The Devil and Sonny Liston (11 page)

Or, more poetically, The Gray. He had other names. According
to newspapers, he had more names than God: Frank Martin, Frankie Tucker, The Man Down South, That Party, That Man, Our Cousin, Our Friend, The Uncle
,
The Ambassador
,
and
,
back in the less politically correct thirties
,
Jimmie the Wop, Frankie the Wop, and Dago Frank (the latter relinquished by the
New York Times
for the cuddlier but otherwise unattested Pug). And although his name was commonly believed to be Frank Carbo, his
real name was Paul John Carbo, and he was born on the Lower
East Side of Manhattan on August 10, 1904.

Carbo was well mannered
,
well dressed, and deadly. He spoke few words, and most photographs of him show him warmly smiling -
being taken into custody, being charged, being sentenced, entering or leaving court (the verdict, guilty or innocent
,
seemed not to matter)
-
warmly, kindly smiling. He was, as they say, a gentleman among gentlemen, and, in a phrase less often turned, a killer among killers.

His criminal record went back to 1915, when he was sent to the Catholic Protectory at the age of eleven. His first murder rap came in 1924, when he was indicted for killing a taxi driver in the Bronx. He copped a plea to manslaughter and was sentenced to Sing Sing in 1928. Three years later, in September 1931
,
while on parole, he was arrested as a fugitive and charged with the Atlantic City killing of the millionaire bootlegger Mickey Duffy. When they seized him, he was holed up at the Cambridge Hotel on West Sixty
Eighth Street with an eighteen year old showgirl who went by the name of Vivian Lee. The following account comes from the
New York Daily News
,
September 3
,
1931, back in the days when journalists could wield a sentence:

"Trapped in a Manhattan hotel with a pretty red headed night
club dancer, Paul Carbo, gang leader and ex
-
convict
,
was held last night charged with being the hired assassin who murdered Phil Duffy
,
Philadelphia and New Jersey beer overlord, in the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City last Saturday."

The teenage showgirl
,
whose real name, somewhat sinister, was Vivian Malifatti, was charged with Carbo in the murder of Duffy, as were a couple of Philadelphia racket guys named Herman Cohen and Albert Hodkinson.

Carbo was released. His next arrest for homicide came in January 1936, when he was seized again as a fugitive-on Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, as he was about to enter Madison Square Garden -
under a standing indictment against him for the April
12, 1933
,
double murder, at the Elizabeth Cartaret Hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey, of Max Greenberg and Max Hassell, two former associates of Waxey Gordon who were believed to have fallen victim of the bootleg war between the forces of Gordon and Dutch Schultz. The John Doe indicted with Carbo in the double murder was believed to have been a Dutch Schultz henchman, Chink Sherman, whose body had since been discovered buried in quicklime in a farm stable in Monticello, New York. Once again, Carbo was released.

In 1940, Carbo and several others, including Bugsy Siegel and Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, the head of Murder, Inc., were indicted for the Hollywood killing, on the eve of Thanksgiving 1939
,
of Harry "Big Greenie" Greenburg, a Lepke defector who had fled
w
est. Although another Murder, Inc. turncoat, A
l
Tannenbaum, ratted out Carbo as the shooter, and a witness identified Carbo as the man she had seen running down a Hollywood street puffing a
cigar moments after she heard the shots that killed Greenburg, all charges were dismissed, and he was freed in March 1942.

By 1935
,
Carbo was the licensed manager of the middleweight champion Eddie "Babe" Risko
-
changed from Henry Pylkowski
-
and other boxers. "Fight Manager Is Held," read the headline of the
New York Times
report of his capture in the Greenburg case. "Prize Fight Manager Held in Gang Killing" ran the headline of the
New York Sun
's report. By the summer of 1940, when the
Times
reported his indictment as the "trigger man" in the Greenburg murder, he was "a New York and Seattle fight promoter." By early 1942
,
when charges in the Greenburg case were dismissed
,
he was "Frank Carbo, former fight promoter.
"

In his retirement from the light of day of the world of boxing, Frankie Carbo became the leviathan of its unseen realm. Through his long and occult career, he had helped many men and killed enough to command fear in many more. Few were the managers, promoters, and fighters who were not in his debt, financially and otherwise, and fewer still who did not court his favor, for good things seemed to happen to those whom Carbo's smile graced. And wherever the dew of profit
,
no matter how meager or how plentiful
,
gathered, Frankie Carbo, as the guys from the other side used to say
,
wet his beak.

IBC founder James Norris had known Carbo casually for some
years. They were both gamblers who lived the lush life
,
and
,
as Norris's partner Truman Gibson expressed it to me, "Jim was enamored of all the mob guys."

Norris himself recalled how the intercession of Frankie Carbo
was the vital catalyst in the rise of the IBC. Encountering him in the street one day when Norris was visiting New York, Carbo asked Norris how things were going with his new venture.

"Oh, no good," Norris said. "If it isn't the managers, it's a lack
of talent or some other problems nobody could anticipate."

These words, Norris said
,
were designed to elicit a helpful suggestion
,
if not a downright offer of help.
"As I recall, he grumbled and said he had problems of his own. I asked him if there was anyone he knew we could use that might be helpful."

"
No.
"
Carbo told him.

Soon after this, despite this "no," the IBC placed Carbo's girlfriend and future wife. Viola Masters, on the payroll.
Though she performed no known function
,
she received payments of $4
0
,
000
over a period of three years. Further considerations, tribute, and propitiations were to ensure a marriage of the interests of the IBC and those of Frank Carbo, a secret partnership in which both would prosper.

"
A
nd was that the policy you finally decided upon," the investigating committee would later ask Gibson,
"
to cooperate with these underworld elements?"

"No, not to cooperate, but to live with them."

Carbo's lieutenant was Frank Palermo, a man everybody knew as
Blinky.

"Do you know a Frank Palermo?" Sonny Liston would one day
be asked by one of those investigating committees.

"No," he would say. "I never heard of Frank Palermo." The inquisitor pressed him, again and again.

"You mean Blinky," Sonny finally said. "Yeah, I know Blinky. Everybody knows him."

Carbo came to know Blinky in the thirties
,
when The Gray, in addition to his house in Maspeth, Queens, and various Manhattan hotel rooms
,
also kept a home at 5542 Walnut Street in Blinky's hometown of Philadelphia.

Operating from a sixth-floor office in the Shubert Building on
South Broad Street in Philadelphia, Frank "Blinky" Palermo was
a licensed manager through whom Carbo shared in the control of many fighters, such as Billy Fox. Blinky was a legend, especially in Philadelphia, where, as a bookmaker, in 1950, he staged a running gun battle through the city streets in pursuit of a numbers runner who pocketed the payoff on a seventy five cent bet. Through the years, Blinky would lose his licenses one after another -
in Illinois in 1952
,
in his native Pennsylvania -
as through those years, in his alliance with Carbo, his power as an undercover manager grew greater than that of any licensed manager.

It was by betting on Billy Fox in
his 1947 fight against the over
whelming favorite Jake LaMotta that Carbo made one of his greatest scores, as no one but he and Blinky and Jake knew that LaMotta had agreed with Carbo to throw the fight to Fox in exchange for a shot at the middleweight title.

Another fix did not go so well. Early in his career, in December
1942, Sugar Ray Robinson was supposed to carry A
l
Nettlow for the full ten rounds of a fight in Philly. But in the third round, when Nettlow hit him with a nasty right, Ray lost his temper, hit him with a left hook, and Nettlow was counted out. That night, Ray went to the newsstand where Blinky hung out, and he tried to explain what had happened. "It was an accident," he told Blinky. "I just happened to catch him."

"It's all right," Blinky said. "Nothin' we can do about it now."

Everybody knew Blinky. Everybody liked Blinky.

But, contrary to popular belief, fixed fights were rare. When one had a piece of both fighters, it mattered little who won. Truman Gibson told me that of perhaps a thousand fights promoted by the IBC, he knew of only three that were fixed.

In a world of guys that have been around, Gibson has been
around longer than any of them. Robust and serene and sharp
,
and still practicing law well into his eighties, he had about him the aura of a man who has captured a wisp of wisdom from every breath
,
bitter and beautiful alike: and there was a gleam in his eyes as we sat in a Chinese restaurant in the On Leong section of Chicago and he recalled those fixes.

The biggest of them was the dive Archie Moore took in his 1955
New York title bout with Rocky Marciano. It was Marciano's last
fi
ght
,
and the fix ensured that Marciano would retire undefeated. After the fight
,
Gibson went with Moore's manager, Jack Kearns, to see Moore in San Diego.
"
A
rchie was happy and took us to his offices
,
beautifully appointed. Then he said, 'I want you to meet my partners.' Brought two guys in, and Jack Kearns looked over and said, 'You dirty son of a bitch, why didn't you tell me?' The minute he saw those guys he knew what had happened."

The gleam became a beam as he told me of another fix. "The lamb was killing the butcher in this case. Frank Carbo was the victim because the guy he was betting on took a dive.
Red Top Davis was the fighter. They took him out, they wanted to throw him in the Hudson River, they did everything to him." (Ted "Red Top" Davis was a New York lightweight also known as Murray "Sugar" Cain.)

As for the third fix, I doubt if history and the lawyers that stand between these words and my paycheck are ready for that one.

Blinky Palermo was Carbo's lieutenant
,
but there were other friends through whom Carbo controlled other fighters. One of these fighters was Virgil Akins, the welterweight champion of
1
95
8.

Akins and Liston came up together in St. Louis. "I first met Sonny up at Johnny Tocco's gym, on the corner of Blair and Cass. Johnny had a lounge downstairs and the gym was upstairs. There
w
asn't no name on it. A lot of people didn't know the gym was up there." It was right after Sonny had got out of prison. One of his
first victims had been a Tocco, now one of his first trainers was another. "It was like he was mad at the world," Akins said. "There wasn't a smile on his face." He remembered Sonny training under Tony Anderson. "He couldn't
hardly get sparring partners. It wasn't no play thing. It was a war. Nobody wanted to fool with him." Tony would try to cajole other fighters into sparring with Sonny
,
saying that if they asked him to take it easy on them, he would.
"
A
nd they'd say, 'No, you can't talk to Sonny
'
"

Through friends of Carbo, Akins came to be managed jointly by Eddie Yawitz of St. Louis and Bernard Glickman of Chicago.

Yawitz was a well
to
do pharmacist in St. Louis. Monroe Harrison claimed that it was in Eddie Yawitz's drugstore, in February
1955
,
that he sold Yawitz his interest in Liston for six hundred dol
l
ars. According to Frank Mitchell
,
it was he who bought out Harrison's share and sold it in turn to Yawitz.