The Devil and Sonny Liston

by Nick Tosches

  Why had no one ever seen these various "contracts": the one that Liston had with Harrison and Mitchell: the one that Yawitz bought from Harrison, directly or by way of Mitchell: the one by which Schoenwald and Mitchell became partners? Mitchell himself elsewhere dropped the fact that there was no contract, at least not in the formal or legal sense: "If I had to do it over," he said, "for one thing, I'd have something in writing."

  Why, if the IBC had been involved to some extent in the course of Liston's career since at least his second professional fight, in 1953, would Mitchell need to apprise Blinky Palermo, the cohort of the power behind the throne of the IBC, of the existence and promise of Sonny Liston? Why, if his interests were so momentously at stake, would a man of Frank Mitchell's experience and wiles not have a written agreement, and why would he ever assume that Barone - or they, as he said - had negotiated a proper deal with Schoenwald in which those interests had been protected?

  Why would Sonny tell Mitchell, "I know you've got somethin' comin', and I'll see that you get it" if Sonny himself was in no way party to or responsible for any transaction concerning that interest in himself that was not his own? "He who is by nature not his own but another's man, is by nature a slave." Liston's alleged promise was the equivalent of a slave consoling a slave trader with a promise to make good for a default on payment by the new master to whom the trader had sold him.

  Irving Schoenwald and his partner, Jack Begun, had indeed been powerful and important promoters in the old days, and their office at 127 Dearborn Street was one of the cathedral seats of Chicago boxing. Like many independent promoters, however, Schoenwald was laid low by the ascendance of the IBC. By 1958, when Mitchell allegedly entered into business with him, Schoenwald's importance in the boxing racket was a vestige of what it once had been, and he was nearing the end of his career as a promoter. While Jack Begun tried to persevere, opening an office of his own on South Wabash, Schoenwald faded from boxing by the end of the decade.

  Why, then, would Mitchell, at that point in time, have sought Schoenwald's help in furthering Liston's career and his own interest in it? Schoenwald by himself was in no better a position than Mitchell to fulfill the promises he allegedly made in exchange for half of Mitchell's interest in Liston; and Mitchell, who well knew both the fight racket and the powers behind it, must have known this as well.

  Frank Mitchell, pimp and pillar of the community, lived a lie and was perhaps not above telling one. His tale of innocence and indignant righteousness is embroidered with all the right names and dates and places. But it was beneath that superficial embroidery, not in it, that the truth lay.

  Eddie Yawitz, whom Mitchell never mentions in his account of the events of 1958, still held the half-interest in Liston that he had procured - through six hundred dollars, as both Harrison and Mitchell claimed, or otherwise - back in February 1955. When Mitchell transferred half of his own interest to Schoenwald, as recounted or otherwise, Yawitz became the majority holder.

  In that presumed transfer, Schoenwald would have been acting on behalf of a man who actually could fulfill the promises that Mitchell alleged Schoenwald to have made and himself to have believed. That man was Schoenwald's friend and associate Bernie Glickman, a fight promoter and a friend of Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo.

  Any contract agreed to by Mitchell in early February 1958, could have been nothing but confirmation of what had already gone down, known or unknown to Mitchell, through an unwritten and more binding contract.

  For even before Sonny came to Chicago to fight Hunter in January, Bernie Glickman and Eddie Yawitz had taken charge of him through the benison of Frankie Carbo and the IBC, to whom John Vitale had delivered Sonny forth as he had delivered forth other St. Louis fighters, such as Virgil Akins and Jesse Bowdry.

  Ben Bentley - he was born Ben Goldberg in 1921- was the IBC matchmaker, publicist, and ringside announcer who was called upon to promote Liston's fights under the new management of Glickman's alliance with Yawitz. Ben was a friend of both Schoenwald and Glickman, and as Ben once told the story, it was Irv Schoenwald who called him about a heavyweight that was being brought up from St. Louis. Years later, Ben told me that it was Bernie Glickman who called him about handling Sonny's first Chicago fight.

  Ben remembered that Sonny arrived forty five minutes late for the weigh in. The boxing commissioner told Ben to get another fighter, and Ben was about to scratch Liston from the card when Sonny appeared. He'd driven up with Foneda Cox, and they'd gotten lost, he said. Ben warned him that this wouldn't work in Chicago, and he told him to be at the stadium at seven o'clock. As they were walking out, Sonny said. "Can I get ten dollars' eating money?" Ben gave him the ten.

  That afternoon, Sonny, who was licensed to fight in Missouri, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, but not yet in Illinois, was examined under oath by Commissioner Frank Gilmore of the Illinois State Athletic Commission.

  "You are twenty five years old and you are applying for a professional boxer's license. Have you ever been convicted of a felony? Have you ever been in prison?"

  "Once. City workhouse."

  "That is not prison. How long?"

  "Four months."

  "What was the reason?"

  "Resisting arrest."

  "Have you ever been penalized by any state or city athletic association?"

  "No, sir."

  "Was that the only trouble you have been in?"

  "That's right."

  "Have you been boxing since then?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "When did you get out?"

  "August 24, 1957."

  "Have you been in training since then?"

  "Yes, sir."

  License and eating money in order, Sonny showed up on time at the Chicago Stadium that night, and he knocked out Billy Hunter one minute into the second round.

  The tide had shifted for Mitchell before, not after, that first Chicago fight. One way or another - bought out, cut out, or conned out - Mitchell was already out of the picture when he entered Irv Schoenwald's office. For Sonny, the tide had merely risen. Since 1953, the shadow of the IBC had been a vague but increasing presence; for longer than that, he had been indentured to John Vitale and his kind. Now, instead of Vitale and his kind, there would be those who were to them as master to slave.

  Harrison. Mitchell. Vitale. Yawitz. Glickman. The IBC Barone. Palermo. Sonny had lost track of who owned what pieces of him, and of through whose and how many grasping hands his money and his freedom passed, dwindling like slough bottom sand through the clutching, sifting fingers of those hands until what remained reached his own. But he knew who called the shots. It was The Gray, Paul John Carbo.

  Glickman, whose welterweight Virgil Akins was on the verge of becoming champion, saw in Liston an opportunity to work with a fighter possessed of the greatest possibility he had ever known. But it was not meant to be.

  Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo was very fond of Bernie Glickman, and Glickman considered Accardo a friend. They got together almost every Sunday. Bernie would bring bagels and lox to Accardo's River Forest mansion, and the two men would while away the morning together. Accardo had told him, however, never to bring his fight business with him, for he wanted nothing to do with it. They could talk awnings, they could talk football, they could talk food, they could talk the ass on this one, the lungs on that one, they could talk the breeze through the trees and the meaning of fucking life itself. But no boxing business. There, Bernie was on his own.

  But in the fight business, nobody was on his own. Glickman operated through the goodwill, and at the mercy of, the IBC and its sub rosa directors, Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo. Bernie's friend Accardo was a powerful and respected man; but lox and bagels were one thing, the tie between him and men such as Carbo was another. Virgil Akins, brought up from his scuffling days by Glickman and Yawitz, won the welterweight title on June 6,1958, in his hometown, at the St. Louis Arena, which was owned by James Norris and Arthur M. Wirtz of the IBC. Upon that championship victory, Carb
o and Palermo seized control of interest in Akins from Glickman and Yawitz. It was like the devil returning inevitably for his due; for in the IBC years, no fighter fought without Carbo's choosing the opponent or the arena, and in this way he controlled the destiny of every fighter. None got anywhere without him; and thus, though he and not nature had dictated and enforced this unwritten law, it followed to him that all of them - enfranchised managers as well as their fighters - owed him. As to when and how much they owed him, it was solely a matter of his own discretion. Like Accardo, Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo were fond of Glickman. But la bisines was la bisines, and things were what they were.

  So impressive was Liston, now fully embraced by the forces of Chicago that Carbo and Blinky did not wait long to claim him as their own.

  Sam Giancana, after taking over from Accardo the previous year, returned from a meeting in Philadelphia, and called Glickman.

  "He meets my father at the Armory Lounge," said Bernie's son Joel, who was in his early twenties when his father had Liston. "They go in the kitchen, and they're having dinner, just the two of them, and he tells my father that he had to give up Liston." Glickman was to receive a buyout price of fifty grand.

  Liston's next fight, with Ben Wise, brought him again to Chicago in March 1958.

  "Well." as Sonny would tell it, "I went up to fight this fight and Frank Mitchell told me when I left St. Louis that it would be a man by the name of 'Pep' Barone to come up with the contract and for you to sign it and he will get you East where you can get sparring partners and more fights, a better trainer."

  The contract - a standard, supply store Form 1B - was signed and duly notarized in Chicago on the night of the fight: a fourth round knockout of Ben Wise at the Midwest Athletic Club on March 11.

  "Buck admission," Ben Bentley recalled.

  The single page, five year contract with Joseph "Pep" Barone entitled Barone to fifty percent of Liston's income, in terms that rendered Liston the receiving party:

  The Manager agrees to pay the Athlete 50% per cent of all sums of money derived by him from any services that the said Athlete may render hereunder, before the deduction of all training expenses and railroad fares that may be incurred by the Athlete in the performance of his duties hereunder, and further agrees and guarantees said Athlete that the said per cent of the monies to be paid to him as above provided shall in no year during the term of this contract be less than $1500.00

  The unwritten clause, the Mephistophelean clause, the only clause that mattered, stipulated silently that Sonny now belonged, body and soul, to Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo. For a boxer in those days, there was no greater fate: because Carbo and, beneath him, Palermo were fate itself, divider of destinies and allotter of days.

  Sonny returned to St. Louis to beat Bert Whitehurst on Apri13. After that, he left St. Louis for good and moved to Philadelphia, where Barone, Blinky, and the big time awaited him. He moved into the Hamilton Court Apartments, a seven story red-brick building at Thirty ninth and Chestnut that was run by Blinky in association with his friend Sam Margolis and his son in law Carlo Musciano, who were also partners in the Sansom delicatessen, located on the Thirty Ninth Street side of the building. In early 1960, with Blinky's help, Sonny would secure a mortgage and buy his first home, a two story house of red and white brick at 5785 Dunlap Street, in the Overbrook section of West Philly, where he welcomed Geraldine's parents to live with them. His own mother still lived in Gary, Indiana, at this time. She would move to Forrest City, Arkansas, in December 1961, to live with the family of her eldest son, E.B. Ward.

  The big time. Liston's first national television exposure came on May 14, when he knocked out Julio Mederos of Havana in the third round of a fight that was broadcast from the Chicago Stadium as part of the IBCs Wednesday night program on CBS. On August 6, in another nationally televised IBC Wednesday night fight from the Chicago Stadium, he knocked out Wayne Bethea in the first.

  Whatever you might say about Blinky and The Gray, one thing was certain: they delivered.

  There was no stopping Liston. By the end of 1961, his professional record, marred only by his sole, narrow decision loss to Marshall, consisted of thirty four wins, twenty three of which were knockouts, including eleven of his last dozen. Only one man stood between him and the heavyweight championship of the world. And, still, he was in a bad place.

  The IBCs Ben Bentley considered Blinky Palermo "a good friend," and one of the few men who seemed truly to care for Liston. When Bentley was close to Liston and traveled with the fighter constantly, Blinky would call him frequently when Liston was in training, instructing him always to call him back collect from a pay phone at such and such a number. "He'd wanna know how did he do in training, how is he doing in training, does he see this guy, does he see that guy, who's his sparring partners, is he behaving himself, is he runnin' around?" When they were together, Blinky would put his arm around Bentley. "Tell me, has he been drinking?"

  And Blinky, in turn, seemed to be one of the few men that Liston trusted: intercessor, paternal protector, and, as Ben Bentley said, they represented the sort of tough guy that Sonny had always wanted to be. "They were class," Bentley said of Blinky and Carbo.

  But Blinky and The Gray were about to fall. Back in St. Louis, on June 6, 1958, a few weeks after Sonny moved to Philadelphia, his friend Virgil Akins won the welterweight title by knocking out Vince Martinez in four rounds. Present at the fight was an investigative representative of a New York County grand jury inquiry into prizefight fixing.

  The investigation had been under way for several months. Subpoenas had been handed out immediately following the previous Akins fight, a welterweight championship elimination bout with the Cuban boxer Isaac Logart at Madison Square Garden on March 21. In that fight, Logart, the odds-on favorite, had dominated until the sixth round, when he seemed to fall under a spell, as did the referee, who began to count him out while he was still standing and then stopped the fight at the count of eight, only seven seconds before the bell would have saved him. Logart's cornermen seemed under the spell as well, for there was not even the show of a protest at the fight's outcome. It was then that agents of District Attorney Frank S. Hogan moved through the ringside crowd passing subpoenas to the unsuspecting assortment of characters whose names those subpoenas bore.

  That spring, as the New York County grand jury gathered the testimony of those who had been summoned forth, the boxing community grew intensely more embroiled in anxiety, speculation, rumor, and suspicion of betrayal. On April 18, James Norris, fearing the worst, tendered his resignation as the president and director of the International Boxing Club, leaving behind Truman Gibson to face the increasing heat as his duly appointed successor.

  On June 7, the day after Akins won the welterweight title. it was announced that "indictments involving alleged 'fixing' of some professional boxing matches are expected next month after the New York grand jury concludes the first phase of its boxing investigation."

  Blinky Palermo, who was under subpoena in the grand jury investigation, was in St. Louis for the Akins title fight. Under the direction of Captain John Doherty, detective squad surveillance of the fight was heavy. Later that night, Doherty himself arrested Blinky and his companion, Abe Sands of Paterson, New Jersey, as the two men drove up to a house at 5822 Waterman Boulevard. It was the home of Millie Allen, the mistress of John Vitale, who a few minutes earlier had passed the house, but had continued on, apparently having sensed the presence of the detectives who lay in wait.

  On the ride to police headquarters, Palermo made an unsuccessful attempt to shove a bottle of pills and a box of capsules behind the seat cushion of a police car [reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch]. On reaching headquarters, the prisoner was reluctant to be photographed or fingerprinted. Sgt. Frank J. Burns said in his report "armlocks" were applied to obtain the prisoner's co-operation. The report added that Palermo threatened to "have you cops fired."

  Sgt. Burns said Palermo threw himself to the flo
or and demanded to be taken to a hospital. Later he laughed and said: "All I want is to get out of town." He admitted knowing Vitale, whom he described as "a nice guy." He was suspected of gambling, although denying that he made any bets on the fight.

  Sands, who said he is a salesman, also denied betting on the fight.

  Later, Abe Sands would be identified as a bagman for Carbo and Palermo, in which role he was often known only as "Mike." Blinky was held overnight in lockup. A sausage pinch, a night on the steel. But it was for him the first of many dark nights to follow.

  Among the items found on Blinky's person at the time of his arrest were "receipts for a hotel bill and telephone numbers indicating he is closely connected with Charles (Sonny) Liston, heavyweight boxer, who recently transferred headquarters from St. Louis to Philadelphia." The newspapers failed to mention that the telephone numbers indicated that he was closely connected to George Raft as well.

  On the night of his arrest, Blinky denied any official connection with Sonny. As Sonny himself would later say regarding the hotel bill, Blinky explained that he had taken care of the boxer's simply because Sonny's manager "was ill in a hospital" in town.

  Investigators in the boxing inquiry [concluded the St. Louis Post. Dispatch], have expressed interest in communications last March between Vitale, who attends most of the important fights, and Palermo. The communications included a long-distance telephone call from Vitale to Philadelphia in which the St. Louis hoodlum warned against any attempt "to gyp me." This was followed by arrangements for a meeting in Chicago.

  It was on March 11 that Liston had signed his contract with Pep Barone; and it was also in March, two weeks later, that Vitale and Millie Allen had traveled to Chicago in the company of Frank Mitchell and Liston.