by Nick Tosches
"It's all right," Blinky said. "Nothin' we can do about it now."
Everybody knew Blinky. Everybody liked Blinky.
But, contrary to popular belief, fixed fights were rare. When one had a piece of both fighters, it mattered little who won. Truman Gibson told me that of perhaps a thousand fights promoted by the IBC, he knew of only three that were fixed.
In a world of guys that have been around, Gibson has been around longer than any of them. Robust and serene and sharp, and still practicing law well into his eighties, he had about him the aura of a man who has captured a wisp of wisdom from every breath, bitter and beautiful alike: and there was a gleam in his eyes as we sat in a Chinese restaurant in the On Leong section of Chicago and he recalled those fixes.
The biggest of them was the dive Archie Moore took in his 1955 New York title bout with Rocky Marciano. It was Marciano's last fight, and the fix ensured that Marciano would retire undefeated. After the fight, Gibson went with Moore's manager, Jack Kearns, to see Moore in San Diego. "Archie was happy and took us to his offices, beautifully appointed. Then he said, 'I want you to meet my partners.' Brought two guys in, and Jack Kearns looked over and said, 'You dirty son of a bitch, why didn't you tell me?' The minute he saw those guys he knew what had happened."
The gleam became a beam as he told me of another fix. "The lamb was killing the butcher in this case. Frank Carbo was the victim because the guy he was betting on took a dive. Red Top Davis was the fighter. They took him out, they wanted to throw him in the Hudson River, they did everything to him." (Ted "Red Top" Davis was a New York lightweight also known as Murray "Sugar" Cain.)
As for the third fix, I doubt if history and the lawyers that stand between these words and my paycheck are ready for that one.
Blinky Palermo was Carbo's lieutenant, but there were other friends through whom Carbo controlled other fighters. One of these fighters was Virgil Akins, the welterweight champion of 1958.
Akins and Liston came up together in St. Louis. "I first met Sonny up at Johnny Tocco's gym, on the corner of Blair and Cass. Johnny had a lounge downstairs and the gym was upstairs. There wasn't no name on it. A lot of people didn't know the gym was up there." It was right after Sonny had got out of prison. One of his first victims had been a Tocco, now one of his first trainers was another. "It was like he was mad at the world," Akins said. "There wasn't a smile on his face." He remembered Sonny training under Tony Anderson. "He couldn't hardly get sparring partners. It wasn't no play thing. It was a war. Nobody wanted to fool with him." Tony would try to cajole other fighters into sparring with Sonny, saying that if they asked him to take it easy on them, he would. "And they'd say, 'No, you can't talk to Sonny'"
Through friends of Carbo, Akins came to be managed jointly by Eddie Yawitz of St. Louis and Bernard Glickman of Chicago.
Yawitz was a well to do pharmacist in St. Louis. Monroe Harrison claimed that it was in Eddie Yawitz's drugstore, in February 1955, that he sold Yawitz his interest in Liston for six hundred dollars. According to Frank Mitchell, it was he who bought out Harrison's share and sold it in turn to Yawitz.
Frank Mitchell was a man whose past was a well kept secret. When he died at the age of sixty five, in 1970, obituaries spoke of him reverently: as a publisher whose paper, the Argus, had "won wide recognition for its reporting and interpretation of racial problems; a charitable and civic minded man who served the Annie Malone Children's Home and the American Cancer Society; a man "active in police - community work." Nothing was said of a well hidden criminal record that included eighteen arrests for gambling, seduction, and counterfeiting.
From the government transcripts of Mitchell's testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly:
"Did you at one time manage a heavyweight contender named Charles 'Sonny' Liston?"
"I take the fifth amendment."
"Were you the on the record manager of Liston from 1952 until 1958?"
"I decline to answer."
"Do you know a person named John Vitale?"
"I decline to answer."
"During this period while you were the on the record manager, is it a fact that this person, John Vitale, was the undercover manager of boxer Sonny Liston?"
"I decline to answer."
"You are directed to answer."
"I take the fifth amendment."
"During the period from 1952 until 1958, did you give this man, John Vitale, the proceeds from Liston's purses?"
"I decline to answer that question."
"In March of 1958, did you go to Chicago with John Vitale and meet with a man known as Frank 'Blinky' Palermo?"
"I take the fifth amendment."
With a man named Anthony "Tony G" Giordano, who was not well liked, John Joseph Vitale, who was, ran what there was of the Mob in St. Louis. Though it was popularly believed that Giordano was the boss, law enforcement officials suspected that the crude and boorish Giordano was merely the bulldog in Vitale's yard.
The cops in St. Louis divided the Italian population into two groups: the predominantly Sicilian "downtown dagos," from among whom emerged the majority of the city's rough cut Italian mobsters, and the predominantly non-Sicilian "Hill dagos." Pleasant, middle class people, whose neighborhood, in the southwestern part of town, was one of safe streets and old country gentility. According to one St. Louis police detective, residents of the Hill were "scared to death of the people downtown."
The borders of the downtown dago neighborhood were Sixth and Ninth Streets, Franklin and Cass Avenues. It was a part of the Fourth Ward, like the black neighborhood, Sonny's neighborhood, that adjoined it; and the hub of the mobsters' action lay in the pocket between Seventh and O'Fallon. The old neighborhoods were identified by their local churches; and for the downtown dagos their neighborhood was the neighborhood of Our Lady Help of Christians.
Born on May 17, 1909, to those downtown streets that were shared by the Mob and the Virgin Mary, John J. Vitale had a criminal record that stretched back to 1927. Ranging from suspected larceny and armed robbery to gambling, it included two busts for suspicion of murder, and three narcotics raps, the latter two of which, in 1941 and 1943, were incurred in prison, at Texarkana and Leavenworth, while he was serving his sentence for the first, in 1940. He was ostensibly in the jukebox, pinball, and vending machine business; and if the St. Louis Mob had ever been given a name, it should have been the Anthony Novelty Co., as Giordano and all of Vitale's lieutenants were members of that company.
St. Louis was never a Mob stronghold, but more of an outpost, a listening post, for Chicago. What power Vitale and his men had was equalled, if not surpassed, by that of the so called Syrian Mob, the criminal element of the city's considerable Lebanese population, whose presence and pull in ward politics eclipsed that of Vitale and his kind.
From the government transcripts of Vitale's own testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly:
"Is it a fact, Mr. Vitale, that from 1952 until 1958, Frank Mitchell acted as front man for you in the management of Sonny Liston?"
"I stand on the fifth amendment."
"Do you know the present No. 1 heavyweight contender, Charles 'Sonny' Liston?"
"I decline to answer on the grounds that I may tend to incriminate myself."
"You are directed to answer the question."
"Fifth amendment."
"Is it a fact that in 1958 you divided up Sonny Liston with Frank Palermo and Frank Carbo and he is presently managed undercover by you, Frank Palermo, and Frankie Carbo?"
"I decline to answer on the grounds I may tend to incriminate myself."
"Would you care, on the basis of your general knowledge of boxing, to give the subcommittee some of your own thoughts as to how to eliminate underworld racketeering and monopoly in the field of boxing?"
"I take the fifth amendment." [Pause.] "What a question."
Vitale and his men shared the organized labor racket with the Syrian Mob. Local 110, the most important of
the city's labor unions, was controlled by the Syrians in alliance with Vitale's crew.
In1952, not long before Liston was released from prison, Vitale took to feuding with Joe Gribler, the business agent and head of Local 110, and with Gribler's union aide George Meyers. Meyers was shot in the head that spring, Gribler that summer. A Vitale ally in the Syrian community, a thirty one year old South Side gambler named Raymond Sarkis, was appointed to head the union. Vitale, who had been seen entering Gribler's car on the night of the slaying, was arrested on suspicion of murder but never tried. His girlfriend, Millie Allen, was given a job working for Sarkis.
When Sonny was paroled that fall, all his jobs were Local 110 jobs, including three months of summertime labor with Vitale Cement Contractors, Inc. Thanks to Vitale, Sonny Liston held cards with both the cement finishers' and the hod carriers' and building laborers' unions.
Claude E. Lyles, Jr., remembered working with Sonny at Building 101 of the government ordinance plant out on Goodfellow. It was the spring of 1953, toward the end of Sonny's amateur rise. Lyles, then in his mid-twenties, worked in the production scheduling department. Sonny operated a machine that produced cartridges for .50 caliber arms.
"He didn't want to talk to anybody. He was always very, very quiet," Lyles said. "Whenever he went over to eat, he would sit by himself. He didn't want anybody to sit with him."
In the winter of 1953-1954, Sonny was a part of the Local 110 crew that renovated Sportsman's Park, which would become Busch Stadium. One Lebanese co-worker on that job remembered him as "a hard worker" who was "a terrific guy" with a "very good heart."
In the summer of 1954, Liston worked as a laborer at the Union Electric plant down in South County. Two fellow workers who came to know him, Larry Gazall and Terry Lynch, were high school kids who had gotten summer work at the plant. Gazall got his job because he was Lebanese, Lynch got his because he had Lebanese friends and Sonny got the job through Ray Sarkis. Gazall and Lynch, like Sonny, were hod carriers. "We were unloading boxcars of fire brick that they used for the chimney down there," Lynch recalled. "It was hard work, heavy work," Gazall said.
They remembered Sonny fondly. "He was quiet," said Lynch, but it was a quiet that led Lynch to feel "like he was more embarrassed about his being uneducated and things like that." Away from others, he spoke freely with the two teenagers. "He was open with us 'cause we were just kids," said Lynch, who thought that Sonny was, "I don't know, maybe in his twenties, late twenties, something like that."
"He was a real nice guy," Gazall said, and Lynch agreed. "He was really a friendly guy."
It would always be said of Sonny that he liked kids, that they saw the best of him.
"Some days he wouldn't be there," said Terry Lynch, recalling Liston and the summer of the Union Electric job. The belief was that he worked, too, as "a kind of chauffeur, quasi-bodyguard," for Ray Sarkis. "You'd hear stories of what he did," said Lynch, "break people's legs and stuff like that. And these were, to a seventeen year old kid" - Lynch searched for a word - "romantic." It felt good to know him, privileged even, in the blossoming of his legendry as boxer and legbreaker: the toughest of tough guys, a bigger than life figure of unspeakable deeds and unspeakable romance, and a source to them of kindness.
That report from that gas station job in 1950: #1 Unknown Negro, "black chauffeur cap." There was no hat now, just a long black shiny car. He worked for Sarkis for about a year and a half. "He was a good friend, "Sonny said.
David Herleth, the cop who had busted him, recalled running into Liston, prosperous looking and wad flashing - "that sucker had two hundred dollars" -not long after his release from prison:
"I walked into another rib station up on Franklin Avenue, which is now Martin Luther King, and he was sitting there. That's all tore down now. I said, 'Hey, don't I know you?' He says, 'Get out of here, you know me, man. I'm Charles Sonny Liston.' I said, Uh oh. Keep your nose clean.' He didn't."
Sonny's prison trainer, Sam Eveland, recalled that, within six or seven months after Sonny got out of prison, Sam was walking toward a joint called Preacher's when "I seen him driving a Cadillac. He had a big black Cadillac and he was eating a hot dog. I brought him in, it's an all-white tavern, and I said, 'This is gonna be your next heavyweight champ of the world. But at that time I didn't know." The rumor, said Sam, was that "Vitale had got ahold of him" and "gave him a job being a strong man."
Sonny's early trainer William Anderson knew Vitale - "J.V.," as he called him -and he said that "J.V. was really involved deeply with boxing. He had his hand in just about everything." It has been said that Sonny worked as a legbreaker for the union, and Anderson believes this to be true. "He was kind of a heavy man for the union," he said, "him and a man named Big Barney Baker."
Barney Baker. I remembered IBC founder Truman Gibson, that gleam in his eye, saying of Sonny, "Barney Baker was his guy."
Robert Bernard Baker. He liked to tell a story about how he had fought on the U.S. boxing team at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, how he had stood in the ring before Hitler with a Star of David emblazoned on his trunks. Then again, by his own account, he was rejected for army service during World War II "because of the obesity."
Big Barney Baker. Born in New York on the day after Christmas of 1912, he had spent the thirties on the West Side waterfront of Manhattan. The forties found him in Florida, working for Jake and Meyer Lansky at their newly opened Colonial Inn, and then in Washington, D.C., where he drove a produce truck, worked in a warehouse, and where, in 1950, he was elected president of Local 730.
Barney Baker. He had come to Lansky as a wanted man, a fugitive sought in the New York murder case of a man named Hintz. And when the heat followed him to Florida, he headed west to Los Angeles, and then to Las Vegas, where he took a room at the Flamingo, which was not yet officially open, since Bugsy Siegel, whom he had met in Florida, had not yet quite finished building it.
He was, physically, a very big man, well over three hundred pounds, thrice wed, and, according to one union official, "a very gregarious man" and "very much fun." Though Baker was known as a labor organizer, and as "a feared enforcer" and "special assignment expert," Truman Gibson seemed to see him as one of the great mystery figures of our time. "He was ubiquitous," Gibson said. ''Always appearing on the scene. In Detroit, in Washington, in Las Vegas." Gibson first met him at the Morrison Hotel in Chicago, where Baker was running a gift shop. Ubiquitous. The files of the Warren Commission show that he was one of the last people Jack Ruby called before the assassination of John Kennedy. Whoever, whatever, he really was, Barney Baker's secrets died with him, in March 1974.
From his position at Local 730 in Washington, D.C., Baker had risen in the Teamsters to serve both Harold Gibbons and Jimmy Hoffa and according to Gibson, Baker was very close to Paul Dorfman, the power behind the Teamsters. It was Gibbons who moved him to St. Louis in 1952, to straighten out some trouble at a taxicab company owned by Vitale's associate Joe Costello. The membership of Local 688, which Baker had been summoned to deal with, was black.
William Anderson recalled that, in the course of his union work, Liston also did some work for Costello. Sonny and Barney, said Anderson, "were muscle men for the union. And Barney was a great fight fan."
The rematch in which Sonny avenged his sole loss by beating Marty Marshall was a preliminary event in the gala Teamsters Benefit Boxing show at Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis on April 21, - a night of boxing matches organized and overseen by Barney Baker, whose mysterious and mercurial station in life was described as "co-chairman of the Teamsters Boxing committee."
By then, Liston's fights were a part of the grand and arrased scheme of the IBC. This involvement dated at least to his second professional fight, when he beat Ponce de Leon, on September 17, 1953. De Leon was a heavyweight that the IBC had tried to develop several years earlier. Forsaking any hope that he had the makings of a contender, the IBC fed him to Liston for breakfast as a gesture of goodwill.
Barney Baker was in
town for that fight.
Liston, interrogated by Senator Estes Kefauver:
"Do you know John Vitale?"
"Yes; I know him."
"Do you know a person named Barney Baker?"
"Yes; I know him."
"By the way, what does Mr. Baker do for a living?"
"I couldn't say. I'm not - I don't know."
"What does Mr. Vitale do for a living?"
"I wouldn't know either."
"How did you come to meet this fellow Barney Baker?"
"I have a very short memory."
"Do you believe that people like this ought to remain in the sport of boxing, Mr. Liston?"
"Well, I couldn't pass judgment on no one. I haven't been perfect myself."
"Since you left St. Louis in 1958, have you met Mr. Baker?"
"Yes, sir."
"Where did you meet him?"
"Chicago."
Chicago. For Sonny, the road there was not fast enough. St. Louis had become his hell. He was the only real heavyweight contender that ever came out of that town; and instead of treating him like a hero, like something and somebody to be proud of, or at least like a man trying to get by in this world, he was hounded down, reviled, and treated like dirt by all except those few who understood, those few who knew, those few he would never forget. Was that the deal, that some little man beats you when you are too small to beat him back, and then when you can beat them all, they still won't let you be? Shit, it got to where he believed in God but not in man, and even where God was concerned, he slept with one eye open.
Liston's rap sheet from 1953, when he got out of prison, to 1958, when he got out of St. Louis, shows a record of fourteen arrests.
In my journey through the chthonic regions of Sonny Liston's years in St. Louis, the deputy chief of police of that city, Lieutenant Colonel James J. Hackett, was to prove my Virgil and my Drummond. He was a man doing a job, the best he could with the best he had; and he spoke straight, even if at times it did involve shutting off the recorder. He gave me history that could be found in no book, led me to people and places and connections that only he was in a position to lead me.