Smokin' Joe

by Mark Kram, Jr.

  Chapter Three

  Cloverlay

  Cloverlay. Philadelphia Bulletin

  When he looked back years later, Joe Hand considered it a lucky break that he ended up in the subway. But it seemed far from that when he was still a young cop in the Philadelphia Police Department and the teletype came in that he had been reassigned to the transit division over an altercation he had had with a prisoner. The subject had been a marine who had just arrived on furlough from Camp Lejeune with a carload of his buddies and, as marines are sometimes apt to do with a weekend off and pay in their pockets, they got drunk and began tearing apart a bar in the Northeast section of the city. The cops were called in to break it up and hauled the besotted bunch away. At the Twenty-Fifth District, the six prisoners became so rowdy in the back of the wagon that it nearly tipped over. One of the arresting officers called out to Hand, “Help me get these guys out of here.” Hand had stopped by to give the keys to their only car to his wife, Margaret, herself a policewoman who had just clocked out. As Margaret walked by the rear of the wagon, the marine yelled, “Hey, honey!” and hurled an obscenity at her.

  Wiry in build yet hard-nosed, Hand knew he had to do something. “Other cops were standing there looking at us,” he said. “Either I handled it or word would get around and the men on the force would start pinching her butt. The department had eight thousand men and only thirty-five policewomen then.” Hand walked to the wagon and slid the back door open. The marine eyed him. “Come on out,” Hand told him. “Nothing’ll happen to you.” When the marine stepped down onto the bumper, Hand whacked him in one knee and then the other. Both kneecaps were shattered in a working-over that would also leave the marine swollen with cuts and contusions. When Hand came in the following day to accompany the marine to appear before the magistrate, the desk sergeant gave him a worried look and said, “Is that your prisoner, Joe? My God, they had to take him to Philadelphia General. He may die.”

  For thirty days Hand reported to the roll call room and sat there as the marine recovered and disciplinary action for excessive force was considered. Finally, Hand was sent down to the subway patrol at Eighth and Market Streets, where the sergeant in charge told him, “We get all the garbage down here.” Hearing himself referred to in that fashion did not sit well with Hand, nor did the assignment itself. “They more or less said, ‘We’ll fix you. We’ll send you where we can keep an eye on you,’” Hand said. “But I had the balls to say, ‘I want to see the police commissioner.’” Hand had not yet become acquainted with Frank Rizzo, but the two shared a common background. Both were sons of cops—in the case of Hand, a detective who passed away when Hand was twelve. Rizzo looked up from his desk and said, “Come on in, I know what happened. Now, what’s your story?” Hand told Rizzo his side of it and claimed that the penalty he had received was too harsh. Rizzo replied, “You nearly killed the guy.” He then added, “Look, stay in the subway. Serve your punishment like a man. And come back to see me in a year.” Rizzo said he would then assign him to any duty he pleased.

  Hand discovered that the subway detail was not as unappealing as he had expected. He worked midnight to 8 A.M. and even again encountered the now-sober marine, who apologized to him for insulting Mrs. Hand. With the exception of a tunnel fire in which Hand rescued two women, there was a low incidence of drama in the subway, where the chief duty entailed hauling drunks off the trains. To stave off boredom, Hand occupied himself by reading the four papers in town. In paging through the sports section of the Philadelphia Daily News one day, he came across an article that announced that a consortium of investors had formed to lend support to a young Philadelphia boxer who had won the Olympic gold medal. While Hand was not an avid boxing fan, the undertaking appealed to his entrepreneurial instinct. For a public servant earning thirty-five hundred dollars a year, the buy-in was high—$250 a share. But he asked to buy a share in a letter to the organizer of the corporation, Dr. F. Bruce Baldwin, who Hand remembered had lived on the same street as he did as a boy. Dr. Baldwin wrote back: “If I can’t help a fellow Jackson Streeter out, I can’t help anybody.” Hand withdrew $250 from the credit union and thus became an early member of Cloverlay—an amalgam of the words “clover,” which stood for good luck, and “overlay,” which was a British term for “a good bet.” But Hand would become more than a passive investor. Given the hazards that were then afoot in boxing, Baldwin appreciated the advantages of having a cop on the beat.

  * * *

  Whatever else Muhammad Ali would become during his extraordinary journey across the world stage, incarnations that would include champion prizefighter, goodwill ambassador, and pillar of hope for the dispossessed, he began it playfully as a consummate showoff who dreamed only of piles of cash and pretty girls. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, the young boy then known as Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. had such an insatiable appetite for attention that he used to run alongside the school bus instead of taking a seat on it. In a 1964 Playboy interview, he told Alex Haley (later the author of Roots): “All the kids would be waving and hollering at me and calling me nuts. It made me somebody special.” Quickly, it became clear to him as he began his ascent in the ring that “grown people—the fight fans—acted just like those school kids.” Coaxed by his amateur coach Joe Martin to overcome his fear of flying and attend the Rome Olympics in 1960, the then–light heavyweight became a whirlwind of sound and color that attracted a parade of enchanted followers in the Olympic Village. With the same alacrity with which he dispensed autographs and mooned over American sprinter Wilma Rudolph, he engaged the press with an originality and charm that belied his average IQ and low class standing at Central High School (376th of 391). When a Russian journalist probed him on the ordeal of blacks in the United States, the eighteen-year-old snapped: “Man, the U.S.A. is the best country in the world, including yours. I ain’t fighting off alligators and living in a mud hut.” In a strategy to gain attention that was then unique in sports but would become commonplace, he recognized that there was box office in a big personality.

  Until Clay appeared on the scene and gave it new energy, boxing was looked upon, with justification, as a province of hoodlums. Captured superbly by screenwriter Rod Serling in the 1962 film Requiem for a Heavyweight—in which Clay had a cameo role that paid him five hundred dollars—the grimy underbelly of the sport was pinned down by the character Maish Resnick, the unscrupulous manager of an over-the-hill heavyweight. With a cynical sneer, Maish scoffs: “Sport? If there was headroom, they’d hold these things in sewers.” From World War II until the early 1960s, boxing was in the stranglehold of the mob, which strong-armed talent, fixed bouts, and extorted kickbacks. At the head of this shadowy enterprise was Frankie Carbo, a soldier in the Lucchese crime syndicate who was known as “Mr. Gray” because of the gray fedora that sat above his dead eyes. He used fear to leverage a blind interest in the top heavyweights of the era—including Jersey Joe Walcott, Rocky Marciano, and Sonny Liston—and he coerced middleweight Jake LaMotta into taking a dive against Billy Fox by assuring him the title shot he had been denied. In collaboration with James Norris, who owned Madison Square Garden and controlled television and site fees by way of the International Boxing Club, Carbo remained an entrenched force in boxing until 1961, when he, Philadelphia underworld figure Frank “Blinky” Palermo, and three others were prosecuted by U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and convicted of trying to chisel in on the earnings of welterweight champion Don Jordan. Upon sentencing Carbo to twenty-five years, U.S. District Judge George Boldt called the so-called “boxing czar” a “menace to humanity and a hardened, degenerate criminal.”

  Eleven wealthy Kentuckians chipped in a total of twenty thousand dollars to get Clay up and running as a pro in October 1960. With ties to tobacco, whiskey, horses, communications, and banking, the consortium called itself the Louisville Sponsoring Group (as opposed to using the term “syndicate,” which had unsavory connotations). Clay would call them his “eleven white millionaire managers.” Ov
erseeing the operation was Bill Faversham Jr., an ex-actor who was a vice president at Brown-Forman Distillers Corp. (the producers of Old Forester, Early Times, and Jack Daniel’s whiskeys). Beyond the unspoken hope of splitting up a big score, they had a paternal affection for Clay, even as they seemed to agree that he could be “a difficult young man.” Chiefly, their aim on his behalf was to shield him from the tax problems that plagued Joe Louis and serve as a firewall between Clay and any encroachment of organized crime. The original contract Clay signed three days before his pro debut on October 29, 1960, called for him to receive a ten thousand dollar signing bonus, a salary of four thousand dollars a year, all expenses paid, and a 50-50 split of all purses. Moreover, the group set up a trust fund in which Clay deposited 10 percent of his earnings and hired veteran trainer Angelo Dundee, who had a spotless reputation and would go on to work with fifteen world champions. Although Clay more or less conditioned himself, Dundee would help him develop his jab, become a savvy presence in his corner, and play a key role as an inexhaustible advocate on his behalf with the press, which in those early days remained unconvinced that the so-called Louisville Lip possessed the cut of a champion.

  But they did know the precocious young man could talk. Given an audience of more than one, he would step out of the deep silences that tended to envelope him in private and launch into monologues that were at once wildly comical and highly purposeful. In creating a commercially viable version of himself that he could project upon the world, he borrowed from an unlikely tandem of progenitors. From Sugar Ray Robinson, he acquired a certain elegance of style, which revealed itself in a cool artistry inside the ring and a regal conceit outside of it. But the underpinnings of his seemingly spontaneous showmanship were pure Gorgeous George, the preening pro wrestler with a head of golden ringlets who wore a robe of orchid brocade and blew kisses into the perfumed air as a frenzied crowd heaped scorn upon him. From the very beginning, Clay divined that if it was good to be loved, it was even better to be hated. To that end, he whipped up self-infatuated rhymes—“They all must fall, in the round I call”—and speared his opponents with ugly taunts that included denigrating them as Uncle Toms. In the manner of an unruly child, he equated them with animals or invoked some other inanity, just as he would years later when he hammered away at Frazier by calling him “The Gorilla.” Some of it was just playful, some of it had a personal edge, but none of it was done without design. Clay told Playboy, “People would start hollering, ‘Bash his nose!’ or ‘Button his fat lip!’” Whatever they called him, Clay professed to be fine with it as long as it put asses in the seats.

  None of the juvenile antics Clay unfurled were particularly amusing to Charles “Sonny” Liston. Clay anointed him “The Big Bear”—“a big, ugly one”—and irritated him so thoroughly that Liston once flipped a copy of Time magazine on the ground, undid his zipper, and urinated on the illustration of Clay on the cover. Born the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children in Sand Slough, Arkansas, to a cotton farmer who Sonny said “gave me a licking almost every day,” Liston joined his mother in St. Louis when he was thirteen, only to end up a street thug who committed serial muggings for small change and participated in an armed robbery of a restaurant, which landed him in Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City just before his eighteenth birthday. He began boxing when a Catholic priest in charge of the prison recreation program laced a pair of gloves on him. Upon his parole two years later, he began entering amateur tournaments, won the National Golden Gloves Championship in 1953, and turned pro under St. Louis Mafia underboss John Vitale. Three years later, he ended up in the St. Louis Workhouse for just under a year after he shattered the leg of a cop during an altercation over a parking citation. Control of his contract passed from Vitale to Carbo and Palermo upon his release, at which point he joined Palermo in Philadelphia. According to Cosa Nostra defector Joseph Valachi, Chicago kingpin Salvatore “Sam” Giancana also had a 12 percent piece of Liston until he was squeezed out of his action in a power play by Carbo and Palermo.

  Stamped into his countenance by the troubles he had seen was an expression of raw hostility. Joe Flaherty captured it exquisitely in a 1969 Esquire piece when he observed of Liston: “His glacial eyes have all the warmth of an army-camp madam a week before payday.” George James worked with Liston as a young trainer in Philadelphia and remembered that he had a violent temper. “When he got that goddamn gin in him, he turned into an animal,” said James. Sober, Sonny remained an unnerving presence. Upon hearing the howling objection of a hooker in England that she had only been paid ten quid (twenty-four dollars) for wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling sex, he told the promoter who had lined up the assignation and had intervened on her behalf for a pay bump, “What about all the sandwiches she ate?” Whenever he roamed, there seemed to be a patrol car in his rearview mirror. Word circulated in Philadelphia that the police kept his photo pinned to the sun visor of their cruisers. The cops picked him up for loitering on a street corner; the charge was later dropped. They picked him up again for, of all things, impersonating a police officer when he stopped a woman on the Schuylkill Expressway and beamed a flashlight at her as she sat in her car; that charge and sundry others were dropped when the woman accepted his apology. James remembered being pulled over once with Sonny in the passenger seat.

  “We saw the police lights behind us and Sonny said, ‘George, they just want me,’” James said. “The cop walked up to the car, saw Liston sitting there, and ordered him outside. Hands up on the hood. They searched him up and down, spun him around, and searched him again. Sonny never said a word. They told him to get back in his car and they drove off. Sonny told me that trouble just always followed him.”

  Sonny could not escape the scorn of society as he ascended to number one in the annual Ring magazine rankings in 1960. Even when Liston apparently severed his connection to organized crime and appointed George Katz as his manager the following spring, the sullen ex-jailbird remained unworthy of challenging churchgoer Floyd Patterson for the heavyweight championship. President John F. Kennedy joined an anti-Liston crusade by saying that if Patterson skipped over Sonny, “we would all be better off”—including his brother Bobby, the attorney general, then deep into an investigation of organized crime. Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People shunned Liston because they considered him to be a poor example for black children. But whatever initial qualms Patterson had that prevented him from giving Liston a title shot were ameliorated when Sonny switched his managerial allegiances to Katz. In what he called the spirit of fair play, Patterson agreed to tangle with Sonny on September 25, 1962, at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Seizing upon the innate decency that this act of liberality reflected in Patterson, Howard Cosell asked Liston what he thought of “this great champion.” Sonny fixed his baleful glare upon Cosell and replied, “I’d like to run him over with a truck.”

  Of the more than six hundred correspondents who poured into Chicago for the fight, including literary figures such as Norman Mailer, Budd Schulberg, and James Baldwin, nearly all found themselves on the horns of a dilemma: they loved the self-probing Patterson but saw no earthly way that he could beat Sonny, who said he would be “ashamed” if Patterson was still standing in the sixth round. With a twenty-five-pound weight and thirteen-inch reach advantage, Liston need not have been unduly concerned. He flattened Floyd with a left hook at 2:06 of the first round. As Patterson slipped out of Chicago in disguise to shield his shame, the sports pages were swathed in black crepe. New York Post columnist Murray Kempton tapped out a dirge that echoed the revulsion that had spread across the land when he observed that Liston was “the first morally inferior Negro I can think of to be given an equal opportunity.” In light of the annihilation that had occurred, no one could seem to summon even a creative argument for a rematch other than Mailer, who, strafed by unchecked boozing and a lack of sleep, emerged from his bunker at the Chicago Playboy Mansion and proclaimed that Patterson had been beaten because the Cosa Nostr
a had cast upon him a Sicilian evil eye. But there would indeed be a rematch less than a year later, on July 22, 1963, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, and the outcome was just as cruelly conclusive. Liston floored Patterson three times, polishing him off with a left uppercut at 2:10 of the first round. Next up (if the precocious young blabbermouth from Louisville dared): Clay.

  Spasms of visceral fear were triggered by the emergence of Liston. White America looked upon him as the avatar of black rage. To his opponents, he was large and unrelenting and, in the words of Philadelphia Evening Bulletin columnist Sandy Grady, had fists as “big as oil cans.” Few in the history of boxing had a jab as concussive; Dundee equated it to being clobbered by a telephone pole. In keeping with his stratagem of fomenting chaos, Clay provoked Liston as he was shooting craps at the Thunderbird Hotel prior to the second Patterson bout. Idling in the vicinity as Liston crapped out, Clay chirped: “Look at that big ugly bear; can’t even shoot craps.” Liston glowered at him, picked up the dice, and crapped out again. Clay chirped once more, “Look at the big, ugly bear. He can’t do nothing right.” Liston strolled over to Clay, eyed him menacingly, and said, “Listen, you nigger faggot. If you don’t get out of here in ten seconds, I’m gonna pull that big tongue out of your mouth and stick it up your ass.” Clay was jarred by the encounter—genuinely so—yet he continued to taunt Liston in the ceremonial prefight introductions of ringside celebrities. Dressed in a tailored suit and narrow tie, he ducked through the ropes, nodded at Patterson, and started for the opposite corner, where Liston glared at him from beneath the hood of his robe. With a theatrical flourish, Clay froze, feigned an expression of horror and waved off Liston with a dismissive hand as he exited the ring. Whatever fear Clay had of Liston would be counterbalanced by his calculation that when faced with a growling bear, the way to subdue it would not be by battling it hand-to-claw but by using a psychological arsenal to bring it down to size. And step over it.