The Devil and Sonny Liston (23 page)

Though Resnick was often considered to have been mobbed down, those who knew him well saw this was a myth that he himself cherished. His real connection, according to the comedian Shecky Greene, was "a New York man called Abe Margolis in the jewelry business. Every time he needed money or something, he'd get it from Abe. I think Abe is even the one who gave him money to go into Caesar's."

Ash and Sonny were very, very tight, although no one could quite figure out why. "Ash had him hypnotized," Dean said, and "I don't know how." Later he would say, "Sonny Liston was the hardest guy in the world to get to know. Ash knew him."

Foneda Cox said that Ash "loved every minute of it. He wanted Sonny with him everywhere he went." And Ash took care of Foneda, too, throwing him a few yards every time he blew his stash at the tables. "I thought Ash was a nice guy. I honestly did." At the same time, he felt Ash to be more than a mobster manque. As Foneda saw him in no uncertain terms, he was "a representative of the Mafia."

It was in 1955 that James R. Hoffa, the vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, consolidated scores of pension funds in twenty two states into the Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund. Hoffa became the president of the Teamsters, and the Fund became the Mob's chest of gold in Vegas, the bankroll through which the Mob's desert dream grew into the great and neon many armed Moloch of a fullblown Mafia dream land. Central to this relationship between the Teamsters and the Mob in Vegas was Moe Dalitz, an old time figure of Mob majesty who was a friend of Hoffa's from the days when Hoffa was nothing, and who was instrumental in Hoffa's rise to power.

Truman Gibson told me a story, in that way he has of delicately spinning out a web that can be plainly seen only from a distance, the gossamer of a tale that seems to have no meaning in itself, but which, when the moon of understanding waxes, shines softly with the light of meaning that was there all along.

After we organized the International Boxing Club, we promoted in several cities, including Detroit, and in Detroit, the Detroit Olympia Stadium. During the course of the boxing season, the Teamsters, which had a contract with the Detroit Olympia, would move the chairs, seats, about once or twice a month. So, after we started, the guy that worked for us in Detroit, Nick Londos, fell out with two Italians who had decided that they would become the matchmakers and have all the dealings with the fighters in Detroit. So, I was in New York when word came that the Teamsters were calling a strike on the Detroit Olympia because of problems with Nick Londos. I hired a lawyer in Detroit to get an injunction. So, we went ahead with the fight as planned.

Then, in an unusual situation, we had a fight the next week there, and I went in and the two gentlemen who attempted to muscle in on us approached me in the offices of the Michigan State Athletic Commission, twelve o'clock in the day. One was about five feet three inches tall and about six feet wide, and the other was his companion. He said, "Come here, we wanna talk." So, we went in the office and the companion started picking his fingers with a knife, and the short one said, "You know, you think you're god damn smart." I said, "No" - a very long o - "I don't think I'm smart, but I know you're stupid because it is twelve o'clock, there are a hundred people in the offices of the Michigan State Athletic Commission, and you think you're gonna blow me away." So I said we're not going to have any more fights in Detroit.

The next day, Paul Dorfman, whom I had known around the fights - Red Dorfman - came in. He was Jimmy Hoffa's right hand man. Paul was very, very close to Jimmy. So, he came in and said there was trouble in Detroit. I said, yeah, we had trouble in Detroit, but, I said, we're not going to have any more trouble because we're not going to Detroit. He said, "No, no, let's take a hop over to Detroit tomorrow." So we went over, and Paul had the two guys in the office and said, "You know, Jimmy don't want this shit that you're pulling, and if you continue, you'll be in the bottom of the Detroit River with chains, you understand?" Understood. Had a victory dinner and no more problems in Detroit. I said to Paul, "What's the grief?" He said, "No, no, I'll call you, there'll come a time."

So, about a year later, Paul Dorfman called me in New York and said, "Pay-off time." I said, "What do you mean, Paul?" And he said, "Well, Jimmy's on trial in Washington, and the jury's all black, and we want Joe [Louis] to come in as a character witness."

I said, "No." He said, "What do you mean, 'No'?'' I said, "Paul, character witnesses don't mean anything." "Well, have him come in and he'll stay a week and every time that the jury comes out, Joe will have his arms around Jimmy, talking to him and giving him advice." And we had Joe's wife hired as one of the counsel, sitting at the counsel table.

That was the case where Bobby Kennedy said, "If I don't get a conviction on this case, I'm going to jump off the top of the Washington Monument." So, Jimmy got a not-guilty and characteristically said, "When's the jump gonna take place? I wouldn't miss it for the world."

In the meantime, I had told Paul. "Don't give Joe any money, don't pay his hotel bill."

So, on the way to the airport - Joe was being driven by a chap by the name of Barney Baker, who is going to be an important connection with Sonny Liston -Joe says, "Goddamnit, I forgot to pay my" - "No, no, we took care of it" - "Oh, shit, oh, no, no, no." He said, "Truman's gonna kick the shit out of me." I had paid the hotel bill.

So we proceeded on our merry way, and about a month later, I got a call from the manager of the Justice Department's business affairs. He said, ''I've got an affidavit for you to sign." "For what?" I looked at it and saw that Joe got thirty-five thousand dollars for going to Washington. I said, "I’ll prepare an affidavit for you." So I prepared an affidavit indicating the facts: how I knew that Jimmy had insisted that his union not be used for purposes for which it was attempted to be used; which put me on Bobby Kennedy's shit-list forever. In any event, during the time that we operated, I went to Vegas several times. We started out with Jack Kearns a great deal, who was Jack Dempsey's manager, who knew all the players and others there. I met the owner of the Dunes Hotel, Morris [Shanker]. He had been a very prominent defense lawyer in St. Louis. His wife was a judge. But he is the one that sponsored, maybe indirectly, Sonny as a former St. Louisan in his fight business. He's the one that was responsible for Sonny going to Vegas.

That, incidentally, was a Teamster-financed hotel, the Dunes. The Dunes was Teamster through and through.

But, yes, Barney Baker, a name familiar from Sonny's leg breaking St. Louis days. Always appearing on the scene. In Detroit, in Washington, in Las Vegas. Never in front." He was, as Truman Gibson said, "ubiquitous." And when Gibson alluded to those that "controlled Sonny's destiny in Vegas," the name of Barney Baker fell nearby.

Barney Baker, a friend of the Teamsters and a friend of boxing. Ash Resnick worked a lot of places during his forty years in that Mob-controlled Teamster paradise: the Dunes, the Thunderbird, the Aladdin, Caesar's Palace, and more. He was, you might say, ubiquitous.

And Ash was a friend of boxers, too. He had put Joe Louis on the public relations staff at the Thunderbird, and he did the same for him when he moved to Caesar's Palace. Wherever he went, he took care of Joe the best he could.

Ash and Joe. Joe and Sonny. Sonny and Ash.

When Sonny moved his training camp to Las Vegas, twenty-one year-old Cassius Marcellus Clay followed him. Clay had not fought Cleveland Williams, as Liston had said he must. He had, on March 13, fought Doug Jones, a New York light heavyweight who had lost to Eddie Machen in 1961, and he had, on June 10, fought Henry Cooper, the British heavyweight champion whom Zora Folley had knocked out in two rounds, also in 1961. The Jones fight was a ten-round performance so lackluster that even Arthur Daley, the Clay supporting columnist of the
New York Times
, was critical of "his miserable showing against Doug Jones." Jack Nilon claimed that he had offered Clay $75,000 to forgo the Jones fight, as it would be damaging to the potential value of the inevitable Liston Clay fight. "I would have given Cassius anything not to fight Jones," Nilon said. "It was a dumb match. Did those Louisville millionaires need money that much?" He referred to the Louisville Group, the consortium of businessmen that were the backers and handlers of Clay's career. "When Jones was rapping Clay in the first round, I thought, uh oh, here it all goes out the window."

Clay rode Sonny's back for all the publicity it was worth. Cus D'Amato, before the Patterson fight, had likened Liston to a bear, and Clay now had taken Cus's phrase and in his amateur theatrical mockery elaborated it into a ceaseless taunting of Liston as "the big ugly bear."

In July, as the fight approached, a reporter asked Sonny what he thought of Patterson personally. "I think he's a nice guy." And Cassius Clay? "I think he's the nicest thing to come along since Christmas."

Nat Fleischer of
The Ring
magazine presented Sonny with his championship belt at a ceremony in Las Vegas on July 18. Sonny, who seemed moved, said nothing. Nearby Cassius Clay taunted him with whining cries of "Why don't you say something?" Sonny looked at him, waited for silence, then simply and sincerely expressed his thanks to Fleischer. This shut Clay's mouth, and when it did, Sonny gestured to the belt and looked at him again. "Cassius," he said, "there's something you will never get."

·

On July 22, the night of the fight, Patterson showed up with no false beard or moustache. "Those things are gone for me now," he said.

As Sonny entered the ring, the crowd greeted him with vicious cries and booing.

It lasted two minutes and twenty three seconds. This time, Sonny knocked him down twice before knocking him down for good - a left to the body, a right to the head. As dictated by Nevada rules, there was a count of eight for each knockdown. Without these eight count pauses, it was, in fighting time, a faster knockout than the first fight.

At the press conference afterward, he was asked what he thought when the crowd had booed him.

"The main thing that went through my mind was, "I’ll fix them."'

He felt it, and he said it: "The public is not with me. I know it. But they'll have to swing along until somebody comes to beat me." When the fight ended, Cassius Clay ran in from his fifth row seat and vaulted into the ring. Three members of the Nevada sheriff's guard grappled him down in a corner of the ring, but he managed to slither free and rush to a closed circuit microphone in another corner of the ring.

That rush to the microphone - and Clay's career was becoming one big rush to the microphone - said much about the youthful Clay.

And, hell, man, fuck youthful: he was twenty one years old, a grown man, and it was not so much youth that he was full of but childishness.

A photograph taken before the fight that night shows Clay in a checkered sport jacket, eyes bulging, mouth open and as wide as the Holland Tunnel, screaming his praise for himself, while entertained white onlookers smile.

He was, at this point in his career, seen as an audacious but enamouring child, a frivolity of the noble white man, who perceived in Clay's persona none of the visceral, deep rooted threat of a Liston, none of the implacable and troubling earnest of a Martin Luther King, or the incendiary aggression of a Malcolm X.

In his frenzy to self aggrandize and to endear through his antics, his sense of humor, so central to those designs, was not much developed beyond the playground realm. Beloved, or tolerated, as he was by the great white middle class - and by many blacks, who found in this time of repression something fine and freeing about the rare black man who spouted off, seemingly without care or restraint or fear, in the very midst of white America - he was not a funny man, and his act was trite. Neither an Amos nor an Andy was he. Certainly Liston possessed a far more cutting and subtle sense of humor, as when he told the Big Brothers gathering that "I would find stuff before it got lost"; as when on his way to court one day in Philadelphia, he asked his lawyer, in the event that he should ever be sentenced to the electric chair, to please try to arrange it so that George Katz got "ten percent of the juice." He wasn't as funny as Pigmeat Markham or Moms Mabley or Dick Gregory or none of them. But he was benign.

That image of Clay rushing for the microphone on that night of another man's victory, so ravenous to hurl himself down the gullet and into the immense maw of mediocrity: it was an image to be reckoned with.

The best actors are often the most vapid. This is simply because, almost without exception, they have been in show business since childhood and have been playacting rather than living ever since. I remember Christopher Walken being asked if there was a role that he felt he could not play. Yeah, he said, he couldn't play a human being, because he'd never been one, as he'd been on the stage since childhood.

Clay had not been a child actor. He had been something more bizarre: a child boxer, whose life had been given over to the game at the age of twelve. Since then, from the Golden Gloves to the Olympics to that night in Vegas, he had boxed rather than lived, and his intelligence and involvement with life were as atrophied as any actor's.

His tiresome and trying wit, his harmless and drably colourful shows of playfulness, and his affected audacity were perfectly suited for the media of the day.
Mediocrity
and
media
, it should be remembered, are cognates of the same Latin root.

With his dangerous ways and his dangerous airs and his love of that rhythm and blues that the white man held to be dangerous, too, Sonny was to become the new hero of a different, younger minority, that minority of black street punks, and white street punks, who could not afford the ticket price to have their own voices heard at the fights when Sonny was booed and execrated. If Sonny is to be regarded as the first rock 'n' roll champ, Clay should be regarded as the first made for TV boxing idol. As he danced and cavorted in acceptable and inoffensive outrageousness before the masses and the cameras and the microphones of mediocrity, so mediocrity embraced him.

"Cassius," said the
New York Times
, "is a delightful young man."

White sentiment would later change when Clay allied himself with the Black Muslims and refused to enter the service. But in the summer of 1963, he was a child of the light who seemed to be all that Sonny Liston was not: a good, clean middle class boy who instead of bringing shame and hostility to America had brought her a gold medal from the 1960 Rome Olympics. And, even as his image changed and the maw of mass mediocrity vomited him forth, he became the darling of a more elite mediocrity, a white intelligentsia who sought meaning and metaphor in boxing. Unlike Sonny, who ignored or sneered at writers, Clay knew their value, and he accommodated them. Many of these writers, who could write no better than they could fight, found in him a willing and suitable accomplice in their conceits of the intellect and their deceit of themselves and others. It was through Clay, and with his implicit approval, that they were enabled to play out the marked deck - the dream cards of manliness, racial understanding, provocative sensibility, and bond between writer and warrior - that in reality were less of the soul than of fancy.

But in that summer of 1963, as Clay ran about proclaiming his self greatness, the estimation of him as a fighter was otherwise among writers and observers who knew what they were talking about. "At this stage of his fistic development," wrote Nat Fleischer, "Clay must be regarded as no more formidable an antagonist for Liston than was Patterson.

"In fact, were Clay to fight Patterson I would pick Floyd to knock him out in six rounds, or less. Nothing that Clay did against Henry Cooper in London or Doug Jones in New York's Garden justifies throwing him to the Wolf."

Fleischer said "the widely advertised Lip" was no match for the Wolf. "Liston," he wrote. "should dispose of Cassius in a couple of heats, and then what?" There were no credible challengers in sight.

Said Joe Louis, "Nobody's gonna beat Liston 'cept old age." Returning to Denver after the fight, Sonny received what Philadelphia had not given: a champion's welcome.

"He's happier than he's ever been," said Father Murphy. "When he flew back to Denver Wednesday night, there were several thousand people waiting for him at the airport, including the mayor."

Murphy said of Liston, "Now, this is a man who won't make any more mistakes.''

Sonny made a homecoming visit to the Missouri State Penitentiary. He had his picture taken, smiling as he shook the hand of Warden E.V. Nash. He was greeted wildly by former cellmates in the old A Hall, gave five dollar tips to prison barbers, and ate in the general population dining hall instead of with the officials. It was the biggest story ever to run in the prison newspaper,
The Jefftown Journal.

Jim Hackett had been studying a Liston fight film and was transfixed by a fleeting glimpse of a figure in Liston's corner, a presence he had not seen before. The figure seemed strangely familiar. "This guy had a straw hat on," he said. Then it hit him. He knew the guy. The guy in the straw hat had been a cop years ago in St. Louis. If he was alive, and if we could find him, Hackett was sure, he could unlock a door that no one else could. Hackett put the word out. With the help of his friend William Anderson, the guy in the straw hat was found. Hackett called him a number of times. Anderson called, and went to his home as well. But he was not forthcoming. Among the three of us, we had left many messages on an answering machine we were not sure was his. Then I dialed one morning, and he picked up.

"Wasn't no straw hat. Was a little old stingy brim, porkpie."

I was talking to Lowell Powell, who was born in 1923, and who, like William Anderson, was a black cop who had known and befriended Sonny in the early days. Lowell was not in the best of shape. Like Frankie Carbo, like me, like a lot of people, he had diabetes, and the complications were getting the better of him. He had already lost a leg and a lot of his sight. But he was a hell of a guy and not past flirting with the pretty lady from the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
, Chris Dickinson, who was doing legwork for me. Lowell died in 1998.

I came to him, he told me, through good people; and he would talk to me. I went to see him the next day, the first of several visits.

He told me that he had known Sonny in the old days; that it was in 1963, when he retired from the force that Sonny hired him as a bodyguard and righthand man, to replace Moose Grayson.

Though Sonny and Geraldine had a childless marriage, Geraldine had a daughter from a previous union, and Sonny, though no one knew it, had fathered a daughter of his own before going to prison. Now, after moving to Denver, he asked his new righthand man to bring him to her.

"He hadn't seen her in life" Lowell said, but he knew who the mother was.