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

by Gianmarc Manzione

  By age sixteen, Richie got invited to the World Invitational, one of the most prestigious bowling tournaments on the planet in his day and an event dominated by the biggest stars in the sport at the time—older and significantly more experienced guys like Don Carter, Dick Weber, and Carmen Salvino. But Richie did one better than merely earn an invitation: He advanced to the finals.

  Clear as Richie’s head may have been, his need for gambling funds bordered on a crack addict’s need for a fix. Like an undisciplined blackjack player, he did not always know when to call it quits. One night, he was bowling Ernie Schlegel at a place up in White Plains, less than an hour north of New York City. For once, Richie was losing, and he was losing big. He kept trying to nudge Schlegel to raise his bet. In action bowling, that nudging could have included anything from impugning your manhood to slandering your mother. But Schlegel would not budge. He had learned his lesson in Philadelphia. So Richie pulled out a gun.

  “What the fuck is that going to prove?” Schlegel said. “That I’m going to raise my bet so I can take all of your money?”

  Richie, finally, called it quits.

  Other times, Schlegel was not so lucky. One night Schlegel bowled Richie at a place called Ridgewood Lanes in Brooklyn with an Everest of cash piled on the score table. Richie needed at least a spare on his first shot in the tenth frame to make the money his. But on his first shot, he left the nearly impossible 7-10 split. The 7 pin is off to the farthest left-hand corner of the pin deck, while the 10 pin is off to the farthest right-hand corner. The only way to convert the split, really, is to throw the ball as hard as you can at one of the pins and hope it bangs off the sideboard or out of the pit. Then you have to hope it knocks over the other pin. Schlegel, figuring he had the game won after he saw Richie leave the dreaded 7-10, began picking up his money and counting it. Then Richie blasted the 10 pin out of the pit and watched it tomahawk the 7 pin to convert the split. Schlegel lost.

  Schlegel loved seeing guys like Richie walk in after a night of big wins at the horse track because he came with loaded pockets and an unthinking willingness to throw all that money down on a match. Making money was not the point for guys like Richie. The point was making enough money to place the kind of bets that made grown men quiver. Schlegel knew that Richie was one of a few action bowlers who could beat him. He also knew that Richie may have been the better bowler some nights, but he was never the smarter bowler. Schlegel was a hustler, the kind of gambler who only bowled when he knew he had the upper hand. He knew when to bet and when to quit. He knew what amount of money to wager in a given situation and why. He knew numbers and scenarios the way a horse-race handicapper knows the names and shortcomings of jockeys. He knew when to bowl his best and when to bowl just good enough to win—just good enough, that is, to keep the other guy thinking he might have a chance if he kept trying. Richie had talent, but his thirst for gambling would always give Schlegel the upper hand.

  Like those wise guys who showed up at Avenue M Bowl to seize the largesse that came with beating Mac and Stoop at their home house, sometimes Schlegel could not pass up the chance to go home with Richie’s pony winnings. Some nights it worked; other times, not so much. That is how it went when you bowled Richie Hornreich. Richie was never interested in the nuances of hustling; he was interested in bowling his best at all times, no matter the opponent or the situation. If you were good enough, Richie thought, then place your bet and take your shot. For a bowler of Schlegel’s caliber, it was always worth a shot—especially when Richie came back grinning from the horse track.

  Looking at the other “team” that fateful night, the opportunity to bowl in a place where no one had any clue of his talent, and to partner with one of the greatest action bowlers in the world in the meantime, proved too tempting for McGrath to resist. He took Johnny up on the offer, and off to Avenue M Bowl they went. The thought would soon occur to them that it might be the last trip they would make in this world.

  That night, an Avenue M regular challenged Richie to a singles match, and Richie promptly accepted. A loan shark got wind of the match and figured he would bet on bowling the way he bet on the ponies: Why put your money on the favorite when you can put it on the underdog and count on an upset? Several hundred dollars down into the match, the loan shark found, like so many before him, that he had bed against a guy who did not lose. Hornreich’s opponent kept at it for a while but eventually called it quits. The Horn was just too good. And that was when the loan shark let the gun in his waistband help everyone understand how he felt about that.

  “What d’ya mean, ya quit?” the shark said before taking a bowling ball in his hands, standing before the front doors of the place, and gently suggesting that the action continue.

  “Nobody leaves this building until that guy bowls one more game,” he said, the bowling ball clutched in one hand by his side.

  “Take it easy, take it easy,” someone from the loan shark’s posse advised.

  Those were the evening’s final words of reason. The shark dropped the ball and raised a gun.

  McGrath, seated within terrifying proximity to the shark and his gun, began slinking away, seat by seat, until he reached the other end of the bowling alley and tried to figure out a way to climb inside the wall. All those rumors Johnny told him were not true about Brooklyn had turned out to be truer than he had imagined. This would be one of those nights when rumor and reality got a little too cozy with one another. Hopefully, it would also be a night McGrath would live to tell about. Right now, he was not so sure.

  The kids bowled another game, all right—a couple of terrified 120s riddled with open frames as they attempted to master the underappreciated skill of bowling while simultaneously pissing themselves.

  “Ya little prick,” Black Sam’s bodyguard told the shark, shoving the mouth of a gun in the back of his head. “For what you did to those kids, I should take that gun and shove it up your ass.”

  The bodyguard turned to Black Sam and asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Just give me the piece,” Black Sam advised before looking up at the shark and taking his gun. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

  “You said we were gonna be safe,” McGrath squeaked on the way home from the back of Black Sam’s Cadillac. “I will never come back here again.”

  Black Sam turned to McGrath, his bodyguard behind the wheel.

  “If you open your mouth again, I’ll leave you out in the street right here and you’ll really see what it’s like!”

  It was four A.M. in a part of town where a west-coast kid like Mike McGrath might have looked like food to the locals. He shut his mouth, a precocious act of wisdom to which he probably owed his life.

  Sadly, that sort of wisdom might have helped preserve the life of a local tough guy known as Mattie. Mattie lacked as much in wisdom as he possessed in brawn, and this flaw in his character soon spelled the demise of the action at Avenue M. Mattie ran with a bike gang out of Coney Island that had a reputation for robbery and the guns and fists they used to carry it out. People knew him as the type of guy who could slap your back and laugh one minute and crush your face with a single blow the next. So when he broke in on a card game at Al Rosa’s apartment one night with a mask and a shotgun looking to clean the place out, nobody uttered a word of protest, even those who knew it was him. The mask could conceal Mattie’s face, but not his voice. He made everyone strip to their bare asses. Then he took their clothes and their money and ran.

  But Mattie never did his due diligence about who he came after, and by the end of 1963, he crossed the kind of guy you did not run from: a member of the Gallo gang. Mattie, strung out on drugs and booze, thought it would be a good idea to make fun of Gallo while the gangster had a drink at a local bar. What a big mouth on this guy, Gallo thought. Gallo was the kind of guy who knew how to take care of people with big mouths. One night two Cadillacs pulled up to the bowling alley. Four guys in suits got out and went looking for Mattie. They found him, of course, in the
lounge upstairs. They asked him to step outside. It was the kind of question that Mattie always eagerly answered in the affirmative to ensure everyone understood he feared no one. It was the last question he would answer in his life. The four gangsters took Mattie out into the street and each fired one bullet into his mouth. This is what we do with guys who have big mouths, their action seemed to say.

  The cops heard that message as loudly as anyone and circled the premises for weeks. Not surprisingly, the proximity to police officers made underage gamblers uneasy, and soon the gambling den that originated with Fish Face and his bait, Mac and Stoop, returned to the days of hushed nights and slow business. As would be the case with many bowling alleys that became hotbeds of action bowling, the Mattie incident ensured that the action at Avenue M Bowl died just as it seemed to have reached its zenith. The circus that was action bowling needed a new home. It would be no time at all before it found one.

  3

  CENTRAL

  The circus moved to a place where even the street names had guns in them. Gun Post Lanes was on East Gun Hill Road in the Bronx. A huge expanse of French windows flanked the front doors, making it impossible to conceal the debauchery within. This architectural quirk would soon become the source of yet another upheaval in the action bowling scene. Gun Post was a two-story bowling alley with forty-eight lanes and a manager everybody called “Skee,” a guy who possessed the same acumen for promotion that made Fish Face a genius. Skee had come up with a game he called “Boomerang” in which bowlers would toss some money into a pot, throw one frame on each of twelve lanes, and the top two or three bowlers would divide the cash. Then they would return to the first pair of lanes and do it again. As entries went up, so did the money. Soon, the big boys started coming around. Saturday nights at Gun Post saw action on every pair of lanes, upstairs and down, beginning at 1 A.M. and persisting through dawn. The carpets gave off a reek of gangsters’ cigars as gamblers penciled their debts into the score table from one end of the alley to the other, every lane crowded with a shouting rush of gamblers looking to get their bets in.

  The craps games that had flourished around the lockers at Avenue M now found their home in the men’s restroom at Gun Post. Gamblers who came to the party a bit late and found the men’s room filled to capacity with craps players took the action to the ladies’ room instead. So acute was their addiction to gambling, in fact, that one bowler known as “Psycho Dave” once arrived directly from a wedding and bowled in his tux. Another bowler in his early twenties, Mike Ginsberg, was surprised when his parents appeared just after dawn, imploring him to leave because they had a family road trip to get on with. Ginsberg refused. So his father muttered something about the bums he kept for company, then went back out to the car, dumped Ginsberg’s clothes into the street, and left him behind.

  The whole cast of characters the cops scared away from Avenue M made Gun Post their new haunt. Iggy Russo with his lead-filled bowling pins and his clown act. The Kangaroo and The Leaper. Freddy the Ox. But Gun Post saw the emergence of new names, too, such as One Finger Benny, who could bowl 180 using just one finger in a lighter bowling ball—eight pounds—and usually made money doing it; Ira “The Whale” Katz, as famous for his girth as Freddy The Ox; or Bobby Pancakes who, rumor had it, was afflicted with an unending appetite for pancakes. Others wore their jobs like nametags. There was Mike the Cab Driver, Tony the Milkman, Morris the Mailman, or Bill “Pepsi” Vanacore, who worked for the Pepsi-Cola company.

  The names may have sounded funny to some people, but few would dare laugh, especially not a bowler known as “Goldfinger,” who earned his Bond villain-esque name in a way Bond himself would have relished. Goldfinger got his nickname because of the bowling ball he used. Brunswick, one of the main manufacturers of bowling balls, was making a series of balls called “Crown Jewels.” One, called the “Gold Crown Jewel,” was flecked with flakes of gold. Some thought it was real gold, while others insisted the flecks were nothing more than sequins or glittery, plastic specks. That was Goldfinger’s ball of choice, and he made enough money with it to justify the extravagance. Unlike most action bowlers, who were natives of New York City or New England, Goldfinger actually lived in Florida. So talented a hustler was Goldfinger that he made enough to hustle for a few days throughout the five boroughs and then buy himself a plane ticket back to Florida. Then he would board a plane a few weeks later and head up to New York to do it again.

  Goldfinger was so good, in fact, that even Ernie Schlegel learned a few tips from the man. One night, Schlegel was bowling Bill Daley, who was as renowned for his bowling ability as he was for his cunning as a gambler. Daley drubbed Schlegel for the first three games. Schlegel’s backers started getting worried. Then Schlegel remembered something. He had heard that Goldfinger had beaten Daley at this same bowling alley weeks earlier, and he knew also that the only line Goldfinger could play on the lane with any success was the 10 board or the second arrow, a portion of the lane known to bowlers colloquially as “the track.” That part of the lane became known as “the track” because it is a part of the lane most right-handed bowlers commonly play. Consequently, the track becomes worn down over time, causing the oil there to dry up or become depleted more quickly than on any other part of the lane. Just as a guy with a snow shovel digs a path from the front door of his house out to the street in a winter storm, a bowling ball carves a path through the oil on the lane that provides a reliable avenue to the pocket. Ridges of oil to the left and right of the track essentially cradle the ball and guide it toward the pocket as it proceeds down the lane. Bowlers who speak of “playing the track” mean they are taking advantage of this quirk in the lane conditions. The track can enable a capable bowler to strike at will for hours on end.

  Unlike Goldfinger, Daley was playing the extreme outside portion of the lane to the right of the 5 board, a strategy known in bowling as “playing the gutter.” He was drubbing Schlegel from out there. Schlegel decided to move in to the 10 board and play the the track like Goldfinger had. It worked; he beat Daley seven games in a row. He beat Daley so soundly, in fact, that the shylock loaning Daley money to keep him in the match ended up running out of money himself. In a twist of fate perhaps unprecedented in action bowling history, the shylock, for once, was the one asking for cash. He asked Schlegel if he would spot him some. By then, Schlegel had made enough money. Rather than spot the shylock to continue the match, he took his winnings and headed out to beat the rush-hour traffic.

  As might be expected of a guy with a nickname like “Goldfinger,” however, ultimately he proved to be a bit too cute for his own good. He tried to cheat the kind of guys who cheated for a living—the shylocks and backers who flocked to Gun Post as surely as the action bowlers did. Goldfinger had a reputation for lodging lead in his bowling ball to give it more “side weight.” He did this through a process called “plugging.” It involved drilling a hole in the bowling ball, embedding lead or pouring mercury into the hole, and then topping it off with a liquid that hardened overnight like glue, trapping the lead or mercury inside. According to the crooks and shysters whose income depended on the extent of their mastery over the various measures of deception, side weight turned the ball so sharply toward the headpin that it obliterated the pocket with an authority no ordinary bowling ball could possibly achieve. He made a lot of money this way. Steve Harris, who ran his own pro shop at 4840 Broadway on the corner of Broadway and Academy in upper Manhattan, would buy mercury from the drugstore and use it to “plug” bowling balls. He did the same with lead sinkers he would get from bait and tackle shops, but he insisted it was impossible to control bowling balls after manipulating them. The density of lead or mercury gave the bowling ball more hitting power—the kind of advantage Goldfinger sought. One bowler, Al Sergeant, unknowingly became a beneficiary of this practice. He bowled with a white towel draped over his shoulder and a cigar pinned between two fingers in his left hand while he threw the ball with his right. Sergeant’s ability as a spare shooter
earned him recognition as the “king of the clean game”; he averaged about a 189 throwing his ball straight up the 15th board, rarely missing the pocket and never missing a spare. He threw the ball with so little angle and power, however, that he rarely carried pocket hits for strikes; he left a lot of 8-10 splits, 5-7 splits, 5-10 splits, and 10 pins. One night, a guy named Eddie Fenton, who owned a pro shop on Broadway and Dungan Place in Inwood, removed Sergeant’s ball from his locker, took it to his shop, and plugged it with lead. Sergeant, known to be as honest a man as he was accurate a bowler, never would have participated in the practice himself. But the ball he removed from his locker the next day made him a new bowler. Those 8-10 splits he left before now were just 10 pins he converted for spares; those pocket 10 pins he left now were strikes. If Sergeant had any idea what was going on, he never let on.

  Goldfinger hoped to enjoy some of the magic Fenton had bestowed upon Al Sergeant. He had just won four consecutive matches with a loaded ball when a group of gangsters betting on his opponent noticed the same peculiarity in the movement of his bowling ball. Unfortunately for Goldfinger, the gangsters were not interested in giving him a snappy nickname for the move; they were interested in making him pay for it.

  “He’s throwin’ a loaded ball,” one of the gangsters growled as he pulled his cigar out of his face.

  One of the gangster’s goons took Goldfinger’s ball back to the pro shop to check it out. He weighed the ball and found that it had half an ounce of extra side weight. So they grabbed Goldfinger, laid him on the ground, held his bowling ball high over their heads, and smashed it down on his bowling hand. The blow blasted the bones in Goldfinger’s hand into so many little pieces they could have been used as mulch. Everybody in the action bowling scene got the message: it may help to load your bowling ball, but having your hand pounded to a pulp by gangsters did not sound like fun. His next trip back to Florida would be the last time he headed back home after a night of action up north; he never bowled again.