The Devil and Sonny Liston (25 page)

SENATOR PHILIP HART: Mr. Margolis, what is your business?

SAM: I am in the vending-machine business.

SENATOR HART: Are you or did you have a partnership in a restaurant in or near Philadelphia in recent years?

SAM: That is prior to the vending business?

SENATOR HART: Prior to your entering the vending business. What was the name of the restaurant?

SAM: Sansom Restaurant.

SENATOR HART: All right, who were your partners in that restaurant?

SAM : My partners was my wife, Carlo Musciano, and Frank Palermo.

SENATOR HART: What discussions, if any, did you have with Frank Palermo concerning Liston in either a fight or the promotion of it?

SAM: I don't know if we ever discussed it or not.

Sam was asked by committee counsel if he knew Angelo Bruno, the criminal overlord of Philadelphia:

"Do you know Mr. Bruno?"

"Yes."

"Did you have any conversations with Mr. Bruno about Sonny Liston?"

"I don't recall having any conversations with Mr. Bruno about Sonny Liston."

Under questioning by Senator Keating of New York. Sam said that he and Sonny had an agreement whereby Sam would receive half of whatever he could get for Sonny from the Nilon brothers in negotiating his position during the formation of Inter-Continental.

Keating asked if steps had been taken to put the agreement in writing.

SAM: No. I trusted Sonny.

SENATOR KEATING: Were you his manager?

SAM: No.

SENATOR KEATING: What was your title?

SAM: Friend.

Sonny had endorsed the shares before they were filled in with Sam's, or anyone's, name. The shares were now worth about a hundred thousand dollars after taxes. Sam had given fifty of the two hundred and seventy five shares to his lawyer Salvatore J. Avena, who was one of two attorneys serving as counsel to him before the committee.

Keating brought up a meeting at Goldie Ahearn's Restaurant in Washington, D.C., on March 19, 1958, the night of a local middleweight fight between Jimmy Beacham and Willie Vaughn. Present were Frankie Carbo, Blinky Palermo, and Sam.

SAM: We did not have a meeting. We went there to eat.

SENATOR KEATING: Was Sonny Liston's name brought into the conversation?

SAM: I never heard Sonny Liston's name mentioned there at that time, Senator.

When Jack Nilon came before the committee, he was asked about the 1962 manager's contract with Liston that entitled him to a third of Liston's purses.

SENATOR HART: When did the change from thirty three and a third percent to fifty percent occur?

NILON: I would say after the Clay fight, after it was signed.

SENATOR HART: Are you a licensed manager?

NILON: No.

SENATOR HART: How do you act as the manager in the Clay fight if you weren't licensed to be manager?

NILON: I wasn't the manager in the Clay fight.

SENATOR HART: Who was?

NILON: I had a second's license.

SENATOR HART: Who was the manager?

NILON: Actually, there was no manager.

At one point, Nilon expressed the feeling that he did not really "feel that I want to be a fight manager," upon which Senator Hart asked him, "As the manager of Liston under this fifty percent agreement, what compensation would you receive, based on the Miami Beach Clay-Liston fight?"

NILON: I would receive - the gross sum estimated is probably four hundred thousand.

SENATOR HART: But you don't want to be a manager, nonetheless?

NILON: There is more to life than bread alone.

For years, Sonny had alluded to the inevitable. It was as if his fate were writ on a crumpled piece of paper, like those slips they had found on him in St. Louis in the summer of '59: an old and faded and irrevocable haruspicy folded away and sometimes forgotten amid those other slips, amid the lint and the nickels and the thousand dollar bills.

"He told me, he said, 'Foneda, I'm gonna tell you. I've got to lose one, and when I do, I'm gonna tell you."'

Though Foneda went most everywhere with Sonny, it was strongly suggested that he remain in Denver and not come to Miami for the fight. "They said. 'Well, you ought to stay here with your business.' And I said, 'No, I ain't worried about that. I got a cousin here that can run my business.'" But Foneda did not go.

"So, this is the only thing that I hold against Sonny, is that he did not tell me when he was actually going to lose. And I'm back here betting."

When Sonny returned to Denver, he seemed to Foneda somewhat distant but not unhappy. "He wasn't really upset." But, as Foneda saw it, Sonny had let him down, gone back on his word to him. "In fact," he said, "after that, I didn't go with him anymore."

Though they continued to spar and hang out together once in a while, the old days were over.

Sonny's bodyguard, Lowell Powell, was there on that stingy brim night in Miami Beach, February 25, 1964, that night the unvanquishable Liston was vanquished by Cassius Clay.

When Liston failed to come out of his corner in round seven, the man in the stingy brim hat knew what others did not know. "I had bet a lot of money on Sonny. What we called a lot of money. Three or four thousand dollars was a lot of money, as far as I'm concerned. I was given odds that he would take Clay in so many rounds. I said, 'Sonny, I'm gonna put some more money on you.'

"He said, 'don't put any more money on me, man. Two heavyweights out there, you can't ever tell who will win.' He said, 'You've got enough money bet.' That's as far as he would go with me.

"So, later on, after it all happened and he lost the fight, I said, 'Sonny, why would you let me lose my last penny on a fight and you knew you were gonna lose it? You could've at least pulled my coat.'

"He said, 'with your big mouth, we'd both be wearing concrete suits."'

Myrl Taylor had been in Algoa with Sam Eveland in the old days and later on had gotten involved with the unions in St. Louis. Later, after another three year stretch, he wound up over all the laborers in the eastern half of St. Louis. He retired in 1993.

John Vitale, said Myrl, "liked to be around people. He always came to the fights." Not long before the Miami fight, Taylor approached Vitale. "I smell a rat here," he said to Vitale.

Vitale, one friend of the Teamsters to another, told Myrl: "Let me give you some advice. When there's two niggers and a million dollars involved, all you better bet on is that a nigger's gonna win."

"In other words," as Myrl said, "he's telling me, you know, get the fuck out of it."

As for Myrl's estimation of Vitale: "well, he was supposed to be a big time gangster, but he was actually a fucking informer for the fuckin' police. He had a code name and everything. But the Italians here, it was a different thing. People up in Chicago and shit like that, all the Mafia people, they killed somebody, they killed somebody. These people here, they never - they always just set 'em up and snitched on 'em. It was a different ballgame."

Sonny's mother, Helen, and eldest brother, E.B. Ward, put in a long distance call to Sonny from Forrest City after the fight. As E.B. Ward recalled, it took the operator about thirty minutes to get him on the hotel phone. Ward asked him what happened.

"He said, 'I did what they told me to do."'

Patsy Anthony Lepera was a gangster from Reading, Pennsylvania. "In those years," he said,

I was still making money through connections in Reading. One day, I got a call from Sammy to come down to his club. "We got something going." I walk in - there's Jimmy Peters the bookie and his brother Louis the Lug, the fight promoter - their real name is Lucchese. Joe Pastore is running the meeting.

Joe Pastore and me were good friends. When something was on, I used to get a piece of it. Now Joe tells us they got everything straightened out in the Liston Clay fight. Liston is a seven to one favorite ... he's going off the board. Philadelphia is sending up a hundred grand to bet, and Reading got to come up with a hundred grand, too. That's what the meeting is for. Okay, I'll go for twenty five.

In a few days, we got the hundred together, and Jimmy Peters is working the money. He's laying it all through the coal region. Lots of bets were laid off with the Mob in Cleveland and Vegas. These guys took the other mobs.

Lepera watched the broadcast of the fight.

It's the seventh round. Liston stays in his corner, his arm hurts, he doesn't feel like fighting anymore, he sits there on the stool. It's a TKO. This guy didn't just take a dive - he did a one and a half off the high board. It was so bad. I figured we blew everything. It worried me - I already spent my end. But no, everybody got paid off. We had to give up forty percent for the information. I come out with seventy five thousand.

Bernie Glickman, who had handled Sonny in his transition from St. Louis control, had come down from Chicago and was around the fighters' camps before the fight.

"Right before the fight, he called me up," his son Joel told me. "He knew I liked to gamble and he knew I loved Liston. He said, 'Don't bet. There's something wrong. I don't know what it is.' I’ll never forget that. I didn't listen."

·

A Chicago bookmaker remembered that night, too.

The biggest key to it, the biggest key was the odds. The fight was five and a half to one here, and by fight time it was down to about two to one. One guy, he called me up from Vegas, he wanted to bet five grand on Clay. He was looking for four or five to one: but I'd already heard they were down to three to one, so I think I said I'd give him three to one. But for a fight to have dropped down like that. And if you knew anything about boxing, there was no way Clay could hurt Liston.

The oddsmaker Bob Martin:

I tried to lay eight to one
,
and I couldn't play around Vegas, and a friend of mine in Miami called me and got me out for five hundred. So I lost four thousand. I would have landed for ten thousand, so I would've lost eighty thousand. I couldn't get on, so I don't know where the line moved.

Martin did not believe that Sonny took a dive. "No," he said, "no chance." He tempered that somewhat: "In my mind, no chance. If a guy takes a dive, there's gotta be a motive."

When the Man says move, you got to move.

Somebody told me to look to the east, to Mecca, for the answer.

Liston had his crew down there in Miami. Pep Barone and the Nilon brothers were there. Ash Resnick from Vegas was there. Sam Margolis, an old friend and partner of Blinky's who had brokered Sonny's deal with the Nilons, was there. His hero Joe Louis was there.

And Clay had his. Among that crew was Malcolm X. The two had met in 1962, and
,
although Clay's interest in Islam had already blossomed by then, it was Malcolm who cultivated, and, in Miami, completed, Clay's conversion. Malcolm at the time was fallen from grace with the Nation of Islam leaders in Chicago, and he had already begun to fear violence against him. He saw in Clay a means of reinstating himself and offered to deliver the flamboyant fighter, and his embrace of Islam, to the Savior's Day convention in Chicago on the very day after the big fight. The Chicago leaders were not impressed: they believed that Liston would win. But the thought of the power and publicity a Black Muslim heavyweight champion might bring cannot have been lost on them.

"They were rough people," Truman Gibson mused when I broached the subject. They were murderously rough, as Malcolm X knew long before assassins from the Newark Temple No. 25 did their work in the cold early days of 1965.

Perhaps, in a world that was no longer Carbo's, a threat of Muslim violence might have worked against Liston. He had long been apprehensive of the Black Muslims, as he was of all he deemed to be estranged from their rightful minds. But any involvement by the Nation of Islam would have been more likely part of a straightforward business deal. Clay was the first great fighter to emerge in boxing's post Carbo age. He had, so to speak, been born to freedom. True, he was owned in part by the Louisville consortium, but he was virgin meat as far as Mob leeching was concerned. Soon, when his contract with the Louisville Group expired, he signed with a Muslim manager, Herbert Muhammad, a son of the Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad. Exalted as the Messenger of the Prophet Allah, Muhammad was a reformed alky born in Georgia of an itinerant Baptist preacher named Poole.

In the days preceding the fight, Clay had evaded questions concerning his reputed conversion to the Nation of Islam. On the day after the fight, he was ebullient with the profession of that conversion.

"I go to a Black Muslim meeting and what do I see? I see there's no smoking and no drinking and their women wear dresses down to the floor." (Not only a clean cut young man, but one who knew that the gam was the devil's meat.) "And then I come out on the street and you tell me I shouldn't go in there. Well, there must be something in there if you don't want me to go in there." The separatist way was the way of nature, he said. "In the jungle, lions are with lions and tigers are with tigers, and redbirds stay with redbirds and bluebirds with bluebirds. That's human nature, too, to be with your own kind."

On that morning after the fight, proclaiming his conversion and announcing in victory his new name, Clay's jubilation was real. Knowing nothing of what Sonny knew, and having been a party to no conspiracy other than that of his own fear and bravery, he had no reason at all to disbelieve that he was, as he said, the greatest. "White people wanted Liston to beat up and possibly kill poor little Clay," said Elijah Muhammad at that Savior's Day rally. "But Allah and myself said no. This assured his victory."

What a great title for a song, what a great title for a poem: "But Allah and Myself Said No."

Islam was a religion of slavery from its beginnings in the seventh century. The holy Koran looked upon slaves as the gifts of God, as those "whom God has given you as booty"; and the early, trans-Saharan slave trade in Africa was dominated by the Muslims. What a fine and fitting heritage, no matter how skewed and misknown, from which to enter the fight racket.

A tithe for Islam surely would not be too much to ask of a man of the faith so blessed as the champion now known as Ali. And from that tithe might be drawn a portion for Sonny. Clay was young, with a long future ahead of him. To a man who felt rather than knew his age, a cut of that future, a piece of every, increasing purse, might seem not a bad deal at all. But if the Nation of Islam had somehow got to Sonny, the unknowing Ali would have been sent into the ring praising the divinity and the blessing and the all conquering power of Allah, rather than been constrained to not publicize his faith before the fight. To the Black Muslims, Clay's publicity value as a champion would be great, but were he to lose, having been known as a Black Muslim beforehand, his loss would be a loss for the power and image of the faith. The Prophet had not shared the future with the Messenger; and the Muslims, like just about everybody else, expected Sonny to bury Clay in the open night.

On February 16, 1963, a year before the Miami fight, the Court of Appeals in San Francisco had handed down its decision in a seventy five page opinion that confirmed the 1961 convictions of Frankie Carbo, Blinky Palermo, and the others. Alcatraz had been shut down, and Carbo was moved to another prison. Blinky lingered a while more on the outside, and was unincarcerated still the night Liston lost to Clay. It was not until June 5, 1964, that United States marshals took him from Philadelphia to begin his fifteen year term in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg.

The Devil gave, and the Devil took away. For Sonny, had the Devil not given to him in the first place, there would never have been anything to take away: because you could be the best, toughest, killingest motherfucking fighter in the world, but without the Devil it did not much matter a good goddamn, because it was the Devil's ring. There was no one left for Sonny to turn to: except to the Devil in himself.