The Devil and Sonny Liston

by Nick Tosches

  It was Dr. Mark Herman who performed the autopsy under the supervision of Dr. James Clarke, the chief medical examiner. It was Dr. Mark Herman who was said to have seen, before he saw those other scars, the copper colored whipping welts, old and faint, like one might imagine to have been those of a driven slave.

  Those other scars. "There is no external evidence of a recent needle puncture perforation in this location".

  The headline of the Las Vegas Sun, the day after the autopsy report: PROBE REVEALS LISTON MAY HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE NARCO VICTIM.

  A day later, the Sun ran a small piece under the heading "Narco Agent Last Person Known to Have Seen Sonny Liston Alive":

  The last person known to see Charles (Sonny) Liston alive was an undercover narcotics agent.

  Sheriff's detectives said yesterday Liston, known as the "bad man" of professional boxing, was visited at his home Dec. 30 by the agent. They refused to divulge the nature or reason for his visit, but did say Liston was apparently in good health at that time.

  Lawmen believe the 38 year old heavyweight may have died from an overdose of drugs. Puncture wounds, similar to needle tracks, scarred the well muscled arms and small quantities of heroin and marijuana were uncovered inside the $70,000 luxury home at the Sahara, Nevada Country Club.

  No name: "the agent." Agent Nobody.

  "They refused to divulge the nature or reason for his visit, but did say Liston was apparently in good health at that time."

  A date of death established by the date of a newspaper left beside a hat, December 28, and the date of a newspaper left on a doorstep, December 29. Then an unnamed visitor, a phantom agent, to establish well being on December 30 - an "agent" never to be heard of or from again. How difficult would it be, really, to place day old or week old newspapers on a dead man's doorstep? Does bestowing the title of agent on an invisibility give credence to words attributed to that invisibility? Undercover agent. Under cover of what? Undercover as in undercover manager, as in under cover of the night? Why would a man who could not read lay a paper beside his hat in the privacy of his own home? Who was the boy who delivered those papers that piled up outside the door? It would seem that he could be brought forth, or was he, too, an undercover agent. Under what premise did the undercover agent gain entry to the abode of the living? Excuse me, sir, I'm an under cover agent, may I come in? The newsboy and the narco. Maybe they were one. Unnamable. Unknown.

  Pieces of Sonny's brain, heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys had been sent to the California Toxicology Service in Los Angeles for independent examination. The report showed that "traces of morphine and codeine were found in body tissues but not in sufficient amounts which could be considered as causing death." These traces of morphine and codeine "corresponded to the amounts which would normally result from a breakdown of heroin in the body." Why was the evidence of heroin present? How accurately, after the passing of an unknown number of days, could the component traces of the breakdown of the heroin reveal the quantity of heroin that originally had been present? These questions were not addressed, and they were not answered.

  The Las Vegas Sun, January 20: "Liston Death 'Natural'":

  "Although traces of heroin were found in the corpse of former world boxing champ Sonny Liston, local experts have ruled the 38 year old heavyweight died from natural causes."

  Case closed. And closed, too, the coffin. Services were held at Palm Mortuary Chapel on the Saturday afternoon of January 9, 1971, with the Reverend Edward P. Murphy presiding. The Ink Spots sang "Sunny." Folks laid down flowers. His little adopted boy looked as though the world had ended or, worse, had taken on the colors of all the sadness that ever was. Of Sonny's kin from the old days, only J.T., the brother known as Shorty, made the trip. The silver steel casket was taken to Paradise Memorial Gardens, and Sonny was laid, fist and feet beneath the dirt.

  Case closed.

  Someone suggested I get in touch with Ralph Lamb, who was the sheriff at that time.

  "I don't know anything about him except that he fought here," Lamb said. "I was not in charge of the case," and "I don't know who was. It was a long time ago."

  A long time ago.

  Natural causes. Some who knew him accepted this. A few felt that perhaps Sonny did indeed die on dope. "I think he was using and he overdosed," said Gene Kilroy. "I think he was depressed because he was running out of money. I think either he did himself in or he accidentally did himself in." Dean Shendal tended to agree with Gene. "Listen," he said, "this town, you'll hear Rip Van Winkle never went to sleep. There's more bullshit in this town than there are bullshitters. I don't know where it all comes from. Some of it comes from guys like me."

  Most who knew him protested that his phobia of needles precluded this. That fear was by all accounts lifelong and intense, evident as early as his prison days and as recently as his November hospital stay, when he expressed anxiety and distress at having been injected unawares.

  "He never took a shot." said Sam Eveland of Sonny in those prison days. "He would catch pneumonia before he would take a shot. That's how scared he was of needles."

  The Philadelphia Daily News writer Jack McKinney, who was one of the very few intrepid sportswriters to champion and defend Liston, said, "Sonny was deathly afraid of needles. He and I had the same dentist in Philadelphia. His name was Dr. Nick Ragni. When Sonny went to Ragni for a root canal, he wouldn't even take Novocain."

  Lem Banker told me that Mickey Duff, the British promoter who handled Sonny's first overseas tours, noted that Sonny refused all inoculations or blood tests, that "he didn't want anything; he was afraid of needles." Banker also said that Sonny refused to take a needle when he got his California boxing license, before his fight with Henry Clark, in 1968.

  "Look what they did!" Johnny Tocco remembered Sonny raving when Tocco visited him in the hospital after his Thanksgiving automobile accident. "He was pointing at some little bandage over the needle mark in his arm. He was more angry about that shot than he was about the car wreck." Sonny was still bitching about that shot two weeks later, Tocco said. "To this day, I'm convinced that's what the coroner saw in his exam - that hospital needle mark."

  "He was." as Lowell Powell put it, "as scared of a needle as a goat is a butcher knife."

  The one unsettling and ambiguous stroke in this picture, the fact overlooked by, or unknown to, those who attest to Sonny's fear and avoidance of needles, is that he was alleged to have undergone, and likely did undergo, cortisone shot treatments in 1963 and again in 1964. Furthermore, there never was a junkie who did not start out afraid of needles. But Sonny's extreme reaction to injections during his hospital stay in November 1970 indicates that Sonny at this late time was far from seduced, indeed repulsed, by the charms of the piqure. And if it is true, as Foneda Cox claimed, that the 1963 knee injury was feigned, there were no cortisone shots at that time; and if one were to regard the after the fact account of a bursitis ridden shoulder as part of an obfuscating explanation brought forth after the first Clay fight, one might suspect, too, that there had been no cortisone shots in 1964.

  Chuck Wepner, who fought Liston five months earlier, told me that Liston certainly did not box like a junkie.

  "He didn't look like a junkie to me. Although his eyes were bloodshot, but that could be from anything. That could be from just not sleeping much. I think he partied and drank a lot. They said that the guy, you know, a lot of the fights, he didn't really train that hard, and he partied and he did what he had to do and he went in and knocked guys out."

  If anybody could have got him to banging the shit, it was his buddy and only hero, old Joe Louis.

  Many simply called it murder.

  ''A friend of mine called me, said, man, they found Sonny dead," Lowell Powell recalled. "I said, 'I’ll be damned, they got to him."'

  On the West Side, and on the Strip, in joints in Chicago and joints in St. Louis and joints in New York, you hear different things. He got involved in a big dope deal. They had his money, they figured who ne
eds him. He got involved in some shylocking operation, fucked with the wrong people. Different things, all sorts of things. Of course, killing Sonny would have been no mean feat. The moment his killers started toward him, as somebody said, "that woulda been all she wrote." The consensus was that they put something in his drink, then gave him a hotshot.

  The police seemed eager to be shut of the whole mess. Drug overdose, natural death: each verdict was welcome and readily accepted in turn. no further questions asked, no matter how many questions the reports left unanswered.

  If Sonny was killed, as most who knew him believed, his killers concealed their act with sophistication and skill that were extraordinary in the extreme - or with the common and ordinary complicity of those entrusted with the revelation of their act. Las Vegas, "a friendly environment for the right people," was also historically a very murder-friendly place.

  Liston was surrounded by, as they say in Sicily, the friends of friends. His life in this regard had been very friendly. The Teamsters, the Boys, this one, the other one: everybody was friends. Sonny knew this guy, and this guy knew Vitale, and Vitale knew this guy, and Kerkorian knew this guy, and Sonny ends up in Kerkorian's house. Better homes and graveyards. You drive a car for some Syrian guy in St. Louis, and some other Syrian guys end up with the Aladdin, and you end up in Vegas, and Ash ends up at the Aladdin, and you end up with Ash, and the Aladdin is funneling money to Vitale. Round and round she went, one big circle of friends. Made sure folks who couldn't read got their newspapers delivered right to their door; sent around agents without names to check that you were all right and well. Friendship. It was a beautiful thing.

  The gossamer web becomes clearly visible. But the spider is nowhere in sight.

  The men who could have helped Sonny, even if only to see, were no longer there.

  In the end, they would fare better than he. Frankie Carbo, released from prison early due to illness, would die in a Miami Beach hospital bed, age seventy two, on November 9. 1976. Blinky Palermo, released from prison in the fall of 1971, would have the balls to apply for a new manager's license, and would die, without that license in a Philadelphia hospital bed, age ninety one, on May 12, 1996.

  "Oh, he loved Blinky." Davey Pearl said with a smile that was wistful. "He told me once that of all the guys that he had, Palermo was the nicest to him."

  "I just heard he OD'd on drugs," Chuck Wepner said. "Then, later on, years later, I started hearing stories that they knocked him off. He wasn't a well liked guy."

  Dope, shylocking. Money. Whatever it was, it came down to money. From that nickel on that winter night in 1950 until the end, it came down to money. Not only in his world, but in the only world there is: it came down to money.

  Lem Banker, who is convinced that Sonny was murdered, spoke of an ex-cop imprisoned at Carson City who claimed he was offered a contract by Ash Resnick. The story is that Ash and Sonny had a big falling out. Over money. Banker doesn't believe the story: "Ash didn't have Sonny killed," he said. "Ash did a lot of things, but he wasn't a murderer." And I don't believe it, either.

  Davey Pearl seemed hesitant to call Sonny's death a murder outright, but as he spoke, other feelings seemed to emerge. "Dealing with the wrong people, there's always a chance of getting killed, "he remarked. Then: "The police don't even know who killed him." Johnny Tocco believed that Sonny died from natural causes: "I think he had a seizure, or something that caused some kind of convulsion, like a stroke." This diagnosis, based on nothing, seemed to be that of a man unwilling to accept that his friend's death could have been brought about either by heroin or the wages of his unknown. "quiet business," or both.

  As someone had told me to look to the east, so someone told me to look to the calendar.

  If a deal had indeed been made whereby Liston was to receive in secret a percentage of all of Ali's future earnings, that deal would not have been worth much. Since early 1967, when the government came down on him for refusing to serve it, Ali had been inactive. There were no earnings. But when Ali, in late 1970, began again to fight, it was not for the sort of purses that fighters had known. (In 1965, the year of the Liston Ali rematch. Liston declared a taxable income of slightly over $109,000; the IRS set it higher, at slightly over $199,000.) In December of 1970, Herbert Muhammad undertook for Ali the brokering of an unheard of five million dollar deal for a fight with Joe Frazier.

  By the time that fight was fought a few months later, Sonny lay beneath the Las Vegas dirt of the Garden of Peace at Paradise Memorial Gardens, beneath a bronze plaque that bears his name and the words A MAN.

  I no longer believe in the secret percentage angle as the cause of Sonny's death. A deal unwritten was a deal that need not be honored, except among the honorable. And a threat to expose a deal unwritten was no threat of all, especially when it came from one who could ill afford to unsettle the ghosts of his own past.

  I believe, in the end, it had more to do with that starless astrology of the soul of a man who "died the day he was born," with the nature of certain January nights, with the domain of that god who beheld beginning and end at once.

  Many Januarys ago, he had stalked the night for money; and there came a time, after fame and wealth and the stain of them, when money was gone again.

  It was what he knew. Dirt, fist, feet. He befriended no priests in Vegas.

  As always, there was money in the street. There was money in dope, there was money in shylocking. I believe that it was to that money that Sonny turned. Whatever it was - dope, shylocking, both - he may not have been content with the old plantation deal of "workin' on halves"; and that may have been his end. Or, whatever he was doing, somebody did not like it. He was, after all, a man whose mere presence seemed to inspire cops to run him out of town, threaten to baptize his ass with lead, or seize him for "corner lounging." I think it can be said with confidence that to accept the premise that Sonny was murdered is, by necessity, to accept the involvement and the malfeasance of cops in that murder, one way or another, either directly or through cover up, either acting of their own accord or according to the command of a higher power.

  But, as much as I should like to meet that unnamed undercover narcotics agent, that newspaper delivery boy; as much as I should like here to have as expositive Virgil the ghost of Big Barney Baker, of Ash Resnick, of the unnamable who knew, I feel that the truth might be far more mundane.

  I look back to a sentence that I wrote over a year ago, a sentence that appears in the earliest of these pages: Only he and the men who killed him knew the date of his death. Looking at it, I realize that it can be easily and cleanly deleted, plucked from the page, with no effect on the words or meaning that surround it. But I choose to leave it there, because it expressed my feeling at that time, and because, unlike a statement proven untrue, it very well might express not only my past feelings, but also the truth, which, in this matter, will never be known. And since it was in the winding passage from that sentence to this - the passage through the unseen sediment, detritus, and sludge beneath the course of this book, and through the articulation of that course as well - that my feeling, for no specific reason, evolved and changed, I think it would render inorganic what has been organic. As the phantom narco, Agent Nobody, said: Exposita without logic, it makes the world go round.

  If someone wanted to kill Sonny, he or she could far more easily and with far less risk have put a bullet through his skull in the street any night of the week.

  I think he took too much dope and died. The fact that no gimmick was found means nothing. He could have shot up elsewhere, then been overcome by the overdose at home. Maybe he did not even bang the shit. And no one knows how long he had been dead when they cut those dead-tissue samples from him. How could the measurement of lingering traces of dispersing morphine and codeine reveal the amount of heroin present in a body at a time of death that was unknown?

  Sonny's friends did not want to admit that he was doing dope. There was never an indication that he was. What sort of an indicatio
n was to be expected from one who might not even be addicted?

  "No, he doesn't trust me on food and things; he gets his little Kentucky Frieds and things."

  As Sonny had said, he wanted to model himself after Joe Louis, "who I think was the greatest champion of all and my idol. He did everything I want to do." Maybe they were shooting more than craps together.

  The mystery of a death serves only to distract us comfortably from the mysteries inside ourselves. Ultimately, the true cause of Sonny Liston's death was the mystery in him. He rode a fast dark train from nowhere, and it dumped him at that falling-off place at the end of the line.

  The only true mystery is one without an answer. That we should be put here for a sigh then blown to nothingness like a harl in an idle wind - that is mystery enough. Sonny Liston was an embodiment of that fatal mystery, which claims us all and leaves no track marks in so doing.

  Call it Shango, call it Syndrome X. There is only one real cause of death, and that is death.

  "He's dead, that's all," as Davey Pearl said. And, like the man said, he was born that way.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As the worn phrase has it, this is a dark tale. It could not be otherwise, as I knew when I took its first breath into me. It was a tale untold whose telling long had beckoned me. And while the nature of that beckoning is to be found early in the pages of this book, it should also here be said an acknowledgment of another sort -that given the choice between the sunny side of the street and the umbrous, I have perhaps more often than not chosen the latter.

  In my work on this book, I encountered those who cleared the shadows with light, and those who overcast light with shadow. Enlightenment, enshadowment. Which leads to which? And, in the end, are they one and the same?