On September 23, 1968, Ash Resnick drove his Ford LTD past the broad entrance of Caesars Palace, with its lines of cypress trees and the fountains that shot 10,000 gallons of water a minute into the air. Mondays were always busy days for casinos, because they had to tally action from the weekend. But this was going to be an especially trying Monday: Resnick had a meeting with the FBI.
One small but telling statistic revealed the permanent level of paranoia that had settled over Las Vegas: there were six hundred active wiretaps spread around the city. Six hundred. That was enough to plant twenty in every hotel. And Resnick would have been naive if he didn’t think that at least one of those bugs was for him. He was a jowly, fast-talking Brooklyn native and everything that a wannabe in Las Vegas wanted to be, with a huge office that overlooked the Strip and a card file that included everyone who was anyone in sports. He also looked the part, with a belly that strained against his shiny suits and a neck that spilled over his collar when he chose to knot a tie. He’d been dealing with the FBI since he was a kid back east and played basketball for the Albany-Troy Celtics of the New York State Professional Basketball League. A photo in the Troy Times Record from 1947 captured the point guard crouching in the moment before he either passed the ball or broke someone’s nose. With Resnick’s tough-guy image, it was hard to tell.
In those days, the bookmaker spent his spare time at the racetrack taking bets in the bar. When the local cops tagged him as an undesirable and chased him out of town, he tried relocating to Florida before deciding to do what all the other mob-connected bookies were doing and make the migration to Las Vegas.
Initially, Resnick applied for a dealer’s license at the Tropicana. But then he came to the attention of the Clark County Sheriff’s Department after it got complaints that he was running an unauthorized sports book “out of his pocket” at the El Rancho Vegas hotel. The former basketball star—who by then had ballooned to well over 220 pounds—tried to claim that he was working as an athletic trainer. But deputies who found $1,456 in his pocket arrested him on vagrancy charges and placed him on a watch list that he was never quite removed from. An FBI report from that era linked him to the Genovese crime family figure Charlie “The Blade” Tourine.*
To stop exactly what Resnick had been accused of doing, Congress passed a law in 1961 that outlawed sending information about betting across state lines. But by then Resnick had already begun to soften his image to get away from the small-time-bookie label and surrounded himself with famous friends. “When I met Ash at Caesars I thought he was Caesar,” says Gene Kilroy, then a close aide to Cassius Clay. “He could do whatever he wanted there. Everyone kissed his ring. If he put it in his back pocket, they’d kiss his ass.” Caesars had more convention space than any hotel on the Strip, and when they poured into the casino after a long day, Resnick made sure his famous friends were there to pose for a photo or shake some hands so his guests had a lifetime memory to take back home.
The FBI, however, was concerned about more than photos. One of Resnick’s closest friends in Las Vegas was Joe Louis, whom he had met while standing on line for his army physical in 1942. When Joe’s free-spending ways started to catch up with him in the 1950s, Resnick was the one who invited him to Vegas and put him up in a bungalow. In one FBI debriefing, Louis was described as being “used by ASH now as bodyguard companion. Stooge for casino. Shoots craps constantly. Ash supplies money. Golf and craps are only interests for Joe. . . . In discussions with Joe, believe he really dislikes Ash but has no other route—Ash treats him like royalty and will give him any money he asks for to gamble.” Thanks to Resnick, Louis became one of the original investors in the Moulin Rouge and a greeter at Caesars. But what concerned the FBI was the way that Resnick had begun taking the beloved champ on collection calls that involved some not-so-thinly veiled threats. The FBI’s Las Vegas office reported the woes of a gambler who lost $60,000 on dice at the casino and got a call from Resnick telling him that if he didn’t pay up, “we have other means of getting the money.”
The FBI was just as worried about Resnick’s association with the NBA star Wilt Chamberlain. A memo dated February 1968, when the future Hall of Famer was playing in Philadelphia, detailed a suspicious episode in which the center announced after a lopsided loss in New York that he had a sore knee and probably wouldn’t be playing the next night’s game against the St. Louis Hawks on a neutral court in Miami. But when the 76ers arrived in Florida as heavy underdogs, Chamberlain’s knee suddenly got better and he scored twenty-one points as he led Philadelphia to a 119–93 blowout. The FBI took a dim view of the fact that Resnick and Louis visited the 76ers locker room before the game and got free tickets to sit in the press box next to Frank Sinatra. The same source who told the Bureau about Louis said that when Chamberlain moved to Los Angeles to play for the Lakers, he was “Ash’s guest at [Caesars Palace] almost every week-end date [the team] was at home or Phoenix.” Chamberlain’s association with Resnick was such a noxious open secret that many casinos wouldn’t even list Lakers games.
But neither Louis nor Chamberlain was on the FBI’s agenda this day. Sonny was.
Athan Theoharis, an FBI historian, notes that many of the pages in Liston’s 129-page file bear the initials of top officials, indicating “he was being closely watched by the entire top rung of the agency.” When Sonny’s old antagonist, the U.S. senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver, rallied to his side by telling the press that he believed Sonny had finally “gotten rid of the tentacles of the underworld,” Hoover scribbled on the report that was sent to him, “Just how naive can some of our VIPs get?”
Before Resnick could pull out chairs for the agents, they asked him if he’d be willing to sign a form waiving his rights to a lawyer. He glanced at the form and said sure. Why not? He didn’t have anything to hide. Now, what was this all about, again?
The agents brought up the name of a veteran gambler, Barnett Magids, who’d been quietly feeding them information from a prison where he’d been sent for swindling banks in his native Houston.
Resnick often carried the air of a world-weary executive who was constantly being forced to answer for things that were out of his control, and he sighed when he heard the name. Yes, he said, he knew the real estate investor. Magids came to Vegas from Houston a lot in the early sixties when Resnick held the vague but important-sounding title of “sports director” at the Thunderbird, a squat bric-a-brac hotel on the Strip with a pair of huge Navajo war birds in the parking lot. Magids became one of the hotel’s high rollers, going as much as a hundred thousand dollars into debt.
Resnick knew that Magids held a grudge over a series of business deals. One involved twenty grand he’d lost in an insider stock opportunity. Feeling jilted, Magids flew to Vegas to get it back and found Resnick shooting craps with $20,000 in chips on the table. The two men had words and Resnick told Magids to wait for him in the lobby. An hour later, he came out pissed. As an FBI report on the incident noted, “Resnick claimed that Magids had jinxed him” and they were even on the twenty grand.
Magids had other stories, too, like the one about Resnick taking Joe Louis with him to Houston to settle a $7,500 debt from the Thunderbird. (Magids claimed Resnick pocketed the money and never settled the debt, leaving him to get hounded when the hotel got sold to new owners.) But the story that really caught the agents’ attention was the one Magids told about Resnick’s links to Liston.
Sonny had met Ash in 1963 when he came to Vegas to train for his second fight with Floyd Patterson and stayed at the Thunderbird. Resnick threw himself into the role of maître d’hôtel, offering Sonny everything from fine clothes to consorts to a few well-timed jackpots for Geraldine in his casino. He even turned himself into Sonny’s de facto publicist, running a PR operation from the coffee shop with a phone permanently cradled in his ear from which he lured high rollers by promising them private viewings of the champ. Magids said he was one of them, claiming he was given “a big buildup to Liston.”
Sonny’s second demolition of Patterson paralleled Resnick’s rise in the Liston camp. He joined Sonny when he traveled to Miami in 1964 to defend his title against Clay and rented the Listons an oceanfront mansion on the Intracoastal Waterway in Miami. (He also paid for a place on Collins Avenue where Sonny could go to meet prostitutes. As the boxing writer Jack McKinney later told New Yorker editor David Remnick, “That’s what Ash Resnick brought him in the way of intellectual and cultural enrichment.”) The night before the fight, he even put on Three Stooges movies to relax his fighter.
Because Ash had no official title in Liston’s camp, the newcomer was viewed skeptically by the ones who did. It was one thing when he helped out at the Thunderbird. Everything turned out okay in Vegas. But when he flew to Miami, Sonny’s regulars kept shooting one another suspicious looks, wondering what the hell the guy in fine cashmere suits was doing at their training camp. So was Florida’s attorney general, who would mention a “well known gambler and bookmaker [who] enjoyed the full run of the training camp and was present in Liston’s dressing room prior to the fight.”
According to the story that Magids told the FBI, Resnick invited him to an all-expenses-paid vacation at the Fontainebleau Hotel to watch the fight as a kind of repayment for all the money he’d dropped in Vegas. Ultimately, Magids couldn’t make the trip, but he said he did call Resnick there a few days beforehand. As he told the agents, “Resnick said that Liston would knock Clay out in the second round” but that he should wait until the day of the fight to place his bets “because the odds may come down.”
Magids thanked him and took the advice. A few hours before fight time, he called Resnick again. This time, according to the FBI report, Resnick urgently told him to forget everything they’d spoken about and “not make any bets but just go watch the fight on pay TV.” Resnick hurried off the phone, insisting he couldn’t say more.
Considering that the pre-fight odds were 7‒1 in Sonny’s favor, it was odd advice. Most experts agreed with Sonny that Clay was too flighty to fight at a championship level. He’d made the trip to Miami in February 1964 in the same rickety bus that he’d driven to Denver a few months earlier and pulled up to the Listons’ home. It was past midnight and Sonny’s neighbors in the white suburb were not amused to see a black man poking a flashlight in windows and blaring the horn in an attempt to get a rise out of the champ. Seven police cruisers and a K-9 unit were called to dispatch Clay.
Clay continued his antics all the way to the pre-fight weigh-in in Miami. In a ballroom full of reporters from seventeen countries, he went on a bizarre tirade that won him a $2,500 fine from the Miami Beach Boxing Commission for screaming, “This is my show!” At ten the next night, February 25, Magids tuned in to see the bout on a feed supplied by Theater Network Television, a company that hired Joe Louis to do color commentary and was charging $4 to $10 so fans could watch in one of 350 theaters as well as a small but growing market of in-home pay TV networks. (Thanks to the fact that the start time was ten o’clock on a Tuesday night and the top ticket price was $250, the Miami Beach Convention Center was only half full.)
Sonny’s entrance was slow and deliberate. Dressed in a white terry-cloth robe that advertised Resnick’s Thunderbird Hotel, he took his time getting to the ring, where Clay was already bouncing nervously. Once Sonny slipped through the ropes, he kept his back to the challenger while Clay held out his gloves so one of Sonny’s cornermen could inspect them.
It was the last moment of supplication Clay would allow. At the opening bell, Clay briefly played into the concerns about his foolishness by carrying his arms dangerously low. But then he slipped the first half-dozen of Sonny’s punches with surprising speed and used a 180-degree flurry of jabs to launch into his own brutal combination. Sonny rallied in the second, but by the third round it was clear to Magids why Resnick told him to pull his money. There was not going to be an early knockout on this night.
At the end of the fourth round, there was a bizarre moment in which Clay’s eyes started to burn and he flailed around his corner, sure he was going blind. The cause of the burning was probably liniment oil, though where it came from was the subject of great debate. It could have accidentally dripped into Clay’s eyes from one of the towels that his trainers were using, or, if it came from Sonny’s gloves, as Clay’s camp suspected, it could have been the result of accidental spillage and not a dirty trick. Nonetheless, Clay panicked and almost didn’t come out to face the fifth.
As the writer Rob Sneddon noted in his 2015 book The Phantom Punch: The Story Behind Boxing’s Most Controversial Bout, Clay was wildly paranoid about being sabotaged, because of the growing influence of the Nation of Islam on him. Malcolm X, the Nation’s charismatic spokesman, spent most of the month of February with Clay in Miami, instructing him on why he should distrust white people. Clay, who was on the verge of changing his name to Muhammad Ali, became so jittery that he wouldn’t even let his doctor touch his water bottle for fear someone might slip something into it. In his corner, Clay kept screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!” which his trainer, Angelo Dundee, feared meant he wanted the fight stopped.
“He said, ‘Cut the gloves off. I want to prove to the world there’s dirty work afoot,’” Dundee later recalled in a television interview. “And I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, back up, baby. C’mon now, this is for the title, this is the big apple. What are you doing? Sit down!’ So I get him down, I get the sponge and I pour the water into his eyes trying to cleanse whatever’s there, but before I did that I put my pinkie in his eye and I put it into my eye. It burned like hell. There was something caustic in both eyes.”
Dundee single-handedly changed the course of both fighters’ careers by forcing Clay to fight the fifth round. And by the time Clay’s eyes cleared, he could tell that Sonny was winded. A case can be made that the fight should never have been held. Sonny had hurt his shoulder while training and needed cortisone treatments for bursitis in both shoulders the day before the bout. That no doubt accounted for Resnick’s frantic advice to Magids hours before the fight to hold on to his money. And as the sixth round ended, Magids was grateful for the tip. After the furious pounding he gave Clay, Sonny could barely raise his left arm.
A lot of gamblers who took the sure bet on Sonny got wiped out when his manager, Jack Nilon, stopped the fight. And, strangely, Resnick claimed he was among them. He told Sports Illustrated he’d lost his shirt on the travesty. But that made no sense to Magids. Why would Resnick squander his own money when he was telling others to hold on to theirs? Magids suspected that Resnick—knowing what he knew about Sonny’s sore shoulders—bet the long odds on Ali and made himself a boatload of money. As he told the agents, “Resnick knew that Liston was going to lose.”
—
A rematch was set for the Boston Garden nine months later, on November 16, 1964. There was so little appetite to see the two men face off that all twenty-nine state athletic commissions in the World Boxing Association refused to sanction the fight. Nevertheless, Sonny had cut himself down to his muscular essence, lean around the hips and neck. He started in Colorado, spending his mornings running at the Mother Cabrini Shrine in the mountains near Golden, where a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus stood atop a 373-step climb. Then he moved his camp to a WASPy country club in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Reporters were impressed when they saw Sonny taking his five-mile runs through the dunes, and Resnick arranged an unexpected show for a small group of journalists on the Friday before the fight. The 13‒10 odds in Sonny’s favor reflected the consensus that he’d rediscovered his murderous left jab. Even Clay’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, admitted that being hit with his jab “was like getting hit with a telephone pole.”
Clay didn’t appear at that workout. He wanted to drop a sack of black cats on Liston as a Friday-the-thirteenth prank but thought twice. Instead, he settled down to a dinner of well-cooked steak, potatoes, and spinach at his hotel and picked the Edward G. Robinson gangster movie Little Caesar to take his mind off boxing. Halfway through the film, though, he started to feel nauseated and began vomiting. “Oh, something awful is wrong,” he told his brother, Rudolph. Boston police were called to whisk Clay to City Hospital, where he was rushed into surgery for what turned out to be a herniated intestine, leading to an indefinite delay in the fight.
At that moment in Boston, Sonny Liston may have still believed he could control his destiny by winning back his title. But in some sad and ironic way, the sportswriters who saw him as Ash Resnick’s puppet had a point. Even though he had the biggest fists in the history of boxing, his fate would always be in someone else’s hands. And it was about to get passed among the politicians of Massachusetts.
In January 1965, Endicott Peabody, the state’s Democratic governor and an enthusiastic backer of the fight, was replaced by a Republican who was far less enamored with big-time boxing. It’s unclear if the new governor, John Volpe, communicated his displeasure to the Suffolk County district attorney, Garrett Byrne. But by April, as author Rob Sneddon points out, Byrne had become an outspoken opponent of the rescheduled fight, and Sonny didn’t help by getting arrested for drunk driving in Denver. Byrne filed an injunction to stop the fight on the grounds that Sonny’s Intercontinental Promotions had failed to apply for a license to do business in Massachusetts.*
Once a superior court judge agreed to hear arguments on the case in early May, the fight’s backers decided to pull out of Boston and accept an offer from a promoter in Maine to use a youth center with fifty thousand seats that was two hours away, in Lewiston, Maine, a town of forty-one thousand residents.
Six hundred reporters descended on Lewiston to cover the rematch on May 25, making the textile town look like an advance station for an army base. Radio towers were hastily erected to beam the fight as far away as the USSR, and members of the local college track team were hired as couriers.
Although Sonny said that he expected an early decision, most boxing pros believed the fight would go to eight rounds. Their news-side colleagues and 240 police officers were on hand, meanwhile, for another reason: three months earlier, Malcolm X had been assassinated after growing disillusioned with the Nation of Islam, and there was grave talk that his supporters, who blamed the Nation for his death, had hired a hit squad to kill Ali as retaliation. (Fred Brooks, the head of the closed-circuit-TV company that was airing the fight, added to the theater by taking a $1 million life insurance policy out on Ali.)
To judge from the weigh-in, the crowd was on Sonny’s side. He entered the arena in a white silk robe and flanked by his trainers, Willie Reddish and Teddy King, to cheers, while Ali arrived to taunts. “You’d better bring your pillow, Clay,” one fan yelled. “Who is the greatest?” Ali shot back. “Sonny Liston?”
When the bell finally clanged later that night, Ali started strong, making a beeline to Sonny and introducing a hard right before he backpedaled so Sonny was forced to lunge into his punches. Sonny regained his footing with a bounce in his knees and started flicking his long jabs into Ali’s body. But two minutes into the first round Ali maneuvered away from one of those jabs by lifting his right arm over the punch and bringing it squarely onto Sonny’s cheekbone. The referee, Jersey Joe Walcott, would call it “one of the most devastating punches I’ve ever seen.”
From the cheap seats, it looked glancing at best, a quick flick of Ali’s glove that shouldn’t have toppled a junior hockey player. A knot of students from Bates College started the chant of “Fix, fix, fix.” And Sonny’s reaction caused others in the audience to join them. Having fallen to his back, he woozily extended his arms behind him, then unsteadily staggered to his knee before he tipped back again and assumed the same supine position, as if it had been rehearsed. The rules dictated that Ali return to a neutral corner so the timekeeper could begin his count, but instead Ali stood over Sonny, yelling, “Get up and fight, sucker!”
Without realizing that the count had already begun, Walcott let Sonny climb back to his feet and the fight appeared to be ready to resume, when The Ring’s publisher, Nat Fleischer, yelled to Walcott that the timekeeper had reached twelve. As Walcott, who doubled as a cop in Camden, New Jersey, would later explain, “I was trying to pick up the count but I couldn’t hear it. They should have had a loudspeaker. But I thought it was more important to keep that wild man Clay away from Liston than run over to get the count.”
Once Walcott raised Ali’s arms, observers were split on what they’d seen. Writing in The New York Times, Red Smith labeled Ali’s winning shot a “phantom punch,” while Tex Maule told Sports Illustrated readers, “It was a perfectly valid, stunning right-hand punch to the side of the head, and [Ali] won without benefit of a fix.” Jimmy Breslin called the whole thing “the worst mess in the history of sports.”
Politicians and pundits, meanwhile, chewed it over in loftier terms, decrying it as another slap at the fading social order. Cynicism might be having its day, but the boxing ring was the one place where old-fashioned values still mattered. Reporting on a sudden groundswell in Congress to ban prize fighting, the Los Angeles Times screamed: “IT ONLY TAKES MINUTE TO KILL BOXING.”
Joe Louis, who was sitting at ringside, got his college-age son tickets for the bout and the two met up afterward to visit Sonny in his locker room. Considering the abrupt way Sonny had hit the canvas, Joe Jr. expected to see him receiving some kind of medical aid. “We were perplexed,” he told me. “Because Sonny didn’t seem to be hurt at all.”
One of the most enduring explanations for what happened in Lewiston became known as the “secret percent theory.” The details vary from telling to telling, but the basics involve someone in Sonny’s camp, possibly Ash Resnick, meeting in secret with Ali’s Nation of Islam managers to float some kind of proposal.
Sonny wasn’t in the same shape as he’d been in before the Boston fight. All the energy and passion he’d built up—all the hate—seemed to have drained away. He spent his nights at a malt shop, laughing with the kids behind the soda fountain. Is it so strange to imagine him offering to take a dive in exchange for a cut of Ali’s future earnings?
Such future-earnings deals weren’t uncommon in boxing. When James Braddock agreed to meet Louis in 1937 at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, their contract included an above-the-table provision for Braddock to get a cut of Louis’s purses for a period thereafter—a shrewd move, since Louis won. And an under-the-table deal was precisely the kind of high-risk, high-reward gambit that Ash Resnick was a master at making.
There would also have been a certain amount of logic in such a deal for the Nation of Islam. Ali was its most public face and its best recruiting tool. A proposal to cut Sonny in on Ali’s future earnings might have been seen as a reasonable opportunity cost—a modest investment to keep the Nation’s recruitment machine greased and Ali on top. (No one at the time anticipated Ali’s future draft troubles or the fact he was going to lose three of the most productive earning years of his life.)
Ali appeared to hint at some hidden machination when he told reporters a day before the fight, “It’s gonna be a shock. If I were to predict what was to happen, no one would come to see the fight. That’s how shocking it will be. They might even say the fight was fixed.”
Ali may simply have been running his mouth, but the appearance of Ash Resnick at Sonny’s side during the weigh-in left open the question. It didn’t help that he was palling around Lewiston with Sam Margolis, the notorious Philadelphia deli owner who was widely considered a front for the mob.
Gene Kilroy, who was helping Ali handle his business affairs at the time, dismisses the idea that Resnick could have gotten close enough to the Nation of Islam to do a deal. “That’s all bullshit,” he told me. “There’s no way that Elijah Muhammad would have gotten involved with anything like that, or even hold a conversation with Ash Resnick. I knew Elijah very well. He was very honorable. There’s no chance that happened, at all.”
Still, the theory endures, and one reason is that it presents Sonny as still being in control of his fate. Having been raised by Mafia opportunists, he would have understood the sense in letting Ali take the punishment from that point forward while he sat back and cashed the checks. Indeed, instead of seeing a dive as a surrender, he might have seen it as the most intelligent thing he could do.
It’s a hopeful scenario, because the alternative is almost too cruel to consider: that Sonny was done in by an unbearable, even existential, dose of bad luck.
—
Almost immediately after Sonny hit the canvas in Lewiston, a race broke out among state athletic commissions to see who could punish him the fastest. When the dust settled, he was banned in so many places that he was literally a boxer without a country.
That made the mid-sixties difficult years for the Listons as they struggled to make ends meet. But those were also, in their own way, tranquil years. Sonny traveled to the beautiful Swedish port city of Gothenburg to barnstorm for ten grand a fight. “I’m staging my comeback campaign in Sweden because it seems impossible for me to get fights in my own country,” Sonny told reporters.
He also came face-to-face with a child he never knew he had, when a twenty-seven-year-old waitress arrived at his hotel with a caramel-skinned boy who she announced was his son. Geraldine couldn’t have been surprised that Sonny had cheated on her on one of his earlier visits. But there was something in the three-year-old boy that seemed to melt her anger away when she met him in June of 1966.
Geraldine had two daughters of her own, both born before she married Sonny. The Listons rarely discussed the girls in interviews, and the only widely published photo of them was a publicity still taken in 1964, before Sonny’s first fight with Ali, when the girls were posed reading a mock children’s book titled How to Whup a Big Mouth. They briefly lived with the Listons in Denver but there’s little evidence they had much of a relationship with their stepfather, or even saw their mother regularly, by 1966, when Arletha would have been about twenty-one and Eleanor fifteen. All of which could explain why Geraldine was so taken by the boy. He offered her a chance to have the family with Sonny that she’d always wanted.
Everyone was discreet about the arrangements that were subsequently worked out. In an interview with Reuters, the Listons claimed that they’d met the waitress, Agnete Weise, while dining at their hotel and became taken with her. “Mr. and Mrs. Liston are wonderful people,” Weise told the wire service. “I cannot give my son the home he deserves and Daniel, my boy, is getting the chance of his life. There will be no more staying at day schools for him while I am at work. I miss him, but I am happy he is with the Listons.” In a final thought, she added: “Nobody can look after children the way Negroes can.”
After the Listons returned to Las Vegas with Daniel in the spring of 1967, the Chicago Tribune dropped by Ottawa Drive to find the boy scampering around their “immaculate living room” and a backyard pool that “shimmered in the dazzling desert sun.” Geraldine came off as detached about her husband’s business affairs even as she subtly lobbied for his return. “Everybody’s always hollering about the elements behind Charles,” she told the paper, obliquely referring to his mob associations with Frank “Blinky” Palermo, among others. “But if that were true, he would have money. He’s got enough to live. The trouble is, you’ve got to have some coming in, too, and we don’t.”
On a separate visit, Sports Illustrated also found that Sonny had mellowed. The magazine described him driving a big green Caddy along the Strip, lounging in health club saunas, and yelling, “Don’t run out of gas, kid,” as he watched the weekly Wednesday-night fights at the Silver Slipper. He was living what the article described as “the life of a country squire.”
It was an upbeat portrayal. But it also contained a quote from a source described as a “Las Vegas gambling figure and Liston confidant” who sounded a note of caution. “The trouble is Sonny’s got no money to put up,” said the source, who with that description could easily have been Ash Resnick.
“He talks about buying into one of the hotels in Vegas, but what with? He has some money coming from his fights, money that was tied up, but he may never see any of that. When he went to Sweden to fight the first time, he had to borrow $3,000 from the bank on his car. He doesn’t spend much. He doesn’t throw it around. But remember: he was cut up pretty good. He never knew what was going on.”
—
With Ash now having moved on to other things, Sonny drove to the Sands casino for a lunch with Sammy Davis Jr. in early 1968. The Rat Pack entertainer was trying to get into boxing and decided that promoting a Liston comeback was a fine place to start. Ed Sullivan, who was serving as a kind of advisor, was in the corner booth with him, as was Henry Winston, the only established black promoter in boxing. Everyone had the same thought: it was time for Sonny to get back to business.
If his jab had started to lose just a bit of its finishing power, those present all knew it was still plenty valuable. Staring at Sammy, Sullivan brought up the elephant in the room: “How do you propose getting around the questions that are going to be asked about organized crime?”
“Geraldine and Sonny were at a point in their lives where they needed and deserved a nest egg,” Winston would tell me decades later. “But they couldn’t make money without the Mafia guys putting their requests in.” Sammy waved off the issue as irrelevant. “Don’t worry about the mob,” he told Sullivan in what appeared to be a thinly veiled reference to Resnick and his friends. “I’ve got control over them.”
Winston was impressed. Figuring it was worth at least taking a chance, he agreed to use his contacts to see if he could get Sonny a fight license in California. Over the next couple of weeks, he began taking acquaintances on the California State Athletic Commission to expensive dinners to remind them that nothing had emerged from all the investigations into Sonny. Boxing was an unpredictable business. Sometimes one punch was all it took. Surely they could see that was what had happened in Lewiston. Surely it was time to let the man earn a living with what little time he had left.
Thanks to those expensive dinners, and perhaps a little extra dessert, the resistance to Sonny melted away. The difference between May 1965 and January 1968 in politics was an eternity. What seemed important in 1965 suddenly didn’t seem so important now, and the commission formally announced that it was putting the issue of a fight license for Sonny on its end-of-the-month docket.
There was little doubt that Sonny was still a physical specimen. But the commission required a blood test. So, before the meeting, Winston brought him to his doctor in Oakland. The promoter was amazed when a nurse approached Sonny with a needle and the blood drained from his face as if he’d seen a ghost.
“He almost jumped in the nurse’s lap,” Winston recalled. “He wouldn’t take the test that morning, so we had to go out and get lunch. All the time he was going crazy on me, ‘Motherfucker’ this, ‘Motherfucker’ that. It took a lot of work, but he finally gave the blood. That’s how much he hated needles.”
As expected at the commission’s hearing in late January of 1968, Winston got pressed on whether Sonny had finally excised himself from the web of mobsters who had followed him since his days in St. Louis. Assuring them he had, Winston dropped Davis’s name and vowed that both of them would do everything in their power to keep Sonny away from organized crime. When it came time for Sonny to speak, he kept it short and sweet. “I feel I’ve paid my debt to society and severed my ties with the underworld,” he said.
On February 3, 1968, the commission approved his application.
—
While Barnett Magids continued to inform on Resnick to the FBI, Sonny started his comeback in Reno in March of 1968 against Bill McMurray, a California truck driver. There were no packs of people paying to see Sonny jump rope to “Night Train” this time around—and, tellingly, no Ash.
One of the few reporters to make the trip was the New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte, who’d been at ringside for the second Ali fight. He was curious to see if Liston had anything left and found that little had changed in the three years since Lewiston. When he walked into the gym, Sonny was giving a hard time to a female photographer who was trying to shoot him for a local newspaper.
“There gotta be plenty of pictures of me. Use some of them,” he barked. When the woman replied that she wanted “special” pictures, Sonny started backing her against the wall. “Special pictures?” he said, his voice rising. “What do you want me to do? You want me to take my shirt off? How do you want me to pose?” He continued until her small frame was entirely covered by his shadow.
“If you don’t want me to take any photos, that’s fine,” she said, standing her ground. “There won’t be any in our paper. But I don’t have to take this shit.” Lipsyte waited for Sonny to erupt, but instead he broke into a broad grin and gave her all the time she needed.
Maybe he had softened after all.
The comeback camp had a celebratory feel, with the rock group the Monkees hanging out beside Sammy’s PR man, Bill Rowe. Even Geraldine made the trip. But Sonny was ten pounds overweight, and when the opening bell rang, his lack of fitness showed. He came out slow and missed several chances to cash in on McMurray’s missteps. It took Sonny four rounds to finally use his jab to end the fight.
Afterward, when Sonny proclaimed, “Joe Frazier will win the title and I’ll beat him,” Lipsyte began his column, “Another threat to the national sanity was posed last night when Sonny Liston punched Bill McMurray through the ropes and announced himself a candidate for the heavyweight championship of the world.”
Sonny’s next fight was at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in L.A., where the local promoter, Don Chargin, was happy to join in the comeback frenzy. The Reno fight had been poorly attended because of a snowstorm, but Chargin figured to sell seven or eight thousand tickets on Sonny’s name. At first he got a little nervous when Sonny asked for an advance. That was always a sign that a fighter was hard up and unpredictable. But to Chargin’s relief, he did every bit of press that was asked and proved altogether agreeable about it.
The bout against Billy “Willie Swift” Joiner, a slick boxer from Cincinnati who didn’t have much punch, was a dreary affair. It took Sonny six rounds to finally put Joiner and himself out of their misery, and fans pelted the ring with garbage, shouting, “Go back to the Missouri state pen!”
But as 1968 wore on, it became harder to call Liston’s comeback campaign quixotic. He took what The Washington Post called a “convincing win” in July by scoring a seventh-round TKO against the far younger Henry Clark in San Francisco. A few months later, in Phoenix, he stopped an ex‒Dallas cop named Sonny Moore in the third. Before Thanksgiving, he embarrassed the unranked Roger Rischer at a benefit in Pittsburgh. And in a closed-circuit broadcast from Baltimore, he derailed one of his old sparring partners, Amos “Big Train” Lincoln.
He was back, back in the game. And it felt great. No, better than great! Lem Banker, a wealthy Vegas gambler who owned the Sahara Health Club and liked to hang around boxers, hit the trail with Sonny, putting them up in high-priced suites and paving the way for them to gorge on women.
It was more than just the road pussy, though. The Harlem snobs who had reviled Sonny back in the day were moving on to bigger battles. The reporters who were around him now were nicer, the fans were pulling for him, and, hell, even the cops were respectful. Sonny had come out the other side of the sixties as a genuine icon, and he even dressed like it, going out in slick shades, mock turtlenecks, and shiny pants.
It was still a little early for irony. That would come later, in the seventies. But it was ironic that the barefoot kid from Arkansas who came to America’s attention wearing fedoras and wool coats would become an early exemplar of black gangster chic.
In Los Angeles, the bartender at the Beverly Wilshire hotel knew how to fix his vodkas just the way he liked them, on the rocks, and the studio executives at Paramount were suddenly interested in him for bit parts on TV shows. Interestingly, for someone who was viewed as scarily humorless, he surrounded himself with a rat pack that included such popular black comedians as Godfrey Cambridge, Nipsey Russell, and Redd Foxx.
There were still skeptics of Sonny, though.
In the not-for-attribution interview with Sports Illustrated, the source who sounded like Ash Resnick asked, “What will happen if Sonny’s comeback fails?” He answered his own question by saying, “He’ll go to work. Just plain take a job. Sonny’s not proud. If he has to work in construction or something like that, why, that’s exactly what he’ll do.”
But Sonny was proud. Too proud to let anyone think he’d gone down or out. During a lull in his fight schedule, he was hanging out at the Town Tavern when a local drunk started going on about what he’d just read in Sports Illustrated.
Sonny’s friend Clyde Watkins was standing beside him, and as Watkins would remember it, the veins on Sonny’s forehead began to pulse. After all that had transpired, Sonny was still sensitive to the claim that he was too dim to manage his own money. Wheeling around, he yelled, “I’ll show you how broke I am!”
With his Cadillac still parked outside, Sonny threw Watkins into the driver’s seat and ordered him to speed through red lights to his house on Ottawa Drive. While Watkins stood in the living room, Sonny ran up the stairs to his bedroom and started banging and clanging. Ten minutes later, he emerged with two thousand dollars in a pillowcase.
Still in a fever, he threw Watkins back in the car and had him speed right back to the Town Tavern, where he emptied the money in stacks all over a blackjack table. Then he stared down anyone who dared meet his eyes.
“That’s how broke I am, motherfuckers.”
—
The FBI agents in Ash Resnick’s office scribbled notes on their thin pads, taking down his denials in detail.
Fix a fight? Come on, boys. Anyone who’d been around Sonny in Miami knew he was taking Clay lightly. He had alcohol on his breath and seemed unfocused. If he didn’t get an early knockout, the odds were good he was going to have trouble in the later rounds.
Resnick also denied that he’d taken two checks from Magids worth $50,000 to place illegal bets on football games while he was the sports director at the Thunderbird. As far as he was concerned, the bigger question was why the FBI was trusting a swindler like Magids. The man was destitute, his family had abandoned him, and he was manic-depressive to boot. (An agent who interviewed him in prison noted that Magids “SHOULD BE CONSIDERED AS HAVING SUICIDAL TENDENCIES.”) Resnick understood that the FBI had to do its job. But surely they had better ways of wasting his time than with a story like this from a guy looking to get out of a ten-year prison sentence.
The feds thanked him and got up to leave.
Upon returning to their office, the agents typed up the notes from the interview and forwarded them to their superiors in Washington.
What they hadn’t mentioned to Resnick was that Magids had suddenly gotten cold feet about testifying against him in court. “He stated he knows what kind of people these are and how they operate,” an agent who interviewed Magids noted four days earlier. “And he is fearful of what they might do to his wife and family if he testified—especially while he is still serving time.”
On the last day of 1968, a high-ranking Justice Department lawyer typed out a memorandum that concluded, “There is not sufficient evidence obtained to justify seeking an indictment in this matter,” meaning that, for the moment, Resnick was in the clear.
But the casino boss understood that J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t going to stop digging into his past. Sonny and Ash had been done with each other for three years. But those two Ali fights weren’t going away. Another memo sent directly to Hoover concluded that Resnick was “the fix point of [the] two heavyweight title fights. He had always been and will continue to be a corruption source for professional sports until he is stopped.”
You couldn’t get any blunter than that.
Resnick had traveled a long way since his days taking bets at the New York racetracks. He loved his house in Paradise Palms, his beautiful showgirl wife, the respect that came from having a big office in a lavish resort like Caesars. If the FBI wanted to take those things away from him, they’d have to pry them out of his white-knuckled hands.
And if Sonny ever tried to help them . . .