroin tracks. And then there was the crooked mouth and the thing his friends called “the twisted eye.” Schlegel’s vision was so poor in one eye that he tightened it into a kind of contorted squint when he bowled. It made him look a little crazy to the unsuspecting. Despite his impaired vision, Schlegel was the most accurate bowler in New York, an asset that made him not just a good bowler, but a great bowler. He threw a much straighter ball than most; a lot of bowlers at least hooked the ball a little, some a lot. Schlegel preferred a straighter shot because he knew that he never would miss his target, while bowlers with big hooks will not always be able to predict where their ball will end up as it makes its way toward the pins. There is a narrower margin for error when you rely on hook instead of accuracy. When you throw a straighter shot you remove that uncertainty; and when you know, too, that you rarely will miss the target you are looking at, you are a fearsome competitor.

  But for Schlegel, action bowling was as much about hustling as it was about physical ability—the way a stench of bourbon or a twist in the eye consumed more of his opponent’s focus than the match itself. And that was exactly the point: You wanted the guy on the other side of the ball return to think about anything but how to get out of the place with money in his pocket, anything but what he had done to succeed in this spot before. You had to convince the fish that there was something wrong with you, afflict him with the delusion that he had the upper hand. If you played your part well, your prey would get angry—so angry, in fact, that he would bet far more money than reason advised. The double-or-nothings, the big bills he would lay down to recoup those small bills his buddies had just watched him lose, the machismo that gnawed at him as his humiliation grew. That’s when you made the real money; that’s when you were playing a game Schlegel liked to call “the spider and the fly.” By the time Schlegel’s opponents found themselves down a couple hundred bucks, they knew they were caught.

  The roommates Schlegel would soon live with knew he played the role of the spider well enough to send him bowling whenever they needed some rent money. They knew about the night Schlegel and his chain-smoking doubles partner, Johnny Campbell, took on the most fearsome duo in action bowling, a pair of bowlers known as Fats and Deacon, in a 12-hour match that culminated in a tie at dawn. Both teams piled their cash on the score table for one last game to settle it all. With fingers so raw by the
n that the finger holes in their bowling balls were stained with blood, they once again battled down to the 10th frame, when Schlegel needed all three strikes to win the match. He stepped up and threw what Campbell would describe for years to come as the best three strikes he ever saw in his life. The money was theirs.

  But Schlegel and his act found fewer takers by 1962. After a while, even the fish came to know your shtick well enough to call it bullshit. It was time to take that act on the road, away from New York City. Philly seemed as promising a stage as any. No matter where the scent of fish happened to lead, Schlegel followed it the way a coyote follows the trail of a dying animal. From Queens to Connecticut, from Paramus to Pennsylvania, no destination was too far off if it promised to bring in the cash. Toru Nagai and his Cadillac made sure of that. In his mid-thirties, Toru was older than Schlegel and the boys by nearly twenty years. To a cadre of degenerate gamblers too young to drive but desperate to follow the scent of money wherever it took them, a guy with a car was a precious commodity. And to hunt for fish in a Cadillac, no less? That was a teen gambler’s dream.

  Back then, the closest Schlegel and Harris came to having a car of their own was by stealing one. Harris’s brother had a car, and some nights Harris waited around for him to fall asleep so he could steal his car keys. The only stop he made on his way to the nearest action was to pick up his walking jackpot—Ernie Schlegel. Then the night, and the money it promised, was theirs. All Harris had to do was make it back home by the time his brother had to get up for work, and pray no one had taken his parking spot in the meantime. Somehow, no one ever did.

  On this particular night, Schlegel found his fish in the form of a hotshot down in Philly who said he would bowl anybody who dared to show up at his home alley. Harris did the man the favor of informing him that a fellow by the name of Ernie Schlegel would be quite happy to oblige his offer, but that before agreeing to bowl him he might want to consider the very real possibility that Schlegel would hand him his ass and charge him for it. Harris could talk that way by then. He had just watched the guy challenge his buddy Richie Solomon to $25 a game and bowl him to an even draw after several hours. A bowler of Schlegel’s caliber this was not. If the man could not get the best of Richie Solomon after three hours of trying his damnedest to do so, then he sure as shit would not get the best of Ernie Schlegel.