The Devil and Sonny Liston

by Nick Tosches

  When Sonny returned to Denver, he seemed to Foneda somewhat distant but not unhappy. "He wasn't really upset." But, as Foneda saw it, Sonny had let him down, gone back on his word to him. "In fact," he said, "after that, I didn't go with him anymore."

  Though they continued to spar and hang out together once in a while, the old days were over.

  Sonny's bodyguard, Lowell Powell, was there on that stingy brim night in Miami Beach, February 25, 1964, that night the unvanquishable Liston was vanquished by Cassius Clay.

  When Liston failed to come out of his corner in round seven, the man in the stingy brim hat knew what others did not know. "I had bet a lot of money on Sonny. What we called a lot of money. Three or four thousand dollars was a lot of money, as far as I'm concerned. I was given odds that he would take Clay in so many rounds. I said, 'Sonny, I'm gonna put some more money on you.'

  "He said, 'don't put any more money on me, man. Two heavyweights out there, you can't ever tell who will win.' He said, 'You've got enough money bet.' That's as far as he would go with me.

  "So, later on, after it all happened and he lost the fight, I said, 'Sonny, why would you let me lose my last penny on a fight and you knew you were gonna lose it? You could've at least pulled my coat.'

  "He said, 'with your big mouth, we'd both be wearing concrete suits."'

  Myrl Taylor had been in Algoa with Sam Eveland in the old days and later on had gotten involved with the unions in St. Louis. Later, after another three year stretch, he wound up over all the laborers in the eastern half of St. Louis. He retired in 1993.

  John Vitale, said Myrl, "liked to be around people. He always came to the fights." Not long before the Miami fight, Taylor approached Vitale. "I smell a rat here," he said to Vitale.

  Vitale, one friend of the Teamsters to another, told Myrl: "Let me give you some advice. When there's two niggers and a million dollars involved, all you better bet on is that a nigger's gonna win."

  "In other words," as Myrl said, "he's telling me, you know, get the fuck out of it."

  As for Myrl's estimation of Vitale: "well, he was supposed to be a big time gangster, but he was actually a fucking informer for the fuckin' police. He had a code name and everything. But the Italians here, it was a different thing. People up in Chicago and shit like that, all the Mafia people, they killed somebody, they killed somebody. These people here, they never - they always just set 'em up and snitched on 'em. It was a different ballgame."

  Sonny's mother, Helen, and eldest brother, E.B. Ward, put in a long distance call to Sonny from Forrest City after the fight. As E.B. Ward recalled, it took the operator about thirty minutes to get him on the hotel phone. Ward asked him what happened.

  "He said, 'I did what they told me to do."'

  Patsy Anthony Lepera was a gangster from Reading, Pennsylvania. "In those years," he said,

  I was still making money through connections in Reading. One day, I got a call from Sammy to come down to his club. "We got something going." I walk in - there's Jimmy Peters the bookie and his brother Louis the Lug, the fight promoter - their real name is Lucchese. Joe Pastore is running the meeting.

  Joe Pastore and me were good friends. When something was on, I used to get a piece of it. Now Joe tells us they got everything straightened out in the Liston Clay fight. Liston is a seven to one favorite ... he's going off the board. Philadelphia is sending up a hundred grand to bet, and Reading got to come up with a hundred grand, too. That's what the meeting is for. Okay, I'll go for twenty five.

  In a few days, we got the hundred together, and Jimmy Peters is working the money. He's laying it all through the coal region. Lots of bets were laid off with the Mob in Cleveland and Vegas. These guys took the other mobs.

  Lepera watched the broadcast of the fight.

  It's the seventh round. Liston stays in his corner, his arm hurts, he doesn't feel like fighting anymore, he sits there on the stool. It's a TKO. This guy didn't just take a dive - he did a one and a half off the high board. It was so bad. I figured we blew everything. It worried me - I already spent my end. But no, everybody got paid off. We had to give up forty percent for the information. I come out with seventy five thousand.

  Bernie Glickman, who had handled Sonny in his transition from St. Louis control, had come down from Chicago and was around the fighters' camps before the fight.

  "Right before the fight, he called me up," his son Joel told me. "He knew I liked to gamble and he knew I loved Liston. He said, 'Don't bet. There's something wrong. I don't know what it is.' I’ll never forget that. I didn't listen."

  ·

  A Chicago bookmaker remembered that night, too.

  The biggest key to it, the biggest key was the odds. The fight was five and a half to one here, and by fight time it was down to about two to one. One guy, he called me up from Vegas, he wanted to bet five grand on Clay. He was looking for four or five to one: but I'd already heard they were down to three to one, so I think I said I'd give him three to one. But for a fight to have dropped down like that. And if you knew anything about boxing, there was no way Clay could hurt Liston.

  The oddsmaker Bob Martin:

  I tried to lay eight to one, and I couldn't play around Vegas, and a friend of mine in Miami called me and got me out for five hundred. So I lost four thousand. I would have landed for ten thousand, so I would've lost eighty thousand. I couldn't get on, so I don't know where the line moved.

  Martin did not believe that Sonny took a dive. "No," he said, "no chance." He tempered that somewhat: "In my mind, no chance. If a guy takes a dive, there's gotta be a motive."

  When the Man says move, you got to move.

  Somebody told me to look to the east, to Mecca, for the answer.

  Liston had his crew down there in Miami. Pep Barone and the Nilon brothers were there. Ash Resnick from Vegas was there. Sam Margolis, an old friend and partner of Blinky's who had brokered Sonny's deal with the Nilons, was there. His hero Joe Louis was there.

  And Clay had his. Among that crew was Malcolm X. The two had met in 1962, and, although Clay's interest in Islam had already blossomed by then, it was Malcolm who cultivated, and, in Miami, completed, Clay's conversion. Malcolm at the time was fallen from grace with the Nation of Islam leaders in Chicago, and he had already begun to fear violence against him. He saw in Clay a means of reinstating himself and offered to deliver the flamboyant fighter, and his embrace of Islam, to the Savior's Day convention in Chicago on the very day after the big fight. The Chicago leaders were not impressed: they believed that Liston would win. But the thought of the power and publicity a Black Muslim heavyweight champion might bring cannot have been lost on them.

  "They were rough people," Truman Gibson mused when I broached the subject. They were murderously rough, as Malcolm X knew long before assassins from the Newark Temple No. 25 did their work in the cold early days of 1965.

  Perhaps, in a world that was no longer Carbo's, a threat of Muslim violence might have worked against Liston. He had long been apprehensive of the Black Muslims, as he was of all he deemed to be estranged from their rightful minds. But any involvement by the Nation of Islam would have been more likely part of a straightforward business deal. Clay was the first great fighter to emerge in boxing's post Carbo age. He had, so to speak, been born to freedom. True, he was owned in part by the Louisville consortium, but he was virgin meat as far as Mob leeching was concerned. Soon, when his contract with the Louisville Group expired, he signed with a Muslim manager, Herbert Muhammad, a son of the Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad. Exalted as the Messenger of the Prophet Allah, Muhammad was a reformed alky born in Georgia of an itinerant Baptist preacher named Poole.

  In the days preceding the fight, Clay had evaded questions concerning his reputed conversion to the Nation of Islam. On the day after the fight, he was ebullient with the profession of that conversion.

  "I go to a Black Muslim meeting and what do I see? I see there's no smoking and no drinking and their women wear dresses down to the f
loor." (Not only a clean cut young man, but one who knew that the gam was the devil's meat.) "And then I come out on the street and you tell me I shouldn't go in there. Well, there must be something in there if you don't want me to go in there." The separatist way was the way of nature, he said. "In the jungle, lions are with lions and tigers are with tigers, and redbirds stay with redbirds and bluebirds with bluebirds. That's human nature, too, to be with your own kind."

  On that morning after the fight, proclaiming his conversion and announcing in victory his new name, Clay's jubilation was real. Knowing nothing of what Sonny knew, and having been a party to no conspiracy other than that of his own fear and bravery, he had no reason at all to disbelieve that he was, as he said, the greatest. "White people wanted Liston to beat up and possibly kill poor little Clay," said Elijah Muhammad at that Savior's Day rally. "But Allah and myself said no. This assured his victory."

  What a great title for a song, what a great title for a poem: "But Allah and Myself Said No."

  Islam was a religion of slavery from its beginnings in the seventh century. The holy Koran looked upon slaves as the gifts of God, as those "whom God has given you as booty"; and the early, trans-Saharan slave trade in Africa was dominated by the Muslims. What a fine and fitting heritage, no matter how skewed and misknown, from which to enter the fight racket.

  A tithe for Islam surely would not be too much to ask of a man of the faith so blessed as the champion now known as Ali. And from that tithe might be drawn a portion for Sonny. Clay was young, with a long future ahead of him. To a man who felt rather than knew his age, a cut of that future, a piece of every, increasing purse, might seem not a bad deal at all. But if the Nation of Islam had somehow got to Sonny, the unknowing Ali would have been sent into the ring praising the divinity and the blessing and the all conquering power of Allah, rather than been constrained to not publicize his faith before the fight. To the Black Muslims, Clay's publicity value as a champion would be great, but were he to lose, having been known as a Black Muslim beforehand, his loss would be a loss for the power and image of the faith. The Prophet had not shared the future with the Messenger; and the Muslims, like just about everybody else, expected Sonny to bury Clay in the open night.

  On February 16, 1963, a year before the Miami fight, the Court of Appeals in San Francisco had handed down its decision in a seventy five page opinion that confirmed the 1961 convictions of Frankie Carbo, Blinky Palermo, and the others. Alcatraz had been shut down, and Carbo was moved to another prison. Blinky lingered a while more on the outside, and was unincarcerated still the night Liston lost to Clay. It was not until June 5, 1964, that United States marshals took him from Philadelphia to begin his fifteen year term in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg.

  The Devil gave, and the Devil took away. For Sonny, had the Devil not given to him in the first place, there would never have been anything to take away: because you could be the best, toughest, killingest motherfucking fighter in the world, but without the Devil it did not much matter a good goddamn, because it was the Devil's ring. There was no one left for Sonny to turn to: except to the Devil in himself.

  ·

  "He who is by nature not his own but another's man, is by nature a slave."

  Nature. Destiny. Fate. Guys like Frankie Carbo.

  The writer Mark Kram recalls being with Ali many years later, in 1983, as they sat and talked by the trancing hushed crackling flames of the fireplace in Ali's Los Angeles mansion. Ali became lost in silence, and, in that silence, he looked into the fire for quite some time. He turned to Kram and whispered to him: "Liston was the Devil."

  In court on May 29, Sonny was let off gently on the speeding and gun possession charges brought against him in March. Municipal Judge Dan D. Diamond handed down fines totaling six hundred dollars. "You have been an idol of mine," said the judge. "God love you and bless you in your future. I’m sorry this had to happen." On an FBI memorandum reporting the judge's words, the Director, accenting those words with his pen, wrote, "Disgusting!"

  On Christmas Day, Sonny was stopped for drunken driving and hauled to jail in a patrol wagon after becoming involved in "a shoving match" with the ten Denver policemen who had answered the arresting officer's call. He was wrestled into a cell, where he spent five hours of his Christmas. Counting a penny ante speeding pinch that took place two weeks after the concealed weapon rap in March, it was his third arrest in the months since the Clay fight.

  He was sporting a close razored moustache tight above his lip these days. He looked bloated some days, drawn on others. What little light had shone in those dead man's eyes could now hardly be discerned. He was described as "haggard" at the time of his arrest. While he now claimed to be either thirty - his date of birth as set forth in his license application for the Miami fight would have rendered him at that time a bit more than two months shy of his thirtieth birthday, though on the same application, he specifically stated his age as thirty - or his more customary thirty-two - a photograph taken of him early in November showed a man who appeared to have at least forty hard years behind him.

  On January 30, 1965, a Denver jury found Liston innocent of the drunk-driving charges. When confronted with the police report that he had been staggering and stumbling while entering his car in front of a restaurant, Sonny explained that he had merely been just jive dancing to the music of his fine new 1965 Cadillac's fine new stereo tape player.

  The suspicions and trouble stirred by the Miami fight were such that no state with a reputation for boxing would sanction the re-match. Art Laurie, who at that time was the chairman of the Nevada State Boxing Commission, told me that Senators Hart and Keating spoke to him personally about the prospect of holding the fight in Las Vegas. "They told me not to have anything to do with that fight, because our industry here was gaming, and that fight was going to stink out the place." They also told him that Sonny "only owned ten percent of himself." Laurie recalled that Ash Resnick, along with the promoters Mel Greb and Jack Doyle "came to my office and asked me for a date." (Greb and Doyle would later co-promote the Las Vegas Ali-Patterson fight with Inter Continental.) "I said, 'That fight's not going to take place here."' The governor of Nevada, Grant Sawyer, involved himself, and in the end, he told Laurie to use his judgment.

  Laurie knew and liked Sonny. He had seen a lot of fighters in his time - born in 1918, he had been a heavyweight champion of the navy boxing team under Gene Tunney, and he later had refereed more title fights than any other official -but he had never seen a fighter with the brute force of Liston. Laurie was watching him work out on a sandbag one day in Vegas, and he saw something he never forgot: Sonny threw a left hook that carried such force that he blew the sandbag loose and sent it crashing to the floor. Furthermore, that force had wrenched open, straightened, and sent flying the S-hook by which the sandbag had been suspended.

  Laurie said that "they" - and this, I now see, is what we truly need: a Gibbon, a full and glorious and detailed history of them - went for the money. "They got three hundred thousand dollars for the fight, and they bet it at seven to one. They got two point one million."

  "The money was bet through Cleveland," Laurie said. "That's where they placed the money. That's what I understand."

  Las Vegas was not alone in wanting nothing to do with this most suspect of sequels to the most suspect and infamous of heavyweight championship fights: and it came to be held, on May 25, 1965, before a sparse crowd at the Central Maine Youth Center, a schoolboys' hockey arena in Lewiston, Maine.

  One thing is certain: in that rematch - it was Liston-Ali then, not Liston-Clay -when Sonny lay down in the first, he showed less acting ability than in the episode of Love American Style in which he later bizarrely appeared. That fight was not merely a fix - a fix that common lore attributes to physical intimidation by the legion of Black Muslims reportedly gathered there. These Muslims were, in fact, fewer than legion and were present to protect Ali from reprisal by the followers of the late Malcolm X. whose apostasy in breakin
g with Elijah Muhammad had been loudly denounced by Clay in his ever-increasing role as party-line mouthpiece - it was a flaunted fix.

  When fights were tampered with, for the benefit of a fighter's career or the benefit of select few gamblers' pockets, or both, they were most usually rigged rather than fixed. Rigging was a simple and not illegal procedure whereby one fighter of greater capability - whether or not that capability was yet known to the general population of suckers - was pitted against another of lesser capability, who indeed might have been made to look better than he was in previous rigged fights. It was a straightforward matter, known as mismatching. (The 1954 Boxing Reference Dictionary of F.C. Avis offers the following definition of the noun mismatch: "a contest between two boxers of very different standards of ability." Sometimes mismatches occur unforeseeably, by nature, as it were; sometimes they occur by design.) As Truman Gibson said, all out fixes were rare: when the same interests profited equally from a fight, no matter who won, what did it matter? Only when an extraordinary gambling payoff presented itself was a debt of fate called in. And only the designated loser knew. The preordained winner was never told, for the main burden of making the fix look real rested on him; for him, the fight must be real, and he must fight naturally and in ignorance. As a knowing accomplice, he would be not only a potential danger to the success of the fix, but also potentially nothing more than an unneeded and unwanted expense. Thus, the winner of a good fixed fight never knows that he is a party to the fix. It has been said that it is harder to throw a good fight than to fight one. But human vanity on the part of a victor does much to compensate in his heart and mind for any suspicion of inauthenticity on the part of his foredoomed opponent. The performance in Lewiston, however, was so bad that even Ali must have known.

  Sonny - the eight to five favorite, despite the prior loss - could not repeat his Miami Beach routine of merely slouching on a stool while Jack Nilon announced his woeful incapacitation. For one thing, the physician at the prefight examination found no evidence of shoulder injury and declared him to be "the fittest man I have ever examined"; for another the most willing suspension of disbelief would not countenance it. And so, in the first round, when Ali hit him, he went down. Sonny, who had been knocked down only once before - by a fighter whom the risen Sonny then had proceeded to give the most ferocious beating of his life - here was felled by a blow so slight that few could see it: a short right that seemed intended only to fluster and to fend off, a short right followed by a left hook that missed.