The Mob and the City (25 page)

“The Combination”

The Cosa Nostra moved into prizefighting in the 1930s principally behind Paolo “Frankie” Carbo and his partner Frank “Blinky” Palermo. Carbo was born on the Lower East Side in 1904 to respectable parents who found themselves with an incorrigible child and sent him away to a Catholic protectory. The nuns could not stop young Carbo's thirst for the criminal life: the police would arrest him twenty different times for charges ranging from juvenile delinquency to murder. In 1924, when he was twenty years old, Carbo killed a taxicab driver in the Bronx. He went on the lam for four years before pleading guilty to manslaughter in 1928.
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6–3: Frankie Carbo, ca. 1928. Carbo was a
de facto
boxing commissioner due to his influence over managers and fighters. (Used by permission of the John Binder Collection)

After getting out of Sing Sing, Carbo was looking for new enterprises, and he was drawn to the fight game. In the early 1930s, he started hanging around the famed Stillman's Gym on 55th Street and 8th Avenue in midtown Manhattan.
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The
mafioso
was enthusiastic and knowledgeable about boxing, charming everyone from lowly pug fighters to top promoters. “I like boxing. I don't know other business,” he told confidants. Still, Carbo was foremost a solider in the Lucchese Family. His business consisted of taking hidden interests in boxers, bookmaking bets on fights, and then fixing those fights.
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Carbo's partner was Frank “Blinky” Palermo of Philadelphia. They were a feared pair. “Blinky” was a bug-eyed, gravel-voiced, strutting rooster of a man with ties to Philly's Jewish gangsters. Carbo was the shadowy power broker they called “Mr. Gray.” Both loved boxing and making money off boxing. They and their associates came to be known as “The Combination,” the underworld's commissioners of boxing.
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They captured professional boxing using tactics not unlike those the Mafia used elsewhere: they targeted fragile producers (individual boxers), gained control over key geographic spaces (Madison Square Garden), and used coercive industry associations to keep everyone in line (the Boxing Managers Guild and the International Boxing Club).

Fragile Fighters

The boxer, for all his athletic strength, had a glass jaw in the mob system. Most came from working class backgrounds, with little education and few prospects outside the ring. And they could not get
into
the ring unless they fought by the mob's rules. “You want to know why they control boxing? It's poor, hungry people,” said former welterweight champion Don Jordan of the mob's influence. “In each state there's another syndicate person waiting to see you.”
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Fighters could only get professional matches through mobbed-up managers. When the young Rocco Barbella (the future “Rocky Graziano”) started showing promise, neighborhood gangsters sent him his first professional manager, Eddie Coco. “You better do what Eddie says. He's an important guy and he's going to get you some matches,” they told him. Coco changed Barbella's name, arranged his first pro matches, and told him when to “carry” an overmatched opponent. “No fighter can get anywhere without us,” mob guys warned a young Jake LaMotta. “Carbo had the middleweight division sewed up,” recalled the fighter Marty Pomerantz. “They made sure there was a huge amount of betting. ‘Don't knock this guy out. Knock that guy out. Maybe you don't have to win this.’ All of that went on.”
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Prizefighters who refused to carry a weaker opponent, or take dives, could be shut out from future matches. “The implication is that if you don't do certain things, you're not going to get certain fights,” explained Danny Kapilow, a boxer in the 1940s. “You were almost blackballed at that time.” It is sometimes forgotten that Jake La Motta took his infamous dive against Billy Fox (managed by Palermo) to get a title shot for the middleweight crown.
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Boxers knew even worse things could happen. “With Steve [Belloise], there came a time in the ’40s that he started to talk around the gym about the fighters’ organizing,” recounted Kapilow. “Somebody quickly put a piece in his ear. That was the end of that. They're not going to talk about it.” As former heavyweight champion Joe Louis testified in retirement, “Fighters have been taken advantage of by the underworld. A lot of managers, even a lot of promoters, get backing from outside world, outside people, who are gangsters and hoodlums.” Louis, who ended up broke himself, could have been speaking from personal experience.
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Madison Square Garden, Eighth Avenue and 50th Street

For boxers, the apex was a fight at the old Madison Square Garden, in operation from 1925 through 1968. The cavernous arena in Hell's Kitchen could seat eighteen thousand spectators, all seemingly atop the ring. The Garden was described as “the center, the pivot of boxing” in America.
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Carbo gained access to the Garden through the legendary promoter Michael “Uncle Mike” Jacobs of the Twentieth Century Sporting Club. In the 1930s, Jacobs skillfully promoted a young Joe Louis, the first African-American heavyweight champion to gain a nationwide following. He parlayed the Brown Bomber's popularity into an exclusive lease of the Garden.
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The problem with success was that Jacobs suddenly needed lots of boxers to fill matches at the Garden. Carbo had scores of fighters in his pocket. Soon, the Lucchese Family soldier would be dictating fight cards on the nation's premier boxing stage.
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The Boxing Managers Guild

Carbo and Palermo maintained power through their influence over the managers. When most managers made less than $1,000 a year (less than $8,000 a year in present dollars), Carbo was known for doling out cash to struggling managers for food or rent. Managers became so ingratiated that when they found their newest fighter, “Mr. Gray” came calling for favors. Carbo and Palermo's influence extended to every corner of the fight game. Outside New York and Philadelphia, they had collusive arrangements with managers in the Midwest boxing centers of Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, and Youngstown, Ohio.
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Their power was enhanced by the Boxing Managers Guild. This shadowy front operated on subtle extortion and hidden interests. Out-of-state boxing managers were forced to “cut in” the guild before they could even hope to get a fight in New York. Television contracts for fights were decided behind closed doors by the guild, which favored fighters in which Carbo and Palermo held interests. An investigation later found that the guild “engaged in monopolistic practices” and “abrogated to itself the conduct and regulation of boxing in New York.”
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When economic coercion was insufficient, Carbo and Palermo drew on past talents. After the boxing promoter Ray Arcel staged Saturday fights without Carbo's permission, he was assaulted with a steel pipe in front of Boston Garden. Subsequently, four bombs ripped through the Boston house of Arcel's business associate Sam Silverman. “The threat of the same for anyone else even thinking about not cooperating with Carbo & Co. was enough to bring the entire sport into line,” recalled trainer Angelo Dundee.
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December 1946, Stillman's Gymnasium on Eighth Avenue

The stench of sweat permeated the dressing room at Stillman's Gymnasium, where up-and-coming boxers trained. “How you feel Rocky? Like to make a good deal on this fight?” offered the gambler. The boxer Rocky Graziano was in training for his match against “Cowboy” Reuben Shank at Madison Square Garden on December 27, 1946. The gambler reappeared a few days later. “Don't forget that that deal is still on. You'll make a hundred grand,” he said to Graziano.
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After the District Attorney's office went public with the bribe offer, Graziano tried to backpedal from his original account, claiming he thought the offer was “a joke.” Still, the entire situation reeked. Graziano's manager was Eddie Coco, a
caporegime
in the Lucchese Family (who in 1953 killed a car wash owner over a bill). The knockout artist Graziano was a 4-to-1 favorite over the journeyman Shank, but a gambling syndicate was reportedly placing huge bets on Shank. Suddenly, on Christmas Eve, two days before the match, Graziano pulled out of the fight claiming a back ailment.
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The District Attorney's office believed Graziano knew gangsters had already bet heavily on Shank, and he was worried about crossing them if he did not take a dive. The New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) temporarily revoked Graziano's license for failing to report the bribe offer. The 1946 bribe debacle portended an era of scandal in boxing that ultimately brought down Carbo and Palermo.
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The Downfall of the International Boxing Club

The most audacious monopoly in boxing was initiated not by gangsters, but by prestigious businessmen. Truman K. Gibson Jr. was a prominent Chicago lawyer and civil rights leader who had helped heavyweight champion Joe Louis with his tax problems. In 1949, Gibson approached James Norris and Arthur Wirtz, who controlled the Chicago Stadium, the Detroit Olympia Arena, and the St. Louis Arena, and proposed that they create a dominant boxing promotion company: the International Boxing Club (IBC). They first struck a deal with the aging Joe Louis: in exchange for shares in the IBC, Louis would secure exclusive fight contracts for the IBC with the four leading contenders and then give up his heavyweight title. In the euphemisms of monopoly, it was proposed that they all “work together now and keep the events for our building and not create a competitive situation that would be harmful to all.”
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The only problem was that they had left Carbo out of the scheme. Gibson explains what happened next. “In New York the first fight that we tried to stage, the Graziano-La Motta fight, suddenly was called off because Graziano developed an illness and we had a picket line around Madison Square Garden,” Gibson recounted. They knew instantly who was behind it. “T]he organization of
managers…the Carbo friendship with managers over the years,” cited Gibson. Cosa Nostra was threatening the IBC's ability to fill its fight cards. “I was having a great deal of guild trouble,” James Norris concurred. So they decided “to live with” the underworld. They put Carbo's very pretty, if very unqualified, girlfriend Viola Masters on their payroll and funneled “goodwill” payments to him through business fronts.
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As the 1950s went on, and rumors of fixed fights threatened to destroy the sport, government officials were pressured to go after Carbo, Palermo, and their business associates. First, in July 1958, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office brought misdemeanor charges against Carbo for his unlicensed management of fighters. In the middle of trial, he pled guilty.
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To break up the IBC, the Justice Department brought a federal civil action against the IBC for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. In January 1959, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the trial court's judgment, holding that the IBC was a monopoly. The trial court had found that the IBC had used its power to promote 93 percent of all the championship fights in all divisions.
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Then, in September 1959, the United States Attorney for Los Angeles brought federal criminal charges against Carbo and Palermo, Truman K. Gibson Jr., and
mafiosi
Louis Dragna and mob associate Joe Sica for using extortion “to obtain a monopoly in professional boxing.” Promoter Jackie Leonard testified that Carbo and Palermo were dictating his fight cards in Los Angeles and trying to muscle in on the earnings of welterweight champion Don Jordan. When Leonard resisted, Joe Sica told him “the same thing could happen to me that happened to Ray Arcel.” Shortly after, Leonard was assaulted outside his garage. The jury convicted the defendants, and the judge sentenced Carbo and Palermo to twenty-five years in prison.
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Their glorious nights at the Copa were done.

OUTLAWING GAY LIFE IN THE 1930s

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the mob nightlife was the Mafia's ownership of gay bars and nightclubs. The Mafia specialized in illegal markets, which is what gay bars became in Gotham. The historian George Chauncey has shown
that gay life was remarkably visible from the 1890s until it was forced underground in the 1930s. New York State's liquor laws barred “disorderly” premises, which the NYSLA interpreted as serving drinks to gays and lesbians, and the City of New York barred the employment of homosexuals. The NYSLA and NYPD closed hundreds of gay bars in the 1930s and ’40s. Using this threat, vice police shook down bars “which catered heavily to…homosexuals soliciting partners,” according to the Knapp Commission on police corruption.
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