The Devil and Sonny Liston (17 page)

If I had one weak spot anywhere, in my body, my chin, or my heart, it would've showed up with all the whuppin' he put on me in the first round. But I was never really hurt bad, no matter how it looked. I knew what was goin' on. Even before I sat down, I was thinkin' to myself. "This cat's gotta put it to me like that for nine more rounds to win this fight, and I don't think he can do it."

Sonny would dispose of Williams again, and more quickly, in a return match the following spring. That rematch, he said, "was no sweat, because I knew his ticket number goin' in."

He was now one of the ranking heavyweight contenders. His August 1959, Chicago defeat of Nino Valdes was covered in Time magazine. ("The massive shouldered Negro looked like just another pug until he stung the man with a left to the belly in the third round.")

Following the Valdes fight, Sonny returned to St. Louis for a visit. On August 12, while visiting St. Louis, a week after the Valdes fight, Sonny was picked up and charged on suspicion of gambling.

In April 1960, when he fought the Texas state heavyweight champion Roy Harris at the Houston Coliseum, the referee halted the fight after only two minutes and thirty five seconds, in which time Harris had been collapsed three times by three left jabs. He had been beaten only once before, by Floyd Patterson in a heavy weight title match in the summer of 1958, and Patterson had taken twelve rounds to do the job. The
New York Times
published coverage of the fight under the headline "Referee Steps in to Protect Texan."

The Whitehurst fight of October 1958, drew an arena crowd of 1,442, grossed a gate of $2.830.50, and was a nationally televised Friday night fight.

The De John fight drew 5000; but De John, who was considered to have been the bigger draw, got the better part of the gate.

By the time of the Williams fight, Sonny was ranked sixth among the world's heavyweight boxers, and he was the favorite over Williams at three to one. The fight drew a crowd of 2,842 and a gross of $5,984.

The Harris fight drew a crowd of more than 12,000 and a gate estimated at $70,000. In addition, it was broadcast as a closed circuit main event on live cards in Dallas, San Antonio, Odessa, New Orleans, Mobile, Atlanta, Miami Beach, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. Liston was guaranteed the greater of $10,000 or twenty five percent of the gate, and twenty five percent of the closed circuit revenue.

In eighteen months: from a head count of 1,442 and an underdog's taste of $2.830.50 to a crowd of 12,000 and a twenty five percent share of seventy grand: from television to closed circuit main event: from an eight-to five favorite against De John to a five to one favorite against Valdes: from small town notices to
Time
magazine and the
New York Times
.

That piece of him that remained to him, what money was his after it passed through the shifting clutches of others, was beginning to be something, as he himself was beginning to be something.

"I ain't complaining," he would say, later in 1960. He spoke as one who knew in his blood what few others admitted: that no man - neither he nor they who had claimed him; neither prisoner nor he who sat in judgement; neither he in the gutter nor he who ruled from the Big House; neither he who knelt before God nor he who knelt before the indwelling darkness of himself - was ever his own man. No one in this world was free; and all, slave and master, victor and vanquished alike, were one, as chaff from the threshing of man against man, the threshing not only of man's will to enslave, but of will itself, and of willfulness itself. It was not true that some men were by nature free and others slaves. Such was the folly of those who refused to, or could not, see themselves for what they were, or the world for what it was. That, and that alone, was nature; and to be aware of this, in thought and in blood, or in blood alone, was to possess something of wisdom, and therein lay the only manumission, the only, elusive windblown cornsilk strand of freedom that was real amid the illusive and delusive freedom that all professed and praised.

"They treat me good," he would say. "I got money in the bank. I'm fighting regular. I like fighting. It's the only thing I know how to do. As long as I'm fighting and making money and driving a good car and eating regular, nothing much is bothering me."

Back in 1947, Jake LaMotta had lied when he told the grand jury investigating committee that he had not taken a dive to Billy Fox in exchange for a shot at the title. As a stand up character, LaMotta had indeed been rewarded with that shot as promised; and he had seized it, beating the French Algerian fighter Marcel Cerdan for the middleweight championship of the world in the spring of 1949. He held the title for almost two years; Ray Robinson took it from him in 1951. LaMotta quit fighting the following year, tried but failed to make a comeback two years later, then quit again, for good. When he was called in 1960 to testify before a new investigating committee, Jake, having had the shot they had promised him, having won and lost the title, and having nothing left to show for it, was now ready to rat out those who had given him that shot, ready to tell the truth, the whole truth, or something like it.

Jake was a terrific opening act for the new subcommittee of the moral crusader and frustrated presidential aspirant Estes Kefauver, the well-intentioned but naive Tennessee Democrat whose chairmanship of the 1950-1951 Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce - which became known among the populace as the Kefauver Committee - was the beginning of an enduring and renowned career built on righteous persecution and the publicity value thereof. Through the new medium of television, Kefauver used the sideshow of his hearings to grasp the vice-presidential nomination from John F. Kennedy, himself the brat offspring of a criminal fortune. By September I951, Kefauver's investigator Rudolph Halley was hosting
Crime Syndicated
on CBS, and by November of that year, Kefauver himself had a Hollywood stage act. Humphrey Bogart introduced him at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where his presentation "Crime in America" was advertised as "ENOUGH EXCITING MATERIAL FOR 100 MOVIES."

Kefauver's chief examiner and assistant counsel in the new Senate Antitrust and Monopoly subcommittee hearings was young John G. Bonomi, the former New York assistant district attorney who had been out to get Carbo for years.

LaMotta testified that the offer of $100,000 to throw the Fox fight had come through his brother, Joey, who had often served Jake as a manager of sorts, and who now distributed pinball and vending machines. An earlier offer to throw another fight, against Tony Janiro at the Garden, had also come through his brother, said Jake. He insisted, however, that he didn't know the names or identities of those who had delivered these offers, even though in a signed deposition the previous month, he had named Billy Fox's then licensed manager, Blinky Palermo, as one of them. An investigator testified that a "terrific amount of Philadelphia money flowed into the city and all of it bet on Fox."

On the following day, June 15, 1960, as the hearings in Washington progressed, a New York detective testified that he believed Frankie Carbo had "controlled the boxing racket by himself" for the past thirty years, that Carbo still controlled boxing from within Riker's Island, and that this control was exercised through a "legman" he identified as Palermo.

Blinky himself was subpoenaed in October to appear before the Senate subcommittee in early December. Two weeks after that subpoena was issued, Federal Judge Ernest A. Tolin ordered Blinky and his four co-defendants -Carbo, Gibson, Dragna, and Sica - to stand trial in Los Angeles on December 8 for their attempt to control Don Jordan. This date was later postponed to February 14, 1961.

December 9, Washington, D.C., as reported in the
New York Times
:

In open testimony today, John Vitale and Frank Mitchell of St. Louis pleaded the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions about the management of Sonny Liston, the No. 1 heavyweight contender.

The questions were designed to show that Vitale - who is familiar here from previous appearances before the Senate Rackets Committee - was the undercover manager of Liston, along with Carbo and Frank (Blinky) Palermo, while Mitchell had served as manager of record.

A St. Louis police lieutenant, Joseph Kuda, also called to appear that day, testified that Carbo owned fifty two percent of the contractual interest in Liston, that Palermo owned twelve percent, that Vitale also owned twelve percent, and that the remaining twenty four percent was owned by others. It should be thought that at least part of what remained went to Sonny's manager of record, Pep Barone, who by contract was the only one entitled to anything. Barone was also under subpoena to testify, but was reported to be ill in an Allentown hospital.

December 12, Washington, D.C.: The former lightweight champion Ike Williams testified that while Palermo managed his career, offers of four big money bribes had been relayed to him by Palermo. Two of the bribes were for title fights, and the biggest was one of$100,000 to go down in his title fight against Kid Gavilan in 1949. He said that Palermo in each case had advised him not to accept, and that he rejected them all. None the less, he had lost two of those four fights on the square, including the Gavilan title fight.

"I should have taken the money," he mused.

Senator Kefauver suggested that Williams probably "felt better" for having withstood temptation and having kept himself clean. "I do not!" declared Williams bitterly. "Believe me, I do not." Sonny had been under subpoena since before Labor Day, and his appearance before the subcommittee came on December 13, as did Blinky's.

Blinky's lawyer read a prepared petition, which began: "I appear before you as counsel for Frank Palermo, a witness who has been subpoenaed to appear before your honorable body." The petition asked that Blinky be excused from appearing at this time because he was presently under indictment and scheduled to be tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California on charges that "arise from matters pertaining to professional boxing." As any "attendant publicity of Frank Palermo's appearance before your committee today will be widespread," it could "prevent him from receiving such a fair and impartial trial as he is entitled under the American system of justice."

"I would think, sir, that he has already gotten considerable unfavorable publicity," said Senator Kefauver, "so that he might welcome the opportunity of stating his side."

Blinky's lawyer thanked Kefauver for "the wide latitude you gave me in my address."

KEFAUVER: I will ask Mr. Palermo, where do you live, sir?

PALERMO: Eight hundred North Sixty Fourth Street, Philadelphia.

KEFAUVER: How old are you, sir?

PALERMO: Fifty five.

KEFAUVER: You have a family?

PALERMO: Yes, sir. Five children.

KEFAUVER: Outside of your connection with boxing, do you have any other businesses?

PALERMO: I respectfully refuse to answer the question. It may tend to incriminate me under a federal offense.

KEFAUVER: I am not asking you about any alleged improper business. I just asked you if you had any –

PALERMO: I respectfully refuse to answer for the reason that the answer -

KEFAUVER: The chairman directs you to answer the question.

PALERMO: -may tend to incriminate me under a federal offense.

Blinky would say nothing more than this in response to every further question, and in the end Kefauver announced that he would seek a contempt citation against him.

Sonny showed up in a suit and tie that shone. He looked good. He looked better than good. He looked like Charles L. Liston, the mightiest of men and the sharpest of dressers. He was too cool to be real, too real to be cool. He just was what he fucking was: Charles L. Liston, mightiest of men, sharpest of dressers. Had more pasts then most people had socks. Go on, pick a past, any past. They were all the same to him: sand slough and alleys, barrooms and prison cells, fancy ass big bad gangster men and bent down cotton pickers. All the same. Working for halves here, Boss, working for halves: you and me, we're working for halves. Sing it loud, sister: "Oh, what a friend we have in Blinky. Oh, what a friend we have in Mr. Gray." Can't barely hear you, sister; why don't you slide up on in here. Gonna be the world champeen. Good Lord told me so. Told me buy this damn suit, too. Had him a whole flock of suits, one for every motherfucker he knocked out. No, not that many; nobody had that many, not even Mr. Frankie C. Gray, not even him. No, maybe one for every past, one for every day of the week. Yeah, had a gal for every day in the week, too. A lot of tail lately, yeah, a good amount of tail. No crime in that, is there, Your Honor, or Your Holiness, or Your Let's Get Blinkiness, or whatever the fuck you are? Yeah, he'd heard that one: "
Your Honorable Body
." Shit, whip this dick out from these guinea britches, show you some honorable fucking body. He was the baddest man with the biggest dick that ever was. That's what those women said. All of them, the free ones and the store bought, too. That old sign casting hoodoo Jesus lady, midwifed him way back when: he knew, all right, he knew where that "L" came from. Yeah, that's what he told those chicks, but, no, he didn't know. He wondered on it, but he didn't know. Charles Lost Liston. Yeah, that would've been a good one: "
and in this corner ... Lost Charles Liston
." Charles Loverboy Liston. Knock the men out with one hand, squeeze the women with other, drink whiskey and shoot dice all at the same damn time. Charles L. Liston. Maybe it didn't stand for nothing. Maybe it was some other man's name that mama and that woman couldn't say outright. Maybe that was it. Maybe that's why Tobe had all the mean in the world coming out of those eyes when he looked at him. That wouldn't be half bad, no. Least that way it would halfwise make sense. No use in asking. Mama can't tell you where or when her boys were born or where her eyeglasses at, but sure can tell you a Mississippi flood time mouthful about what ain't never been no way nohow at all.

Fuck this shit - adjournment for dick in the midst of this ever more precipitous and perplexing narrative. Let's talk cock. Let's talk all sorts of shit.

Sonny Liston knew that he had what those lying niggers bragged about and those white motherfuckers feared they did.

"Did you ever see him in the dressing room?" howled the famous St. Louis character Dean Shendal, extending his open palms outward as if in sacerdotal orans. "He had a prick this big. Holy Christ, he could scare a horse."

"He was huge in his size," said Foneda Cox, his friend and sparring partner. "That was the biggest man I have ever seen, and I've been through the service, in gymnasiums all across the country, and I have never seen a man as big as that man was."

That attracted the women, all right, said Foneda, who not only ate, drank, and traveled with Sonny, but fucked with him, too, in the hotel suites they shared.

"When he wasn't training, his big sport was women. He used to get the hotel rooms and pick up women left and right. We would meet girls, and I think this is one of the reasons Sonny wanted me, because I would attract a lot of girls for him. So, this was what we would do. We would go into a new town, and we would have girls in there. When Sonny would have sex with women, I would have sex with them, too. And it's amazing the things that they would do." Foneda was a handsome, charming man, but he knew he was merely the procurer, the sidekick, the bait for Sonny's line. In the hotel suites, once Sonny had his britches down, "he was the main target for the women."

It was a part of their routine. "We'd pick up a girl and keep her all night, and then, the next morning, that's when they would leave. So then we'd have some more the next night."

When they couldn't get free women, they went with store bought; and these were usually the women that Sonny let loose on. "He put some of the prostitutes in the hospital. Yeah, because he would jam up on the inside, see. It would just be terrible the way he would be banging on some of them. You wouldn't believe the prostitutes he sent to the hospital."

Sometimes they shared one woman, sometimes they shared a brace of women. Sometimes each man took a woman for himself, sometimes each took a brace for himself. Sonny liked that, going to bed with two ladies. It befitted him.

I had heard a story about somebody who once called on Sonny at a hotel. There was a woman with Sonny, and the room was littered with bottles and crumpled paper sandwich wrappings. When the caller arrived, Sonny slipped something into the woman's hand and bade her adieu. She looked at what he had put in her hand. "Damn it, Sonny," she remonstrated. "Here I am with you all last night and half of today, all these hours, and this is all you give me."

Sonny looked at her and said, "What about that tunafish sandwich I bought you?"

It was this story that prompted me to ask Foneda if Sonny was cheap with prostitutes.

"No, 'cause, see, he would give me the money, and then I would give the girls a hundred dollars apiece. I didn't let him worry about that."

When morning came, Sonny and Foneda usually took breakfast together. "We never took 'em to breakfast too often," he said of the prostitutes. "They would be on their way. Once they got their money, they were ready to go."

Foneda seemed at times wistful for those bygone days. As he spoke, phrases such as "It's amazing the things that they would do," "You'd be surprised at the things that they would do," and "They did everything" seemed in their utterance to be not so much a commentary or a part of his narrative, but rather recurrent, passing inner reflections of nostalgia stirred by the raised memories of that narrative.

Both he and Sonny were blowjob men. Sure, Sonny liked to "jam up on the inside, see"; but a good piece of tail and a good blowjob were unto each other like penitentiary gruel and prime steak, or a dreary but winning decision after the full twelve rounds and a knockout through the ropes in the first. It was all the medicine, all the religion, that any man needed at times; and it was likely, polio vaccine and such notwithstanding, the greatest invention of the white man.

Foneda remembered being around "maybe once or twice" when Black Muslim proselytes hovered near Liston, trying to get his ear. "He just didn't think too much of their expression on separating races. Sonny liked white women as much as he did black women. Sonny just didn't like the expression that they would greet the women with, call them 'white devils' and stuff. That wasn't his make at all."

Actually, Sonny's loathing of the Black Muslims dated to his earliest exposure to them, at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. Some say it was fear as well as loathing, as Sonny generally was apprehensive of people who were, or were seen by him as, crazy, and in his suspicious and unspeaking eyes the Black Muslims were just that - crazy. He did not like them, and he did not like their ways, and he did not trust them.

The so called Freedom Riders were in the forefront of the news in those days. Organized by CORE in 1961, Freedom Riders traveled through the South in buses to test the effectiveness of a 1960 Supreme Court decision declaring that segregation was illegal in bus stations that were open to interstate travel. The beatings and trouble the riders endured, which made crackerjack news, were a powerful demonstration of the gravity of commitment within the civil rights movement.

"I think those Freedom Riders is stupid," said Sonny in that year of 1961. "That ain't no way to do things. You have to fight for what you get. It's like boxing. No use being in there if you just catch punches."

Later, a writer from
Ebony
magazine asked if he regarded white opponents with particular severity. "Yes," he answered.

What did he think of when the round one bell sounded and the man in the other corner was white?

"Kill him," Sonny said, sullenly, matter of factly. "I always say kill him when I'm in the ring with a white boy. You got to knock 'em out to win. You won't get the decision. I try to knock 'em all out, white or black."

This was the way of his life, and the way of his heart, and the way of his soul. Sonny Liston did not give a fuck what color you were when he knocked you down and dragged you in that alley. He did not give a fuck what color you were when he embraced you. He was - in good and in bad, if such distinction can or should even be made -
pure
. There were few friends in his life, as there are few real friends in any life; but for every Foneda Cox that he loved and trusted, there was some white gangster - and, yes, he did trust in thieves, as only a thief can -or some old Jewish cat that was writ just as deep in the lines of his palm.

The writer Mark Kram encountered Sonny some years later. It was in the early hours before dawn in a Las Vegas casino. Sonny told him a story, which I here pass on. The story takes place in Houston in 1960, on the night Sonny beat Roy Harris. Sitting in a chair in the deserted lobby of the hotel where he was staying, Sonny had fallen into a tired, boozy nod and was almost asleep when he heard something - the creak of leather bootsteps, then the click of a gun - behind his ear: