4
THE ROAD TO BUFFALO
Schlegel knew his road to the PBA would be a tough one long before Central Lanes burned to the ground. He knew it the night he buried a blade in a buddy’s chest amid an argument over twenty bucks.
The fight began with a suggestion heard frequently at Schlegel’s haunt on Broadway and Sherman Avenue in Inwood, a bowling alley called Manhattan Lanes: “Go fuck yourself.” It was a place owned by a businessman named Emil Lence, who owned several bowling centers throughout the country. On Mondays, Schlegel watched Lence stroll through the place with a cigar in his face, a fedora, a long coat, and a bodyguard the size of a Buick on either side of him to haul his business’s cash into a truck out in the street. Just the place, then, for the kind of salty language directed at Schlegel on this particular afternoon. The person directing that language his way was a portly, Jewish kid named Mike Ginsberg who happened to be a commendable action bowler himself. Ginsberg owed Schlegel money, and he did not take too kindly to Schlegel’s request that $20 of it be paid on the spot one afternoon. As Ginsberg would learn, most people who told Schlegel to go fuck himself did so only once.
A lot of people in Schlegel’s life found themselves in that particular company by then. It was 1962; Schlegel, now age 19, soon would be moving out of his parents’ place on Sickles Street and shacking up with a couple buddies in a three-bedroom apartment for a grand total of $150 a month. One of Schlegel’s roommates was Jerry Markey, who first saw Schlegel while attending a Boy Scouts meeting with his friend Mike McKeean one Friday night. Markey looked out the window at one point and saw Schlegel, dead-drunk and staggering with a zip gun in his hand. A kid had broken Schlegel’s nose in a street brawl, so Schlegel told him he was going to get his gun and come back to shoot him in the face. He promptly did exactly as he had promised. He went home, assembled and loaded his zip gun, and then went back out and found the kid. A riotous commotion ensued in which Schlegel was separated from his zip gun, likely saving his intended target’s life.
“Who the hell is that guy?” Markey asked McKeean.
“Oh, that’s Ernie Schlegel,” McKeean said.
The way McKeean said Schlegel’s name sounded as much like a forewarning as it sounded like an answer to Markey’s question.
Schlegel had learned much from Ginsberg over the years. He watched how Ginsberg worked back at Gun Post, the way he used his wiseass mouth to cajole players like Tony the Milkman or Mike the Cab Driver into bowling him for more money than they could afford to wager. How he would give guys so much shit that they would keep betting more money out of anger. When Ginsberg finally got his opponents to bet with their emotions rather than their minds, he knew he had them beaten. Schlegel watched Ginsberg pay his own way through college this way. It was Ginsberg whom Schlegel credited for turning him into the chest-pounding gorilla of Central Lanes, Ginsberg who showed him how to bleed money from the driest stone.
Ginsberg tutored Schlegel in the discipline practiced by the greatest gamblers. Schlegel watched Ginsberg’s opponents try to turn the tables on him, hoping to lure him into a match he didn’t care to bowl, nudge him out of his comfort zone. They called him an arrogant Jew. They called him a fat Jew bastard. Anything they could think of to get him to lace up his shoes and put some money down. Nothing worked. No one could embarrass or enrage him enough to get him on the lanes. That was the steel exterior of a guy who had his shit together, and Schlegel knew it.
“You never get on the lanes until you got an edge,” Ginsberg would tell Schlegel. “If you think you’re better, you can win.”
The smart action bowlers never allowed emotion to interfere with their judgment. The sooner a player got you emotional enough to bowl, the sooner he stuffed his pockets with your rent money. But one thing Schlegel would also come to understand was that at Manhattan Lanes, to ask for money upfront from a guy who owed it to you was to ask for the fight of your life. Eight weeks had passed since Schlegel lent Ginsberg $155, and Ginsberg had yet to pay back a dime. So one afternoon while Schlegel kicked back some brews at the bowling alley bar, he happened to spot Ginsberg. Schlegel asked him for twenty bucks and reminded him of his debt.
“Go fuck yourself. I ain’t paying you back shit,” Ginsberg said.
“Fuck you!” Schlegel said. “Man, if I had you outside!”
“Yeah? Well fuck you! Let’s go!” Ginsberg said.
Such were the means of conflict resolution practiced in the bowling alleys of New York City in 1962. This particular conflict, however, would take quite a bit more to resolve than the usual opprobrium of the street.
Now Ginsberg, too, was about to meet the Other Ernie.
Ginsberg hurled Schlegel through a plate-glass window and out into the street. Schlegel, dusted in a coating of shattered glass, got up off the ground.
“Fuck you! I’ll kill you!” Schlegel said.
But Ginsberg kept coming at him. He swung once at Schlegel and missed. Then Schlegel reached for the blade he kept in his pocket. He buried it in Ginsberg’s chest. Yet Ginsberg, as much of a stocky bull off the lanes just as he was on the lanes, kept coming at him still. He smashed Schlegel once more. Schlegel hit him with a left. Finally, Ginsberg slipped bloodily down the hood of a parked cab. A friend grabbed the knife and ran. Schlegel never saw that knife again.
Schlegel rose from the blood and shattered glass, his torn jeans revealing two scraped and bleeding knees. Then he did what any reasonable person might do after stabbing somebody: He went home, cleaned himself up, and went back to the Manhattan Lanes bar.
Which was exactly where the cops hoped to find him—and did.
“Are you Ernie Schlegel?” they asked.
Schlegel returned the question with one of his own, a not particularly wise strategy under the scrutiny of New York City cops who suspect you just tried to kill somebody.
“Who wants to know?” Schlegel said.
“We do!”
Clearly, the cops would be the only ones asking questions.
The cops dragged Schlegel out of the bar and delivered him to Jewish Memorial Hospital on Broadway at 196th Street. There, they brought him into Ginsberg’s room.
“He stabbed me!” Ginsberg said, pointing at Schlegel from his bed.
The cops looked at Schlegel. Schlegel shrugged.
“I didn’t stab nobody,” Schlegel said. “We got in a fight. What are you gonna do?”
A skilled defense attorney, Ernie Schlegel was not.
“He stabbed me,” Ginsberg repeated.
The cops believed him. They booked Schlegel into the 34th precinct, badgering him until, they hoped, they might wear him down.
“Where’s the knife?” they would ask him.
“What knife?” Schlegel would answer.
This went on for hours. The cops charged him with attempted murder and sent him to a cell where he stayed the night. He lit his pack of smokes down to the last cigarette, one after the other, until he was left with only four unused matches. He peeled those in half and smoked them, too, as he tried to keep his mind off the swollen and throbbing hand he had crashed into Ginsberg’s skull.
“Never get arrested on a Friday night,” Schlegel thought to himself. “Especially when you have only four smokes and four matches left.”
Schlegel’s mother, Irma, who came to America from Nazi Germany just as Hitler was rising to power, proved especially unimpressed with the aftermath of her son’s blow-out with Ginsberg. Schlegel never knew if the story was true, but he had heard that his mother once spit at Hitler. She found him holed up in a jail cell with a right hand bloated to the size of a mango, a black eye from a cop’s cocked fist, and his bloodied face emblazoned with the pattern of the corduroy coat he had slept on. The shaggy, blonde hair that had earned him the nickname “Strawhead” looked like the nest of some livid crow.
“What did you do to my son?” Schlegel’s mother screamed in her thick German accent.
This didn’t look to her like something that ha
ppened in America. It looked more like something that happened in the country she left behind.
A doctor told a grand jury soon thereafter that it looked to him as though Ginsberg had been stabbed. It looked, in fact, as though Ginsberg was lucky to be alive. The knife went in right under Ginsberg’s heart, leaving a clean wound doctors sutured with a couple of butterfly stiches.
Things did not look good for Schlegel, but the streets of Inwood had a way of cultivating experts in the field of “things that don’t look good.” That expertise was about to spare Schlegel from calling the clink home for years to come. Luck may have guarded Ginsberg’s heart from the jab of Schlegel’s knife, but it would prove utterly powerless against the war of attrition that followed. Schlegel found his soldiers among the many other people who owed him a buck. They now had the chance to dissolve their debt with little more than a few well-chosen words on the witness stand. Everybody who owed Schlegel money, it seemed, found their way to the courthouse to pay their debts more handsomely than cash alone ever could. Each of them testified before the grand jury as to the quality of Schlegel’s character. By the time they were done, they had turned Schlegel into a man whose character was as unimpeachable as the Pope’s. The grand jury, however, proved rather less than convinced.
If Schlegel knew anything at this moment in his life, it was this: He was not going to jail. Few people could turn a crisis into a fortune like Ernie Schlegel. From adolescence, he could pick up the scent of a dollar as quickly as a wolf picks up the smell of blood in the woods. At age fourteen, he found the scent in nearby homes where he earned pocket money cleaning ovens and windows for housewives. He found it in the window he broke through with friends to steal ice cream and hot dogs at a restaurant in Fort Tryon Park. He found it in the 7Up factory where he spent summers working from 7 A.M. to midnight, and he found it in the bowling alleys where he spent what was left of his sleepless nights hustling con men and clowns. He only slept by accident in those days, and that was fine by him. By the time he was holding down that gig with 7Up, he worked so much that he never had time to spend what he made. If the money he made there still was not enough to satisfy him, then there were the televisions his friends would steal and deliver to him for $200, which Schlegel quickly turned around on the street for $225. Or the ’48 Jaguar he bought for $30 and sold days later for $75.
It was no different in 1962. He sold everything he owned, saved everything he earned, and soon had what he needed—enough money to make a lawyer care what happened to him. Schlegel’s girlfriend at the time knew a guy named Mr. Richardson, who knew a lawyer. Schlegel stuffed a suitcase with every dollar he had scrounged and went to see the lawyer in his office. He pushed his money across the lawyer’s desk and explained what had happened in the street outside Manhattan Lanes that day.
“I can’t go to jail,” he said.
The lawyer took the money and proceeded to request more time from the judge every time he went to court on Schlegel’s behalf. And so began Schlegel’s war of attrition against Mike Ginsberg, who kept taking days off from his job with Jonathan Logan, a wildly popular brand of dresses in the 1960s, to attend court hearings only to discover that they had been postponed. Finally, after so many postponements that Ginsberg did not bother showing up anymore, the charges were dismissed. Neither the cops nor the prosecutor could turn up enough evidence to prove definitively that Schlegel had, in fact, stabbed Ginsberg. The only hard evidence Ginsberg himself could provide were the few butterfly stitches it took to heal the wound.
But the fundamental problem had not been dismissed. If anything, his triumph over Mike Ginsberg proved a pyrrhic victory at best. The charges may have been dismissed on paper, but they lingered in the minds of the men who guarded the gates of the PBA. A bowler needed signatures from three sponsors as well as the approval of a PBA executive before he could compete on the PBA Tour. Schlegel soon learned there was something about kids with attempted murder charges in their pasts that made it tough for potential sponsors to find their pens. Nobody wanted to sponsor him. Then Schlegel dug himself a deeper hole while at a bowling alley called Paramus Lanes in Paramus, New Jersey. Frank Esposito, a founding member of the PBA, opened the place in 1955. His contacts in the TV business played a big role in helping the PBA secure its contract with ABC, the network that broadcast the championship round of PBA tournaments each week. He eventually expanded Paramus Lanes into a 42-lane establishment that attracted the greatest stars in the sport. It also was one of those places Schlegel referred to as his “office,” a place where the action was as big as the names it attracted, and the money flowed for those who had what it took to take it home. Schlegel was one of those who had what it took.
One night Esposito took exception to the kind of crowd Schlegel brought with him, an unruly posse of hangers-on who talked like sailors and let the ashes of their Lucky Strikes smudge Esposito’s new carpet. They might as well have soiled the man’s living room rug. Schlegel was not there to babysit his buddies; he was there to make money. Esposito knew how to keep out the riff-raff: Kick out the guy they followed in. He told Schlegel to get the hell out and not come back. That was a lot like sacking Schlegel from his job, as it meant he no longer could count on the money he made there fleecing lesser players of their lunch money in the middle of the night.
The implications of Schlegel’s run-in with Esposito extended much further than that. Esposito’s dual role as owner of one of the most famous bowling alleys in the northeast and an executive board member with the PBA meant Schlegel had little chance of going pro so long as Esposito had anything to say about it. Esposito had heard enough about Schlegel—the knife he buried in Ginsberg’s chest, the zip guns he wielded outside Boy Scouts meetings. And he had finally had enough that night at Paramus. The PBA was a place for groomed men with pressed slacks, parted hair, and wooden smiles; it was not, Esposito thought, a place for Ernie Schlegel. So Schlegel watched helplessly as buddies like Petraglia, Limongello, and Lichstein bowled for real money on national television. Schlegel did not understand how it was possible that one man, Frank Esposito, could wield so much authority as to single-handedly deny him his dreams. To deny him his dreams also was to deny him his livelihood, as his reputation as a great action bowler was making it harder than ever to find an opponent willing to put money down on a match against him on a rapidly shrinking underground scene. He needed the pro tour because he needed to live. Schlegel was the king of the action, and any gambler with half a mind knew it was a lot cheaper to let him be king than it was to try to steal his crown.
One afternoon Steve Harris phoned with news of action bowlers in Jersey who knew so little about this reluctant king that they would put up money to bowl him. Harris, at this time in his life, was earning an advanced degree in the art of bullshitting that served him well in the action. He was working customer service for the Baumritter Corporation, the company that later became Ethan Allen. Harris was taking complaints from customers by phone and repeating them into a Dictaphone, which he then delivered to a pool of typists to transcribe. Company policy mandated that Harris work under a phony name. His name at Baumritter was James Warren. The pseudonym used by his neighboring colleague, an African-American woman named Judy Brown, was Douglas Reed.
“What’s wrong with Steve Harris?” Harris would complain to his bosses. “Why do I need a phony name?”
“Steve Harris will leave someday,” they told him. “James Warren will be here forever.”
One day Harris took a call from a guy in Mississippi with a thick, southern drawl asking for “Douglas Reed.” Harris played the part.
“This is Douglas Reed,” he said.
“Hi, Doug! How are you?” the exuberant southerner drawled.
“I’m fine, sir. How are you?” Harris said.
“Doug, I got a question for you,” the man said. “I hear that Baumritter Corporation is full of niggers and Jews.”
“Fuck you!” Harris shouted, and then hung up the phone with an angry bang.
/> Harris was petrified; Judy Brown nearly fainted. He explained the reason he hung up on the guy.
“Good!” she said. Harris’s feisty personality was beginning to shine through.
Harris spent his working hours making deals with disgruntled customers, offering them discounts and other perks to keep them off his manager’s case. He thought he had spotted a deal of his own the night he called Schlegel with news Schlegel had received from Harris before.
“Ernie, we got fish in Jersey,” Harris said when his friend answered the phone.
Schlegel hardly made it past “Hello” before he and his crew were halfway up the Major Deegan Expressway, looking for an easy score. The fish Harris found this time were a group of Jersey milkmen who would bowl for money after their runs at about 5 A.M. on Sundays. Nagai was tied up with business at his restaurant that night, so they called up One Finger Benny, the man who could bowl 180 using just one finger. He would find gamblers willing to spot him thirty or forty pins, sure they were good enough to beat him anyway if he was going to bowl with just one finger. Benny won almost every time. It was as lucrative a gag as anything Iggy Russo ever pulled off. But Benny also had a car. He called his friend Sammy Mauro, an ex-con and an excellent bowler whose soft-spoken manner belied his brawny frame and chiseled arms. Together they picked up Harris and Schlegel and headed down to Jersey.
By the end of the night, a penniless Schlegel found himself on the side of a freeway, walking home with his bowling bag at his side and yet another reluctant title to add to his reputation: accomplice. Those milkmen they met down in Jersey proved at least as proficient at bowling as they were at leaving milk bottles on doorsteps. They wiped out Schlegel and his crew. With less than $10 between them, they got into Benny’s car and headed back over the George Washington Bridge. Then Sammy got an idea.
Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion Page 10
