The Devil and Sonny Liston

by Nick Tosches

  When we met, he was counting down time to his retirement. I began to feel that, to Hackett, the mystery of Sonny Liston, with which I came to him, represented a new case, rekindled a sense of street detective excitement that had ebbed. If I am right - and I have never asked him about this - I can only be thankful that I came along when I did.

  I asked Jim to study the rap sheet and, if he could, analyze it as if its subject were without name or identity. He studied it carefully for a few minutes.

  "Most of these are just sausage pinches," he said matter of factly.

  I hesitated a moment, then asked him what a sausage pinch was, "A sausage pinch. You pick the guy up, put him on the steel for twenty hours, feed him a baloney sandwich, send him home."

  Twenty hours on the steel: no way out unless a lawyer showed up with a habeas corpus.

  Liston remembered those nights on the steel. He spoke to the subcommittee man who asked him if he recalled a certain arrest when, under questioning, he had stated that he had been introduced to Ray Sarkis by John Vitale:

  No; I don't. The way it is there - I mean I may have said anything because they just kept grabbing me, picking me up, holding me overnight. If nobody come down to make a squawk to get me out, they keep me; then they finally let me go. Next day, back in. So what am I supposed to do? I said what they wanted me to say, because who wanted to sleep on that cold steel all that night.

  The more he drank, the more he got in trouble. And Sonny drank all right. "Canadian Club," Sam Eveland said. Truman Gibson named the same. "By the bottle," he added. "He loved the 1843 Bourbon," William Anderson said. Lowell Powell, another black cop who befriended Sonny in those days, told me, "He'd drink anything. He would drink white lightning."

  This went against all natural law. Boozers made bad boxers. "The fighters in those days, they didn't drink," Truman said; but Sonny "was a heavy drinker. He might have been an alcoholic." He seems to have had a sense of shame about his drinking, a shame that compelled him to hide it from priests and certain others, who believed him to be a man of temperance, even abstinence. But booze was his mistress, the one true lover that shared with him and understood and could never betray the secrets of those places inside him.

  The only entry on that rap sheet that Hackett saw as more than a sausage pinch was the incident of May 5,1956. There are a lot of tales about the truth of that night. According to the story accepted by the police and the press, forty one year old Patrolman Thomas Mellow of the Tenth District was making his rounds that night at about ten minutes to eleven, when he saw a Harris taxi parked in the alley east of Taylor, beside Liston's home at 4454 St. Louis Avenue. It was a pleasant balmy night of spring in full, a foretaste of sweet summer to come. Sitting out on the porch, drinking beer and talking with, or around, Sonny were a twenty seven year old neighbor and fellow ex-con named Willie Patterson - who later told the cops that he and Sonny had been "going around together" for about two months - and two sisters who also lived there. The sisters were identified as Ada Chambers, age twenty six, married, housewife, and Geraldine Clark, age thirty one, single, factory worker. Ada, who was three years older than reported, lived there with her husband, Arthur Chambers, who was also twenty nine.

  Geraldine worked in the S&W food canning factory. She had an eleven year old daughter named Arletha. She was a very pretty woman, and she was Sonny's fiancee.

  The cab's parking lights were on, and Mellow asked aloud whose cab it was. Willie Patterson said it was his. Mellow told him he could get a ticket and suggested that he move the cab. "Then," as Mellow told it, "Liston came down. 'You can't give him no ticket,' he said, real tough like. 'The hell I can't,' I said. I took out my ticket book, flashlight, to get the city sticker number off the cab. As I started over, Liston came over and gave me a bear hug from the front, lifted me clear off the ground." In the alley, the three men struggled, and Liston took Mellow's Colt .38 service revolver. Patterson said, "Shoot the white son of a bitch." Liston put the gun to Mellow's head. Mellow hollered, "Don't shoot me." Liston then struck the cop over the left eye "with either the gun or his fist. It took seven stitches. My left leg was broken in the knee from the fall or somebody stomping me. Then they run up the alley." Liston "appeared to be drinking: the fellows that arrested him had a little trouble."

  According to Liston:

  I called a cab to come pick me up. I saw the cab pull up into the alleyway, and I hurried out of the house. Meanwhile, a cop came up and told the cabbie he was going to give him a ticket. I said, "How come you going to give this cab a ticket? He's just doing his business." Then the cop turns to me and says, "You're a smart nigger," and when I say "I’m not smart," he reaches for his gun and tries to take it out his holster, but I take it away from him. Later the cop said I was drunk. Now how could a drunk handle a sober cop trained to make arrests and to pull a gun? I never drink any hard liquor anyway.

  According to the police report based on Patterson's statement:

  About 10:30 o'clock P.M. (5-5-56) he went to the home of Charles Liston at 4454 St. Louis Avenue and parked his vehicle in the alley adjacent to the house and then he and the mentioned two women began drinking beer on the front porch, and shortly thereafter they were joined there by Charles Liston, and as the four of them were seated there drinking beer a uniformed police officer came to the front of the house and inquired about the taxi-cab parked in the alley and stated that he was going to give a ticket to the driver of same. Patterson adds that he told the Officer that he was the driver of the vehicle and offered to move same from the alley and about that time Liston joined in the conversation and began to argue with the Officer and shortly afterwards Liston and the Officer began to struggle with each other, and he (Patterson) tried to separate the two men. He further states that Liston and the Officer fought into the darkness of the alley and shortly thereafter Liston came back to the mouth of the alley and told him to drive around to the Maffit Avenue side of the alley which he complied with and a few minutes later Liston emerged from said alley and told him to take him downtown, during the ride he displayed a revolver which he stated was the Officer's gun. Patterson continued that he drove Liston to the home of his (Liston's) sister at 1438 (rear) N. Fifteenth Street, where he left the revolver and rejoined him in the taxi-cab and he took Liston to 23rd and Franklin Avenue and left him.

  Patterson was arrested almost immediately where he dropped Sonny off, at about half past two in the morning. Sonny was arrested about an hour later, a few blocks away, at Franklin and Elliot, in his old neighbourhood, more specifically in the vicinity of Cole and Carr, near that alley where Anthony Tocco had been taken down six years ago and more. It was as if one alley led to another, the first to this and this to that, in a world that was nothing but alleys. When beer was in the blood and blood was on the britches - and Liston and Patterson both had bloodstains on their britches, when they were taken in - when one felt like going home but had no true home to go to, when the night was dead and the morning uncome, it was like that.

  According to the police report, Liston "refused to make any statement concerning the incident, stating that he did not know the Officer and had never seen him before, further refusing to answer any questions in this connection. The attitude of Liston at this time became very belligerent due to indications that he had been drinking.''

  The revolver was retrieved by police from the home of Sonny's sister Alcora Jones, "who stated that at about 11:30 P.M. (5-5-56) her brother came to her home and left a package in the bottom of a wooden clothes chest in her bedroom."

  As for the report concerning Geraldine: "Officer Mellow talking to Patterson regarding the violation during which time his conversation was interrupted by Charles Liston, who began to berate the Officer, as Patterson was observed to attempt to separate Officer Mellow and Liston."The three men then

  disappeared into the darkness of the alley, and shortly afterwards she heard an outcry from the Officer of "don't hurt me" and she could see Liston striking at someone, apparently
Officer Mellow, a short time later Liston and Patterson came out of the dark alley and Liston told Patterson to drive around to the other end of the alley, at this time Patterson drove west on St. Louis Avenue and south on Taylor Avenue and disappeared. Liston walked south through the alley and apparently met Patterson at the Maffit Avenue side of same.

  Ada, who had gone up to her room during the fight, corroborated her sister's version of what transpired before the fight, and stated "that she heard the outcry of 'don't hurt me' come from the alley while she was in the house from her raised window which is adjacent to the alley."

  Liston pled guilty of assaulting a police officer, and was sentenced, on January 28, 1957, to nine months in the City Workhouse. Patterson drew thirty days in jail.

  He had not had a fight since his third encounter with Marty Marshall, in March of 1956, two months before the Mellow incident. Almost immediately upon news of that assault, the St. Louis boxing commissioner, Charles Pian, had moved to suspend Liston's license to fight. Bob Burnes was one of the local sportswriters who successfully urged Pian to lift the suspension after Liston had served his term in the workhouse. In so doing, they joined with Captain John Doherty, the cop who ruled St. Louis with a thyrsus of lead-filled hardwood, and who in many ways was the nemesis and sworn enemy of the man to whose defense he came. While other cops supported Liston's suspension - "Every time he fights," one of them complained - "half the hoodlums in the country show up in St. Louis" - Doherty demanded of the commissioner, "What do you want to do, give him a license so he can get in a ring and fight, or a gun so he can go out and rob? Those are the only two things he knows how to do."

  On August 28, four days after Sonny got out of the workhouse, he and Geraldine applied for a license. The Affidavit of Male bears Charles Liston's earliest known signature, faltering but proud. Above that signature, Sonny swore his date of birth to be May 8, 1932, and his place of birth to be Memphis, Tennessee.

  Geraldine stated that she was a native of St. Louis. She stated her name to be Geraldine Chambers, her marital status as single, her date of birth as January 25,1932 - if it was fine enough a year for Sonny, it was fine enough for her - and the license was issued three days later.

  In the past fifteen months, Geraldine had grown six years younger; and, bearing the surname of her sister's husband, Arthur Chambers, she had now become Geraldine Chambers instead of Geraldine Clark. Later records would show the loss of another three years, with a date of birth of January 25, 1935. This would mean that she had been all of nine years old when she gave birth to her daughter, Arletha, on June 2, 1944, as opposed to the child bearing at age twelve postulated by the information on her marriage license application. If indeed she was thirty one, as reported at the time of the Mellow incident, her year of birth thus would have been 1925, meaning that she was nineteen when her daughter was born.

  On September 3, 1957, Sonny and Geraldine were married by the Reverend G.L. Hayden, Minister of the Gospel, of 4965 Cote Brilliante Avenue, six blocks south of that alley at Taylor and St. Louis Avenue. As husband and wife, they lived at 4439 Farlin Avenue, to the north. It was to be Sonny's final St. Louis address.

  Cops such as William Anderson and Lowell Powell had been his friends. "I was a policeman and he was something of a thug," Powell recalled, but none the less they had been friends. In the big picture, however, there was no love lost between Sonny and the cops.

  "He has no finesse, tact whatsoever," Frank Mitchell said. "He doesn't realize that he has to keep his name out of the paper. He's kind of mean, too. He hates policemen; they hate him."

  He hated them, they hated him. The assault on Mellow had made his situation dangerous. "At that time," Lowell Powell said, "the policemen were the real bosses around St.Louis, and fighting a policeman was unheard of really. We'd call them "nixie fighters.''" (Etymology unknown, even to Jim Hackett.) Another black cop, Detective Sergeant James Reddick, made no secret of his feelings. "He's a bad man," Reddick declared. "If he ever crossed me, I'd baptize his ass. He'd be like a coffee sieve."

  The harassment intensified. Between his assault on Mellow in May 1956, and his sentencing, in January 1957, he was popped five times: for suspicion of theft; speeding; failing to appear on a summons; suspicion of larceny; and careless driving. He was released on every charge: only the twenty five buck speeding ticket stuck. Sausage pinches, nights on the steel.

  Four days after his wedding, he was busted again, for general peace disturbance and individual peace disturbance; both charges nolle prossed. Two more pinches for suspected robbery followed on September 28 and September 29. His car was stopped again, another speeding ticket issued him, later that fall. His rap sheet was no longer the playsheet of St. Louis alone. He had what they called a "Hoover sheet" now, too: a centralized criminal record designated by an FBI record number - his was number 272 767 B – copies of which were duly issued to the criminal identification bureaus of other law enforcement agencies, such as the Missouri State Highway Patrol. In his record as circulated by the United States Department of Justice in October 1956, the charge for his encounter with Mellow is set forth as "aslt to kill."

  Captain John Doherty, the boss, was a man with a penchant for running people out of town. He had gotten rid of Barney Baker. There was nothing that compared to the ire Sonny roused in Doherey. "Five coppers tried to lock Sonny. This ain't no bullshit story. They broke hickory nightsticks over his head. They couldn't get his hands cuffed. He was a monster."

  The tale has been told that Doherty literally took Liston to the tracks at the outskirts of town, stuck a gun to his head, and told him to leave. Sonnys' story, though less melodramatic, amounts to much the same: "Well, the captain, Captain Doherty, told me to my face, if I wanted to stay alive, to leave St. Louis." Doherty's words were: "If you don't, they're going to find you in an alley." The meaning was clear to Sonny: "He said that his men was going to put me in the alley."

  Between trouble, suspension, and the workhouse, Sonny had fought only one fight in 1956, none in 1957.In late January 1958, he left St. Louis for his first professional match in Chicago, a fight against Billy Hunter, the boxer that Foneda Cox had beat the night Sonny vanquished Summerlin for the second time, back in 1953. The fight was to be held at the Chicago Stadium, which was owned by the Norris group and where all boxing was controlled by the IBC.

  Frank Mitchell told a reporter for Newsweek that he met with Irv Schoenwald, a prominent Chicago insurance man and fight promoter, and that he signed over to Schoenwald half of his interest in Liston in return for Schoenwald's promise that he would get Liston bigger purses and break him into the lucrative market of the big time television fights, which paid not in the hundreds but in the thousands. Mitchell said that his deal with Schoenwald was executed the week following the Hunter fight.

  Thus, at this point, according to Mitchell, he and Schoenwald now shared a twenty five percent interest in Liston. Eddie Yawitz and the half interest he had supposedly bought for six hundred dollars in early 1955 were suddenly and inexplicably no longer a part of the picture.

  Don Wake, who set down Mitchell's story in an unpublished 1963 background report for Newsweek, noted in parentheses: "The mention of Schoenwald certainly should be checked - I've never seen his name mentioned before as one of Liston's managers, and there may, some way or other, be libel involved. Bob Burnes, in his Saturday Evening Post article avoided using Schoenwald's name, describing him as a 'respected' Chicago insurance man." In his 1963 book, Sonny Liston: The Champ Nobody Wanted, A.S. "Doc" Young quotes Mitchell in the following manner: "'I referred him to --- ' - Mitchell mentioned the name of a Chicagoan."

  Less than two months after the Liston-Hunter fight, Frank Mitchell traveled again to Chicago, ostensibly to attend the March 25 rematch between Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio, who had taken the middleweight title from Robinson the previous September in New York. Although Mitchell never said so, he came to Chicago this time in the company of Liston, John Vitale, and Vitale's cummari, M
illie Allen.

  "When I was in town," Mitchell told Newsweek's man, "I met Blinky Palermo in a hotel lobby. I told him, "I’ve got the next heavyweight champion."

  Blinky's response, according to Mitchell, was, "I can't manage him, but I can get somebody to help you."

  Joseph "Pep" Barone, a close associate of Blinky Palermo, operated as a fight manager out of Allentown, Pennsylvania. His listing in the managerial directory of The Ring Record Book read: "JOE (PEP) BARONE - Fair Grounds and Allentown High School, 643 No. 6th St., Allentown, Pa. Phone Allentown 32513, 27229."

  Mitchell recalled, "When I got back to St. Louis, I got a long distance call from Pep Barone. He said, 'I understand you have a fighter you want some help with.'"

  "Yes, I do." Mitchell said. He then apparently referred Barone to Irv Schoenwald and "told him I was going back to Chicago for a fight, and he and Barone could speak further at that time. As Mitchell told the story, it was then that Pep Barone told him that he was taking over Liston and moving him to Philadelphia. Mitchell said that he assumed "they'd, gotten in touch with Schoenwald to work out a deal, and that he, Mitchell, retained his twelve and a half percent interest in Liston's career. "Barone said when Sonny was made, I'd be in."

  From that moment, Mitchell said, he never received a cent from that interest he claimed to have held. "Sonny has a moral obligation toward me and he knows it," he said after Liston had become champion. According to Mitchell, Liston had "visited with mother and me," soon after winning the championship. "He said, 'Frank I know you've got somethin' comin,' and I'll see that you get it.' Someday, I think Sonny will." Mitchell's homiletic tale, here drawn from several recorded variations, ended invariably with the insistence that he "didn't get a penny." Furthermore, "the income tax people have checked and rechecked that twelve and a half percent of Sonny's contract that I discovered I don't have. They haven't found it either."