The Devil and Sonny Liston (7 page)

I don't remember whether a car stopped or what, but he come runnin' over from this rib station towards his house. I walked out of the hallway, put a .38 on him, said "Whoa, hold it
,
" all that good stuff
,
"hands against the wall." Shook him down for a weapon. No weapon, but he had rolls of nickels in the hammer pocket of his overalls. He was wearing bib
type overalls as I remember, and this yellow shirt.

One roll of pennies, one roll of nickels, twenty-four loose nickels, ten dimes, and twelve quarters: seven dollars and seventy cents. That was the exact accounting of what remained of the fruits of the criminal career of the Yellow Shirt Bandit. Charles L. Liston, Unknown Negro Number One.

"So I marched him up to the station"
-
which was close by, on Carr Street
-
"with his hands on his head, or behind his head, or what the hell. Walked behind him with my .38 out."

At the Fourth District station, Liston was "booked, placed on
the holdover, charged
,
held pending further investigation, suspected of being implicated" in the Wedge Filling Station robbery. Police reports of January 15 and 16 recount the information that Liston gave under questioning after Herleth brought him in. As Herleth said, Liston was "big"
,
"six-something, hands like hams." And yet, within an hour of being brought in, "CHARLES LISTON, colored,
22
years of age
,
born in Arkansas, Single, a Laborer, residing at 1006 O'Fallon Street," made a detailed confession and ratted out both Jordan and Belt "and a man known as 'JAMES."'

"I won't go into how they talked to him," Herleth said.

At a quarter past three that Sunday morning, led to him by information got from Liston, Officer Herleth and Sergeant Jesse Miller arrested at his home Sterling Belt, "colored, 35 years of age, born in Louisiana, Married, a Laborer, residing at 1241 North Ninth Street." At the time of his arrest, he had six .38-caliber cartridges in his left trouser pocket.

"Upon questioning" -
an ominous phrase in St. Louis law enforcement of this era, as David Herleth's wry implication attested
,
Belt
,
within forty-five minutes, corroborated what Liston had said and went further, confessing to the Market Street diner holdup as well. At about four o'clock in the morning, the Market Street counterman, Leroy Andrew Nelson, arrived at the station, "where he viewed Charles Liston and positively identified him as the man who removed the money from the cash register, while his companion held a pistol on him. Liston then related in Nelson's presence
how they had planned and enacted the holdup and also identified
Nelson as the man he had robbed."

Later, at about half past one that Sunday afternoon, three Fourth District patrolmen arrested Willie Jordan,
"
colored, 18 years of age, born in Arkansas, Single, a Laborer, residing at 1018
North 1
0
th Street." He was brought to the station, "where he was questioned" and further corroborated the information given by Liston and Belt regarding the Wedge Filling Station and Unique Cafe stickups. Like Belt, he went beyond what had already been established by his previous confessor, giving account of the second filling
station holdup, at Easton and Prairie. By then, the Hopkins and Allen .3
8
caliber revolver was found at Belt's home and identified by Liston and Jordan as the gun used in the Market Street and Easton Avenue holdups.

At about half past seven that Sunday evening, Frank Morgan of
the Wedge Filling Station, Leroy Nelson of the Unique Cafe, and
Wilson Miller of the filling station at Easton and Prairie "positively identified Willie Jordan as the man who was in the company of Liston at the time they were robbed." In turn, "Liston and Jordan identified the aforementioned men as being the men that they held up."

Liston, Belt, and Jordan were booked that Sunday night on
three counts of robbery, with warrants to be applied for on the following morning.

When morning came, Liston, Jordan, and a third man confessed to the robbery of William James. It is curious that here, and repeatedly hereafter in the Supplementary Report of Monday, January 16, as well as in the Continuation Report of January 17, the third person's name was subsequently blacked out
-"redacted," as they say in law enforcement.
Sterling Belt had never been implicated in the strong armings prior to the Wedge Filling Station holdup; no mention had ever been made of a possible fourth assailant; and the same redacted report stated that the third man accompanying Liston and Jordan in the attack on William James was known to Liston only by the name of James, his identity thus presumably still a mystery. It may have been that the police had wanted a third man and found him through "questioning," a man arrested at his home the night before: "
------
, Colored, 21 years of age, born in Missouri, Married, a Laborer, residing at 1521
O'Fallon Street."

Charles Liston was, of course, the motherfucker they really wanted: the big bad nigger who looked at you like he didn't know whether to drink your blood or spit on you, or, worse. like he didn't even see you with those deep dark grave dirt
colored dead man's eyes of his; the big bad nigger who come up here from way down there and took people round the neck from behind like a beast. Even old Tocco -
around the neck from behind. Dirt, fist, feet. They looked at him and they saw not only something that was inhuman
,
but also something in which humanity was not even vestigial. He was worse than a predator, worse than a cop
-
hater: a
m
an hater. And not one, not two of them could take him alone without a gun, and they knew it, and they hated him for that, the very fact of his existence. Big bad niggers weren't supposed to be that big and that bad
,
not in St.Louis, anyway.

That first hour at that station, in that desolation between two
and three in the morning on the Lord's given day
,
when he, Charles Liston, Unknown Negro Number One, confessed as openly and wildly as any mourning bench Baptist beset with the speaking in tongues -
it must have been an hour of brutality as awful as any that Charles Liston himself had brought down upon another. An eye for an eye, maybe, a tooth for a tooth, one cold January night for another. He was a man who had forsaken wrong and right. and in that desolate station, he did not know what hit him, wrong or right, justice or vengeance, or just that sort of shit that happens when animals get to mixing, a pack of one kind against a stray of another. He had hunted lone defenseless prey with his little pack, all right, attacking from behind, silent as a big nightstalking cat. Dirt, fist, feet. And now he was the prey.

Helen Liston remembered how her son got the scar between the
thumb and forefinger of his left
hand. It was back on the planta
tion
,
and he was splitting stove wood. "I told him to be careful with that ax, and I just walked into the house when he hit his hand and cut it bad. We soaked it in coal oil to stop the bleeding." But she never knew where those other scars came from, the one on his cheek, the one on his forearm.

"They say he confessed," she would say. "I don't know."

Captioned "Man Caught 25 Minutes After $37 Cafe Holdup"
and describing him as "a bandit," a small item in the
St. Louis
Globe
Democrat
of
January 16,
gave "Charles Liston. 22, Negro," his first notice in the press. A
St. Louis Post Dis
p
atch
item of that day began: "A flamboyant yellow lumberjack-type shirt worn by a
young Negro walking in the 1000 block of O'Fallon street early yesterday attracted the attention of Patrolman David Herleth."

On May 23
,
he pled guilty on all counts to three charges of first degree robbery and two charges of larceny
,
and was sentenced to five years on each charge, the terms to run concurrently, at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.

David Herleth
,
who now advocates boot camps or tent towns
for young criminals
,
never saw much good in sending them to prison. "Shit," he said, prison was where "they learned to do the job right." Charles Liston knew the job: it was to survive
,
any way he could. But as for doing it right, he had not a clue.

Upon entering prison, on June 1, 1950, Liston stated his age to
be twenty and his residence to be Wynne, Arkansas
,
which appeared misspelled as "Wynn" on the prison identity card that carried the first pictures ever taken of Charles L. Liston, right profile and facing front
,
with a tag around his neck: Mo. State Prison
63723, dated 6-2-50. His weight was recorded at 199 pounds, his height at six feet, his build as Heavy; his complexion was described as light brown
,
his hair as black
,
his eyes as dark brown. In the pictures, those eyes say nothing.

"
I’
m not sure how he happened to get into so much trouble,"
Helen Liston would say. "You know, it's sometimes the company you keep which run your luck into a bad string. He was just a country boy. He didn't know to do nothing." She simply could not understand it, she would say.
He had, after all, taken religion in the Methodist church down home in Arkansas. "I heard him confess. I used to tell him he had to cultivate his religion. He said he would."

All things considered
,
she said
,
"He was about as good a conditioned child as I had."

By the time Charles entered prison, Helen was gone again, off to another daughter, in Gary, Indiana. She and Charles were never
to see much of one another from that time on. And by the time he got out of the joint, Charles was no longer a bandit. He was a boxer named Sonny.

Charles Liston fucked with no one in Jeff City
,
and no one fucked with him. "I didn't mind prison," he would later say.

The prison population was about two-thirds white, one-third colored, and the three dominant gangs were white. After Liston became the heavyweight champion of the world, he was mythologized into a hero of the Jeff City cultus. There was the legend about the time the prison gang
leader Hank Calouris gave shit to some black kid, and Liston walked across the yard, smacked Calouris across the face with the back of his hand, and told him,
"
I’l
l do that every time I hear you touched a colored boy. If you
don't like it
,
I'll see you in the Hole" -
a storage room beneath the cellblock
-
"at six"; about how he went to the other prison gang
leaders, Nick Baroudi and a guy named Frankie, and told their white asses the same damn thing; about how when he emerged from the Hole that night
,
he left the three of them lying battered behind him on the concrete floor.

In reality, his disciplinary record showed only three minor violations: shooting dice, wasting food, and "chewing gum rubber bands in his cell." He was enrolled briefly in the prison school program, but he dropped out.

William P. Steinhauser, who worked at the prison during Liston's term and later became the assistant warden, told the sports writer Andrew Sturgeon Young that "as well as I can remember, Liston was assigned to the kitchen and worked on the docks where they bring the vegetables in and unload them from the farm." He remembered him as a formidable character all right. "I don't think you could hurt the man," and if he hit you, "it's just
too bad." But.as long as nobody fucked with him
,
"he didn't fuck with nobody.
"
"He was a reserved sort of fellow
,
"
Steinhauser said. "He was the sort of fellow you almost had to draw a conversation out of. We had no trouble with him at all. He was all right.
"
Though men have claimed to know where Liston's nickname came from
,
and some have taken credit for bestowing it on him
,
no one knows for sure who it was in prison that gave Liston the nic
k
name of Sonny. But the man who first put gloves on his fists was the
Reverend Edward B. Schlattmann
,
the prison chaplain.

Born in 1909.Father Schlattmann was retired and in his eighty ninth year when I spoke to him.
He clearly recalled Liston's arrival at the Missouri State Penitentiary in the spring of 1950.

"The Catholic chaplain," he explained to me
,
"was also director of athletics. No extra pay
,
of course." Liston "was a big husky guy and always getting in fights with other men.
"

Like other brawling inmates
,
he was put into the main-yard ring by Father Schlattmann.
"
After four weeks of fighting
,
nobody in the penitentiary would get into the ring with Sonny."

From the outset, there was the problem of gloves. It was a problem that would remain for years to come. Sonny's hands were bigger than other men's. Almost all heavyweight fighters have fists that measure a foot or less in girth. But Sonny's fists -
which gave pause to men merely on seeing them -
were between fourteen and fifteen inches around. Aside from the poor
,
pitiable giant Primo Carnera in the early thirties, the only heavyweight champion for whom a fourteen-inch fist was claimed was Jess Willard
,
the six
and
a
half
foot champion of the late teens. Standard boxing gloves simply were not made for fists like Sonny's. They did not fit. His hands could be forced into the biggest of them, but then they could not be properly laced and tied. Eventually, there would be money for custom
fashioned gloves from the Sammy
Frager Company in Chicago. Until then, he would use what he
had to use.