American Gangster (34 page)

“What?” he asks.

“Don't make any entangling alliances.” I told him that's what George Washington advised his successors when he retired from the presidency.

“‘Don't make any entangling alliances'”—Wynton repeats, writing it down in his looping handwriting on a napkin, which he shoves into his pocket. “Thanks,” he says. “I'll remember that.”

It is a nice day, so we walk across the Lincoln Center campus, as Wynton has been doing for more than twenty years. You forget how stitched into this community he is. He knows everyone, cops, maintenance guys, doormen. By Avery Fisher Hall, we run into Brandon Lee, whom Wynton introduces as “from Houston, one of the baddest motherfuckers on trumpet out here.” Seventeen and rail-thin, Brandon attends the new jazz program at Juilliard. Largely because of Wynton and Victor Goines, who now heads the school, Brandon did not have to play Mahler or the Brandenburgs at his audition. He could choose from tunes like “Cherokee,” “Round Midnight,” “Con Alma,” and “Willow Weep for Me.”

Approaching Wynton's apartment house, we run into Beverly Sills, the former diva who now runs Lincoln Center. With a deft side step, Wynton slips ahead, opening the door for her. Rumors have been flying about that Sills was instrumental in pushing Wynton's friend Gordon Davis from his job as president, but the jazzman claims to want no part of the culture-industry politics that has recently beset Lincoln Center, calling it, perhaps disingenuously, “grown-up people's business.” Kissing Sills on the cheek with a great flourish, he says, “She's always been great to me.”

From the moment the elevator door opens on Wynton's floor, you can hear the music. Someone's almost always playing something at Wynton's, a horn or his grand piano. The sound beckons you forward, into this zone of sanity, this world where art lives. Why isn't
your
house like this? you wonder. Maybe Marsalis is a genius, maybe not, but this vibe might be his greatest achievement.

As usual, the pad is packed. Tony Parker, the gray-eyed cop from Detroit, is here. Ditto Mo the cook from New Orleans, dishing up mounds of gumbo and jambalaya. In the living room, where the LSU game is on the TV, Wynton has left notes for a composition he's been writing on top of the grand piano. “Emphasis on these elements,” it says on a pad: “1. strength, 2. speed, 3. glamour, 4. pain, 5. heaven.” A few minutes later,
Jumaane Smith, a Juilliard trumpet student, arrives with a tallish, cornrow-sporting thirteen-year-old.

“This is Steve,” Jumaane says, introducing the kid, who's come down from the Bronx with his mother and sisters. It is a bit of a continuum, since Jumaane has been one of Wynton's protégés and Steve, a young trumpet player, is now under Jumaane's wing. Jumaane has been talking about the kid for several weeks, touting his moves to the basket as well as his horn tone.

“How good are you?” Wynton demands. “In basketball?”

Not bad, not bad at all, Steve answers, attempting modesty, looking Wynton in the eye, the way his mom told him to. He's got an outside shot, can also go to the hole.

“Why don't we go over to the court,” Wynton says. “Beat me, I'll do two hundred push-ups. I beat you, you got to practice your horn two hours a day.”

Steve thinks that will be fine, Wynton being such an old man and not that tall to boot. He takes the ball and bounces it between his legs.

An hour or so later, the boy returned. How'd he do? it was inquired.

“It was an ass-whipping,” Steve remarked glumly. Then, brightening, he said, “So it looks like I got to practice two hours a day. That won't be so bad.”

A few years ago, after doing a wholly desultory piece on the basketball player Stephon Marbury—the only time he looked me in the eye was when I told him my mother had graduated from his high school, Lincoln, in 1938. Mar-bury couldn't believe such a year existed—I took a vow never to write about another so-called “major sports” figure. Rendered unfailingly boring by an excess of corporate regimen, hubris, hangers-on, lack of education, etc., they just don't give you anything. “Minor” sports, like horse racing and boxing, popular before the leveling effect of television, are better. As a prizefighter the Syrian immigrant Mustafa Hamsho was more a linebacker than an elegant purveyor of the sweet science. But he got the job done. As with almost all fighters, with ample avenues to get out their aggressions, he's a heck of a nice guy
. New York
magazine, 1999
.

In the Big City, you never know when you might walk into the corner store to buy a quart of milk and see a face from the distant, treasured past on the other side of the counter. This particular face, slightly battered but still handsome in a sleepy way, belonged to Mustafa Hamsho, now the owner and operator of the M & H Deli on Fourteenth Street in Brooklyn's Park Slope, but once the leading contender for the middleweight championship of the world.

“Mustafa, is that you?” Faded pictures hanging on the wall below the store's pressed tin ceiling showing the fighter, who is from Syria, in boxing gloves and a burnoose confirmed the ID.

From behind the phone card displays, Milky Ways, and Koranic quotations, a huge smile came across Mustafa's squarish countenance. “Mark! How are you?” he boomed. “Are you still working for the
Village Voice
?”

“How can you remember that?” I hadn't worked for the
Village Voice
for nearly twenty years, hadn't seen Mustafa for almost as long. It seemed the ensuing decades, along with the fact that Mustafa had been hit in the head often, and hard, by the likes of Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Wilfredo Benitez, Donnie LaLonde, and a host of others would preclude such mnemonic feats.

“No, no,” said Mustafa, now forty-six, a dozen years past his last fight, chortled in his low-timbre but lively Arabic-inflected English. “I remember everything.”

It being a beautiful spring day, Mustafa, with typical hospitality, drew two cups of coffee from his urn beside the Boar's Head sign, bid his nephew to man the Lotto machine, and set out a couple of folding chairs on the sidewalk. Ignoring his array of ringing cell phones and beepers, the erstwhile pugilist then filled me in on his highly particularized life and times. Or, what Mustafa, with offhand geniality, refers to as “my American thing.”

Growing up with his brothers in the Syrian town of Lattika on the Mediterranean coast, Mustafa never imagined he'd make it in this country, much less come close to a world champion. His father, a sometime soldier who periodically fought against the Israelis, was a religious man who “wanted me to become a doctor,” reported Mustafa, still looking formidable in his low-center-of-gravity way despite an extra twenty-five or so pounds. But after a friend arrived in Lattika with a few dog-eared pictures of Sugar Ray Robinson (“the most beautiful of all”) and Joe Louis, Mustafa was smitten. When at sixteen, he defeated the twenty-eight-year-old Syrian middleweight champion, Mustafa began to think, “I might be good.”

Seeking a “bigger world,” Mustafa signed onto a Greek steamer that eventually pulled into a Red Hook pier for six months of drydock. In America for the first time, Hamsho was amazed and pleased to find the Atlantic Avenue Arabic community a short walk away from his disabled ship. It was at
that time he began training at a couple of the local gyms. “I'd tell them I was sick and sneak off the boat to work out,” he recalls. After a hazily remembered New Year's Eve in Brooklyn, Mustafa jumped ship permanently and took an apartment in Bay Ridge, where he still lives twenty-six years later.

The beginning of his fight career was inauspicious. He got nothing for his first fight, $75 for the second. Not being able to speak or read English, he signed a lifetime contract with a less than reputable (even for boxing) promoter who sought to change his name to a less Islamic Rocco Estafire. Soon, however, Hamsho fell in with a zany, if typically rapscallion array of New York fight crowd characters who would change his life.

“These people, they were crazy but what did I know? … I thought all Americans were crazy.” Mustafa recollects with a bemused shake of his still bushy-haired head. There was Chuck Wepner, a.k.a. the Bayonne Bleeder, the model for Stallone's “Rocky” character, who had somehow managed to last fifteen rounds with Mustafa's great hero, Muhammad Ali. There were the two Als—Al Certo, of the millinery Certos of Secaucus, New Jersey, and Al Braverman, a crude-mouthed, pickle-nosed plug ugly with a secret passion for delicate porcelain dolls that he sold in his fussy antique shop located under an elevated platform of the Woodlawn-Jerome line of the IRT in the Bronx. Foremost of these denizens, however, was the floridly syntaxed, popeyed, and smash-nosed Irishman, Paddy Flood, who would not only become Mustafa's new manager but also his mentor and guide to the New World, if you want to call attending Yonkers Race-way to bet on trotters six nights a week guidance.

Well versed in the Barnumesque nuances of the sweet science, Paddy envisioned a massive Madison Square Garden showdown between Mustafa, whom he had dubbed the Syrian Buzzsaw, and Mike Rossman, who despite being brought up as the Italian Mike Dipiano, had taken his mother's maiden name and was campaigning as the Jewish Bomber.

It was in this context that I first encountered Mustafa, after climbing up the creaky stairs of the old sweatbox Gramercy Gym near Union Square, once home base for such luminaries as Floyd Patterson and Jose Torres. Paddy Flood sat in his accustomed spot, on the red vinyl couch by the
window, drinking his usual cup of hypersweetened tea. The HamshoRossman matchup would be “the biggest thing New York has ever seen!” Flood ballyhooed.

“Arab vs. Jew! Jew vs. Arab!
We're gonna put a picture of a bomb on Mustafa's robe! Tick, tick, tick. Lock up your first born:
here comes the terrorist!
It'll be a sell-out! Every Jew in the City will come to boo him! They hate him! He hates them! He hates Jews!”

At this point the young Mustafa, dutifully working his southpaw jab upon the nearby heavy bag and scandalized by such talk, politely excused himself for interrupting. “But, Paddy, that's not so…. I don't hate Jews.
I like Jews.”

Flood was apoplectic at this sabotage of his sales pitch. “No! No!” he boomed. “When you gonna learn? That's not what you're supposed to say!”

As it was, Mustafa never fought Rossman. He did, however, employing his inelegant but highly persistent attack, manage to beat almost every major middleweight in the late 1970s and early '80s. Colorfully monikered men like Bobby Boogaloo Watts, Bobby Czyz, and Willie “The Worm” Monroe fell before the Syrian Buzzsaw. The only one who stopped him was the nonpareil Hagler, probably the best fighter in the world at that time. After the fight it took sixty-one stitches to sew up Mustafa's face. “I look like a road map,” he said at the time. Then, shortly before a second losing meeting with Hagler, Paddy Flood had a cerebral hemorrhage and died on the spot. Mustafa sobbed uncontrollably at the wake. “He was my best friend!” the fighter wailed.

“It was not the same after Flood. He talked about money all the time, but he never really cared about it. They said he lied, but he never lied to me. He loved me. I loved him,” Mustafa says, sipping coffee in front of the M & H Deli. The store is only part of what Mustafa calls “my empire.” In addition to owning the five-story building containing the deli with his partner and friend, Dr. Malik, a Pakistani internist, Mustafa also has the car service, Destinations Unlimited, around the corner and a Laundromat on Classon Avenue. Mustafa likes the Laundromat best because “it is just machines, dirty underwear and quarters, no people…. Sad to say, I have learned, you can't trust anybody.” Mustafa says he gave all of his fight
money to his family back in Syria, and now, with a wife and five kids in Bay Ridge (four between age five and nine), he has to work “night and day to keep up.” He seems to be maintaining. It is no big thing to see Mustafa pull up in front of the M & H Deli in a black Mercedes, either the sedan or the sports model, designer sunglasses on, knit shirt with Plaza Hotel logo snug upon his barrel chest.

Noting that most of his former opponents have not shared this good fortune, Mustafa sighs. “Some hit me so hard I still have scars. I look in the mirror and I know Wilford Scypion did that to me. These men, they live in me. But some are not doing so well. It is sad. If you are a fighter, it is everything to you. When it is over, without education, there's nothing left, nothing to do. No one cares about you.”

Mustafa has avoided this fate because “I know who I am and where I come from…. America is a great country, but you can get lost here. There is so much on TV, you can easily be confused. So I keep my culture. We speak Arabic in the house. I send my children to Al Noor Arabic school on Fourth Avenue. They teach respect for the family there. There is tradition. Public school is shit. The teachers fear the children, first time there's trouble, they call the police. In Islamic school, they call the parents. I don't care what the law says, family is more important.”

Still an icon to those who turned up waving green flags as he fought in such less glamorous venues as the Jersey City Armory and the Villa Roma Resort of Callicoon, New York, Mustafa is a pillar of the Brooklyn Arabic community, a small business Don of sorts. He holds court in the tiny office behind the car service dispatch booth where of jugs of antifreeze and jumper cables compete for space with memorabilia like a replica of the trophy handed to the winner of the 1984 “Hamsho Pace” at the Meadow-lands. “After I lose so much money maybe they think they owe me something,” Mustafa says of the race named in his honor. Other items include photos of many good friends like Joe Frazier, NYPD nonpariel crime-buster Jack Maple, and a number of Saudi Arabian princes whom Mustafa, with some coyness, says he served in “a security capacity.”