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

by Gianmarc Manzione

  But mercury plugs and lead sinkers from the local bait and tackle shop ranked among the crudest deceits employed by the more refined practitioners of hustling. Like Avenue M Bowl, Gun Post provided the stage on which many of action bowling’s most inimitable characters performed with subtlety and style.

  Ralph Engan, who then was nearly forty while most other action bowlers were in their teens and twenties, was renowned for his smooth delivery and deadly accuracy. To beat Ralph Engan—the elder statesman of the action bowling scene—was to beat the best. Being known as “the best” was a double-edged sword, however; bragging rights are great, but ultimately they are only as good as the money that comes with your next win. It is awfully hard to win when no one can find the courage to bowl you, and that is why con men like Iggy Russo were on to something. Why blow people away with your skill when you can fool them into thinking you had no skill at all? Engan was no Iggy Russo; he wanted to bowl you man to man and beat you with his best. But he also wanted to make money, and after spending too many nights sitting through hours of action waiting for challengers who never came, even Engan had to use some wiles. Sometimes he headed out to bowling alleys beyond the five boroughs, places where he could be reasonably sure people did not know of him. He would plant his bowling ball among the regular house balls on the ball racks. Then he would feign cluelessness as he fumbled through them while his prospective opponent prepared to wager any amount of money on a match against a bum who owned no ball of his own. Engan always seemed to find exactly the same ball on the rack—his own. And when he did, the match was his before anyone threw a shot.

  Engan, in fact, was the guy who first tutored Ernie Schlegel in the art of the out-and-out hustle. One night Schlegel kept hearing Engan complain about how tired he was, and a chance to seize the largesse that surely would accompany a victory over the great Ralph Engan was one Schlegel could not pass up. Ralph bowled Schlegel all night, telling him how tired he was all along, until Schlegel passed out from exhaustion. Engan won big. It was a lesson Schlegel never forgot.

  But by the mid-1960s, Schlegel himself was dishing out far more lessons than he received. He was no longer the green rookie who scoured Philadelphia for fish. Some even considered him the greatest action bowler they had ever seen. Now in his early twenties, he was bowling every night of the week and making more money in a month than his parents made in a year. He had sharpened his game to the point where he felt ready to take a shot on the PBA Tour. For now, however, he still was catching enough fish to be content with his life as an action bowler. The tour would come, but only when he found himself having to resort to Engan’s antics to get somebody to bowl him. Schlegel did not mind rubbing bourbon behind his ears or faking the gout now and then, but when things got desperate enough for him to pretend he had never seen a bowling ball in his life, well, that was when he would know the time to move on had come. Schlegel considered himself a businessman before he considered himself a bowler. For him, Gun Post was a kind of crooked accountant’s office he would happily occupy as long as the money kept coming in. As the gamblers of Gun Post would learn, Schlegel’s version of a businessman was one who feared nobody and stopped at nothing to protect his cut.

  One night Schlegel had a score to settle with a man named Psycho Dave, who had conned him out of $600 in a game of Gin Rummy. Psycho Dave had trounced Schlegel and his buddy Stevie, only for them to find out later that Psycho Dave had been cheating. So Schlegel took Stevie out looking for Psycho Dave one night. Stevie, a scrappy guy who stood 6’1” and 190 lbs., was the kind of buddy you bring out when you needed to issue non-refusable offers to those who owed you. They found Psycho Dave up in the Bronx at a place called All-Star Lanes. Stevie walked up to Psycho.

  “Where’s my money?” he asked.

  “What money?” Psycho Dave replied.

  Then Stevie round-housed him hard enough to send him flying over a ball return.

  “I am only gonna ask you once,” Stevie told him. “And that was it. Now, where’s my money?”

  Psycho Dave may have been psycho, but there is something about a swift fist to the face that restores sanity. Psycho Dave knew exactly what Stevie was talking about. He proved sane enough to pay up on the spot.

  The kind of company Schlegel kept was the kind that played a little game he liked to call “You hurt me, and they shoot you,” which was a pretty pointed reference to the mobsters who liked to gamble on him. But he had other means of protecting himself against the unsavory elements any sworn gambler had to run with on occasion. Years later, sports writer Herm Weiskopf would document the kind of garb Schlegel donned as a kid to keep the street gangs off his back: “He was fond of dressing in black stovepipe pants, a white silk shirt, an iridescent raincoat and high Roman heels,” Weiskopf wrote. “He also sported a Mohican haircut and carried an umbrella with its tip filed to a point.” What fool would step up to a kid who dressed that way in places where the people were as threatening as the weapons their coats concealed? Only the craziest of the crazy, and that alone made most folks steer clear of him.

  But if they did step up, Schlegel concealed his own assortment of weapons. One night he spotted some talent up at a place on 168th Street and Webster Avenue in the Bronx called Webster Lanes, a twenty-year-old kid out of Long Island named Mike Limongello. “Lemon,” as he was known, already was the king of the Long Island action scene. Nobody beat Lemon out there. Now he was making a name for himself in the five boroughs, where he heard he could make some real money. It would not be long before people uttered Lemon’s name in the same breath as guys like Schlegel, Richie Hornreich, or Johnny Petraglia.

  Lemon rivaled Schlegel’s flare for fashion as much as he rivaled his ability. At a ceremony in which he accepted the New York Metropolitan Bowler of the Year award in 1965, he sported a ducktail hairdo slathered in Pomade, a sharp, ivory-white suit with a flowered lapel, and a black bowtie that sparkled in the flash of reporters’ cameras. He could just as easily have been standing in for Frank Sinatra at a Rat Pack gig as accepting a bowling award. His remarkably huge, green eyes earned him the nickname “Banjo Eyes” on the action scene; he always had the look of a doe staring directly into the headlights of an oncoming truck.

  Schlegel’s concern was money, not fashion, and he saw plenty of it in this brash bulldog from the Island who almost never missed the pocket and took on all comers for any amount of money, anywhere, anytime. One guy who could have told Schlegel about Lemon was Richie Hornreich, who already had clashed with Lemon at a Long Island house called Garden City Bowl. Hornreich was bowling league there one night when in walked Lemon and his crew, looking for action. The Horn gladly supplied it, but quickly fell behind as Lemon crushed him 220-170 in the first game, then did it again in the second. Then Hornreich got an idea.

  “Mikey, I got nothing on this pair,” he said. “If you want to keep bowling, we need to move to a different pair.”

  So move to a different pair of lanes they did, and the action exploded. Lemon started losing shooting 250s to The Horn’s 260s. But the action would not last for long that night. Just as Hornreich thought he was on his way to cleaning Lemon out, his thumb ripped open and began gushing blood. It was time for another idea. The Horn always had another idea, especially when it came to money.

  “Mikey, I can’t bowl, but I’m not gonna quit on ya,” Hornreich said. “Bet whatever you want and I will bowl one last game, blood and all.”

  Just in case Lemon thought he was kidding, Hornreich put down $2,500. Then he threw the first ten strikes in a row. On the second ball in the tenth frame, he left a 10 pin. Lemon had started the game with a spare and then strung the next nine consecutive strikes. Hornreich finished with a 279, easily enough to beat most players. Most players, that is, with the exception of Mike Limongello. Lemon needed at least the first two strikes in the 10th frame to win. He did one better: He blasted three perfect strikes, and the money was his.

  That was the thing about Lemon; he was more action bowler than hustl
er. All he knew how to do was bowl his best every time he hit the lanes. And Lemon’s best almost always was better than anyone else’s. Schlegel, on the other hand, was a hustler. He only bowled well enough to win and rarely more than that. That was how the smart hustlers preserved the air of vulnerability they needed to attract challengers. Here was the goldmine Schlegel had been dreaming about—a doubles partner he could count on to blast the pocket all night long while Schlegel did just enough to keep them ahead. Why bother bowling better than 180 or 190 when the guy you were bowling with could bowl 250s and 260s just as effortlessly? Schlegel knew where to take his new partner in business: Gun Post Lanes.

  “If you really want some action,” Schlegel told Lemon, “come to Gun Post Lanes in the Bronx. Bring anybody you want, and bring lots of money, because there will be people there from all over the place and you can get any match you want.”

  The best way for Schlegel to size up Lemon’s talent was first to bowl the man himself. So Schlegel teamed up with a good bowler from the Bronx named Johnny Masarro, who once bowled for the New York Gladiators team in the short-lived National Bowling League. Unlike the Professional Bowlers Association, which focused on a singles-competition concept fashioned after professional golf, the NBL focused on team competition inspired by professional leagues in other sports such as football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. NBL players would earn annual salaries just like pros in any pro sports league.

  Bowling arenas were constructed as homes for some NBL teams. Texas oilman J. Curtis Sanford, the visionary behind the establishment of college football’s Cotton Bowl in 1937, pumped $3 million into the construction of the Bronco Bowl to house his NBL team, the Dallas Broncos. With 72 lanes, the establishment was the largest bowling alley in the country at the time. Another arena called Thunder Bowl—home of the Detroit Thunderbirds—went up in Allen Park, Michigan, with stadium-style seating for spectators capable of holding thousands of fans. Similarly ambitious digs went up in Bloomington, Minnesota, and Forth Worth to house the Twin Cities Skippers and the Fort Worth Panthers respectively. Elsewhere, famed theaters such as the Midland in Kansas City and the Paramount in Omaha were transformed into bowling arenas. Those venues became home to the Kansas City Stars and the Omaha Packers. Masarro’s New York Gladiators sought to make their home atop Grand Central Station, “where it had hoped to perch like a city pigeon,” as one 1961 Sports Illustrated story about the NBL’s inception put it. Instead, in a turn of events that foreshadowed the ill-fated league’s demise, they ended up 20 miles away at a stadium in Totowa, New Jersey. Other NBL teams included the San Antonio Cavaliers as well as California’s Fresno Bombers and the Los Angeles Toros.

  The NBL barely lasted through its first season, from October, 1961 through July, 1962, when then-commissioner Ed Tobolowski officially declared the league defunct. The NBL failed to land a much hoped-for television contract and never lured the likes of Dick Weber or Don Carter—then the rock stars of the sport—away from the PBA and other, more lucrative endorsements and commitments. Those names might have helped the NBL garner the star power it sorely needed to succeed. Weber and Carter made as much money bowling as pro athletes made in any other sport in those days, including marquee stars such as baseball’s Yogi Berra, Stan Musial or Mickey Mantle. Rumors swirled about bribes offered by NBL executives, one of whom allegedly tried to propitiate Don Carter by offering him a pig farm. Carter must not have cared much for pigs; he never did bowl in the NBL.

  Masarro’s participation in the NBL meant he learned as much about great bowling as he learned about great characters even before he descended into New York City’s action bowling underworld. The NBL may have failed to attract Weber and Carter, but it still boasted competitors who were as dazzling in their skill as they were in personality—future Hall of Famers such as Carmen Salvino, Steve Nagy, Billy Golembiewski, Joe Joseph, Therm Gibson, Ed Lubanski and others. None of them were as inimitable as “Buzz” Fazio out of Akron, Ohio—Buzz being short for the name given him by his Sicilian parents, Basilino. Fazio converted the nearly impossible 7-10 split not once, but twice, on his way to winning the prestigious Masters tournament in 1955. He defeated two tumors, survived a car wreck that cost him his spleen and nearly a leg, and a barber who accidentally sliced his bowling thumb down to the bare bone while wiping off a shaving blade in his lap one day. (Fazio somehow finished the final stretch of the renowned All-Star tournament anyway.) Fazio’s antics included leaping to click his heels together in mid-air after throwing a great shot and crashing down to his hands and knees at the foul line to wish his ball where he needed it to go. Fazio fell so in love with bowling as a 16-year-old kid in Akron that he would slip down the coal chute of a place called Butchel’s Recreation before dawn, feel around in the dark of the building’s cellar to find his way into the place, then set up some pins for himself and bowl alone before his friends arrived.

  After banging heads with guys like Fazio in the NBL, no amount of skill or bluster was going to rattle Masarro in a crack-of-dawn doubles match at Gun Post Lanes in the Bronx, and Schlegel knew it. Lemon bowled with a guy named Phil Lamenzo, and the match was on. Lamenzo was a decent bowler, but a lot of guys were decent bowlers until their wallets told them otherwise. Lemon liked to play a particular part of the lane out in Long Island—the third arrow, closer to the pocket, where his accuracy served him well with a straight shot up the 15th board and into the pocket. Out in the Bronx, though, Lemon was learning the hard way that the inside shot he liked out on the Island didn’t play so well in New York City. There are many reasons why the lane conditions might be different in one part of town versus another. Sometimes the lane surface was older than in other bowling alleys; over time, the wear of many games and harsh weather—the stultifying humidity and heat of a New York City summer, or the brutal cold snaps and blizzards in the winter months—would cause grooves, warps, or other idiosyncrasies. Or the lanes at some bowling centers might have topographical quirks—subtle grooves, slopes or humps in the lane perceptible only to the most observant eye. And even then, you really had to know what you were looking for. Sometimes the ball’s reaction as it proceeded down the lane would tell the story. If no one could get their bowling ball to hook on one lane, and everyone always had trouble throwing it straight on another, no matter what time of day or how much oil had been put down, that could say as much about the composition of the lane as it might about a given bowler’s ability. A slight downward slope in the lane, however imperceptible, would increase the speed of the ball which had the same effect as throwing the ball too hard; the ball is less likely to hook as much as a bowler would like it to. The harder a bowler throws the ball, the farther the ball will skid down the lane before it gets into a roll and then, finally, hooks back toward the pocket—or “grabs” the lane, as some bowlers say. Just as a downward slope in a lane’s topography causes the ball to accelerate and therefore hook less than desired, an incline in a lane’s topography, however slight, slows down the bowling ball, which may cause the ball to get into a roll sooner than the bowler would like and therefore hook too much.

  Schlegel’s understanding of these variables was one of the things that made him great. He memorized the contours and idiosyncrasies of every lane he bowled on throughout the five boroughs. He knew every warped board, every topographical quirk, every blemish and bend. Because he bowled in a different bowling alley every night of the week, he accumulated an immense store of knowledge that he used to his advantage.

  Action bowlers commonly insisted on bowling on a specific pair of lanes if they were going to agree to a match; if the opponent refused, the match was off. If he agreed, he soon would learn why his adversary wanted to bowl on that particular pair of lanes—because he knew those lanes better than anyone in the house. Sometimes, though, a bowler who agreed to bowl on another player’s favorite pair and beat him could end up winning a lot of money, because a bowler who thinks he cannot be beaten on a particular pair of lanes is a bowler who is more prone to be
tting like a fool. Schlegel knew which pair he loved in every bowling alley he entered, and he made sure to bowl only on pairs that gave him an upper hand. That is an advantage gamblers did not have at the racetrack or in a game of cards. You don’t get to decide if it’s going to rain the day of a horse race and affect the outcome by muddying the track, just as you don’t get to decide when you will get a royal flush—unless, of course, you’re the Iggy Russo of poker. But action bowlers often did get to decide what pair of lanes they would agree to bowl on for money, which also was to decide implicitly the lane conditions on which the match would commence. That is an advantage any gambler gladly would take.

  Sometimes these idiosyncrasies were manufactured by con men who deliberately manipulated the lanes to their advantage. In the 1950s, when lane surfaces were coated with lacquer, some bowlers would place a horse hair on the seventeenth board—the board leading directly into the pocket—and paste it to the lane’s surface with a coating of lacquer. If you threw the ball straight and weak enough, it would catch that horse hair and be guided directly into the pocket for a strike. Such schemers also sometimes manipulated the approaches as well as the lanes. If a bowler noticed his opponent’s sliding foot landed on the eleventh board, for instance, he would slide hard on the eleventh board with the rubber heel of his sliding shoe, leaving a streak on the approach that would cause his opponent to stick. When a bowler would stick once, it would be in his head for the rest of the match. Take out a bowler’s footwork and you take out his entire game.