Atlas

by Teddy Atlas

  We walked toward a big table in the back. There were nine guys, and Sammy introduced me to them all. Everybody was there for a reason, each person. There was a guy, Jimmy this, another guy, Al that, another guy, Danny whatever, and they all had a purpose. One guy was going to do the promotion, another guy was going to do ticket sales, another guy was going to do a thing with the hotels.

  The chef came out from the kitchen, fawning all over Sammy. “What do you want tonight, the veal? I’ll make it a special way. It’ll be beautiful. You’ll see.” The waiter brought over bottles of wine, the best wine they had, and asked, “Is this good for you?” Sammy enjoyed every moment of it.

  When we were all sitting, Sammy got up to do something, leaving me alone with the others. They all looked at me.

  “Teddy, you know he’s only going to do this if you say, ‘Yeah.’”

  “I’m gonna do what feels right for me.”

  “No, no, we know, but it would be nice. There’s a lot of money. He’s got a lot of money behind him. It would be a good opportunity for you.” They kept looking at me, letting that sink in.

  Sammy came back, and we got down to it, he broke it all down. He said, “You know, I’ve gotten really good in the construction business, but I didn’t know nothing about the construction business when I started. I brought people in that knew. I’d never get involved in a business that I didn’t know unless I had someone that did know and that I could trust. I’m smart enough to know that.”

  Everyone nodded enthusiastically. You got the feeling he could have been saying anything and they would have been just as intent and focused on him. “I’m not going to get involved in the boxing business,” he continued, “unless Teddy Atlas gets involved with me, because he knows the business and you can trust Teddy Atlas. His track record shows he’s a man and he’s been tested.” He turned in my direction and our eyes met.

  “The key to running a successful business,” he went on, “is having the right people putting things together and getting the whole thing…what do you call it? Getting it…” He was struggling for the right word, and they were all looking at him, but no one would say it. They all knew the word he was searching for, but they were afraid to say it.

  “What’s the word I’m looking for?” Sammy said.

  “Organized,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Organized.”

  Now they were all laughing.

  “That’s the word,” Sammy said. “You could say it, Ted. I can’t say it.”

  They all thought it was hysterical, the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

  When Sammy had finished talking, they again turned toward me, and I felt compelled to launch into a whole explanation of the mechanics of the boxing business, making clear that it wasn’t what they thought it was. I was wasting my time. They wanted to get into it. Their minds were made up. Sammy said, “Teddy, everything will be in your name,” and I was thinking, Does that mean the indictments, too?

  I told them I appreciated that they thought so much of what I did, but that I was committed to the guys I was training and didn’t feel like being tied down and getting involved in the business end of boxing. A couple of Sammy’s guys tried to reassure me that it wouldn’t work that way with them.

  “You won’t have to do that stuff. We’ll do all that. You won’t be burdened with the promotional and business side of things, we will.”

  “Yeah, but I just—”

  Sammy cut it off. He said, “You want to stay free is what you’re saying. You wanna be your own man.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying. I’ve turned other things down for the same reason.”

  “Yeah, I know. I know I’m not the only one you’ve said no to.”

  In fact, he knew I’d turned down Josephine Abercrombie; I’d turned down the Duvas.

  “Well, that’s good enough for me,” he said. “If that’s your final word, that’s your final word. Like I said at the beginning, it doesn’t work out, we’ll just enjoy a good dinner together.”

  So that was that. When I told Nick Baffi about the meeting later, I mentioned how Sammy had said everything would be in my name, and Nick said, “The indictments, too?”

  I laughed. “Jesus, Nick, that’s exactly what I was thinking when he said that.”

  Nick said he had been worried that I’d wind up saying yes to Sammy, but the fact that I’d said no also worried him.

  “This guy is dangerous. You don’t know how he’s gonna react. I know he says he likes you, but he also told Philly that you know a lot of stuff, all the discussions you’ve been having with him about boxing and fear. He wanted to know from Philly whether you’ve ever said anything to me about him. He might think you’re talking about him and be worried you know his weaknesses. He’s the kind of guy who kills people for that.”

  But Sammy never brought it up again, and there were no repercussions. We kept training together at the gym and everything was okay. Then one morning he showed up and said, “There’s indictments coming down.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I might have to…You might not see me around for a while.”

  We went into our regular routine with the weights. I spotted for him, he spotted for me. He didn’t tell me exactly what he was going to do, but it was clear that he might go into hiding or something.

  “It’s the fuckin’ U.S. government coming after me, Bo. They invade countries and they’re coming after me. What the fuck are they coming after me for? They want me to do bad things to my friend John. They want me to hurt my friend. They want me to forsake him.”

  I was stunned that he was telling me this. He wrestled the weight back on its rest and got up off the bench.

  “They want to take my manhood. They want to take it, but they can’t take it. The only way they can get it is if I give it.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Take a walk with me,” he said. We left the weight room and went outside. We stepped outside into the cool, late fall air. The street was empty. We started walking. Halfway down the block, he said, “Listen, I hate to even ask you this….”

  “What?”

  “Could you do me a favor? Would you train my son in boxing while I’m gone?”

  I looked at him.

  “I just want him to be all right,” he said. “If he’s with you I know you’ll make him strong and you’ll make him all right.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do you that favor,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  He never showed up at the gym the next day. It was strange, after all that time, to be there alone. I was training and he was gone. Louie was gone. They went on the lam. Pennsylvania, Florida, all over the place. One night, they even snuck back into town and showed up at one of Snipes’s fights in the Garden wearing fake beards. But eventually they came back for real because Gotti ordered them to come back. Sammy didn’t want to, but Gotti did a lot of things that got people screwed.

  A few days later, December 11, 1990, the feds went to the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street and arrested Sammy and John and Frankie Locascio and Tommy Gambino and Jimmy Fiello, a.k.a. Jimmy Brown. They brought them out single file. It was on all the news channels. Everyone in the world saw them parading out in handcuffs five of the heaviest wiseguys around.

  Not long after that, Louie got in touch with me. He said, “Sammy said you promised to train his son while he’s in the can.” At that point, Sammy was still being a stand-up guy, and I felt something for his kid, Gerard, what he must have been going through, so I made good on my promise. Four or five days a week, Louie would pick up the kid, then he would pick me up, and we’d drive over to Gleason’s.

  I trained him like I trained any other fighter. He was only fifteen, but he was strong, and he learned. When he progressed to a certain point, I let him spar with Tyrone Jackson, my old fighter. It was good. Louie videotaped it with these small video cartridges, and he was able to get them to Sammy’s lawyer. Louie was funny. He would make ever
ybody get in on it. Sammy’s father-in-law, who was there, me, Tyrone, everybody. Louie would say, “Okay, this is Howard Cosell here with Gerard “the Bull” Gravano, getting ready for the Golden Gloves….” And he would do this whole shtick. “I got his trainer, Teddy Atlas, here. Teddy, you got anything to say?”

  “Yeah, the kid’s doin’ all right. He’s looking okay….” It was funny, the stuff Louie would put together. The lawyers would sneak the tapes in when they were conferring with Sammy in a meeting room. They had monitors and VCRs set up there, because sometimes they needed to go over footage of stuff for the trial. But instead of or in addition to doing that, they’d watch tapes of the kid training and sparring. Sammy would ask Louie while he was watching them, “Is Teddy gonna put him in the Gloves? Does he think he’s ready?”

  The thing was, Gerard didn’t want to fight in the Gloves. “Are you gonna make me go in the Gloves?” he’d ask me.

  “I’m not gonna make you do nothing.”

  “My father wants me to do it.”

  “The only thing I’m doing is training you. Your father felt it would help give you confidence and some direction. But something like the Gloves is up to you to decide, if you want to take boxing that seriously.”

  Gerard was very quiet and careful, and he was a little beaten down by having a larger-than-life father. He was afraid of saying how he really felt. One day we were driving to Gleason’s. Louie was driving, and we were crossing the Verrazano Bridge. I could see that Gerard didn’t want to train, that he was lacking enthusiasm. I said, “You don’t wanna train today, do you?”

  “Oh, no, I—”

  “Tell the truth if you don’t wanna train. You don’t feel good, take a day off.”

  “No, my father will go crazy.”

  “You can take one day off.”

  “No, I mean I like doing it, it’s just sometimes I don’t feel like it.”

  “Louie, turn the car around.”

  “What!” Gerard said.

  “It’s better to take the day off today. That’s what I think,” I said. “I don’t want you to be faking it. It’s not healthy.”

  We turned back. At first Gerard didn’t say anything more. He wasn’t much of a talker anyway. But then he turned to me and said, “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I wanna be.”

  “That’s okay. You’re young,” I said.

  “Sometimes I think about being a fireman. What do you think about that?”

  “I think that’s good.”

  “Really?”

  “A fireman’s good.”

  “Yeah, I think of that sometimes. But I don’t know….”

  “A lot of people don’t know what they wanna be,” I said. “Especially at your age.”

  “You really think I could be a fireman?”

  I felt for Gerard because I understood what he was wrestling with. He was afraid to tell his father what he was feeling. Like every son, he just wanted his father’s approval, and he was afraid to tell him. Even though he was hesitant with me, I could tell that he was talking more freely than he ever had with his father. It made me feel bad for him. I knew how much Sammy was a prisoner of his need to be a tough guy, and how his son was really just an extension of that need. Gerard was paying a big price for something that had more to do with his father than it did with him.

  Near the end of October, a woman named Louise Rizzuto, who was friends with Louie and Sammy and me, called up. She was crying.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “Louie will tell you,” she said. “He’s on his way over to see you.”

  “Did something happen to Sammy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  “He’ll tell you.”

  As soon as I hung up, I got a call from Louie. “Meet me downstairs,” he said.

  I walked downstairs, I didn’t take the elevator. As I was going, it hit me, it just clicked. The fucking guy flipped. I tried not to think that’s what it was, because it was as if the fact that I thought it made it true. When I got downstairs, Louie was there, dressed in a suit, as always. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  We went up near the park. It was raining lightly. He was shaking his head slowly and I could see there were tears coming from his eyes. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Lou,” and he kept walking and looking ahead, not at me.

  “This fucking guy. I can’t believe he did this.”

  Louie had gone to see Sammy that morning at the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center, like he did every day. The MCC was where they kept all the high-profile guys. But Sammy wasn’t there. They had taken him out. Before long, every news station had the story. Sammy “the Bull” had turned state’s evidence. He was going to be a government witness and testify against his old boss, John Gotti. The headline of the New York Post called him “King Rat.” I had seen too much by that point to be surprised by anything. I wasn’t alone in that. A New York police detective named Joe Coffey had said about Sammy even before they arrested him, “You see that guy? When we get him he’s going to roll like a tumbleweed. ’Cause he’s got no balls. Cowards make the best informants.”

  The first thing I thought about, though, wasn’t that; it was Gerard. I knew he was going to be devastated. It was like he was one of my fighters and I had an obligation and a responsibility to him. Somebody even told me that he was asking for me, and that added to it, knowing that.

  It was strange because once his father did what he did, once he flipped, it changed everything. Sammy was no longer perceived as a tough guy and criminal but as something much, much worse. People I talked to were like, “Fuck his kid.” People actually said that. “Fuck the fucking kid, his father’s a fucking rat.” I heard that Gerard was afraid that I would abandon him, that I wouldn’t be his friend anymore.

  I went over to his house that night. I was so naive that I thought I would just be able to go over and see the kid. But when I got off the Staten Island Expressway, the place was surrounded by every news truck in New York. As soon as they saw my car, even though they didn’t know who I was, they started running toward me. I had made the mistake of slowing down, but I recognized what was going on and hit the gas. It was crazy. This mob of TV and print reporters chased after me, running down the street after my car.

  I thought about giving up at that point and leaving. A lot of people had been telling me not to continue training Gerard. But I thought, No, I can’t leave. I want the kid to know that I don’t hate him. That I haven’t abandoned him just because his father is a rat. That would be too easy. Instead, I ditched my car around the corner and made a mad dash for the house. The news reporters had already backtracked from where they had chased me, but when they saw me sprinting for the house, they tried to cut me off. It was like a freaking hundred-yard dash to the front door.

  I got there ahead of them and started banging on the door. The camera guys and reporters were rushing up the walk toward me. Just before they got to me, the door opened and I squeezed in, slamming it shut behind me. Though the outside of the house was fairly ordinary, the inside had a few touches that you might expect to see in a Hollywood movie about a high-profile mob underboss, including a giant saltwater fish tank and a small pool with a waterfall. Sammy’s wife, Debra, said, “Teddy, they almost got you, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That was close.”

  “It’s crazy,” she said. We tried to joke about the situation, but what was going on was no joke. It was real. I could see the pain in her face. There were a bunch of people there, mostly family. The house had the mood of a wake. Debra yelled out, “Gerard! Teddy’s here.”

  He didn’t hear her, or at least he didn’t respond.

  “He’s in the basement,” she said. “Why don’t you just go down?”

  I went down the stairs. There were weight machines and a Jacuzzi. I remembered that Louie had told me that Sammy had built a big vault into the wall down there, and that sometimes there was so much money in
there that it literally went higher than Sammy’s head. I wondered where all that money was now.

  I found Gerard sitting on a black leather couch, reading a comic book. He looked up. There were tears in his eyes. “Why did he do it, Teddy? Why?” Gerard had always hidden his emotions and had been careful about what he said, but now he looked open and vulnerable and terribly young. “Why did he do that?”

  I tried to think of something that would help him. I was thinking about the kid, not the father, even though I had to talk about the father. “You know, sometimes a person is under pressure and he wants to do the right thing but he’s just not strong enough to do it. You just never know until you’re in that position.”

  Gerard was almost sobbing at that point. “I guess what I’m trying to tell you,” I said, “is that the feeling I’m talking about can overwhelm everything else. A guy comes in a room wanting to be a fighter, wanting to go out there and hear the crowd cheer for him and have his hand raised and feel good, but then something happens and suddenly all he can think about is his fear. It becomes too much for him.” When I said “fear,” I thought, Here I am talking to Sammy’s kid about fear when Sammy couldn’t even say the word. I had to push aside what I had been thinking about Sammy. “What I’m trying to tell you,” I went on, “is that what your father did doesn’t mean he don’t love you. It’s just that he couldn’t face the fight. Do you understand?”

  “Sort of,” Gerard said. “I guess so.”

  “It’s your father, it’s not you. It’s his weakness, not yours. But you don’t have to hate him for that. He wasn’t trying to hurt you. He just wasn’t thinking about anything but this fight that he couldn’t face.”

  I didn’t know if Gerard understood what I was trying to tell him or not, or if it helped. I think it might have a little. I told him I’d still train him if he wanted to. I thought it was important to offer him that. He was surprised. “You will?” he said. So we kept training for a couple of weeks after that. But then we stopped. He didn’t want to do it anymore. His father wasn’t around. His whole reason for training with me in the first place had been to get his father’s approval. Now, not only was his father not around, he wasn’t the guy he pretended to be, so the kid didn’t want to train anymore. I felt bad about it, but there wasn’t much I could do.