Читать книгу Jacobs Beach: The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing - Kevin Mitchell J. - Страница 11

A lot of desperate men resorted to earning a living with their fists when most of the legal options disappeared during the Great Depression. And, where there are desperate men, there are others more than willing to accommodate their desperation. Owen Madden was such a man.

Madden's widowed mother, an O'Neil, sailed from Liverpool to New York in 1901 with her sister, landing up in Hell's Kitchen, the West Side slum that Irish refugees from the potato famine had made their own uncoveted manor for nearly fifty years. From the moment Owen followed a year later, aged nine, to join his mother and her sister in a cold-water flat on Tenth Avenue, he traded strongly on his Irish roots.

His friends called him Owney. While he was growing up in the company of Arnie Rothstein, “Lucky” Luciano, Jack “Legs” Diamond, and Dutch Schultz, none of them choirboys, Madden, born in Leeds but made for New York, was also known more chillingly as “The Killer.” He was a top-flight thug, a graduate of the feared Gopher Gang who earned his reputation wielding a gun as if he were in a Wild West show. After his uncontrollable temper got the better of him once too often, he spent nine years in prison for murder.

When Madden got out of Sing Sing, in 1923, there to meet him at the gates was Joe Gould, sitting at the wheel of a fancy Packard, alongside a convicted murderer called Arthur Bieler. Gould, a small-time boxing hustler, had been instructed to collect Madden on behalf of Schultz, one of New York's premier liquor salesmen. Madden got in and Gould handed him a beer. “This is what Dutch Schultz puts out,” Bieler told him. “If you play your cards right, you can get in on the act. Dutch don't like no fuckin’ freelance operators. You would do well to do what he says.”

Madden didn't much care for the quality of the spiel, or the beer—and he spat the latter all over Bieler's pinstriped suit. Owney determined he would open his own brewery. He told Bieler to tell that to Schultz. To start out as a bona fide bootlegger, though, he had to get rid of Eugene O'Hare (a fellow Irish American), that Schultz had installed in Madden's territory after he was sent up the river. Within weeks, O'Hare's dead body was found on an empty scrap of land on the Lower West Side.

Gould, meanwhile, was soon to play a role quite a deal more important than driving a Packard to Sing Sing for Dutch Schultz. In the course of boxing history he would not have envisaged a role much grander than that—but for his association with Owney Madden. Gould was the manager of James J. Braddock; Owen had a large piece of Max Baer. And one day they would collide.

Braddock, born in Hell's Kitchen, raised in New Jersey, was just another “Irish” fighter as the thirties got underway, a good one among thousands, but not exceptional. He fought often—and often he fought with cracked ribs, sore knuckles, and not much food in his belly. But, as was the norm, he had to do business with people who put a better gloss on their reputations than was deserved.

Gould was indisputably one of those chameleons. Joe was close to Madden—and that was not like being next to cleanliness. With Prohibition came endless business opportunities, chiefly at the shakedown end of the retailing gig. You could sell Madden's booze, if you signed up for Madden's goons to “protect” your premises and your back. Madden worked for Schultz only as long as it took him to stamp his own authority on his territory, Chelsea. With money from strikebreaking and bootlegging, Madden opened the Cotton Club—previously owned by the world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson when patrons knew it as the Club DeLuxe. (Years later, the establishment and its owner achieved immortality of sorts when Bob Hoskins played Madden in Francis Ford Coppola's eponymous movie of the infamous hangout.) Owney also had a stake in the Stork. If you were looking for crime and criminals, these were the places to be seen.

Madden thrived in Chelsea. His brewery occupied a building so obvious—on Tenth Avenue between 26th and 27th Streets—it must have been difficult for policemen of the day to walk past without putting their hands over their eyes. His beer, called Madden's Number 1, was, by all accounts, not bad, and he served it in pints. Damon Runyon asked him once if he were not stretching the patience of the law by putting his name on the bottle. Madden said it was the most popular beer in New York and he was “dead proud” to have his name on the label.

According to Jimmy Breslin, Madden took Runyon to one of his fancy apartments one night, a penthouse at the top of the London Terrace block on 23rd and Ninth Avenue. From the rooftop, they could see his brewery. Staying in the apartment were Ray Arcel, who would go on to become one of boxing's most revered trainers, and his fighter, Charley “Phil” Rosenberg. Madden was now entrenched in the boxing business and had arranged for Rosenberg to fight Eddie “Cannonball” Martin for the world bantamweight title. Rosenberg was in his apartment because Madden wanted to keep an eye on the challenger's diet. To that end, he also installed in the swanky apartment Charley Phil's cook, his mother.

Come fight night, Madden bet $1,000—on Martin, because he didn't think Phil had been eating right. Charley Phil cut the champ to pieces. Owney was livid.

Madden is sometimes overlooked in the history of gangsterism's grip on boxing, but it was during the turbulent thirties that he was at the height of his dubious powers. Along with Schultz and Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll (whom he'd later help kill), Owney had a piece of the world heavyweight champion Primo Carnera—even though, as far as the National Boxing Association was concerned, the champ's managers were Louis Soreci, Billy Duffy, and Walter Friedman. Next to Joe “The Human Punch Bag” Grim, who was knocked down at least eighty times and won maybe four of 113 verified contests in the thirteen years leading up to the Great War, Carnera was the most pathetic figure in all of boxing. At the end, he owned less than 10 percent of himself.

Madden was near the heartbeat of the sick beast Boxing throughout the Depression. At one point, he controlled the bantamweight and light heavyweight titleholders, as well as four of the five heavyweight champions between 1930 and 1937. Max Baer was the only fighter to hold out against him, publicly at least. It was always rumored Madden had a piece of him too, through Duffy and an underworld tough called George “Big Frenchy” DeMange. Gould was now on the inside, with a so-so heavyweight and connections to all the people who controlled the title.

Owney, it is said, also owned a slice of Braddock. And you won't see that in the schlock movie Cinderella Man, which depicts Braddock as an innocent victim of his times and calling, oblivious to the deals Gould was doing with the psychopath Madden.

Braddock's story was a good one. Devastated by the Wall Street Crash, he famously rose from the breadline and occasional work on the Jersey docks and, against all the odds, got a shot at the awesome puncher Baer.

Gould expended a lot of energy in putting the hitherto down-and-out Braddock in the limelight, introducing him to influential friends of all stripes. Later, he would pull off one of the cheekiest scams in boxing history, but first, they had to get their hands on the title.

Gould was a master of hype—the best in the business.

He was not fazed by threats or demands, even from the men in pulled-down hats. He knew many of them as friends. He had Madden on board. He knew Carbo, Palermo, Costello, and J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI. This was some guardian angel. While selling Braddock to a skeptical audience, he maintained a classic front, retaining an office he could not afford, making promises he wasn't sure he could keep.

Baer, known here and there as “The Livermore Larruper,” was an awesome hitter. He'd killed one man in the ring and given a beating to another who died later, tragedies that took the edge off his aggressive instincts and made a lighthearted man occasionally sad. Might it also have contributed to what has been described over the years with ever-increasing conviction, even by those who were not there, as the biggest upset in heavyweight history?

Max was more than fourteen pounds heavier than the challenger, and should have murdered Braddock, in the nicest possible way, that night in the Madison Square Garden Bowl, an offshoot of the MSG, in nearby Long Island. But he hadn't trained properly and there was a lot of the clown in Max, who loved the high life. He took James too lightly. Braddock found something deep down he always knew was there. It came together for him over the fifteen rounds in his career that mattered more than any other, and he beat Max. His opponent wished Jim well, saying he hoped he valued the title more than he had done, a gnomic reference perhaps to the pressures brought to bear behind the scenes by Madden.

Lucky Jim was now not only the world heavyweight champion, he was the unofficial king of New York, with the run of the clubs and bars up and down Broadway and its environs. Runyon was the first to call him the Cinderella Man, and it stuck, another of boxing's enduring fairy tales. What happened before and after that historic upset is less well chronicled.

In the engrossing Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Anthony Summers offers this real-life glimpse of Braddock's movements away from the ring:

The mob bosses had been well placed to find out about Edgar's compromising secret, and at a significant time and place. It was on New Year's Eve 1936, after dinner at the Stork Club, that Edgar was seen by two of Walter Winchell's guests holding hands with his lover, Clyde [Tolson]. At the Stork, where he was a regular, Edgar was immensely vulnerable to observation by mobsters. The heavyweight champion Jim Braddock, who also dined with Edgar and Clyde that evening, was controlled by [Frank] Costello's associate Owney Madden. Winchell, as compulsive a gossip in private as he was in his column, constantly cultivated Costello. Sherman Billingsley, the former bootlegger who ran the Stork, reportedly installed two-way mirrors in the toilets and hidden microphones at tables used by celebrities. Billingsley was a pawn of Frank Costello's, and Costello was said to be the club's real owner. He would have had no compunction about persecuting Edgar, and he loathed homosexuals.

This was not a fairy tale. This was the Cinderella Man out on the town with the head of the FBI and his boyfriend, surrounded by an array of unsavory types, as well as the biggest and most self-important windbag in town, Walter Winchell. Even back then, Frankie Carbo, who would go on to be the main man in the fifties, was in on the take, a regular at the Cotton Club and the Stork. It is said he was answerable only to Costello and had regular quiet talks with Mike Jacobs.

So, whatever the halo that filmmakers might have deposited over their innocent heads, Joe Gould and James J. Braddock moved with ease through all parts of Gotham, from the Garden to Lindy's, the Cotton Club, and on to the Stork. Sometimes they'd stop in at Dempsey's and hang out with Jack. Dempsey's got a reputation over the years as a drop-off place for the Mob's bag money, a sort of gangsters’ post office, but none of this ever rubbed off on the proprietor—who also played a background part in Max Baer's career.

Was Baer–Braddock a fix? There is no evidence. But Baer was the only heavyweight of the era not to go openly with Madden. Owney wanted him out of the picture. And it suited him and others to have Joe Gould's fighter as the heavyweight champion of the world, because he could be manipulated more easily, through Gould, his one-time point man to Dutch Schultz. It is inconceivable that Max took a dive—and what was to follow does not constitute a case for the prosecution. But, whatever the reality, it all fell neatly into place for Gould and his Cinderella Man.

The fight with Baer was, in truth, a one-off for Braddock. It has been dressed up over time as the greatest upset in the history of heavyweight boxing up to that point when, in fact, it was an honest, workmanlike performance. The fight itself was dull. When Max threw punches, they rocked Jim; trouble was, he hardly threw any—and Braddock just pecked away and survived. Every fighter has a story, often a good one, and this was Jim's. But the reality was Braddock fought the right fight on the right night against a champion who clowned about once too often.

Max, who might have had a long and lucrative reign, was consigned to boxing's second division without fuss. Had he gone with Madden, that might not have happened. Instead, Joe Louis—now part of the action at the summit of the fight game thanks to the encouragement of Mike Jacobs—gave him a memorable four-round beating in his next fight. Thereafter, over the next two years, Max belted out a decent living against other hopefuls, twenty-nine of them, but he would never get another shot at the title, even though he deserved one.

There was a curious symmetry to Baer's career, which he wound up in 1941: Max fought a total of 110 professional rounds and scored 110 knockdowns. The Ring magazine rated him at 22 among the 100 greatest punchers of all time.

Once he stopped taking advantage of being Jewish (Goebbels banned his first movie in Nazi Germany “not because I was Jewish, but because I beat Schmeling”), he made the most of his looks to earn a good living as an actor. Max was a bright-eyed, smiling presence in a succession of forgettable movies and TV shows, all the way up to 1959. His son, Max Jr., found screen fame as Jethro in the sixties’ TV hit The Beverly Hillbillies, and he was livid when Cinderella Man portrayed his father as a mean, unfeeling fighter. He was anything but. As far as his family and friends were concerned, Max was a rush of mountain air in a sewer.

For Braddock, life took a different turn. While the boxing fraternity and the general public were buzzing with the enormity of his achievement against the fearsome Baer, the game's machinery was grinding away to ensure this well-placed champion and his manager did not go short once he faced the inevitable: a big-money showdown with the unbeaten Louis and the loss of his title.

However good and fleeting a story Braddock's was, everyone at the time knew the best heavyweight boxer in the world was Joe Louis. Mike Jacobs knew, the kids stealing nickels from the pay phones knew, the president of the United States knew. Jimmy Johnston wasn't so sure. And the reason was Joe Louis was black. Johnston's reign as matchmaker at the Garden was, predictably, troublingly racist. The Garden, advised by Johnston, reflected the wider view in the business that fight fans wanted a white heavyweight champion. It was a prejudice that was to cost Jimmy the ride of his life.

In a single phone conversation with Joe's manager, John Roxborough, Johnston properly gave the game away.

Roxborough phoned Johnston to see if he could find a place for Louis on a Garden bill, after Joe's string of impressive wins in the Midwest, including two over the well-regarded Lee Ramage.

“If he comes here,” Johnston told Roxborough, “he'll be expected to lose a few. I don't care if he's knocked out Ramage. He's still colored. . . . Don't you have any white boys out there?”

What Johnston couldn't know over the phone was Roxborough was black—as black as Joe, who would go on to be the biggest box-office hit in boxing since Jack Dempsey and until Muhammad Ali. And Johnston missed out on signing Louis because his manager didn't much like Johnston's attitude. Such biological determinism as the Garden matchmakers would not have looked out of place in the beer cellars of Munich at that time.

Louis, contrary to the heavily massaged perceptions of his day, suffered at the hands of all types and races, including his own. He made a lot of money—for other people, mainly. He had a black manager, a Jewish promoter, and, waiting up the road, a Jewish-managed German opponent, Hitler's pet Max Schmeling, who would spend the rest of his life vigorously detaching himself from the prevailing philosophy of the Third Reich and all the sins they visited upon Hebrews everywhere.

This is the story of what happened to Joe Louis, and Mike Jacobs's part in it.

A couple of weeks after Baer–Braddock, Joe was scheduled to beat Primo Carnera—from whom Baer had won the title in 1934—and Louis duly did what he had to do. But, with the preliminaries out of the way, what might have seemed a natural match between the finest heavyweight of that part of the century, Louis, and the new champion, a man blessed (or otherwise) to share the same occupation, Braddock, did not pan out as expected—except by those in the know. And nobody was more in the know than Mike Jacobs. Jacobs was a strange fish. He had no worries referring to all dark-skinned fighters as schwartzes—but at the same time he would give them as much work as they could handle. His only prejudice was against an unimpressive bank balance. He knew Louis was good business. In time, he would also come to be proud of their friendship, not to mention their business relationship.

Roxborough and his partner, Julian Black, an old numbers racketeer, were as attuned to the moneymaking possibilities of their boxer as was Jacobs. They knew that, while Johnston was a roadblock, Jacobs was a conduit. What they had to overcome, however, was the ingrained resistance of white America to recognizing a black man as the best heavyweight in the world. Roxborough needed no history lessons on this subject.

The reason Louis was having trouble making his way to the top of the heavyweight pile was the legacy left by the last black champion, Jack Johnson. Jack gave the White Hope, James J. Jeffries, such a hiding in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910, that few present would ever forget it.

Tex Rickard, who promoted Johnson–Jeffries, was anxious to give the bout a hint of respectability, and even asked President Taft to referee. The president said he was busy. Johnson was indisputably the best heavyweight of his time, the champion of the world since he'd ripped the title away from Tommy Burns in Sydney on December 26, 1908. They'd dragged old, white James J. off his alfalfa farm in Ohio, five years into his retirement, to “put down the uppity nigger,” this refugee from the Chitlin’ Circuit, who'd once had to be content to box his black brothers, among them the similarly gifted Sam McVey and Sam Langford, and then had left them far behind too.

But Jim, thirty-five, was too slow and Jack was too good. Johnson, who self-mockingly described himself as “the brunette in a blond town,” tormented Jeffries before putting him out of his misery in the fifteenth round in front of an audience of cowboys, hookers, and thieves.

For a taste of the evil of the times, Johnson himself is as reliable a source as many. He says this in his autobiography:

More than 25,000 people had gathered to watch the fight and, as I looked about me and scanned that sea of white faces, I felt the auspiciousness of the occasion. There were few men of my own race among the spectators. I realized that my victory in this event meant more than on any previous occasion. It wasn't just the championship that was at stake: it was my own honor, and in a degree the honor of my own race. The “White Hope” had failed.

Hysteria greeted Jack's deed. Blacks were murdered in race riots across America—nobody is sure how many—lynched and humiliated by the Klan and other white supremacists. The color bar went up just as Jack was trying to tear it down, albeit for his own purposes.

As the acclaimed American filmmaker Ken Burns said in his 2006 documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson: “Johnson in many ways is an embodiment of the African-American struggle to be truly free in this country—economically, socially, and politically. He absolutely refused to play by the rules set by the white establishment, or even those of the black community. In that sense, he fought for freedom not just as a black man, but as an individual.”

His people even wrote a spiritual about him:

Amazin’ Grace, how sweet it sounds,

Jack Johnson knock Jim Jeffries down.

Jim Jeffries jump up an’ hit Jack on the chin,

An’ then Jack knock him down agin.

The Yankees hold the play,

The white man pulls the trigger,

But it make no difference what the white man say,

The world champion's still a nigger!

And white did not want black ever to have even a chance of being champion again. Some black people agreed. Pastors and kindly old community leaders preached silence. Booker T. Washington, the conservative black intellectual fountainhead of his day, reminded his brothers and sisters, “No one can do so much injury to the Negro race as the Negro himself.” Angry blacks called that just another day of slavery. And number-one black of the day, Jack Johnson, said it loudest and longest.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the radical alternative to Washington, said: “Jack Johnson has out-sparred an Irishman. He did it with little brutality, the utmost fairness, and great good nature. He did not knock his opponent senseless. Apparently he did not even try. Neither he nor his race invented prizefighting or particularly like it. Why then this thrill of national disgust? Because Johnson is Black.”

Du Bois was shaky on the boxing facts, and on the money with the social consequences. It would be well into the Great Depression before another black man would be in position to challenge the white man's stolen supremacy as the best heavyweight in the world.

Roxborough knew his history, all right. That's why, as a businessman, he would do whatever it took to get Joe his shot. It might not seem that savory from a distance, but he had to deal with the prevailing morals and attitudes of the day.

It was his good fortune to be doing business with Jacobs at just the time Uncle Mike was rising to the top of his profession, ready to make a move on the big job at the Garden. Johnston's job.

Having made no progress with Johnston, Roxborough got to work on Jacobs. Roxy went out of his way to assure the almost totally white fight-writing fraternity that Joe Louis would not be photographed with white women, wouldn't be seen alone in nightclubs, wouldn't have an easy or fixed fight, wouldn't humiliate a beaten foe by standing over him in triumph, would not “showboat” in any way, but would be a clean-living young athlete of which America, all of America, could be proud.

Joe went along with most of it—apart from the “clean-living” bit; he chased women, white or black, voraciously.

But they did a deal. Jacobs did the deal of his life; Joe did the only deal on offer. He wasn't complaining. All he wanted to do was fight. He didn't read the contracts, he just listened to his handlers, got fit, and knocked out anyone they put in front of him. To Joe, it could not be simpler. Eventually, of course, it would become so complex it would wreck his life. For now, though, he was a young, black, fighting genius rushing toward his destiny.

As the great adventure was getting underway in 1935, then, Jacobs was the man in control of Joe and the title. He did as he wanted with both, and he was not without friends, naturally. He had been co-opted on to what was to become the Twentieth Century Sporting Club and it had as its prime movers the preeminent media dictator of his day, William Randolph Hearst, plus Ed Frayne, the sports editor of the American, Bill Farnsworth, sports editor of the Journal, and the legend himself, Runyon, Hearst's favorite and most eloquent mouthpiece. It was a powerful team, and they had their eyes on the Garden. Johnston and his bosses didn't stand a chance. Joe was on his way. Just about.

After Jacobs got Roxborough to sign Louis up to the Twentieth Century Sporting Club, to promise white America that black America would not visit another Jack Johnson upon their precious heads, everything fell into place. It seemed so easy now for the scuffling Joe Gould to make lots of money. He did not let his boy Braddock down. Once Jim had the championship, Gould came into his own. He engineered a quick autobiography, Braddock: Relief to Royalty, and a flimsy legend was born. That was just the start of it.

When Joe knocked the stuffing out of the Ambling Alp, Primo Carnera at Yankee Stadium (attracting 64,000 customers, twice the number who filled the Garden for Baer–Braddock), it seemed the clamor for Louis–Braddock would not be denied for long. It was put on hold—but for reasons that would not become immediately obvious. This was going to be a slow burn, kindled by the Hearst newspapers, which now had links to the Garden through the enterprising Runyon and his pals.

The lineage of boxing's most prized championship up to that point was, generally, a distinguished one: Sullivan lasted exactly seven months; then came James J. Corbett, 1892 to 1897; Bob Fitzsimmons, 1897 to 1899; James J. Jeffries, 1899 to 1905; Marvin Hart, 1905 to 1906; Tommy Burns, 1906 to 1908; Jack Johnson, 1908 to 1915; Jess Willard, 1915 to 1919; Jack Dempsey, 1919 to 1926; Gene Tunney, 1926 to 1928 (the title was in abeyance for two years after Tunney retired in 1928); Max Schmeling, 1930 to 1932; Jack Sharkey, 1932 to 1933; Primo Carnera, 1933 to 1934; and Baer, who held it a day short of a year.

That made it fourteen champions in forty-three years, almost a royal succession. What was to follow would do much to eat away at the credibility of professional boxing. After Braddock and all the way up to late 2006, just seventy-one years, the title changed hands a bewildering ninety-three times. What started as the biggest prize in sports became a very grubby enterprise, which then somehow managed to slide even further.

At least Lucky Jim's recognition meant something. He was all over the papers. People shook his hand in the street, bought him a drink in the clubs. He fit the picture. He'd risen from bum to hero in a twinkling. If he could do it, anyone could. America needed Jim Braddock badly in 1935, as the Depression gnawed away at the fiber of its being. To the guys growing weaker by the day at the soup kitchen, or riding the rails, Jim was one of them. Just like Dempsey had been. It didn't matter that he wasn't a great fighter. He fought great on one night. He sustained hope.

But Braddock too would be dispensed with soon enough. Asked how long the new champ might remain in office, Max Baer told reporters, “Until he fights somebody else.”