The Devil and Sonny Liston

by Nick Tosches

  Leonard demurred at the proposed violence against his partner, and he promised once again to try to work things out with him. "Try, hell." Palermo said. "You are going to straighten it out. I can't go home like this. I am in a hell of a jam with The Gray."

  A few days later, Palermo and Sica met with Leonard at his office in the Hollywood Legion Stadium. This time, Nesseth joined them. Sica reviewed the situation. Leonard, he said, had sought and accepted help from certain people, "and by dealing with these people, there were certain commitments made." He concluded, talking directly to Leonard and Nesseth, "Now, when you fellows got lucky and won the title, there were certain things that were supposed to be fulfilled."

  Nesseth objected that he was a free man and that Jordan's fights were not to be dictated by Carbo or Palermo.

  Sica and Palermo rose. As they left the room, Sica whispered into Leonard's ear, "Jackie, you're it."

  The conversation was bugged. Driven by fear and desperation, Leonard had gone to the police the previous day, and Sica's words, like everything else said at this meeting, were recorded.

  Before boarding his flight to return to Philadelphia, Blinky stopped at an airport newsstand. He picked up a couple of sporting magazines and a couple of packs of gum. On his way to the cashier, he picked up a pack of peanut butter crackers, and when he got to the cashier, he paid only for the crackers. A plainclothes cop had been watching him, and Blinky was arrested as a petty thief of eighty cents' worth of cheap magazines and chewing gum.

  He was taken in and booked. Bail was set at five hundred dollars pending trial by jury. Blinky made bail, then split town. Before he left, however, he was questioned by Police Captain James D. Hamilton. The captain asked Blinky what had brought him to Los Angeles. Blinky told him that it was a social visit. When the captain asked him about Louis Dragna and Jack Sica, Blinky said that he had never heard of them.

  A few weeks later, on May 30, Carbo was captured in New Jersey.

  In his sentencing by Judge Mullen several months later, Carbo got off easy. But just as Carbo was unto others a fate in himself, so the fate which was his own lay beyond the powers that were his own.

  In May, after his bugged meeting with Palermo and Sica, Jackie Leonard had told his story to an investigation board of the California State Athletic Commission. His fear had ebbed, as Captain Hamilton had assigned him police protection. But two weeks later, on June 3, as he was about to draw up the garage door at his Los Angeles home, Leonard was struck in the base of his skull by a concussive blow that drove him to his knees, whereupon his two assailants commenced to kick him.

  While awaiting trial in New York, Carbo had been allowed to travel to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for kidney treatment. In Baltimore, at about half-past nine on the night of September 22, as he lay in his hospital bed, he was arrested under an indictment charging him with attempting to extort control of Don Jordan. At the same moment, under the same indictment, Truman Gibson was arrested in Chicago, Blinky Palermo in Philadelphia. In Los Angeles, Dragna and Sica were already in custody for close to half an hour.

  Appended to the December 1, 1959, New York Times report of Carbo's sentencing, there was a small item datelined Los Angeles, November 30:

  Five men charged with attempting to cut in on the earnings of Don Jordan, welterweight champion, had their trials continued to March 29 by Federal Judge Ernest A. Tolin today.

  Both the Government and attorneys for defendants agreed additional time would be necessary to secure witnesses.

  The defendants include Frankie Carbo, Frank (Blinky) Palermo, Philadelphia fight promoter, Truman Gibson Jr., president of National Boxing Enterprises, of Chicago, and Joe Sica and Louis Tom Dragna, both of Los Angeles. The trial had been set for Dec.8.

  Carbo will be flown here tomorrow to face arraignment in Federal District Court, the United States Attorney's office said.

  After his arraignment in Los Angeles, Carbo was returned to New York to serve his two year sentence at Riker's Island Prison. He could not have been too worried about the Jordan case; more of the same old conspiracy shit, another few flies to swat away, another few cockroaches to crush underfoot.

  Christmas came and went: turkey with the fellas. The new year came, then spring, then summer, then fall. One year down. It was an easy bill, and he slept away the better part of it in the prison hospital. The rest of the time, he did what he always did: controlled the fight racket, by way of Blinky.

  Under their thraldom, Sonny flourished. For just as they had rendered him not his own but another's man, so in the ring they had freed him to prevail and to conquer. There was no more of carrying opponents, no more of holding back. In the witnessing of his victory upon victory over all whom he was set against, they had come to realize that he was one of a kind, and they knew there would not be another like him again. He was invincible: a sure thing. And in that, he must not be fucked with, but ridden wild to the sea of golden glory that raged and awaited him; and when the time came that they sold the scrap metal of that glory to the junkman, they would make more money than anybody in the fight racket ever dreamt of making, as would Sonny, for he was the best and he was their boy.

  In October 1958, when he beat Whitehurst for the second time, he knocked him with fury clear through the ropes and out of the ring.

  In February 1959, when he knocked out Mike De John in Miami Beach, the Miami Herald described it as "one of the most brutal outpourings of punishment in recent heavyweight history." The odds that night were with Liston, at eight to five.

  In April, when he knocked out Cleveland Williams in the third round, it was the third of what would be a run of nine straight knockouts of ever more formidable opponents. (And, to be sure, although he was a two to one underdog against Sonny, Williams himself was quite a formidable character. A strange motherfucker, yes: a strange motherfucker from Georgia who heard voices, but who none the less had lost only three of forty seven fights and was on an eleven fight winning streak, with eight of them knockouts, when he came into the ring against Sonny.) The Miami Herald declared that Liston, in defeating Williams, had now evinced his "credentials for a shot at Floyd Patterson's seldom defended heavyweight championship."

  "That was the night I really found out about myself." Liston would say some years later.

  If I had one weak spot anywhere, in my body, my chin, or my heart, it would've showed up with all the whuppin' he put on me in the first round. But I was never really hurt bad, no matter how it looked. I knew what was goin' on. Even before I sat down, I was thinkin' to myself. "This cat's gotta put it to me like that for nine more rounds to win this fight, and I don't think he can do it."

  Sonny would dispose of Williams again, and more quickly, in a return match the following spring. That rematch, he said, "was no sweat, because I knew his ticket number goin' in."

  He was now one of the ranking heavyweight contenders. His August 1959, Chicago defeat of Nino Valdes was covered in Time magazine. ("The massive shouldered Negro looked like just another pug until he stung the man with a left to the belly in the third round.")

  Following the Valdes fight, Sonny returned to St. Louis for a visit. On August 12, while visiting St. Louis, a week after the Valdes fight, Sonny was picked up and charged on suspicion of gambling.

  In April 1960, when he fought the Texas state heavyweight champion Roy Harris at the Houston Coliseum, the referee halted the fight after only two minutes and thirty five seconds, in which time Harris had been collapsed three times by three left jabs. He had been beaten only once before, by Floyd Patterson in a heavy weight title match in the summer of 1958, and Patterson had taken twelve rounds to do the job. The New York Times published coverage of the fight under the headline "Referee Steps in to Protect Texan."

  The Whitehurst fight of October 1958, drew an arena crowd of 1,442, grossed a gate of $2.830.50, and was a nationally televised Friday night fight.

  The De John fight drew 5000; but De John, who was considered to have been the bigger draw,
got the better part of the gate.

  By the time of the Williams fight, Sonny was ranked sixth among the world's heavyweight boxers, and he was the favorite over Williams at three to one. The fight drew a crowd of 2,842 and a gross of $5,984.

  The Harris fight drew a crowd of more than 12,000 and a gate estimated at $70,000. In addition, it was broadcast as a closed circuit main event on live cards in Dallas, San Antonio, Odessa, New Orleans, Mobile, Atlanta, Miami Beach, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. Liston was guaranteed the greater of $10,000 or twenty five percent of the gate, and twenty five percent of the closed circuit revenue.

  In eighteen months: from a head count of 1,442 and an underdog's taste of $2.830.50 to a crowd of 12,000 and a twenty five percent share of seventy grand: from television to closed circuit main event: from an eight-to five favorite against De John to a five to one favorite against Valdes: from small town notices to Time magazine and the New York Times.

  That piece of him that remained to him, what money was his after it passed through the shifting clutches of others, was beginning to be something, as he himself was beginning to be something.

  "I ain't complaining," he would say, later in 1960. He spoke as one who knew in his blood what few others admitted: that no man - neither he nor they who had claimed him; neither prisoner nor he who sat in judgement; neither he in the gutter nor he who ruled from the Big House; neither he who knelt before God nor he who knelt before the indwelling darkness of himself - was ever his own man. No one in this world was free; and all, slave and master, victor and vanquished alike, were one, as chaff from the threshing of man against man, the threshing not only of man's will to enslave, but of will itself, and of willfulness itself. It was not true that some men were by nature free and others slaves. Such was the folly of those who refused to, or could not, see themselves for what they were, or the world for what it was. That, and that alone, was nature; and to be aware of this, in thought and in blood, or in blood alone, was to possess something of wisdom, and therein lay the only manumission, the only, elusive windblown cornsilk strand of freedom that was real amid the illusive and delusive freedom that all professed and praised.

  "They treat me good," he would say. "I got money in the bank. I'm fighting regular. I like fighting. It's the only thing I know how to do. As long as I'm fighting and making money and driving a good car and eating regular, nothing much is bothering me."

  Back in 1947, Jake LaMotta had lied when he told the grand jury investigating committee that he had not taken a dive to Billy Fox in exchange for a shot at the title. As a stand up character, LaMotta had indeed been rewarded with that shot as promised; and he had seized it, beating the French Algerian fighter Marcel Cerdan for the middleweight championship of the world in the spring of 1949. He held the title for almost two years; Ray Robinson took it from him in 1951. LaMotta quit fighting the following year, tried but failed to make a comeback two years later, then quit again, for good. When he was called in 1960 to testify before a new investigating committee, Jake, having had the shot they had promised him, having won and lost the title, and having nothing left to show for it, was now ready to rat out those who had given him that shot, ready to tell the truth, the whole truth, or something like it.

  Jake was a terrific opening act for the new subcommittee of the moral crusader and frustrated presidential aspirant Estes Kefauver, the well-intentioned but naive Tennessee Democrat whose chairmanship of the 1950-1951 Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce - which became known among the populace as the Kefauver Committee - was the beginning of an enduring and renowned career built on righteous persecution and the publicity value thereof. Through the new medium of television, Kefauver used the sideshow of his hearings to grasp the vice-presidential nomination from John F. Kennedy, himself the brat offspring of a criminal fortune. By September I951, Kefauver's investigator Rudolph Halley was hosting Crime Syndicated on CBS, and by November of that year, Kefauver himself had a Hollywood stage act. Humphrey Bogart introduced him at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where his presentation "Crime in America" was advertised as "ENOUGH EXCITING MATERIAL FOR 100 MOVIES."

  Kefauver's chief examiner and assistant counsel in the new Senate Antitrust and Monopoly subcommittee hearings was young John G. Bonomi, the former New York assistant district attorney who had been out to get Carbo for years.

  LaMotta testified that the offer of $100,000 to throw the Fox fight had come through his brother, Joey, who had often served Jake as a manager of sorts, and who now distributed pinball and vending machines. An earlier offer to throw another fight, against Tony Janiro at the Garden, had also come through his brother, said Jake. He insisted, however, that he didn't know the names or identities of those who had delivered these offers, even though in a signed deposition the previous month, he had named Billy Fox's then licensed manager, Blinky Palermo, as one of them. An investigator testified that a "terrific amount of Philadelphia money flowed into the city and all of it bet on Fox."

  On the following day, June 15, 1960, as the hearings in Washington progressed, a New York detective testified that he believed Frankie Carbo had "controlled the boxing racket by himself" for the past thirty years, that Carbo still controlled boxing from within Riker's Island, and that this control was exercised through a "legman" he identified as Palermo.

  Blinky himself was subpoenaed in October to appear before the Senate subcommittee in early December. Two weeks after that subpoena was issued, Federal Judge Ernest A. Tolin ordered Blinky and his four co-defendants -Carbo, Gibson, Dragna, and Sica - to stand trial in Los Angeles on December 8 for their attempt to control Don Jordan. This date was later postponed to February 14, 1961.

  December 9, Washington, D.C., as reported in the New York Times:

  In open testimony today, John Vitale and Frank Mitchell of St. Louis pleaded the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions about the management of Sonny Liston, the No. 1 heavyweight contender.

  The questions were designed to show that Vitale - who is familiar here from previous appearances before the Senate Rackets Committee - was the undercover manager of Liston, along with Carbo and Frank (Blinky) Palermo, while Mitchell had served as manager of record.

  A St. Louis police lieutenant, Joseph Kuda, also called to appear that day, testified that Carbo owned fifty two percent of the contractual interest in Liston, that Palermo owned twelve percent, that Vitale also owned twelve percent, and that the remaining twenty four percent was owned by others. It should be thought that at least part of what remained went to Sonny's manager of record, Pep Barone, who by contract was the only one entitled to anything. Barone was also under subpoena to testify, but was reported to be ill in an Allentown hospital.

  December 12, Washington, D.C.: The former lightweight champion Ike Williams testified that while Palermo managed his career, offers of four big money bribes had been relayed to him by Palermo. Two of the bribes were for title fights, and the biggest was one of$100,000 to go down in his title fight against Kid Gavilan in 1949. He said that Palermo in each case had advised him not to accept, and that he rejected them all. None the less, he had lost two of those four fights on the square, including the Gavilan title fight.

  "I should have taken the money," he mused.

  Senator Kefauver suggested that Williams probably "felt better" for having withstood temptation and having kept himself clean. "I do not!" declared Williams bitterly. "Believe me, I do not." Sonny had been under subpoena since before Labor Day, and his appearance before the subcommittee came on December 13, as did Blinky's.

  Blinky's lawyer read a prepared petition, which began: "I appear before you as counsel for Frank Palermo, a witness who has been subpoenaed to appear before your honorable body." The petition asked that Blinky be excused from appearing at this time because he was presently under indictment and scheduled to be tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California on charges that "arise from matters pertaining to professional boxing." As any "a
ttendant publicity of Frank Palermo's appearance before your committee today will be widespread," it could "prevent him from receiving such a fair and impartial trial as he is entitled under the American system of justice."

  "I would think, sir, that he has already gotten considerable unfavorable publicity," said Senator Kefauver, "so that he might welcome the opportunity of stating his side."

  Blinky's lawyer thanked Kefauver for "the wide latitude you gave me in my address."

  KEFAUVER: I will ask Mr. Palermo, where do you live, sir?

  PALERMO: Eight hundred North Sixty Fourth Street, Philadelphia.

  KEFAUVER: How old are you, sir?

  PALERMO: Fifty five.

  KEFAUVER: You have a family?

  PALERMO: Yes, sir. Five children.

  KEFAUVER: Outside of your connection with boxing, do you have any other businesses?

  PALERMO: I respectfully refuse to answer the question. It may tend to incriminate me under a federal offense.

  KEFAUVER: I am not asking you about any alleged improper business. I just asked you if you had any –

  PALERMO: I respectfully refuse to answer for the reason that the answer -

  KEFAUVER: The chairman directs you to answer the question.

  PALERMO: -may tend to incriminate me under a federal offense.

  Blinky would say nothing more than this in response to every further question, and in the end Kefauver announced that he would seek a contempt citation against him.

  Sonny showed up in a suit and tie that shone. He looked good. He looked better than good. He looked like Charles L. Liston, the mightiest of men and the sharpest of dressers. He was too cool to be real, too real to be cool. He just was what he fucking was: Charles L. Liston, mightiest of men, sharpest of dressers. Had more pasts then most people had socks. Go on, pick a past, any past. They were all the same to him: sand slough and alleys, barrooms and prison cells, fancy ass big bad gangster men and bent down cotton pickers. All the same. Working for halves here, Boss, working for halves: you and me, we're working for halves. Sing it loud, sister: "Oh, what a friend we have in Blinky. Oh, what a friend we have in Mr. Gray." Can't barely hear you, sister; why don't you slide up on in here. Gonna be the world champeen. Good Lord told me so. Told me buy this damn suit, too. Had him a whole flock of suits, one for every motherfucker he knocked out. No, not that many; nobody had that many, not even Mr. Frankie C. Gray, not even him. No, maybe one for every past, one for every day of the week. Yeah, had a gal for every day in the week, too. A lot of tail lately, yeah, a good amount of tail. No crime in that, is there, Your Honor, or Your Holiness, or Your Let's Get Blinkiness, or whatever the fuck you are? Yeah, he'd heard that one: "Your Honorable Body." Shit, whip this dick out from these guinea britches, show you some honorable fucking body. He was the baddest man with the biggest dick that ever was. That's what those women said. All of them, the free ones and the store bought, too. That old sign casting hoodoo Jesus lady, midwifed him way back when: he knew, all right, he knew where that "L" came from. Yeah, that's what he told those chicks, but, no, he didn't know. He wondered on it, but he didn't know. Charles Lost Liston. Yeah, that would've been a good one: "and in this corner ... Lost Charles Liston." Charles Loverboy Liston. Knock the men out with one hand, squeeze the women with other, drink whiskey and shoot dice all at the same damn time. Charles L. Liston. Maybe it didn't stand for nothing. Maybe it was some other man's name that mama and that woman couldn't say outright. Maybe that was it. Maybe that's why Tobe had all the mean in the world coming out of those eyes when he looked at him. That wouldn't be half bad, no. Least that way it would halfwise make sense. No use in asking. Mama can't tell you where or when her boys were born or where her eyeglasses at, but sure can tell you a Mississippi flood time mouthful about what ain't never been no way nohow at all.