by Nick Tosches
"Let me give it to you this way," Foneda said. "There was no fighter living that could put on a boxing glove and stand up against Sonny Liston." That, to Foneda, was the plain and simple truth. "Nobody," he said, "could whip Sonny Liston."
Foneda's words should be borne in mind when regarding the loss to Marshall, or the lackluster Welch fight. They should be borne in mind always.
As should money. Those seven dollars and seventy cents taken from a man beaten down and dragged into an alley. One roll of pennies, one roll of nickels, twenty four loose nickels, ten dimes, and twelve quarters. That two yard price, that taste of undreamt fortune, on the night of that first professional fight. In yellow shirt and bib overalls, in white trunks and leather gloves, the same blow, the same motive.
With that first two hundred dollar payday, Sonny had entered a world in which money was the kind and loving god of the ruling few and the predestining subjugator of the many. At best, it was a matter of "workin' on halves," as E.B. Ward said of sharecropping. "If you had ten bales of cotton, the white man got five." It was not right. It was not wrong. It was simply and supremely the way it was.
The first rematch with Marty Marshall was held in St. Louis on April 21, 1955. Liston sent Marshall reeling to the canvas four times, and the fight ended as a six round technical knockout for Liston. Marshall remained forever in awe of Sonny's power. "He hit me like no man should be hit." he told the reporter George Puscas of the Detroit Free Press. "He's tough. That's one thing nobody can deny about that man. He hurts when he breathes on you." Liston's only loss, to Marshall, may have been a grievous error that Liston was able to wave away. But in the fourth round of the second Liston Marshall fight. Marshall did something to Liston that was so unthinkable, so impossible, that Liston, doing his best to erase it from history, denied that it ever happened: Marshall knocked him down.
"I’m sorry to this day about that," said Marshall. "Man, am I sorry. He hit me after that like - nobody should be hit like that. I think about it now and I hurt. He came out after me in the fifth round. He hit me with a right hand on my ear. It didn't knock me out and it didn't knock me down, but it hurt so much I just had to go down anyway. The next round, he knocked me down three times." Marshall recalled. "He hit me in the stomach with a left hand in the sixth. That wasn't a knockdown, either. It couldn't be: I was paralyzed. I just couldn't move. I couldn't move enough to fall down." Later that round, said Marshall. Liston "knocked me down three times, and that was it."
For all of that, Sonny would never admit to his having been momentarily felled while off guard. "I just don't know why he wouldn't remember that," Marshall would say. "Everybody remembers. It was in the papers."
But Sonny didn't read the papers. Later, in 1956, when the time came for their third and final match, Marshall knew that he never again in his life wanted a beating such as Liston had given him: and if losing was inevitable, he wanted at least to avoid the new dimensions in pain to which Liston had delivered him: "I just knew I couldn't let him touch me."
The Marshall TKO of April 1955 was the first of five consecutive knockouts in an ever widening territory. Sonny knocked out Emil Brtko in Brtko's hometown of Pittsburgh on May 5. He knocked out Calvin Butler in St. Louis on May 25. It was the Cleveland fighter's third defeat, the others having been delivered by Marty Marshall and Emil Brtko. Sonny knocked out the Chicago fighter Johnny Gray in Indianapolis on September 13. Two months later, on December 13, in the first professional fight held in East St. Louis in a quarter of a century, he knocked out Larry Watson, an Omaha fighter who had beaten Wes Bascom, the only conqueror of John Summerlin prior to Liston.
Frank Mitchell, the publisher of the black weekly Argus, used the newspaper to champion his prodigy. The first publicity photo of Liston - poised in the corner of the ring, gloved fists raised to the breast, white T shirt, white trunks -appeared in the Argus of December 9, 1955, in a story announcing the upcoming Watson fight. The next week's issue, under the headline "Liston Wins Number 13," celebrated the "flashing left and right combination" witnessed by "a crowd of 780." The publicity picture ran again in the Argus two weeks later, above an item noting Liston's "climb toward the heavyweight title row." In concluding, Mitchell's Argus declared that Liston "may be a champ in a very short time."
By the time Liston was fighting out of town. Frank Mitchell was his sole manager of record.
"I was committed to paying thirty five dollars a week for Sonny's support," Monroe Harrison would later say, "and my wife got sick and I just couldn't afford it. I had to turn my share of the contract over to Mitchell." Harrison spoke these words at a time when Liston was the heavyweight champion of the world and he himself still a school custodian. "Let's face it," he added, "a poor. colored trainer just don't ever wind up with fifty percent of a heavyweight champion's contract."
When Harrison died, Bob Burnes, in eulogizing him, would tell a different tale. "There came a time," Burnes would write, "when Monroe Harrison came into the office on a Tuesday afternoon." Harrison's lugubrious demeanor "surprised me because I knew that Sonny had won the night before in Chicago, but that's all I knew."
"They took Sonny from me," Harrison said, according to Burnes.
"Who did?"
"Two guys touched me on the shoulder during the sixth round," Burnes claimed Harrison told him. "They said, 'We're taking Sonny,' and I said, 'When?' and they said, 'Right now."'
"That was the beginning," Burnes would write, "of the takeover of Sonny Liston by the mob."
But Liston never fought in Chicago on a Monday night, and he never fought in Chicago at all until 1958, four years after Harrison had sold out his interest in Liston. It was a good tale that Burnes told, and it would become a part of the Liston legend. But it was a lie. Liston's takeover by the Mob had begun long before, right under the unseeing eyes of Burnes and the rest of them, the moment that Liston drew the first breath of that dream of a golden new morning.
Frank Mitchell, pillar of the black community, was, in his management of Liston, a front man for the interests of another gentle man, named John J. Vitale.
In those days, professional boxing was largely the domain of the International Boxing Club, a corporation formed in 1949 by James Dougan Norris, a wealthy forty two year old Chicago sportsman who, with his father, James Norris, and his partner, Arthur Wirtz, already owned the Chicago Stadium, the Detroit Olympia, the St. Louis Arena, and considerable stock in Madison Square Garden.
Though Norris bankrolled it and was its president, the IBC was conceived, midwifed, and masterminded by Truman K. Gibson, Jr., a distinguished Chicago attorney whose involvement in boxing came through his relationship with the heavyweight champion Joe Louis.
Born on an Alabama cotton plantation and raised in the bad parts of Detroit, Louis was the first black champion since Jack Johnson lost to Jess Willard in 1915. Defending his title a record twenty five times in an unprecedented reign that spanned the years 1937 to 1949, Louis, described by one writer as a fighter "with murder in his heart and thunderbolts in his gloves," was perhaps the only hero that Sonny Liston ever had.
It was during World War II that Gibson and Louis met. Gibson, also a black Southerner, was two years older than Louis. Born in Atlanta in 1912, he attended the University of Chicago, was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1935, and to the bar of the Supreme Court in 1939. He met Louis when, serving as a civilian aide to Secretary of War Stimson, he arranged the fighter's exhibition tour of army bases in Europe and North Africa. Gibson subsequently received a Medal of Merit. Appointed to the Compton Commission for Universal Military Training and the President's Advisory Commission on Morals, Religion, and Education in the Armed Services, he became an instrumental agent in the desegregation of the military, a role he attributed to the Louis tour and his observation that the white soldiers always had the good seats.
Though Gibson had little interest in boxing, the two became friends. After the war, when Louis - who had served four years of his championship in the armed forc
es and who had donated the entire purses of his 1942 title defenses to the Army and Navy Relief Funds - was set upon by the government for back taxes, he turned to Gibson for help.
It was Gibson who set up Joe Louis Enterprises, Inc., to set aright the exploited champion's financial situation. It was Gibson freed Louis from the contractual clutch of Mike Jacobs's 20th Century Sporting Club. It was Gibson who, in early 1949, cut the deal through which Louis's resignation as champion brought the IBC officially into being: the deal through which Norris and Wirtz purchased from Joe Louis Enterprises contracts binding the four leading contenders to the title Louis abdicated, contracts that thus gave the IBC exclusive promotional rights to the heavyweight championship.
Once in control of the heavyweight title - won by Ezzard Charles over Jersey Joe Walcott in the IBC's inaugural presentation - the organization set out to place under contract and deliver to its fold the leading contenders in every principal division. As it succeeded, the IBC of Illinois grew into a network of tentacle entities: the IBC of New York, the IBC of Missouri, the IBC of Michigan, and various other related companies. Norris and Wirtz gained control of the Madison Square Garden Corporation; Norris became its president, Wirtz its vice president and treasurer. Exclusive television contracts were negotiated with NBC for the weekly Friday night fights, with CBS for the Wednesday night fights.
Gibson, who became, with Norris and Wirtz, one of the triumvirate that was the IBC's board of directors, would later flatly tell the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly: "During the period 1950 to 1959, practically all of the championships in the major weight categories were staged by one or the other of our organizations or in conjunction with our television presentations." In 1949, after its auspicious beginning, the IBC faced a bleak future. Beset by the demands and resistance of suspicious and disgruntled managers, picketed and boycotted by the Boxing Guild that represented those managers, it seemed that the IBC's dream of imperium, and the IBC itself, might be short lived. It was then that the board of its directors came to know what wise old timers already knew: in the world of boxing, there was only one true and sovereign power and he lived in New York. Some called him Mr. Gray.
Or, more poetically, The Gray. He had other names. According to newspapers, he had more names than God: Frank Martin, Frankie Tucker, The Man Down South, That Party, That Man, Our Cousin, Our Friend, The Uncle, The Ambassador, and, back in the less politically correct thirties, Jimmie the Wop, Frankie the Wop, and Dago Frank (the latter relinquished by the New York Times for the cuddlier but otherwise unattested Pug). And although his name was commonly believed to be Frank Carbo, his real name was Paul John Carbo, and he was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on August 10, 1904.
Carbo was well mannered, well dressed, and deadly. He spoke few words, and most photographs of him show him warmly smiling - being taken into custody, being charged, being sentenced, entering or leaving court (the verdict, guilty or innocent, seemed not to matter) - warmly, kindly smiling. He was, as they say, a gentleman among gentlemen, and, in a phrase less often turned, a killer among killers.
His criminal record went back to 1915, when he was sent to the Catholic Protectory at the age of eleven. His first murder rap came in 1924, when he was indicted for killing a taxi driver in the Bronx. He copped a plea to manslaughter and was sentenced to Sing Sing in 1928. Three years later, in September 1931, while on parole, he was arrested as a fugitive and charged with the Atlantic City killing of the millionaire bootlegger Mickey Duffy. When they seized him, he was holed up at the Cambridge Hotel on West Sixty Eighth Street with an eighteen year old showgirl who went by the name of Vivian Lee. The following account comes from the New York Daily News, September 3, 1931, back in the days when journalists could wield a sentence:
"Trapped in a Manhattan hotel with a pretty red headed night club dancer, Paul Carbo, gang leader and ex-convict, was held last night charged with being the hired assassin who murdered Phil Duffy, Philadelphia and New Jersey beer overlord, in the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City last Saturday."
The teenage showgirl, whose real name, somewhat sinister, was Vivian Malifatti, was charged with Carbo in the murder of Duffy, as were a couple of Philadelphia racket guys named Herman Cohen and Albert Hodkinson.
Carbo was released. His next arrest for homicide came in January 1936, when he was seized again as a fugitive-on Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, as he was about to enter Madison Square Garden - under a standing indictment against him for the April 12, 1933, double murder, at the Elizabeth Cartaret Hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey, of Max Greenberg and Max Hassell, two former associates of Waxey Gordon who were believed to have fallen victim of the bootleg war between the forces of Gordon and Dutch Schultz. The John Doe indicted with Carbo in the double murder was believed to have been a Dutch Schultz henchman, Chink Sherman, whose body had since been discovered buried in quicklime in a farm stable in Monticello, New York. Once again, Carbo was released.
In 1940, Carbo and several others, including Bugsy Siegel and Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, the head of Murder, Inc., were indicted for the Hollywood killing, on the eve of Thanksgiving 1939, of Harry "Big Greenie" Greenburg, a Lepke defector who had fled west. Although another Murder, Inc. turncoat, Al Tannenbaum, ratted out Carbo as the shooter, and a witness identified Carbo as the man she had seen running down a Hollywood street puffing a cigar moments after she heard the shots that killed Greenburg, all charges were dismissed, and he was freed in March 1942.
By 1935, Carbo was the licensed manager of the middleweight champion Eddie "Babe" Risko - changed from Henry Pylkowski - and other boxers. "Fight Manager Is Held," read the headline of the New York Times report of his capture in the Greenburg case. "Prize Fight Manager Held in Gang Killing" ran the headline of the New York Sun's report. By the summer of 1940, when the Times reported his indictment as the "trigger man" in the Greenburg murder, he was "a New York and Seattle fight promoter." By early 1942, when charges in the Greenburg case were dismissed, he was "Frank Carbo, former fight promoter."
In his retirement from the light of day of the world of boxing, Frankie Carbo became the leviathan of its unseen realm. Through his long and occult career, he had helped many men and killed enough to command fear in many more. Few were the managers, promoters, and fighters who were not in his debt, financially and otherwise, and fewer still who did not court his favor, for good things seemed to happen to those whom Carbo's smile graced. And wherever the dew of profit, no matter how meager or how plentiful, gathered, Frankie Carbo, as the guys from the other side used to say, wet his beak.
IBC founder James Norris had known Carbo casually for some years. They were both gamblers who lived the lush life, and, as Norris's partner Truman Gibson expressed it to me, "Jim was enamored of all the mob guys."
Norris himself recalled how the intercession of Frankie Carbo was the vital catalyst in the rise of the IBC. Encountering him in the street one day when Norris was visiting New York, Carbo asked Norris how things were going with his new venture.
"Oh, no good," Norris said. "If it isn't the managers, it's a lack of talent or some other problems nobody could anticipate."
These words, Norris said, were designed to elicit a helpful suggestion, if not a downright offer of help. "As I recall, he grumbled and said he had problems of his own. I asked him if there was anyone he knew we could use that might be helpful."
"No." Carbo told him.
Soon after this, despite this "no," the IBC placed Carbo's girlfriend and future wife. Viola Masters, on the payroll. Though she performed no known function, she received payments of $40,000 over a period of three years. Further considerations, tribute, and propitiations were to ensure a marriage of the interests of the IBC and those of Frank Carbo, a secret partnership in which both would prosper.
"And was that the policy you finally decided upon," the investigating committee would later ask Gibson, "to cooperate with these underworld elements?"
"No, not to cooperate, but to live with them."<
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Carbo's lieutenant was Frank Palermo, a man everybody knew as Blinky.
"Do you know a Frank Palermo?" Sonny Liston would one day be asked by one of those investigating committees.
"No," he would say. "I never heard of Frank Palermo." The inquisitor pressed him, again and again.
"You mean Blinky," Sonny finally said. "Yeah, I know Blinky. Everybody knows him."
Carbo came to know Blinky in the thirties, when The Gray, in addition to his house in Maspeth, Queens, and various Manhattan hotel rooms, also kept a home at 5542 Walnut Street in Blinky's hometown of Philadelphia.
Operating from a sixth-floor office in the Shubert Building on South Broad Street in Philadelphia, Frank "Blinky" Palermo was a licensed manager through whom Carbo shared in the control of many fighters, such as Billy Fox. Blinky was a legend, especially in Philadelphia, where, as a bookmaker, in 1950, he staged a running gun battle through the city streets in pursuit of a numbers runner who pocketed the payoff on a seventy five cent bet. Through the years, Blinky would lose his licenses one after another - in Illinois in 1952, in his native Pennsylvania - as through those years, in his alliance with Carbo, his power as an undercover manager grew greater than that of any licensed manager.
It was by betting on Billy Fox in his 1947 fight against the overwhelming favorite Jake LaMotta that Carbo made one of his greatest scores, as no one but he and Blinky and Jake knew that LaMotta had agreed with Carbo to throw the fight to Fox in exchange for a shot at the middleweight title.
Another fix did not go so well. Early in his career, in December 1942, Sugar Ray Robinson was supposed to carry Al Nettlow for the full ten rounds of a fight in Philly. But in the third round, when Nettlow hit him with a nasty right, Ray lost his temper, hit him with a left hook, and Nettlow was counted out. That night, Ray went to the newsstand where Blinky hung out, and he tried to explain what had happened. "It was an accident," he told Blinky. "I just happened to catch him."