The Devil and Sonny Liston

by Nick Tosches

  Wepner, who was thirty one at the time, said that, up close in the ring, Sonny "looked like he'd been around the block quite a few times. They said he was thirty eight, and he looked like he was maybe fifty."

  The money had run as dry as the rivulet that had trickled to nothing on that plantation slough. It was said that in November Sonny entered a Las Vegas recording studio and made him a rock 'n' roll record, and that he was hoping that it might bring him a few bucks when it was released. Nothing else was ever heard or discovered about that record.

  Sonny was in an automobile accident on Thanksgiving Day of 1970. He was given emergency treatment at Sunrise Hospital, then released. Two days later, he was admitted to Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital, where, on December 1, he was reported in satisfactory condition. The hospital would not reveal the nature of Sonny's injuries. In a letter Geraldine wrote to a friend, she said, "he got cut on the head and nose kind of bad but we think it will be ok when it heal." He was released on December 4.

  Something drew him to Los Angeles. There, on December 16, he was arrested on a freeway for drunken driving. He returned to Las Vegas.

  Johnny Tocco, Davey Pearl, and Lem Banker were the three men who had flown with Sonny when he fought Chuck Wepner.

  Tocco was a trainer who had worked with Sonny in the early days in St. Louis. He had moved in the early fifties to Vegas, where he had been operating the Ringside Gym on East Charlton since 1956. He was now serving once again as a trainer of sorts for Sonny.

  Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1917. Davey Pearl had come to Vegas in September 1947. After blowing his last sixty bucks gambling, he had tried to politely bum a smoke from a guy who told him no, which "got me so mad that I made up my mind that I was gonna stay here and be somebody, and let that son of a bitch, if I ever run into him, know that he turned me down for a cigarette."

  Davey tells this story sitting diminutive and dapper beside his diminutive and dapper and very identical twin, Lou. His package of Merit cigarettes is placed carefully before him on the table of a joint called Bagelmania, at Twain and Swenson, where he takes his breakfast coffee almost every morning; and, as he tells this story, he seems as if he would still be able, after more than half a century, to readily recognize that prick if he walked in, and would just as readily blow smoke in his face.

  "That's what made me stay here. Plus the fact that I had no money." One thing led to another, and he found himself working the Flamingo, Bugsy Siegel's joint. "Ya hadda call him Mr. Siegel. Yeah. He got killed a few months after I started." From there, running shows, running joints, and working fights, he came to know them all, as many claimed but few did: from Sinatra to Dean Martin, from Carl Cohen, who knocked out Sinatra's teeth ("the number one nice guy in Vegas," Pearl said of Cohen) to Moe Dalitz ("one of the greatest guys that ever lived. I cried when he died") to Meyer Lansky. "Dalitz, you had to respect him; Cohen, you had to respect him; but when Lansky said something, that was it. He was a nice guy, quiet as could be." Lansky was not a gentleman, said Davey, he was a perfect gentleman. They chartered a plane together, he and Lansky, in the summer of 1954, flew off to Frisco for the Olson Castellani middleweight championship fight. Yes, Davey Pearl. the modest, down to earth, behind the scenes Vegas legend that the writ big legends sought out and trusted, had a past that liars would pay to have as their own. In the fight game, he became a legend far beyond Vegas, as one of the most honored and respected referees in boxing. Told initially by the Nevada State Athletic Commission that he was too small to be a referee, Davey went on to referee thousands of fights, more than fifty world title bouts among them. In 1997, he was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame.

  Sonny Liston, he said, was "one of the best friends I ever had in my life, if not the best." Times had changed. The days of gentlemanly tough guys were gone, and Davey was no kid anymore. But "after I was with Sonny," he said, "nobody fooled with me. You know what I'm saying? Nobody got tough. Nobody ever stepped outta line with me. There were guys here who were professional tough guys, and they'd maybe try to get in on the muscle, and I hated that with a passion. Well, nobody ever did that to me when Sonny was near me.''

  Davey remembered the time he cajoled Sonny into serving as guest referee at a boys club boxing tournament.

  Little kids; nine, ten years old. So, going into the ring, Sonny says to me, "Now I'll show you how a referee should referee." So, he gets in the ring and the kid is beating the other kid up badly. So he stops the fight. The loser was so mad he stopped the fight, he takes the glove off his hand and throws the glove at Sonny and hits him right in the face. I never got him back there again.

  While never officially Sonny's manager - he accepted no money from him, though Sonny offered it - Davey was a friend who often performed the duties of a manager. They did roadwork together, ran maybe five or six miles on those mornings when Davey could rouse or find Sonny. Sometimes Sonny would be outside waiting for him. "The mornings that he wasn't outside, I knew he was trying to keep away from running, so I’d ring the bell. He hated for me to ring that bell. 'What the fuck you want? I ain't goin' today.' 'The fuck you're not goin."' Sonny's respect for Davey seems in one way to have inspired the same reserved behavior that he showed among priests. "Everybody used to tell me he was a drunk," said Davey, who himself drank and smoked; but "I never saw him take a drink in all the years I was with him."

  Some mornings, Sonny would not be at home when Davey arrived. According to another Vegas friend, Gene Kilroy, an associate of Muhammad Ali, Sonny on those mornings would be holed up often as not at Joe Louis's house, the two of them shooting craps on Joe's bedroom floor. Joe, according to Dean Shendal, was a craps degenerate, an alchemist who "turned money into shit." Truman Gibson, Joe's old friend, said that America's most beloved boxer had by this time become a smack and coke junkie who was fast falling apart. Truman remembered seeing him so strung out and fucked up that he was hearing voices come through an air conditioner. Louis was hospitalized for a breakdown in 1970; and, as Truman said, it was not until a stroke debilitated him that he got off the shit.

  Lem Banker, another friend of Sonny's, was described, in a November 1997 profile in the New York Times business section, as "perhaps one of the most successful gamblers in Las Vegas."

  Of his relationship with Sonny in Las Vegas, Lem Banker, who is now in his seventies, told me, "I was his best friend for the simple reason that I never tried to make any money off the guy." Like Davey Pearl, Lem seemed to evoke in Sonny that same respectful reserve brought out by priests. "He wouldn't drink in front of me," Lem said.

  Banker said that, after returning to Vegas from the Wepner fight. "Ralph Lamb, who was sheriff, told me, 'Lem, I know you're friendly with Sonny. Tell him he's hanging around the wrong people on the West Side. We're gonna bust these guys. Tell Sonny not to hang out with them."'

  The West Side was the bad side, the black side.

  "I started drinking in 1930 and stopped drinking in '87," said Charles Broadus.

  Broadus, known as Doc, was involved with the Olympic heavyweight champion George Foreman at the outset of his professional career, in 1968. He brought Sonny together with the young fighter, and together Sonny and Foreman went to St. Louis.

  "Sonny brought him over to my house," Lowell Powell remembered.

  I took him to the gym every day. The funny thing, Sonny sat next to me in the car, we were driving over south St. Louis to the gym, and this young boy, George Foreman, nineteen years old, and he was smacking gum or something in Sonny's ear, and Sonny said, "Will you stop smacking that gum in my ear?" He said, "If you seen the way I whupped that German, you wouldn't talk to me like that." That cracked everybody up, because Sonny wasn't used to people sassing him. He loved Sonny. Yeah, he loved Sonny.

  Doc Broadus recalled running round the West Side with Sonny. "Me and him run together twenty four hours. Only difference between me and Liston was I had to go to work and Liston would go to bed," said Broadus.

  "We drank together," and chas
ed down women. "Oh, shit, yeah." They hung out, too, he said, at the Zebra Lounge, which was part of Tocco's gym. "We had fun, we'd run together day and night. We had fun and enjoyed what we was doing, and that was that." As far as Broadus knew, Sonny never messed with dope.

  The booze, the broads, all that shit. "Hey," as Dean Shendal said, "he was fucking around with thirty young broads." But no one who knew him - no one -believed that he was on dope.

  According to Lowell Powell, his old friend and bodyguard from St. Louis, Sonny wasn't using the shit, but he was selling it.

  "I learned a lot about Sonny's quiet business through Ash," Lowell said. "I guess Ash thought I knew a lot of things that possibly I didn't know. Sonny kept a lot of things from me. Well, a lot of things he couldn't discuss with me by virtue of my being a policeman," albeit a retired policeman.

  "Ash was a good guy, yes. He loved money." And, as Lowell later said in idle reflection, "Money makes strange bedfellows." And while Sonny was selling, he was also shooting his mouth off, threatening to talk about things. "Yeah," said Lowell, "that's what got him killed in my opinion. He started putting pressure down, he started selling narcotics."

  Lowell received a long letter from Sonny. "I guess everyone was upset over the fight," it said, but it was good "to know I still have Friend. I know Friend ar much better then money." The letter ended, "I hope to see you when I get some money. I had not for got you."

  On his way to visit his brother in Los Angeles, Lowell stopped in Vegas. It was perhaps little more than a week before Christmas.

  I came looking for Sonny and he wasn't at home, so I talked with Geraldine for a while. She said, "Sonny has gotten unruly." I said, "Isn't he coming home for dinner? I'll stay and eat with him. "She said, "No, he doesn't trust me on food and things; he gets his little Kentucky Frieds and things, and you can catch him over there at the Hilton Hotel. You go to the casino, and if he's not there, you just stand there five minutes, and he'll come through."

  The Hilton - it was still the International, really; Kerkorian's new management agreement with Hilton was in effect, but the name had not yet been changed -was only a few minutes from the Liston house. "I was there, I’d say, five minutes before he came up and touched me on the shoulder. So we got to talking and spent the evening together. We had just ordered new Cadillacs. I had got mine, he was waiting for his. He wanted me to stay, but I had to go. He drove me to the airport." He did not seem unruly. "No. He was in a very friendly mood."

  On the day after Christmas. Geraldine left town to visit her mother in St. Louis. Sonny drove her to the airport.

  While away, she would later say, Geraldine tried unsuccessfully to telephone her husband several times. She returned home to the smell of death on the night of January 5, 1971, at about half past eight.

  In the glimpse of Sonny that she could bear before coming apart, she saw him lying back, stiff and bloated, butt down in his skivvies on the upholstered bench at the foot of the velvet covered bed; his upper body prone, his feet on the floor, his shoes and socks beside them.

  Geraldine arrived, hysterical, at about eight forty five at the home of her friend Bernice Heath on Aztec Way. With Bernice was a business associate, William Hartford. Without success, Bernice and Hartford tried to reach Geraldine's doctor, Kenneth Turner. They called upon another friend, James Custer, and the three of them accompanied Geraldine to her home, where, at about a quarter past ten, they found Sonny - what had been Sonny - just as Geraldine in her hysteria had described. At about eleven o'clock, they reached Dr. Turner's colleague Dr. William J. Cavin. He arrived at the house on Ottawa Drive at about twenty past eleven. It was Cavin who pronounced Liston dead at about half past eleven on that night of January 5, 1971.

  Dr. Cavin did not examine the body. Judging by its abnormal swelling and rigor mortis, he concluded that it had lain dead for about a week. The police were called, and two detectives arrived at about twelve forty five. They interviewed those present except for Geraldine, whose "apparent shock" rendered her unable to be questioned.

  The subsequent Dead Body Report noted that, "Upon examining the mail in the house, it was observed that a Notice of Attempt to Deliver Mail dated 12.28.70, was observed laying on a table in the entryway to the residence. Also a newspaper dated 12.28.70 was noted." The newspaper was lying on the basement bar, next to Sonny's hat.

  According to the report of Investigator H. Bowe of the coroner's office, "Decedent was in a bloated condition and gas was escaping from his nose. Blood appeared to have come from the nose and it appeared that blood had soaked and dried in the bedsheet at the decedent's head. Decedent's fingers appeared dehydrated."

  The ID Bureau of the Clark County Sheriff's Office arrived to take pictures.

  The body was removed by the coroner's office to Palm Mortuary, on North Main.

  The sheriff's office stated that a quarter ounce of heroin was found in a colored balloon in the kitchen, a bag of reefer in a pocket of Liston's trousers draped over a bedroom chair. There was a glass of vodka on a nightstand; on a dresser, a holstered .38 revolver, a wooden cross, a stuffed rattlesnake, some loose change. The television set was on. Again duly noted was the December 28 Las Vegas Sun newspaper that lay by Sonny's hat atop the basement bar. Newspapers from the twenty ninth and later lay stacked on the porch.

  An autopsy was performed at Palm Mortuary later that day, January 6.

  The body is that of a well developed, well nourished middle aged Negro male measuring 73 inches in length and weighing an estimated 240 pounds. The body shows considerable postmortem changes. There is gaseous distention of the skin particularly the face, abdomen, scrotum and penis. Facial details are obliterated partially by this gaseous subcutaneous distention. The face shows a flattened appearance. The skin also shows some areas of bleb formation and skin slippage. The skin surfaces including the scalp show no evidence of recent traumatic injury.

  The left anticubital fossa shows a horizontal old scar which appears to have been traumatic in origin. This measures 3 cm in length. Immediately beneath the horizontal scar is a V-shaped scar with the apex at the horizontal scar, the arms of which measure 1 and 1.5 cm. in length. These scars have a somewhat nodular appearance and roughly follow the course of anticubital veins. These scars may have been caused by old traumatic injury but the possibility that they represent old needle puncture marks (in the V shaped scar) cannot be absolutely excluded. There is no external evidence of a recent needle puncture perforation in this location. Dissection of both anticubital fossae show no abnormalities on the right. On the left there is a small extravasation of blood subcutaneously and in the dermal fat immediately beneath the skin. This is not associated with detectable hemorrhage about the exposed anticubital vein in this location. Portions of skin, subcutaneous fat and veins were taken for subsequent microscopic examination. Except for gaseous extention in the scrotum and penis the anus and external genitalia show nothing of note.

  The term "antecubital", rendered incorrectly throughout as "anticubital", refers to the inner surface of the forearm.

  The body cavities and organs revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Microscopic findings were said to include "an increase in fibrous tissue about the small blood vessels in the septums" of the heart. "The small arteries and the arterioles in the heart show considerable collagenous intimal thickening."

  This description of microscopic fibrosis, or scarring, within the heart is an indication of the presence of small-blood-vessel disease.

  While large vessel disease is easily detectable in the living as well as in the dead, small-vessel disease is not, but, as with any fibrosis of the heart, it can possibly result in arrhythmia, which can lead to sudden death.

  However, it is extremely unlikely to find normal large vessels and abnormal small vessels within the same heart, and instances of this rare condition (now known as Syndrome X) are restricted almost exclusively to women and, to a lesser degree, diabetic men.

  According to the medical examiner's report, Sonn
y's death was due to "probable myocardial anoxia due to coronary insufficiency": that is, a deprivation of oxygen to the muscular tissue of the heart. The words "exact cause undetermined by autopsy" are appended in parentheses to the diagnosis of "probable myocardial anoxia due to coronary insufficiency": but the implication is that this anoxia was caused by the narrowing of the fibrous small blood vessels described in the autopsy's microscopic findings: a narrowing independent of any large vessel abnormality, as encountered only rarely and usually only among women.

  There are two ways of interpreting this diagnosis. Either the examiner did indeed encounter in Sonny a very rare instance of Syndrome X in a male or, in need of a final diagnosis but lacking any other conclusive evidence, found it convenient to attribute death to a condition - small-vessel abnormality without accompanying large vessel abnormality - that is all but undetectable in life and thus not a part of a routine medical history that could either refute or confirm such a condition as a postmortem diagnosis.

  "Probable myocardial anoxia due to coronary insufficiency." Probable. Odd that after all these centuries of cut and croak, there should be no obfuscating medical term for that particular equivocation.

  The immediate cause of death, as attributed to this "probable" cause, was diagnosed as "pulmonary congestion and edema." While commonly indicative of a heart attack, as here implied, this congestion and filling of the lungs with serous fluid is also indicative of a fatal heroin overdose.

  "This autopsy," stated the report, "eliminates the possibility of homicide."

  A confidential Homicide Detail report dated January 20 incorporates information from Sonny's physician, Dr. Richard J. Browning.

  During Sonny's recent hospitalization following his Thanksgiving auto accident, said Browning, the examination of Sonny's heart and lungs had been extensive and thorough. "His findings prior to the deceased's dismissal from the hospital," stated the confidential report, "were contrary to the Coroner's final diagnosis." The doctor also stated that in the five years he had known and treated Sonny, "there was no evidence of the deceased using narcotics."