The Devil and Sonny Liston (16 page)

Gibson met with Leonard and Nesseth in Los Angeles to discuss the upcoming title fight between Jordan and Akins. During that meeting
,
Gibson was called to the telephone. After exchanging a few words with the caller, Gibson passed the telephone to Leonard. The caller was Blinky Palermo.

"Do you know we're in for half?" he demanded of Leonard.

"Half of what? I don't know what you're talking about."

"We're in for half of the fighter
,
or there won't be any fight."

Nesseth absolutely refused to go along with any such arrangement, but Leonard was intent on the fight.

The fight was held in Los Angeles on December 5
,
1958. It was a long and close fight, which Jordan won by a decision in fifteen rounds.

Exactly a month later
,
on the morning of January 5
,
1959
,
Leonard was brought to Miami, where he was met at the airport by Blinky and his cohort Abe Sands, the guy everybody knew only
by the name of Mike. At one point, Sands left Blinky and Leonard
to have breakfast together in the coffee shop of the Chateau Resort
Motel, where Blinky was registered under a false name and ad
dress.
When Sands returned to the coffee shop, Carbo was with
him. The men adjourned to Blinky's room, where Carbo
con
fronted Leonard, demanding to know whether or not
Leonard
could set his partner straight:

"Can you or can't you?"

Blinky told Leonard that he was going to force Jordan to fight Garnet "Sugar" Hart, a formidable young Philadelphia fighter whose management Blinky now controlled, and who was now the foremost contender for the welterweight championship.

"Nesseth won't go for it," Leonard said. "He can make a lot more money fighting easier fights than Sugar Hart."

"He's got to," Blinky told him. "The only reason I got control of Hart is by telling the manager I would get a title for him. What the hell is the difference? A fighter wins the title, and Nesseth gets fifteen percent of Hart.
That's the way it works."

Carbo said that he was little interested in money for himself. He
gestured to Blinky, to the unseen that Blinky represented:
"
As long as these fellows are making money, I don't have to be doling out money to them."

Two other men then joined them: Gabe Genovese and Chris Dundee.

Dundee, an older brother of the trainer Angelo Dundee, was originally from Philadelphia, where he was born, as Cristofo Mirena, on February 25, 1907. His older brother Joe, a Philadelphia club fighter, had taken the name of Dundee from another
,
more celebrated fighter named Johnny Dundee. Chris had followed suit as a teenager, at the outset of his own career as a boxer: and he, like Leonard, kept his ring name after that career was finished. In the early years of the alliance between Carbo and the IBC, Chris Dundee operated as a boxing manager, with an office in the Capitol Hote
l,
close to Madison Square Garden. He had since moved to Miami
,
where he was now that city's most imp
o
rtant boxing promoter, with an office at the Miami Beach Audit
orium.
Sonny Liston's four Miami fights in 1958-1959 were Dundee
prom
otion
s
, held while Carbo was a fugitive, whereabouts un
known
except to a chosen few.

When Carbo and Dundee left the room to confer, Genovese
told Leonard that it was good to see that he had joined the "fam
il
y." Carbo, he told Leonard, was "a great guy."

Later that night, on the drive back to the airport, Blinky took Leonard to an apartment where Carbo was in the company of a woman. Blinky and Carbo stepped into the bedroom to talk
,
and when they came out, Carbo once again confronted Leonard:
"
A
re you sure you can handle everything all right now?"

"
I’l
l try," said Leonard.

At that
,
Carbo bared his teeth:
"God damn it, don't
try
.
You are going to do it, aren't you? You are the man we are looking for, and you are the man responsible out there. This is your baby
;
you're the one that is going to handle the thing."

The IBC was dissolved by law a week later, on January 12, by a Supreme Court affirmation of a judgment that found the IBC and its many tentacled subsidiary and sister companies to have violated the Sherman Act by conspiring to control the promotion of boxing. But the broken bones of the IBC survived for a while as Nationa
l
Boxing Enterprises, administered by Truman Gibson as its director of record. It was Gibson who played the good cop role in convincing Leonard, as he was drawn in ever more deeply, that it was all just a matter of placating Blinky.

Carbo reportedly threatened Leonard's life in a telephone call of January 27. "You son
of a bitching doub
le
crosser," Carbo intoned. "You are no good. Your word is no good. Nothing is good
abo
ut you. Just because you are two thousand miles away, that is no s
i
gn I can't have you taken care of. I have got plenty of friends out
the
re to take care of punks like you. The money had better be in."
An
other, more om
in
ous call came from Carbo on April
28, about
a month before Carbo was captured. "We are going to meet at crossroads.
"
he told Leonard. Gibson had tried to calm
Leonard,
to reassure him. "They wouldn't resort to violence or anything
like
that, so severe.
"

Leonard still could not get Nesseth to go along with him;
and
on May 1, while Carbo was hiding out in Jersey. Blinky traveled
to
Los Angeles. After a dinner meeting with a local gangster Louis Dragna, he called and commanded Leonard to the lobby
of
the Beverly Hilton, where Blinky awaited him in the company
of
another local gangster, Jack Sica. The three men took the
elevator
to Blinky's room, where Palermo turned angrily on Leonard.
Af
ter much yelling and threatening by Palermo, Sica told
Leonard
that he, Sica, had been a friend of The Gray for many years,
and
that Leonard was in grave trouble and liable to get hurt.

"Look
,
Jackie, you made a choice. It is a question of either
you
or Don Nesseth is going to get hurt. Wouldn't you rather go grab
him by the neck and straighten him out, than for me to go back and tell The Gray? You try it
,
you're all right, but it is Nesseth that's no good. The way it is now, you and Blinky have both got your necks in a sling. Something has to be straightened out. If you have to, go and beat hell out of Nesseth. If you need help
,
we will go with you and help you drag him out of bed."

Leonard demurred at the proposed violence against his partner, and he promised once again to try to work things out with him. "Try, hell.
"
Palermo said. "You are going to straighten it out.
I
can't go home like this. I am in a hell of a jam with The Gray."

A few days later, Palermo and Sica met with Leonard at his office in the Hollywood Legion Stadium. This time
,
Nesseth joined them. Sica reviewed the situation. Leonard, he said
,
had sought and accepted help from certain people, "and by dealing with these people, there were certain commitments made." He concluded
,
talking directly to Leonard and Nesseth, "Now, when you
fello
ws
got lucky and won the title, there were certain things that were supposed to be fulfilled."

Nesseth objected that he was a free man and that Jordan's fights were not to be dictated by Carbo or Palermo.

Sica and Palermo rose. As they left the room, Sica whispered into Leonard's ear, "Jackie, you're it."

The conversation was bugged. Driven by fear and desperation, Leonard had gone to the police the previous day, and Sica's words, like everything else said at this meeting, were recorded.

Before boarding his flight to return to Philadelphia, Blinky stopped at an airport newsstand. He picked up a couple of sporting magazines and a couple of packs of gum. On his way to the cashier, he picked up a pack of peanut butter crackers, and when he got to the cashier, he paid only for the crackers. A plainclothes cop had been watching him, and Blinky was arrested as a petty thief of eighty cents' worth of cheap magazines and chewing gum.

He was taken in and booked. Bail was set at five hundred dollars pending trial by jury. Blinky made bail, then split town. Before he left, however, he was questioned by Police Captain James D. Hamilton. The captain asked Blinky what had brought him to Los Angeles. Blinky told him that it was a social visit. When the captain asked him about Louis Dragna and Jack Sica, Blinky said that he had never heard of them.

A few weeks later, on May 30, Carbo was captured in New Jersey.

In his sentencing by Judge Mullen several months later, Carbo got off easy. But just as Carbo was unto others a fate in himself, so the fate which was his own lay beyond the powers that were his own.

In May, after his bugged meeting with Palermo and Sica, Jackie Leonard had told his story to an investigation board of the California State Athletic Commission. His fear had ebbed, as Captain Hamilton had assigned him police protection. But two weeks later, on June 3, as he was about to draw up the garage door at his Los Angeles home, Leonard was struck in the base of his skull by a concussive blow that drove him to his knees, whereupon his two assailants commenced to kick him.

While awaiting trial in New York, Carbo had been allowed to travel to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for kidney treatment. In Baltimore, at about half-past nine on the night of September 22, as he lay in his hospital bed, he was arrested under an indictment charging him with attempting to extort control of Don Jordan. At the same moment, under the same indictment, Truman Gibson was arrested in Chicago, Blinky Palermo in Philadelphia. In Los Angeles, Dragna and Sica were already in custody for close to half an hour.

Appended to the December 1, 1959,
New York Times
report of Carbo's sentencing, there was a small item datelined Los Angeles, November 30:

Five men charged with attempting to cut in on the earnings of Don Jordan, welterweight champion, had their trials continued to March 29 by Federal Judge Ernest A. Tolin today.

Both the Government and attorneys for defendants agreed additional time would be necessary to secure witnesses.

The defendants include Frankie Carbo, Frank (Blinky) Palermo, Philadelphia fight promoter, Truman Gibson Jr., president of National Boxing Enterprises, of Chicago, and Joe Sica and Louis Tom Dragna, both of Los Angeles. The trial had been set for Dec.8.

Carbo will be flown here tomorrow to face arraignment in Federal District Court, the United States Attorney's office said.

After his arraignment in Los Angeles, Carbo was returned to New York to serve his two year sentence at Riker's Island Prison. He could not have been too worried about the Jordan case; more of the same old conspiracy shit, another few flies to swat away, another few cockroaches to crush underfoot.

Christmas came and went: turkey with the fellas. The new year came, then spring, then summer, then fall. One year down. It was an easy bill, and he slept away the better part of it in the prison hospital. The rest of the time, he did what he always did: controlled the fight racket, by way of Blinky.

Under their thraldom, Sonny flourished. For just as they had rendered him not his own but another's man, so in the ring they had freed him to prevail and to conquer. There was no more of carrying opponents, no more of holding back. In the witnessing of his victory upon victory over all whom he was set against, they had come to realize that he was one of a kind, and they knew there would not be another like him again. He was invincible: a sure thing. And in that, he must not be fucked with, but ridden wild to the sea of golden glory that raged and awaited him; and when the time came that they sold the scrap metal of that glory to the junkman, they would make more money than anybody in the fight racket ever dreamt of making, as would Sonny, for he was the best and he was their boy.

In October 1958, when he beat Whitehurst for the second time, he knocked him with fury clear through the ropes and out of the ring.

In February 1959, when he knocked out Mike De John in Miami Beach, the
Miami Herald
described it as "one of the most brutal outpourings of punishment in recent heavyweight history." The odds that night were with Liston, at eight to five.

In April, when he knocked out Cleveland Williams in the third round, it was the third of what would be a run of nine straight knockouts of ever more formidable opponents. (And, to be sure, although he was a two to one underdog against Sonny
,
Williams himself was quite a formidable character. A strange motherfucker, yes: a strange motherfucker from Georgia who heard voices, but who none the less had lost only three of forty seven fights and was on an eleven fight winning streak, with eight of them knockouts, when he came into the ring against Sonny.) The
Miami Herald
declared that Liston, in defeating Williams, had now evinced his "credentials for a shot at Floyd Patterson's seldom defended heavyweight championship."

"That was the night I really found out about myself." Liston would say some years later.