The Devil and Sonny Liston (27 page)

A guy nobody wants any part of. "Liston, the bum of bums" yeah, that's what some other columnist called him - "the nothing of all nothings."

For the first time, as if uncaring, he indirectly admitted to his control by Carbo and Blinky. Applying for a license to fight in California, a member of the boxing commission in Sacramento asked him about his history of managers.

"One's doin' fifteen years," Sonny said, "and another's doin' twenty five."

The California commission turned down his application, but in February 1968, a California license was granted him.

In the spring of 1968,
Sports Illustrated
published an article called "What's Become of the Big Bear?" The author, Jack Olsen, described his attempts to draw words from the once infamous man who was now all but forgotten:

"Sonny lounged on a long window seat and tried his best to stay awake. 'Been huntin' rabbits,' he said with great effort, 'and when we hunts rabbits, we don't get much sleep. We leave at two o'clock in the morning." Olsen spends much of the time talking with Geraldine, then finally there is a question that Sonny rouses himself to answer. Olsen asked him if he lost any friends after the Clay fights. Sonny looked dead straight at him and dead straight said: "No. I had my friends in my pocket."

Back in 1965, he had been given a bit part in one of the two bad movies called
Harlow
that were released that year. In Vegas, he connected with a couple of more movie parts: Bob Rafelson's
Head
, which came out in 1968, and something called
Moonfire
, which came out in 1970. He did a 1969 Braniff Airline commercial with Andy Warhol, in which he sat in unsmiling silence, ostensibly aboard a Braniff aircraft, while Warhol, in the next seat, spoke to him about the "inherent beauty" of soup cans.

Punctuated by only one arrest (for drunk driving, in February 1969), Sonny fought a dozen fights between March of 1968 and September of 1969. He won them all, eleven of them by knockouts. In December 1969, at Kirk Kerkorian's new International in Vegas, his former sparring partner Leotis Martin, a three to one underdog, knocked him out in the ninth.

There would be one more fight, with the Bayonne heavyweight Chuck Wepner, at the Jersey City Armory on June 29, 1970.

At the weigh in and press conference at the Oyster Bay Restaurant in Jersey City a few days before the fight, a reporter asked Sonny if he would request a license to fight in New York, which had always been denied him.

"I’m on my way down," he snarled. "The hell with New York." Wepner recalled that it was a surly motherfucker who looked down impassively at Wepner's hand when he extended it for a pre-fight shake before the press.

"Well, the first few rounds, the fight was almost even," Chuck said.

I thought he was getting tired, and I started pressing him, and he really nailed me with that jab. He had a tremendous jab. And he started busting me up. After the fifth round, I was target practice. My one eye closed, my equilibrium was off. Broken nose, broken left cheekbone, seventy two stitches. They iced me down for two straight days. I was in shock for three days, I really was.

He could punch. And it got so bad near the end when the guy landed a jab - and he had a jab; he could step in and throw his shoulder, like, bang, with the shoulder right behind it, the way you're supposed to throw it - I could hear the bone shattering. The referee came in at the beginning of the ninth round and he said. "I gotta stop the fight, his eyes are all busted up.'' And I said. "I’m all right." And he said. "Well, how many fingers do I have up?" I couldn't see him
,
all I could see were blurs. Al Braverman had his hand on my shoulder. Al tapped me three times; I said, "Three." He said. "O.K., you're all right, you can see." I came out for the ninth round and got banged around, but actually in the ninth I landed some. He was getting tired, definitely. He was even getting tired of beating the shit out of me.

Braverman, in partnership with Gary Garafola, was Chuck's manager. He was an acquaintance of Ash Resnick and had worked with Liston in Vegas. As Chuck said,

Al Braverman was supposed to be the trainer but was really only the cut-man, and Gary was the manager. Gary had Frankie De Paula, a couple other guys, and he also owned the Rag Doll up in Union City.

That's how I signed with him. I go up there to the Rag Doll, and they got this go-go girl dancing, and she was a knockout. Gail. Pretty sure her name was Gail. So, Gary Garafola, who owned the place, says, "When does your contract run out?" I said. "It runs out in about a month or two." He says, "What are you gonna do?" I says, "I don't know." He says. "I’d like to sign you." I said. "I don't know." So, I'm looking at the girl. Gary says. "You like her?" I said. "Do I like her? She's beautiful." He said, "Do you want her?" I said, "Do I want her?" He says, "You wanna sign a contract with me, you can have any girl here you want." I said, "Are you serious?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "I want her." He says, "Go in the office, I'll send her in." So, I go in the office, they've got these great big desks there, and I knocked everything off, pushed it on the floor. Five minutes later, she walks in and says. "Hi. I'm Gail. Gary told me to come in." I said, "Yeah?" She says, "What do you want?" I said, "I want everything." I was loaded. Anyway, I come outta there, and I'm all perspiring and everything; I come out and Gary had the contract. He said, "Here's the contract." I said, "Give me the pen, boss, you got yourself a fighter."

Not long after the fight at the Armory, Garafola would be charged with the murder of his light heavyweight boxer Frankie De Paula. But Frankie's murder, Chuck said, "was over a broad. He was whacking somebody's wife, and they wanted him to stay away, and he didn't. I even told him." Gary was acquitted, went to the joint on another rap, and it was then that Braverman took over actively as Chuck's manager.

The Genovese team player that oversaw that part of Jersey was James Napoli, also known as Jimmy Nap. He was, in Chuck's memorable phrase, "the local guy from the what you call it. He had a lot to do with the fights. He was very involved in all the fights in them days."

The Armory fight went into the tenth round, and it ended only when Wepner, one of the great warhorses of boxing, could no longer see through his swollen and blood drenched eyes. The referee was Barney Felix, who had refereed the Liston Clay fight in Miami, six years earlier.

A few years later, Chuck would fight Muhammad Ali for the heavyweight championship.

"I would have to say that Liston was a lot tougher to fight. Ali didn't hit like Liston. Liston was the only man that ever hurt me." Dave Anderson of the
New York Times
called the Jersey City fight between Liston and Wepner "a bloody sacrifice that evoked more sympathy for the loser than prestige for the winner."

Wepner's take was supposed to be fifty percent of the $37,600 gate, and from his take, he was supposed to pay out Sonny's guarantee of thirteen grand.

As he recalled, it was an even five grand, paid out to him in cash some days later at the office of the fight's promoter Willie Gilzenberg of Newark. "I gave Al a third. I wound up with thirty something hundred." Three thousand and change left from what had started out as fifty percent of a thirty seven thousand dollar gate. "Yeah. It was my biggest payday to date. By far."

Paul Venti, the knockdown timekeeper at the fight, shared a big musty dressing room with Sonny.

I didn't see Sonny Liston when I changed into my referee clothes, but when I went back after the show was over, Sonny was using a different corner from where I was. He got into his street clothes - brown suit, no tie, fedora - and I didn't want to bother him; I was in a different end of the room. And I was sitting on the stool of a piano that was there, and I was changing. So, now the guys came in from Bayonne, and they went over to Sonny.

Sonny was completely alone, Venti said, and the guys from Bayonne numbered either three or four.

"They had this white envelope, and they told Sonny, 'There you go, Seven grand. That's all we could come up with."'

"'No, no, no,' he says, 'I came here with a deal to get fifteen thousand."'

While the above board guarantee was stipulated at thirteen grand, there may have been an understanding of an additional two grand to be paid under the table, a practice far from uncommon.

"No, that's all we can give you. We're losing money on this whole thing. If you don't take it, then go home with nothing."

He took a deep breath. When he took a deep breath - I remember it like yesterday - I moved away. I figured, hey, were gonna have some fireworks here, and these guys are kinda crazy from Bayonne. They're always at ringside.

And, so, Sonny took a deep breath. "Count it," they told him.

He looked through the money. He looked again. And he looked at the guys. Stuck it in his inside pocket and walked out.

Three men flew with Sonny from Las Vegas to the fight and back. Two of those men are still living, and both of them recalled that Sonny left town with either thirteen grand, as one of them swears, or fifteen grand, as the other remembered while conceding that, yes, it might have been thirteen. Ten grand of that money, one of them said, went to pay off a losing bet that Sonny had made on Jerry Quarry, another heavyweight in another fight, a dozen days before. (Quarry, who was twenty-five and white, had beaten Floyd Patterson in 1967. Although it was not yet public knowledge at the time of Sonny's bet. Quarry was to be the opponent of Muhammad Ali several months later in the fight that would mark Ali's return to the ring after an absence of more than three years. It is interesting that Ali showed up during the Wepner fight and purposely disrupted it, aggressively drawing attention from the fight in the ring to his own loud presence.)

Paul Venti's mind is lucid, and he is a very honest man. The same can rightly be said for the other two gentlemen. Could it be that, after leaving the Armory, Sonny might have taken it upon himself to have collected what was due him? There were in his corner no more of those guys, as Chuck would have it, from the what you call it. The very fact that he had been treated as recounted in Venti's story evinces as much: that he was now a man without true intercessor, rabbi, or
cumpari
.

Venti, who was born in 1920, has been in the fight racket for a long, long time. "Frankie Carbo and Palermo," he said, "were running the fight game out of their cells. They were in jail, and they had a phone service at their disposal, and they made matches. They were running the Garden out of jail." (Lowell Powell agreed. "They could arrange anything.")

Things changed, Venti said, and things stayed the same. "Today you've got about six, seven organizations, and they don't have to tell you who their champions are. If you don't protect them, you just don't work again. It's happening today. They don't want a lopsided decision, but if it's close, they expect you to lean."

I remembered the rumors at the time of the fight. Liston, it was whispered, was going to go down for the Hudson County money. "I wish," Wepner said with a laugh. "Maybe they didn't get the message through to him. I wish they had."

Johnny Tocco remembered sitting in a hotel coffee shop with Sonny a few days before the fight.

A couple of shady-looking characters came in and motioned Sonny over. So, Sonny told me he'll be right back, and then he left. He was gone for hours.

When I see him, I ask him who those guys were, and he just mumbled something. The next day, one of those guys comes up to me, shakes my hand, and says something like: "If your guy loses, don't feel bad. Chucks' a real popular guy here."

Well, I went up to Sonny, and I said. "Hey, is something going on? Who are those guys? Sonny, are you just here for a payday? If somethin's goin' on, I want to know about it."

Sonny said, "Aw, go to sleep. I'm going to knock this guy out."

Wepner, who was thirty one at the time, said that, up close in the ring, Sonny "looked like he'd been around the block quite a few times. They said he was thirty eight, and he looked like he was maybe fifty."

The money had run as dry as the rivulet that had trickled to nothing on that plantation slough. It was said that in November Sonny entered a Las Vegas recording studio and made him a rock 'n' roll record, and that he was hoping that it might bring him a few bucks when it was released. Nothing else was ever heard or discovered about that record.

Sonny was in an automobile accident on Thanksgiving Day of 1970. He was given emergency treatment at Sunrise Hospital, then released. Two days later, he was admitted to Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital, where, on December 1, he was reported in satisfactory condition. The hospital would not reveal the nature of Sonny's injuries. In a letter Geraldine wrote to a friend, she said, "he got cut on the head and nose kind of bad but we think it will be ok when it heal." He was released on December 4.

Something drew him to Los Angeles. There, on December 16, he was arrested on a freeway for drunken driving. He returned to Las Vegas.

Johnny Tocco, Davey Pearl, and Lem Banker were the three men who had flown with Sonny when he fought Chuck Wepner.

Tocco was a trainer who had worked with Sonny in the early days in St. Louis. He had moved in the early fifties to Vegas, where he had been operating the Ringside Gym on East Charlton since 1956. He was now serving once again as a trainer of sorts for Sonny.

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1917. Davey Pearl had come to Vegas in September 1947. After blowing his last sixty bucks gambling, he had tried to politely bum a smoke from a guy who told him no, which "got me so mad that I made up my mind that I was gonna stay here and be somebody, and let that son of a bitch, if I ever run into him, know that he turned me down for a cigarette."

Davey tells this story sitting diminutive and dapper beside his diminutive and dapper and very identical twin, Lou. His package of Merit cigarettes is placed carefully before him on the table of a joint called Bagelmania, at Twain and Swenson, where he takes his breakfast coffee almost every morning; and, as he tells this story, he seems as if he would still be able, after more than half a century, to readily recognize that prick if he walked in, and would just as readily blow smoke in his face.

"That's what made me stay here. Plus the fact that I had no money." One thing led to another, and he found himself working the Flamingo, Bugsy Siegel's joint. "Ya hadda call him Mr. Siegel. Yeah. He got killed a few months after I started." From there, running shows, running joints, and working fights, he came to know them all, as many claimed but few did: from Sinatra to Dean Martin, from Carl Cohen, who knocked out Sinatra's teeth ("the number one nice guy in Vegas," Pearl said of Cohen) to Moe Dalitz ("one of the greatest guys that ever lived. I cried when he died") to Meyer Lansky. "Dalitz, you had to respect him; Cohen, you had to respect him; but when Lansky said something, that was it. He was a nice guy, quiet as could be." Lansky was not a gentleman, said Davey, he was a
perfect
gentleman. They chartered a plane together, he and Lansky, in the summer of 1954, flew off to Frisco for the Olson Castellani middleweight championship fight. Yes, Davey Pearl. the modest, down to earth, behind the scenes Vegas legend that the writ big legends sought out and trusted, had a past that liars would pay to have as their own. In the fight game, he became a legend far beyond Vegas, as one of the most honored and respected referees in boxing. Told initially by the Nevada State Athletic Commission that he was too small to be a referee, Davey went on to referee thousands of fights, more than fifty world title bouts among them. In 1997, he was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame.

Sonny Liston, he said, was "one of the best friends I ever had in my life, if not the best." Times had changed. The days of gentlemanly tough guys were gone, and Davey was no kid anymore. But "after I was with Sonny," he said, "nobody fooled with me. You know what I'm saying? Nobody got tough. Nobody ever stepped outta line with me. There were guys here who were professional tough guys, and they'd maybe try to get in on the muscle, and I hated that with a passion. Well, nobody ever did that to me when Sonny was near me.''

Davey remembered the time he cajoled Sonny into serving as guest referee at a boys club boxing tournament.