The Devil and Sonny Liston (12 page)

Frank Mitchell was a man whose past was a well kept secret.
When he died at the age of sixty
five
,
in 1970
,
obituaries spoke of him reverently: as a publisher whose paper
,
the
Argus
, had "won wide recognition for its reporting and interpretation of racial pro
b
lems; a charitable and civic
minded man who served the Annie Malone Children's Home and the American Cancer Society; a man
"
active in police
-
community work." Nothing was said of a well
hidden criminal record that included eighteen arrests for gambling
,
seduction
,
and counterfeiting.

From the government transcripts of Mitchell's testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly:

"Did you at one time manage a heavyweight contender named
Charles 'Sonny' Liston?"

"I take the fifth amendment."

"Were you the on
the
record manager of Liston from 1952 until 1958?"

"I decline to answer."

"Do you know a person named John Vitale?"

"I decline to answer."

"During this period while you were the on
the
record manager
,
is it a fact that this person
,
John Vitale
,
was the undercover manager of boxer Sonny Liston?"

"I decline to answer."

"You are directed to answer."

"I take the fifth amendment."

"During the period from 1952 until 1958
,
did you give this man, John Vitale, the proceeds from Liston's purses?"

"I decline to answer that question."

"In March of 1958
,
did you go to Chicago with John Vitale and meet with a man known as Frank 'Blinky' Palermo?"

"I take the fifth amendment."

With a man named Anthony "Tony G" Giordano, who was not well liked
,
John Joseph Vitale, who was, ran what there was of the Mob in St.
Louis. Though it was popularly believed that Giordano was the boss
,
law
enforcement officials suspected that the crude and boorish Giordano was merely the bulldog in Vitale's yard.

The cops in St. Louis divided the Italian population into two
groups:
the predominantly Sicilian "downtown dagos," from among whom emerged the majority of the city's rough
cut Italian mobsters, and the predominantly non
-
Sicilian "Hill dagos."
P
leasant
,
middle class people, whose neighborhood, in the southwestern part of town,
was one of safe streets and old c
ountry gentility. According to
one St. Louis police detective, residents of the Hill were "scared to death of the people downtown.
"

The borders of the downtown dago neighborhood were Sixth and Ninth Streets, Franklin and Cass Avenues. It was a part of the Fourth Ward
,
like the black neighborhood, Sonny's neighborhood, that adjoined it; and the hub of the mobsters' action lay in the pocket between Seventh and O'Fallon. The old neighborhoods were identified by their local churches; and for the downtown dagos their neighborhood was the neighborhood of Our Lady Help of Christians.

Born on May 17, 1909, to those downtown streets that were shared by the Mob and the Virgin Mary, John J. Vitale had a criminal record that stretched back to 1927. Ranging from suspected larceny and armed robbery to gambling, it included two busts for suspicion of murder, and three narcotics raps
,
the latter two of which, in 1941 and 1943
,
were incurred in prison, at Texarkana and Leavenworth, while he was serving his sentence for the first, in 1940. He was ostensibly in the jukebox, pinball, and vending machine business; and if the St. Louis Mob had ever been given a name, it should have been the Anthony Novelty Co., as Giordano and all of Vitale's lieutenants were members of that company.

St. Louis was never a Mob stronghold, but more of an outpost, a listening post, for Chicago. What power Vitale and his men had was equalled, if not surpassed, by that of the so called Syrian Mob, the criminal element of the city's considerable Lebanese population, whose presence and pull in ward politics eclipsed that of Vitale and his kind.

From the government transcripts of Vitale's own testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly:

"Is it a fact
,
Mr. Vitale, that from 1952 until 1958, Frank Mitchell acted as front man for you in the management of Sonny Liston?"

"I stand on the fifth amendment."

"Do you know the present No.
1
heavyweight contender
,
Charles 'Sonny' Liston?"

"I decline to answer on the grounds that I may tend to incriminate myself."

"You are directed to answer the question."

"Fifth amendment."

"Is it a fact that in 1958 you divided up Sonny Liston with Frank Palermo and Frank Carbo and he is presently managed undercover by you, Frank Palermo, and Frankie Carbo?"

"I decline to answer on the grounds I may tend to incriminate myself."

"Would you care, on the basis of your general knowledge of boxing, to give the subcommittee some of your own thoughts as to how to eliminate underworld racketeering and monopoly in the
field of boxing?"

"I take the fifth amendment." [Pause.] "What a question."

Vitale and his men shared the organized labor racket with the Syrian Mob. Local
110
, the most important of the city's labor unions, was controlled by the Syrians in alliance with Vitale's
crew.

In195
2
, not long before Liston was released from prison, Vitale took to feuding with Joe Gribler, the business agent and head of Local
110
, and with Gribler's union aide George Meyers. Meyers was shot in the head that spring, Gribler that summer. A Vitale ally in the Syrian community, a thirty one year old South Side gambler named Raymond Sarkis, was appointed to head the union. Vitale, who had been seen entering Gribler's car on the night of the slaying, was arrested on suspicion of murder but never tried. His girlfriend, Millie Allen, was given a job working for
Sarkis.

When Sonny was paroled that fall, all his jobs were Local
110 jo
bs, including three months of summertime labor with Vitale
Cement Contractors, Inc. Thanks to Vitale, Sonny Liston held cards with both the cement
finishers' and the hod
carriers'
and building
laborers' unions.

Claude E. Lyles, Jr., remembered working with Sonny at Building 101 of the government ordinance plant out on Goodfellow. It was the spring of 1953
,
toward the end of Sonny's amateur rise. Lyles, then in his mid
-
twenties, worked in the production scheduling department. Sonny operated a machine that produced cartridges for .5
0
caliber arms.

"He didn't want to talk to anybody. He was always very, very
quiet," Lyles said. "Whenever he went over to eat, he would sit by himself. He didn't want anybody to sit with him."

In the winter of 1953-1954
,
Sonny was a part of the Local
110
crew that renovated Sportsman's Park, which would become Busch Stadium. One Lebanese co
-
worker on that job remembered him as "a hard worker" who was "a terrific guy" with a "very good heart."

In the summer of 1954,
Liston worked as a laborer at the Union
Electric plant down in South County. Two fellow workers who came to know him, Larry Gazall and Terry Lynch, were high school kids who had gotten summer work at the plant. Gazall got his job because he was Lebanese, Lynch got his because he had Lebanese friends and Sonny got the job through Ray Sarkis. Gazall and Lynch, like Sonny, were hod carriers. "We were unloading boxcars of fire
brick that they used for the chimney down there," Lynch recalled. "It was hard work, heavy work," Gazall said.

They remembered Sonny fondly. "He was quiet," said Lynch
,
but it was a quiet that led Lynch to feel "like he was more embarrassed about his being uneducated and things like that." Away from others, he spoke freely with the two teenagers. "He was open with us 'cause we were just kids," said Lynch, who thought that
Sonny was, "I don't know, maybe in his twenties, late twenties, so
m
ething like that."

"He was a real nice guy," Gazall said
,
and Lynch agreed. "He
was really a friendly guy."

It would always be said of Sonny that he liked kids, that they saw the best of him.

"Some days he wouldn't be there," said Terry Lynch, recalling Liston and the summer of the Union Electric job. The belief was that he worked, too, as "a kind of chauffeur, quasi
-
bodyguard," for Ray Sarkis. "You'd hear stories of what he did," said Lynch, "break people's legs and stuff like that. And these were, to a seventeen
year
old kid"
-
Lynch searched for a word
-
"romantic." It felt good to know him, privileged even, in the blossoming of his legendry as boxer and legbreaker: the toughest of tough guys, a bigger
than
life figure of unspeakable deeds and unspeakable romance, and a source to them of kindness.

That report from that gas
station job in 1950: #1 Unknown Negro, "black chauffeur cap." There was no hat now, just a long black shiny car. He worked for Sarkis for about a year and a half. "He was a good friend,
"Sonny said.

David Herleth, the cop who had busted him, recalled
running into Liston, prosperous
looking and wad
flashing -
"that sucker had two hundred dollars"
-not long after his release from
prison:

"I walked into another rib station up on Franklin Avenue, which is now Martin Luther King, and he was sitting there. That's all tore down now. I said, 'Hey, don't I know you?' He says, 'Get
o
ut of here, you know me, man. I'm Charles Sonny Liston.' I said,
Uh oh. Keep your nose clean.' He didn't."

Sonny's prison trainer, Sam Eveland, recalled that, within six or seven months after Sonny got out of prison, Sam was walking toward a joint called Preacher's when "I seen him driving a Cadi
l
lac. He had a big black Cadillac and he was eating a hot dog. I brought him in, it's an all-white tavern, and I said, 'This is gonna be your next heavyweight champ of the world
.
But at that time I didn't know." The rumor, said Sam, was that "Vitale had got ahold of him" and "gave him a job being a strong man."

Sonny's early trainer William Anderson knew Vitale
-
"J.V.," as he called him -and he said that "J.V. was really involved deeply with boxing. He had his hand in just about everything." It has been said that Sonny worked as a legbreaker for the union, and Anderson believes this to be true. "He was kind of a heavy man for the union," he said
,
"him and a man named Big Barney
Baker."

Barney Baker. I remembered IBC founder Truman Gibson, that gleam in his eye
,
saying of Sonny, "Barney Baker was his guy."

Robert Bernard Baker.
He liked to tell a story about how he had fought on the U.S. boxing team at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, how he had stood in the ring before Hitler with a Star of David emblazoned on his trunks. Then again, by his own account, he was rejected for army service during World War II "because of the obesity."

Big Barney Baker. Born in New York on the day after Christmas of 1912, he had spent the thirties on the West Side waterfront of Manhattan. The forties found him in Florida, working for Jake and Meyer Lansky at their newly opened Colonial Inn, and then in Washington, D.C.
,
where he drove a produce truck
,
worked in a warehouse, and where, in 1950, he was elected president of Local
73
0
.

Barney Baker. He had come to Lansky as a wanted man, a fugitive sought in the New York murder case of a man named Hin
tz
. And when the heat followed him to Florida, he headed west to
Los
Angeles, and then to Las Vegas, where he took a room at the
F
l
a
m
ingo, which was not yet officially open, since Bugsy Siegel,
w
hom he had met in Florida, had not yet quite finished building it.

He was
,
physically, a very big man, well over three hundred
pounds
,
thrice wed, and
,
according to one union official
,
"a very gregarious man" and "very much fun." Though Baker was known as a labor organizer, and as "a feared enforcer" and "special assignment expert," Truman Gibson seemed to see him as one of the great mystery figures of our time. "He was ubiquitous," Gibson said.
'
'
A
lways appearing on the scene. In Detroit, in Washington, in Las Vegas." Gibson first met him at the Morrison Hotel in Chicago, where Baker was running a gift shop. Ubiquitous. The files of the Warren Commission show that he was one of the last people Jack Ruby called before the assassination of John Kennedy. Whoever
,
whatever, he really was, Barney Baker's secrets died with him, in March 1974.

From his position at Local 730 in Washington, D.C., Baker had
risen in the Teamsters to serve both Harold Gibbons and Jimmy Hoffa and according to Gibson, Baker was very close to Paul Dorfman, the power behind the Teamsters. It was Gibbons who moved him to St. Louis in 1952
,
to straighten out some trouble at a taxicab company owned by Vitale's associate Joe Costello. The membership of Local 688, which Baker had been summoned to deal with, was black.

William Anderson recalled that, in the course of his union
w
ork, Liston also did some work for Costello. Sonny and Barney, said Anderson, "were muscle men for the union. And Barney was a great fight fan."

The rematch in which Sonny avenged his sole loss by beating Marty Marshall was a preliminary event in the gala Teamsters Benefit Boxing show at Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis on April 21,
-
a night of boxing matches organized and overseen by Barney Baker, whose mysterious and mercurial station in life was described as
"
co-chairman of
the Teamsters Boxing committee.
"

By then, Liston's fights were a part of the grand and arrased scheme of the IBC. This involvement dated at least to his second professional fight, when he beat Ponce de Leon, on September 17,
1953. De Leon was a heavyweight that the IBC had tried to develop several years earlier. Forsaking any hope that he had the makings of a contender, the IBC fed him to Liston for breakfast as a gesture of goodwill.

Barney Baker was in town for that fight.

Liston, interrogated by Senator Estes Kefauver: