The Devil and Sonny Liston (22 page)

The rematch, which was the final commitment of Liston and Nilon to Championship Sports, was put off until the summer, and the venue was changed from Miami Beach to Las Vegas.

According to Foneda Cox, there was no injury. "What I'm telling you," Foneda said, "they didn't get it together to make the agreements on the fight. They really had not decided whether they was going to let Sonny win the fight or not." It was clear that Foneda was talking not about the Patterson rematch, but of the machinations involved in the fight that was to follow the rematch. His claim that there was no injury would, if true, explain the troublingly casual reference to Sonny's undergoing cortisone treatment. As everyone close to him knew, Sonny had a fear of needles that was pathological in the extreme. It may also be not without meaning that a shift to Las Vegas came at a time when these alleged machinations were said to be unresolved.

Sonny's basic entourage at this time consisted of six men: Jack Nilon, who no longer was an advisory non-manager, but a manager in full; Willie Reddish, his trainer; Joe Polino, his assistant trainer and cornerman; Foneda Cox, his friend and sparring partner; Teddy King, his friend and valet; and John Grayson, his body guard.

Grayson, the newest member of the troupe, was known as Moose. He was a black ex-cop who had been working as a detective in the Illinois attorney general's office when he was assigned, at Sonny's request, to provide licensed-gun protection during the Aurora training period before the first Patterson fight. Since then, Sonny had made Moose Grayson his full-time bodyguard.

Ben Bentley, the veteran Chicago public relations man who had first met Liston during the last days of the IBC, had been brought aboard and charged with remaking the champion's image. Others had failed in their sporadic attempts to fulfill this imposing task. Time magazine in the summer of 1959 had bought a taste of the Horatio Alger story, which presented a young, imprisoned Liston who for inspiration "studied Joe Louis'
My Life Story
by the hour" in the meager light of his cell. But it proved a hard tale to sell about a man who could not read.

"All right," Bentley had shouted to the awaiting press the night Sonny won the crown in Chicago, "he'll be right out. Everything has to be done right, or else he'll clear you all out of here. You've seen presidential press conferences. That's how you do it."

The April 1963,
Ebony
featured Sonny as a happy homebody in its "Date with a Dish." A photograph showed a smiling Liston seated in suit and tie at a dinner table of wholesome plenty, a dainty glass of orange juice raised in his immense and manicured hand: "The Champ enjoys a glass of orange juice before he consumes his favorite menu. He feels that orange juice is the best cocktail and appetizer before dinner." The article made further revelations: "His favorite menu consists of orange juice, crabmeat salad, filet mignon, broiled medium and rare, Brussels sprouts, baked potato with butter, tossed green salad with thousand island dressing, tea, and ice cream." Several recipes followed, all of them "tested in EBONYs test kitchen."

Ben Bentley served as Liston's publicity director from 1962 to 1964. Liston hated the press, and the press hated him; and for Bentley, who was an easygoing man, it was not an easygoing time.

One of Bentley's greatest coups was to have Sonny invited as a guest of honor at the Big Brothers banquet hosted by the columnist and Big Brothers president Drew Pearson. The banquet was held in Washington, D.C., on March 29, 1963.

Director J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI had taken an increasing interest in the Liston file, personally reviewing and adding his scrawled and initialed comments to various of the Liston-related documents that crossed his desk. At the bottom of a United Press International report that "Liston was here tonight for a 'Big Brothers' dinner for which he and the vice president were the headline attractions," the Director wrote: "Just how naive can some of our VIPs get?" Later, in his column "The Washington Merry-Go-Round," Pearson recounted what Liston had said in addressing those assembled: "I feel that mothers and fathers should know where the child is at all times. And should have a deadline to get home at night." As for his own youth, well, "I would find stuff before it got lost." To a copy of the column, Hoover added. "It is nauseating the way Pearson tries to present Liston as a 'clean' person."

While in Washington for the Big Brothers dinner, Sonny visited Junior Village, a public home for abandoned and orphaned children, where he remained so long among the children that he was late to arrive at the Big Brothers affair.

In an unpublished letter to
Newsweek
, dated July 22,
1963, the institutional administrator of Junior Village, Joseph S. Kosisky, Jr., wrote to defend Liston amid ongoing bad press, describing Liston's visit, which had gone unnoticed: "He won the admiration of the youngsters, from the babies to teenagers, who seemed to sense that this man, this tower of strength, had a genuine liking for them. He awed the children and staff alike with his kindness and consideration." Kosisky said, "There is no doubt in my mind but that in the eyes of the 800 children living at Junior Village, he appeared as a real champ" and "an idol to look up to." He ended his letter by noting "that apparently this visit was not a publicity stunt, since there was no press coverage during his visit with the children.''

It was true: children loved Sonny as he loved them. In Philadelphia, while the cops and the newspapers hunted him down, the kids in the neighborhood would run to gather around the man they all called Uncle Sonny.

The secretarial diary of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson shows that Johnson met with Liston and Pearson at ten o'clock that morning in Senate Room S212, and that he led them on a tour of the Senate floor. Afterwards, Sonny and Ben visited with Johnson privately in the vice president's office.

Of course, an audience with President Kennedy could not be arranged, because of his brother's ongoing crusade against the element whence Sonny, like the Kennedy fortune itself, had come.

But Bentley viewed the opportunity to be accepted into the vice president's graces not only as an honor, but as a godsend for Sonny's image.

In Johnson's office, amid various decorative objects and mementos, there was "an alligator or something." Bentley recalled, "made out of leather or something."

"I know where that comes from." Sonny said. "That's what we made in prison."

After a few minutes in the vice president's company. Sonny grew restless, leaned toward Bentley, spoke low into his ear: "Let's blow this bum off."

As they flew back to Chicago, Sonny withdrew into an increasingly foul mood, and he got to drinking, and he went off by himself.

When Sonny had quit training in Miami following his knee injury, he had left Foneda Cox and Moose Grayson to close down camp and haul the training equipment back to Chicago in a trailer hitched to a car. They were traveling together toward Chicago, equipment in tow, on that night of March 29, as Sonny was flying back to Chicago from Washington, D.C.

Late that night, Ben Bentley got a call. It was Moose Grayson's wife, Pearl, and she was very distraught. Sonny, she said, had sexually assaulted her.

As I write this, I remember a pleasant dinner I had not long ago with the casting director Vickie Thomas. Sonny Liston, she said, struck her as a man who in the eyes of the world was so big and so bad and so black, and yet inside so gentle. Would that it were so, I now think, if only for the sake of storytelling, if only for the sake of what we might want to believe, if only for the sake of the dignity of tragedy itself; if only for the sake of understanding.

Liston's private acts of charity and kindness - to prisoners, the disabled, the poor - were many; his love of children was well known; and he was a man without racism in him.

"We were riding down Fremont Street downtown, and I was driving his car," remembered his Las Vegas friend Davey Pearl. "Bumper to bumper traffic. And he says to me, 'stop the car.' I said, 'I can't stop the car here.' He said, 'stop the goddamn car.' I stopped the car, and he runs out, and there's a little woman sitting on a little dolly selling pencils. He emptied out both pockets and gave it to her, just dropped it on her tray," Pearl said. "And it was a white woman, so there was no racial thing."

If it is true that we feel compassion most for those in whom we see ourselves, these emanations of the heart say much.

But, as Lowell Powell said, "Sonny had a lot of gangsterism in him."

I asked Truman Gibson if Sonny had a sense of right or wrong. Truman thought awhile, smiled somewhat, gently shook his head, and softly answered: "None."

It was Sonny's first known sexual assault. Few would ever learn of it. Matt Rodriguez, the superintendent of police in Chicago, was one of those few. He told me he had encountered Grayson some years after the incident, and that Grayson told him that there had been a "settlement."

Sonny left town. His flight from Chicago was sudden, stealthful, and unquestioned by - for the most part unknown to - a press that remained unaware.

He and Foneda left Chicago together, with the idea of going to California. They would drive southwest, because Sonny wanted to pass through Denver to visit Father Murphy.

They never made it to California, but only as far as Denver. Father Murphy "convinced Sonny that he should stay here. So we stayed here. And for a while we lived in that motel on East Colfax. We stayed together. Then, after a while, Sonny bought a house on Monaco. Thirty fifth and Monaco. And then I rented an apartment over on Twenty first and Race."

Sonny paid $28,500 for the brick house at 3633 Monaco Drive, on May 10, 1963. It was set on a corner lot with a lawn in an attractive black neighborhood in the parish of St. Ignatius Loyola Church.

The
New York Post
columnist Milton Gross, in his column of April 17, painted the sort of picture that Ben Bentley had wanted, but which in its falsity made Bentley feel somewhat uneasy and somewhat unclean. "Sonny," wrote Gross, "has been making the rounds since the April 10 bout was postponed. Instead of undergoing an operation, he hobnobbed with Vice President Lyndon Johnson in Washington, visited his old cell mates at Jefferson State Prison in Missouri and is now at the home of Rev. Edward Murphy."

Sonny started roadwork in Denver on April 12. His trainer, Willie Reddish, soon joined him, and they began training at Lowery Air Force Base. Arrangements for the rematch were made in Las Vegas on April 12, with the fight set to be held at the Las Vegas Convention Center on June 27. Then, three weeks later, the fight was postponed yet again, to July, when surgery was required to remove a callus from Floyd Patterson's right hand.

Sonny arrived in Las Vegas in a gleaming black Fleetwood Cadillac with a white leather top and his initials on the driver's door. Inside, there was air conditioning; there were two telephones, a television set. An engraved metal plate was inscribed, "This car was specially made for Sonny Liston." There was a crucifix on the dashboard, a pair of miniature boxing gloves dangling from the rearview mirror.

It was initially planned that Sonny's training quarters would be at the Dunes. But three previous champions - Ray Robinson, Benny Paret, and Gene Fullmer -had become ex champions after training at the Dunes; and Sonny, who may not have had much religion, had a hell of a lot of superstition. So it came to be that the Liston camp set up at the Thunderbird, in a four bedroom cottage behind the hotel, the same ninety dollar a night cottage where Attorney General Robert Kennedy had stayed on his last visit to Vegas. In addition to Foneda Cox, there were two other sparring partners: the Nevada heavyweight Howard King, who had fought two professional matches with Sonny, in 1960 and 1961, and Leotis Martin, a light heavyweight who had begun his professional career the year before. As Willie Reddish explained, Foneda was there because he was the best puncher, King because he was good at attacking the torso, and Martin because he was "the nearest thing to Floyd Patterson with his shifty, peek a boo style."

Sparring matches between Sonny and the massive and heavily pomaded Howard King were presented as stage shows hosted by Ben Bentley. The sparring show was followed by the rope skipping show, in which Sonny sometimes varied his moves but never the music - "Night Train" - to which those moves were performed. When he wasn't working out, he played blackjack and shot craps, often with his hero who now was his friend, Joe Louis.

Las Vegas, as a Vegas lawyer once said to me with the straightest of faces, was "a friendly environment for the right people."

It was at the Thunderbird that Sonny grew close to a character known as Ash Resnick.

His real name was Irving. He had been born in New York on March 6, 1916. As a New Utrecht High School and New York University basketball star in the thirties, Ash had perfected the art of dumping and shaving points. It was said that he spent hours at a stretch in a playground on Bay Parkway in Brooklyn practicing foul shots that would bounce off the rim. In Vegas, he worked for several casinos and became, with Dean Shendal, one of the owners of Caesar's Palace.

He would be convicted of tax evasion for failing to report more than $300,000 he had skimmed from Caesar's. The same year, eight sticks of dynamite were found under his car. According to Dean, Ash put them there himself, and they were "nothing but Texas sawdust." Two years later, he was shot at, or seemed to be, while leaving Caesar's.

Everybody loved Ash, and everybody expressed that love with reservation. "Ash had balls as big as a canary," Dean said. "But I happened to like him. He was one of my best friends." But "he was no tough guy."