by Nick Tosches
It was true: children loved Sonny as he loved them. In Philadelphia, while the cops and the newspapers hunted him down, the kids in the neighborhood would run to gather around the man they all called Uncle Sonny.
The secretarial diary of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson shows that Johnson met with Liston and Pearson at ten o'clock that morning in Senate Room S212, and that he led them on a tour of the Senate floor. Afterwards, Sonny and Ben visited with Johnson privately in the vice president's office.
Of course, an audience with President Kennedy could not be arranged, because of his brother's ongoing crusade against the element whence Sonny, like the Kennedy fortune itself, had come.
But Bentley viewed the opportunity to be accepted into the vice president's graces not only as an honor, but as a godsend for Sonny's image.
In Johnson's office, amid various decorative objects and mementos, there was "an alligator or something." Bentley recalled, "made out of leather or something."
"I know where that comes from." Sonny said. "That's what we made in prison."
After a few minutes in the vice president's company. Sonny grew restless, leaned toward Bentley, spoke low into his ear: "Let's blow this bum off."
As they flew back to Chicago, Sonny withdrew into an increasingly foul mood, and he got to drinking, and he went off by himself.
When Sonny had quit training in Miami following his knee injury, he had left Foneda Cox and Moose Grayson to close down camp and haul the training equipment back to Chicago in a trailer hitched to a car. They were traveling together toward Chicago, equipment in tow, on that night of March 29, as Sonny was flying back to Chicago from Washington, D.C.
Late that night, Ben Bentley got a call. It was Moose Grayson's wife, Pearl, and she was very distraught. Sonny, she said, had sexually assaulted her.
As I write this, I remember a pleasant dinner I had not long ago with the casting director Vickie Thomas. Sonny Liston, she said, struck her as a man who in the eyes of the world was so big and so bad and so black, and yet inside so gentle. Would that it were so, I now think, if only for the sake of storytelling, if only for the sake of what we might want to believe, if only for the sake of the dignity of tragedy itself; if only for the sake of understanding.
Liston's private acts of charity and kindness - to prisoners, the disabled, the poor - were many; his love of children was well known; and he was a man without racism in him.
"We were riding down Fremont Street downtown, and I was driving his car," remembered his Las Vegas friend Davey Pearl. "Bumper to bumper traffic. And he says to me, 'stop the car.' I said, 'I can't stop the car here.' He said, 'stop the goddamn car.' I stopped the car, and he runs out, and there's a little woman sitting on a little dolly selling pencils. He emptied out both pockets and gave it to her, just dropped it on her tray," Pearl said. "And it was a white woman, so there was no racial thing."
If it is true that we feel compassion most for those in whom we see ourselves, these emanations of the heart say much.
But, as Lowell Powell said, "Sonny had a lot of gangsterism in him."
I asked Truman Gibson if Sonny had a sense of right or wrong. Truman thought awhile, smiled somewhat, gently shook his head, and softly answered: "None."
It was Sonny's first known sexual assault. Few would ever learn of it. Matt Rodriguez, the superintendent of police in Chicago, was one of those few. He told me he had encountered Grayson some years after the incident, and that Grayson told him that there had been a "settlement."
Sonny left town. His flight from Chicago was sudden, stealthful, and unquestioned by - for the most part unknown to - a press that remained unaware.
He and Foneda left Chicago together, with the idea of going to California. They would drive southwest, because Sonny wanted to pass through Denver to visit Father Murphy.
They never made it to California, but only as far as Denver. Father Murphy "convinced Sonny that he should stay here. So we stayed here. And for a while we lived in that motel on East Colfax. We stayed together. Then, after a while, Sonny bought a house on Monaco. Thirty fifth and Monaco. And then I rented an apartment over on Twenty first and Race."
Sonny paid $28,500 for the brick house at 3633 Monaco Drive, on May 10, 1963. It was set on a corner lot with a lawn in an attractive black neighborhood in the parish of St. Ignatius Loyola Church.
The New York Post columnist Milton Gross, in his column of April 17, painted the sort of picture that Ben Bentley had wanted, but which in its falsity made Bentley feel somewhat uneasy and somewhat unclean. "Sonny," wrote Gross, "has been making the rounds since the April 10 bout was postponed. Instead of undergoing an operation, he hobnobbed with Vice President Lyndon Johnson in Washington, visited his old cell mates at Jefferson State Prison in Missouri and is now at the home of Rev. Edward Murphy."
Sonny started roadwork in Denver on April 12. His trainer, Willie Reddish, soon joined him, and they began training at Lowery Air Force Base. Arrangements for the rematch were made in Las Vegas on April 12, with the fight set to be held at the Las Vegas Convention Center on June 27. Then, three weeks later, the fight was postponed yet again, to July, when surgery was required to remove a callus from Floyd Patterson's right hand.
Sonny arrived in Las Vegas in a gleaming black Fleetwood Cadillac with a white leather top and his initials on the driver's door. Inside, there was air conditioning; there were two telephones, a television set. An engraved metal plate was inscribed, "This car was specially made for Sonny Liston." There was a crucifix on the dashboard, a pair of miniature boxing gloves dangling from the rearview mirror.
It was initially planned that Sonny's training quarters would be at the Dunes. But three previous champions - Ray Robinson, Benny Paret, and Gene Fullmer -had become ex champions after training at the Dunes; and Sonny, who may not have had much religion, had a hell of a lot of superstition. So it came to be that the Liston camp set up at the Thunderbird, in a four bedroom cottage behind the hotel, the same ninety dollar a night cottage where Attorney General Robert Kennedy had stayed on his last visit to Vegas. In addition to Foneda Cox, there were two other sparring partners: the Nevada heavyweight Howard King, who had fought two professional matches with Sonny, in 1960 and 1961, and Leotis Martin, a light heavyweight who had begun his professional career the year before. As Willie Reddish explained, Foneda was there because he was the best puncher, King because he was good at attacking the torso, and Martin because he was "the nearest thing to Floyd Patterson with his shifty, peek a boo style."
Sparring matches between Sonny and the massive and heavily pomaded Howard King were presented as stage shows hosted by Ben Bentley. The sparring show was followed by the rope skipping show, in which Sonny sometimes varied his moves but never the music - "Night Train" - to which those moves were performed. When he wasn't working out, he played blackjack and shot craps, often with his hero who now was his friend, Joe Louis.
Las Vegas, as a Vegas lawyer once said to me with the straightest of faces, was "a friendly environment for the right people."
It was at the Thunderbird that Sonny grew close to a character known as Ash Resnick.
His real name was Irving. He had been born in New York on March 6, 1916. As a New Utrecht High School and New York University basketball star in the thirties, Ash had perfected the art of dumping and shaving points. It was said that he spent hours at a stretch in a playground on Bay Parkway in Brooklyn practicing foul shots that would bounce off the rim. In Vegas, he worked for several casinos and became, with Dean Shendal, one of the owners of Caesar's Palace.
He would be convicted of tax evasion for failing to report more than $300,000 he had skimmed from Caesar's. The same year, eight sticks of dynamite were found under his car. According to Dean, Ash put them there himself, and they were "nothing but Texas sawdust." Two years later, he was shot at, or seemed to be, while leaving Caesar's.
Everybody loved Ash, and everybody expressed that love with reservation. "Ash had balls as big as a canary," Dean said.
"But I happened to like him. He was one of my best friends." But "he was no tough guy."
Though Resnick was often considered to have been mobbed down, those who knew him well saw this was a myth that he himself cherished. His real connection, according to the comedian Shecky Greene, was "a New York man called Abe Margolis in the jewelry business. Every time he needed money or something, he'd get it from Abe. I think Abe is even the one who gave him money to go into Caesar's."
Ash and Sonny were very, very tight, although no one could quite figure out why. "Ash had him hypnotized," Dean said, and "I don't know how." Later he would say, "Sonny Liston was the hardest guy in the world to get to know. Ash knew him."
Foneda Cox said that Ash "loved every minute of it. He wanted Sonny with him everywhere he went." And Ash took care of Foneda, too, throwing him a few yards every time he blew his stash at the tables. "I thought Ash was a nice guy. I honestly did." At the same time, he felt Ash to be more than a mobster manque. As Foneda saw him in no uncertain terms, he was "a representative of the Mafia."
It was in 1955 that James R. Hoffa, the vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, consolidated scores of pension funds in twenty two states into the Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund. Hoffa became the president of the Teamsters, and the Fund became the Mob's chest of gold in Vegas, the bankroll through which the Mob's desert dream grew into the great and neon many armed Moloch of a fullblown Mafia dream land. Central to this relationship between the Teamsters and the Mob in Vegas was Moe Dalitz, an old time figure of Mob majesty who was a friend of Hoffa's from the days when Hoffa was nothing, and who was instrumental in Hoffa's rise to power.
Truman Gibson told me a story, in that way he has of delicately spinning out a web that can be plainly seen only from a distance, the gossamer of a tale that seems to have no meaning in itself, but which, when the moon of understanding waxes, shines softly with the light of meaning that was there all along.
After we organized the International Boxing Club, we promoted in several cities, including Detroit, and in Detroit, the Detroit Olympia Stadium. During the course of the boxing season, the Teamsters, which had a contract with the Detroit Olympia, would move the chairs, seats, about once or twice a month. So, after we started, the guy that worked for us in Detroit, Nick Londos, fell out with two Italians who had decided that they would become the matchmakers and have all the dealings with the fighters in Detroit. So, I was in New York when word came that the Teamsters were calling a strike on the Detroit Olympia because of problems with Nick Londos. I hired a lawyer in Detroit to get an injunction. So, we went ahead with the fight as planned.
Then, in an unusual situation, we had a fight the next week there, and I went in and the two gentlemen who attempted to muscle in on us approached me in the offices of the Michigan State Athletic Commission, twelve o'clock in the day. One was about five feet three inches tall and about six feet wide, and the other was his companion. He said, "Come here, we wanna talk." So, we went in the office and the companion started picking his fingers with a knife, and the short one said, "You know, you think you're god damn smart." I said, "No" - a very long o - "I don't think I'm smart, but I know you're stupid because it is twelve o'clock, there are a hundred people in the offices of the Michigan State Athletic Commission, and you think you're gonna blow me away." So I said we're not going to have any more fights in Detroit.
The next day, Paul Dorfman, whom I had known around the fights - Red Dorfman - came in. He was Jimmy Hoffa's right hand man. Paul was very, very close to Jimmy. So, he came in and said there was trouble in Detroit. I said, yeah, we had trouble in Detroit, but, I said, we're not going to have any more trouble because we're not going to Detroit. He said, "No, no, let's take a hop over to Detroit tomorrow." So we went over, and Paul had the two guys in the office and said, "You know, Jimmy don't want this shit that you're pulling, and if you continue, you'll be in the bottom of the Detroit River with chains, you understand?" Understood. Had a victory dinner and no more problems in Detroit. I said to Paul, "What's the grief?" He said, "No, no, I'll call you, there'll come a time."
So, about a year later, Paul Dorfman called me in New York and said, "Pay-off time." I said, "What do you mean, Paul?" And he said, "Well, Jimmy's on trial in Washington, and the jury's all black, and we want Joe [Louis] to come in as a character witness."
I said, "No." He said, "What do you mean, 'No'?'' I said, "Paul, character witnesses don't mean anything." "Well, have him come in and he'll stay a week and every time that the jury comes out, Joe will have his arms around Jimmy, talking to him and giving him advice." And we had Joe's wife hired as one of the counsel, sitting at the counsel table.
That was the case where Bobby Kennedy said, "If I don't get a conviction on this case, I'm going to jump off the top of the Washington Monument." So, Jimmy got a not-guilty and characteristically said, "When's the jump gonna take place? I wouldn't miss it for the world."
In the meantime, I had told Paul. "Don't give Joe any money, don't pay his hotel bill."
So, on the way to the airport - Joe was being driven by a chap by the name of Barney Baker, who is going to be an important connection with Sonny Liston -Joe says, "Goddamnit, I forgot to pay my" - "No, no, we took care of it" - "Oh, shit, oh, no, no, no." He said, "Truman's gonna kick the shit out of me." I had paid the hotel bill.
So we proceeded on our merry way, and about a month later, I got a call from the manager of the Justice Department's business affairs. He said, ''I've got an affidavit for you to sign." "For what?" I looked at it and saw that Joe got thirty-five thousand dollars for going to Washington. I said, "I’ll prepare an affidavit for you." So I prepared an affidavit indicating the facts: how I knew that Jimmy had insisted that his union not be used for purposes for which it was attempted to be used; which put me on Bobby Kennedy's shit-list forever. In any event, during the time that we operated, I went to Vegas several times. We started out with Jack Kearns a great deal, who was Jack Dempsey's manager, who knew all the players and others there. I met the owner of the Dunes Hotel, Morris [Shanker]. He had been a very prominent defense lawyer in St. Louis. His wife was a judge. But he is the one that sponsored, maybe indirectly, Sonny as a former St. Louisan in his fight business. He's the one that was responsible for Sonny going to Vegas.
That, incidentally, was a Teamster-financed hotel, the Dunes. The Dunes was Teamster through and through.
But, yes, Barney Baker, a name familiar from Sonny's leg breaking St. Louis days. Always appearing on the scene. In Detroit, in Washington, in Las Vegas. Never in front." He was, as Truman Gibson said, "ubiquitous." And when Gibson alluded to those that "controlled Sonny's destiny in Vegas," the name of Barney Baker fell nearby.
Barney Baker, a friend of the Teamsters and a friend of boxing. Ash Resnick worked a lot of places during his forty years in that Mob-controlled Teamster paradise: the Dunes, the Thunderbird, the Aladdin, Caesar's Palace, and more. He was, you might say, ubiquitous.
And Ash was a friend of boxers, too. He had put Joe Louis on the public relations staff at the Thunderbird, and he did the same for him when he moved to Caesar's Palace. Wherever he went, he took care of Joe the best he could.
Ash and Joe. Joe and Sonny. Sonny and Ash.
When Sonny moved his training camp to Las Vegas, twenty-one year-old Cassius Marcellus Clay followed him. Clay had not fought Cleveland Williams, as Liston had said he must. He had, on March 13, fought Doug Jones, a New York light heavyweight who had lost to Eddie Machen in 1961, and he had, on June 10, fought Henry Cooper, the British heavyweight champion whom Zora Folley had knocked out in two rounds, also in 1961. The Jones fight was a ten-round performance so lackluster that even Arthur Daley, the Clay supporting columnist of the New York Times, was critical of "his miserable showing against Doug Jones." Jack Nilon claimed that he had offered Clay $75,000 to forgo the Jones fight, as it would be damaging to the potential value of the inevitable Liston Clay fight. "I would have given Cassius a
nything not to fight Jones," Nilon said. "It was a dumb match. Did those Louisville millionaires need money that much?" He referred to the Louisville Group, the consortium of businessmen that were the backers and handlers of Clay's career. "When Jones was rapping Clay in the first round, I thought, uh oh, here it all goes out the window."
Clay rode Sonny's back for all the publicity it was worth. Cus D'Amato, before the Patterson fight, had likened Liston to a bear, and Clay now had taken Cus's phrase and in his amateur theatrical mockery elaborated it into a ceaseless taunting of Liston as "the big ugly bear."
In July, as the fight approached, a reporter asked Sonny what he thought of Patterson personally. "I think he's a nice guy." And Cassius Clay? "I think he's the nicest thing to come along since Christmas."
Nat Fleischer of The Ring magazine presented Sonny with his championship belt at a ceremony in Las Vegas on July 18. Sonny, who seemed moved, said nothing. Nearby Cassius Clay taunted him with whining cries of "Why don't you say something?" Sonny looked at him, waited for silence, then simply and sincerely expressed his thanks to Fleischer. This shut Clay's mouth, and when it did, Sonny gestured to the belt and looked at him again. "Cassius," he said, "there's something you will never get."
·
On July 22, the night of the fight, Patterson showed up with no false beard or moustache. "Those things are gone for me now," he said.
As Sonny entered the ring, the crowd greeted him with vicious cries and booing.
It lasted two minutes and twenty three seconds. This time, Sonny knocked him down twice before knocking him down for good - a left to the body, a right to the head. As dictated by Nevada rules, there was a count of eight for each knockdown. Without these eight count pauses, it was, in fighting time, a faster knockout than the first fight.