Where are we going?”
“Take a left,” the passenger said, directing Sonny.
Sonny took the left and cruised until he arrived at the front of a flat beige single ranch home in Charleston Heights, a subdivision of Las Vegas that catered to working families and temporary casino help.
Sonny’s passenger was Mark Rodney, a long-haired teenager who wouldn’t normally have had anything to do with a fifty-year-old ex–heavyweight champion, except that his father ran one of the most successful criminal crews in the city.
“How much?” Sonny said.
Mark checked his notepad. According to what his father told him, they were about to knock on the door of a dentist who’d been hitting his nitrous oxide a little too hard and moved on to heroin.
“It says here five hundred.”
The amount made Sonny run a certain calculation in his head. He reached down to his ankle for the .38 he kept strapped there and made sure it was loaded. “Okay, five hundred,” he said.
He got out and took a look around. It was that time of day in Vegas when everyone either was going to bed after an overnight shift or was already out of the house for the morning, which meant there wouldn’t be anyone to give them any trouble. For the most part, their customers were high-functioning junkies who paid on time, which was the way Sonny liked it. He didn’t need to be messing with the strung-out pimps he ran into on trips through the Westside.
Mark’s father also split the work so that another of his crews did the drops. Mark was purely on the collections side, which had the dual benefit of keeping him away from the drugs and letting him keep an eye on the family’s money. Sonny was there for muscle.
The man who answered the door looked like he didn’t belong near anyone’s mouth. Sonny, for all of his bad habits, had perfect teeth—something he owed to his genetics and not letting anyone get near his face when he fought. (By contrast, he used to punch so hard that his sparring partners ended their sessions by picking teeth out of their mouth guards.) The dentist’s teeth had a yellow glaze over them. A couple of them might have even been loose.
“Did we wake you?” Sonny asked.
“No, uh, uh, no . . .” the dentist said.
“We’re here for what you owe,” he said.
“Yeah, sure, sure,” the dentist said, and disappeared back into his house.
Mark and Sonny exchanged glances, knowing what was coming.
When the dentist appeared a minute later, Sonny jammed his leather shoe into the door, just to be on the safe side.
“Um, there’s a little problem,” he said.
Mark looked to Sonny, whose expression didn’t change. “We don’t really do problems, man,” he said.*
The dentist handed over a crumpled roll. “Here’s a hundred and fifty,” he said. “I’ll get you the rest tomorrow. I promise.”
Mark once again looked at Sonny. The great thing about working with the Champ was that it never took much. A twitch of his eye. A slight flex of his fist. Maybe just a little flare in his nostrils. For such a badass, he could be remarkably subtle. This time he adjusted his perfectly creased pants enough to lift his leg and reveal the loaded .38.
“Really, I don’t have it all,” the dentist said, pleading. He went back into the house and came up with a hundred more.
Mark counted the money, made a note in his pad, and said, “Okay, but no deliveries until we have the rest.”
Back in the car, Sonny shook his head in disgust. “Shit, did you see what those teeth looked like? That must be some ugly pussy he’s eating.”
This was late 1969, and Sony’s comeback was pointing to one place.
Joe Frazier was on the kind of roll Sonny could only dream about. He’d just been on the Today show and had his pick of fights. The one he claimed not to care about was the one everyone was clamoring for: a showdown with Muhammad Ali.
As past his prime as Sonny now was, he still had a fighter’s conviction that, if not for some bad luck, he’d be climbing into the ring against the new champ first. Instead, he was using his fists to make collections.
Later that night, when Sonny returned to Rodney’s home and explained to Mark’s father why they were short, the old man gave them a disapproving look. “He’s got the money,” he said. “The fucker has a safe with about twenty grand in jewelry in it.”
—
Robert Chudnick was a legendary jazz trumpeter who also went by the stage name Red Rodney and led the kind of double life that could only flourish in a place like Las Vegas. He’d hop a flight to Burbank to play on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson one night and be back in Vegas by nightfall selling heroin. So, in the seams of celebrity Las Vegas, it was inevitable that a jazz legend who loved boxing and a boxing legend who loved jazz would cross paths. Whether it was at the International, where they both worked, or at one of the parties thrown by friends like Sammy Davis Jr., Las Vegas was too small a town for them not to meet. And when they did, they understood that they were cut from the same cloth.
What Sonny admired most about Chudnick was that he was unreconstructed by his fame. To most of the world he was a genial trumpet player who lived in a spacious Spanish colonial on a block full of weeping palms. To those in the know, however, he was a compulsive thief who couldn’t resist an easy score. And, like Sonny, he’d traveled far and wide, only to keep coming back to the same place.
The two men couldn’t have started out any more differently. While Sonny was still working his father’s peanut fields in Arkansas, Chudnick was growing up as a musical prodigy in a white Jewish home in Philadelphia, picking up jobs playing with the big bands. His life changed on the day when he went to the Downbeat Club in South Philly and watched Dizzy Gillespie. He was thunderstruck by the faster, improvisational music that Gillespie was pioneering. When Gillespie introduced him to Charlie Parker, his future was set.
Parker was impressed enough with Chudnick to invite the young trumpeter into his quintet, making him the only white musician to be part of the creation of bebop. But certain adjustments had to be made. When the band played in the racially segregated South, Chudnick pretended to be an albino so they wouldn’t run afoul of public accommodation laws barring mixed-race bands. He got away with it because he had fiery red hair and a yellow-tinged skin color that was accentuated by his heroin use.
In those days, half the jazz world used the stuff. But there came a bottoming out in 1960, when Chudnick found himself destitute in San Francisco. Desperate for money, he swindled $10,000 by impersonating an army officer. By the time he was convicted and sentenced to twenty-seven months in prison, he was almost relieved. It gave him a chance to kick his habit and study some law while he was behind bars.
After being released, Chudnick moved to Las Vegas for yet another fresh start. There was plenty of musical work on the Strip, but as far as he was concerned, it was the soul-destroying kind. Every so often he’d get an invitation from Elvis or Ella or Streisand—artists he felt were worthy of his musical talents. But more often than not, he found himself gigging in second-tier lounges with the kind of corny crooners he once mocked. He became so depressed that after the shows he hit the strip clubs or casino bars and, before he knew it, the needles were coming out and he was going into the bathrooms to tie off and get back on the junk. It didn’t take long for him to begin selling to his musician friends, too, and then to their friends.
Like all successful drug dealers, Chudnick was paranoid about his business. He took precautions like burying his drugs under garbage in his backyard at 4145 Gibraltar Street and splitting batches into tiny plastic pouches so that if a courier got caught he could swallow it and shit it out later. Mark and Sonny were recent additions to his crew. Mark had grown up with his mother in Hollywood Hills but yearned to live with his father. “He was so famous in the bebop era that he knew everybody, all the big musicians,” Mark told me. “Every time he went to L.A. he got invited on the Carson show to play with Doc [Severinsen] and the band. He knew Doc real well. He knew all those guys. We always fought about music: jazz versus rock. We were like cats and dogs. But I really wanted to join his crew, really bad. At the time, I thought it was cool.”
Chudnick initially resisted the idea. Yet eventually he saw the wisdom in having a family member keep an eye on things. On a night when he was out to dinner with a wealthy friend, he gave his teenage son the blueprints to the friend’s house along with a stolen key and told him where he would find a safe filled with cash and jewelry. “Don’t fuck it up,” he said. “You fuck it up, you’re never going to do nothing for me.”
He didn’t fuck it up.
“There was a lot of shit my dad wouldn’t tell me,” Mark went on. “Like, I’d get a call from him: ‘Go in my closet in the back room and do that thing I told you about,’ which meant he wanted me to get the shovel he kept in the closet and bury the drugs we were keeping in the house in the backyard. I had to do that a bunch of times so there wasn’t anything in the house. There was all kinds of shit.”
Mark met Sonny for the first time at a party that his father took him to at 2058 Ottawa Drive. It was one of the shindigs that Sonny threw when Geraldine wasn’t around, which was becoming more frequent by late 1969. Entertainment types like the actress Barbara McNair and the outlandish R&B performer Wayne Cochran chatted with Sonny’s friends from the gyms, and strippers were draped over every piece of open furniture. Chudnick warned his son that Sonny could be mean and standoffish, but somehow the two made a connection, perhaps because Mark was still in his teens and Sonny always loved kids.
“I hear you like rock-and-roll music,” Sonny said, handing him a copy of the Sgt. Pepper album cover.
“Groovy. Can you sign it for me?” Mark asked. That was when he saw the side of Sonny that his dad warned him about. The big man glowered and turned away. It was only later, when Mark asked his father what he’d done wrong, that he learned Sonny never gave autographs because he was embarrassed about not being able to sign his own name very well.
“When I . . . saw him the first few times, he was a happy guy,” Mark recalled. “He was smiling all the time. My dad would be, like, ‘Hey there, Sonny boy!’ It got dirty later. Drugs always do that to every relationship. But I used to joke around with him and he’d smile because he knew I wasn’t making fun.”
The Chudnick home on Gibraltar Street became a refuge for Sonny. “In the beginning he used to come around a lot,” Mark continued. “We had a music studio and if I wasn’t in there, my dad would go in there with his friends. Sonny was sniffing a lot of heroin. I knew he was doing heroin up there because I did it with Sonny, too. He wasn’t going to do heroin in front of his boxing friends. But my dad was a musician junkie and so was I, then. We were in the dope and the crime and the money business. [Sonny] could do stuff around us that he couldn’t do with anyone else. That’s why he liked hanging around us.”
Sonny eventually became a full-fledged member of their crew and Mark’s travel partner. The two would spend their business hours going door-to-door in places like Charleston Heights, which they nicknamed Heroin Heights. Sometimes after work, Sonny and Mark would go out for a drink, and one night Sonny took Mark to a bar he knew on the north end of Las Vegas Boulevard. Instead of inviting him in, however, he told his teenage sidekick to wait in the car.
As Mark waited and waited, he kept his eye on the clock until he finally became nervous about sitting in a parked car in an all-black neighborhood with five thousand dollars in cash in his pocket. He knew his father would be eyeing the clock as well, furious at him for not coming straight home with the loot. So, against Sonny’s express instructions, he got out and went into the bar.
Instantly, he regretted it. It was pitch-black and pulsating under the sound of soul music. He spotted Sonny at the bar, dealing in small aluminum foil wrappers that he guessed were packets of cocaine.
As Mark recalled it, “Everyone just stared at me, like, ‘What the fuck is he doing here?’ I was a hippie. I had long hair and shit. Sonny saw me and said, ‘Oh, he’s with me.’ But he was mad. He didn’t talk to me all the way home.”
—
At that point, the two top spots in the heavyweight division were the property of Joe Frazier and Jimmy Ellis,* both of whom were scheduled to meet at Madison Square Garden in early 1970. Sonny and his new trainer, veteran fight man Dick Sadler, desperately wanted a piece of the winner, and Sadler lobbied a new sanctioning body known as the North American Boxing Federation to help. Supported by eight states, including Nevada, and run by the head of the California Athletic Commission, the NABF didn’t have the cachet of the World Boxing Association. But it had an office near Sadler’s gym and a title to give out, and that’s all he needed.
Once Sonny ran his record to 49–3 after fighting again in May and September, the question was who would be the last piece of the comeback puzzle. In early November of 1969, Sadler approached him with the idea of Leotis Martin, a former sparring partner. Martin had a habit of planting himself in one place for long periods, which made him inconsistent and vulnerable to bad luck. He’d also been doing a lot of fighting lately, which meant he’d be tired and unlikely to last long against Sonny’s jab.
ABC had an opening on its Wide World of Sports in a few weeks. Would he do it? Sure, Sonny said, and the wheels were set in motion. The Vegas oddsmakers liked Sonny so much that they had him as high as a 14‒5 favorite, and the crowd in the 2,300-seat showroom of the International on December 6, 1969, was just as enthusiastic as it gave him a standing ovation. Scanning the ringside seats, Sonny saw Sammy Davis Jr. next to Ed Sullivan giving him two thumbs-up. Howard Cosell was there to make the call for ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
But Sonny’s high-stakes gambling friend, Lem Banker, had a queasy feeling about the fight. “He had a cold that morning, and Geraldine didn’t want him to go,” he’d recall. “The whole thing happened too quick.”
Martin prepared carefully, seeing all the things that Liston’s camp took as negatives as positives. Sure, the ten pounds he gave away made him susceptible to Liston’s jab, but it also made him quicker, and all the fighting he’d been doing gave him the confidence to know he could get knocked down and get up, especially since Sonny didn’t have the punching power he once had.
On the day of the fight, it was a lean and confident-looking Sonny who walked into the showroom of the International, bobbing in his bathrobe as his hometown crowd cheered, “Come on, Sonny!” and “Looking good, champ.” Martin, who had a scruffier look with his bushy black mustache and long sideburns, was more subdued. His plan was to stay out of Liston’s reach as much as possible, then pull inside. But in the early rounds the fight went pretty much the way the oddsmakers expected. Sonny used his left jab to dictate the pace, slowing Martin down just enough to knock him off his feet in the fourth with a sweeping left hook. But to Sonny’s surprise, Martin came back stronger, dancing faster and faster as the next rounds sped by. This was exactly the kind of fight Sadler didn’t want to have, and his concern grew as Martin started landing jabs, bloodying Sonny’s nose. By the start of the ninth round, Cosell sounded like he belonged on a police radio when he described the cut on Sonny’s nose as “a brutal, ugly sight. He’s virtually snorting blood.”
Seeing that Martin’s eyes were swollen, Sonny tried to close them with his jab. He pounded Martin three straight times. But instead of going down, Martin came back with a right cross, left hook, right cross combo that lifted the twenty-pound-heavier Liston off his feet. By the next morning Martin would wake up in the hospital with a detached retina that would end his career. But for the moment Sonny was the one who was out. By the time he opened his eyes, a ring doctor was standing over him with ammonia capsules.
It’s hard to know how much he was able to process while he tried to shake the blurriness out of his eyes. But he managed to be remarkably poised in his post-fight interview with Cosell. “Will you continue your career or is it over?” the broadcaster asked.
“Well, it’s hard to say,” he replied.
“It’ll be hard to go up the trail again.”
“Yes, it would be,” Sonny said, a weak smile playing across his lips. “I’ll have to see.”
As soon as he got home, Sonny threw down his things and walked quietly to his pool, where stared blankly ahead. He’d been in front on all three cards when he got knocked out: 37–34, 38–35, and 38–36. All he had to do was hang in a little longer. He was that close to getting that one more fight a boxer always wants, which in his case was a meeting with Joe Frazier. Now all anyone would remember was that he went out against a former sparring partner who would never fight again.
Geraldine had planned a post-fight party and it was too late to cancel it now. So Sonny stayed by the pool as guests filtered in to offer handshakes and conciliatory words. But as the evening wore on, she felt her husband’s mood darken. George Foreman would recall that when he arrived, Geraldine finally decided that she’d had enough of all the long faces and exploded in front of her guests: “What you guys gotta understand is that sometimes you lose. You can’t win them all. Nobody wins them all.”
Then she turned to the younger heavyweight and said something that she hoped everyone, especially Sonny, would take to heart.
“You hear that, George? You lose. Everybody loses. But you can’t just die!”
—
Nearly a year to the day that John Sleeper arrested Earl Cage in the operation that left Sonny narrowly avoiding being shot, the police lieutenant gathered his agents to tell them that they were heading into the sheriff’s department’s territory once again.
The men in the room looked at one another with a sense of adventure. Even in a town as colorful as Vegas, the sheriff of Clark County, Ralph Lamb, was in a league by himself. One of eleven children born to horse ranchers in the farming town of Alamo, the six-foot-five Lamb gravitated to police work early, while his older brother, Floyd, entered politics. He became a sheriff’s deputy at the age of twenty-one and worked there until he decided to open his own private detective agency. (His main client was Howard Hughes.) Six years later, when the incumbent sheriff retired, the thirty-one-year-old Mormon ran for the seat and was handily elected.
Combining a cowboy image with a knack for public relations, Lamb made an immediate impression on the city. He rousted the two-bit con men who lurked around the Greyhound station, making them think twice about tripping out-of-towners to steal their wallets and running other crude scams. He also made life miserable for mobsters who used Vegas to escape whatever cops were on their tails by enforcing an ordinance that required convicts to register as soon as they hit town. (It was that same ordinance that led Sonny to fill out the Convicted Persons Questionnaire when he arrived in Vegas in 1966.) As Gary Beckwith, a deputy who worked undercover for Lamb, would recall: “We had a blue binder book that had pictures of all the known career criminals and a short story on them and their associates. Whenever we saw somebody in that book, we found a way to take them to jail.”
Lamb’s power grew along with the Strip. Since it was unincorporated and lay outside the boundary of the Las Vegas PD, he was its top cop. And since he also sat on a commission that handed out liquor and gaming licenses, he influenced nearly every job there, too. When the Beatles arrived in 1964 to play the Convention Center, he demanded that they first make an appearance at his office to register as performers. After a street sweep nabbed seventy-four Hells Angels, Lamb made them get haircuts before he dismantled their bikes and released the bikers into the desert.
Sonny got his own taste of Lamb when he moved to town full-time in 1966. “Sonny lived out by the Stardust Golf Course, which was in county territory, and when he first came to town Ralph went out to visit him,” H. Lee Barnes, a veteran of the department, told me. “He said right up front, ‘Listen, you’ve beaten up a couple of cops in Denver. You’re not going to beat up any of my cops or my officers’—‘any of my boys’ is probably the way he put it—‘and if you do, you’re only one and I’ve got more than a hundred of them.’
“So one day I pull off Eastern onto Ottawa Drive, just doing regular patrolling, and I see Sonny has this pink Cadillac that’s stalled on the street. He can’t get it to start and he’s trying to push it. I get out and I help him push it and he doesn’t even look at me. So I just stood there staring at him and said, ‘Hey, asshole, you’re welcome.’ Honestly, he didn’t know what to do. And the reason I say that is because I don’t think he dared to do anything to any cop in this town, not after he had his conversation with Ralph Lamb. I mean, there were all sorts of things that floated around about the sheriff. But he was a stand-up guy when it came to taking care of that kind of business. He wasn’t going to tolerate anybody running roughshod over his people.”
Yet here came Sleeper, drawing a map on a chalkboard that zeroed in on a stately home in Paradise Palms that was squarely in the county sheriff’s jurisdiction. Its owner, Las Vegas socialite Ava Pittman, was moving major amounts of heroin, he told the men in the room, and he was going to dress one of them as a florist and give him a delivery van so they could get close. Once the lead agent got into the house, he’d announce that a raid was under way, and the rest could follow.
“Anyone have a problem?” Sleeper asked the group he had assembled.
The agents looked at one another. No one said a word.
As the daylight city was cranking to life on February 21, 1970, the florist van pulled up to 1568 Pawnee Drive and the undercover walked to the intercom with a bouquet in his hands. He knew he was being watched on closed-circuit TV and calmly buzzed.
“Who’s there?” a voice crackled through.
“Flowers for Ava,” he replied.
“Come around to the side door,” Ava Pittman said.
Pittman claimed to be a grandniece of Vail Pittman, the state’s Democratic governor from 1945 to 1950, and she served various charitable causes; but her house was built like a fortress, with iron bars on the windows and the shades pulled down. The deliveryman made his way to the side and looked over both his shoulders. Then, when the service door opened just a crack, he threw his shoulder against it to push his way inside. As his colleagues stormed in after him, the fake florist threw down a search warrant and announced, “This is a raid.”
Pittman stood helplessly with her mother as Sleeper’s men tore through the place, tossing bedrooms, closets, and spare rooms. After an hour’s worth of commotion, they ended up with sixty bags of 14.2 percent pure heroin—roughly three times street strength—a hundred methadone tablets, and a loaded M68 rifle that Pittman kept in her bedroom.
Lamb hit the roof when he heard about the raid. Who the hell was John Sleeper to show him up like that? While the Sun trumpeted the raid with the headline “Las Vegas Police Nab Narco Queen,” Lamb screamed at the police chief and mayor to get that son of a bitch under control. Before the police chief, Paul Wichter, could investigate, Sleeper poured fuel on the fire by holding an impromptu press conference in his office, where he stood over a table filled with the bindles of seized heroin. With reporters crowded around him, the buzz-cut cop accused Pittman of selling $33,000 worth of heroin to high school kids on a monthly basis. It took another week for Wichter to finally assert his power and demote Sleeper to a desk job in the detective’s bureau.
“Vegas Police Chief Ousts Narco Buster,” the Sun blared.
Sleeper’s demotion concerned the black community leaders, who viewed him as a critical ally. On the Monday after the police chief announced his discipline, a group of black businessmen descended on City Hall, not to demand equal protection or any major new initiative, but to beg for the littlest bit of attention from the cops. “The possibility of inviting capital in is nil,” a businessman named Bob Bailey complained. “We can’t even get a black person to open a business here and black people are not going to black businesses. They are afraid to.”
Bailey didn’t specifically blame heroin for the “troublemakers who don’t want to work at all.” But he didn’t have to. In most African-American quarters, it was quietly believed that the city’s Mormon elders were letting heroin finish what they’d started at the Moulin Rouge. Bailey ended his speech by saying, “We have one of the best law enforcement agencies in the country. But we just don’t get any benefit from it over here.”
Not surprisingly, Sleeper didn’t take his punishment quietly. On the contrary, he ratcheted up his war with the sheriff’s department, telling reporters that he felt duty-bound to roust Pittman because he’d learned she was giving protection money to Lamb’s deputies. Even by Sleeper’s eccentric standards, it was a remarkable statement. Not that it was implausible. Both police forces had corrupt elements. But Sleeper was going after the powerful sheriff where he knew it would hurt most: his law-and-order reputation.
“I can’t imagine getting demoted for arresting suspected dope peddlers who we think are supplying kids in our schools,” he announced. “But if that’s what the politicians in this town want, they can have it.”
What was only beginning to become clear was how far ahead the police lieutenant had planned. Even as some members of the city council were pushing for his ouster, he strode to a microphone on May 9 to announce that he was formally launching his bid to become the next sheriff of Clark County and replace Ralph Lamb. “I expect this campaign to be one of the most hard fought and controversial in Clark County,” he said.
Painting himself as the last honest cop in Vegas, the demoted lieutenant confided that he’d been subpoenaed by DA George Franklin Jr. to tell a grand jury what he knew about payoffs. But, he said, he feared the invitation was really a thinly veiled way to “find out what I have on them so they could lock it up forever.”
As performances went, it was bravura. The police lieutenant not only made himself out to be the last honest cop in Las Vegas—a role that Frank Serpico would soon play to even greater effect in New York—but also cast a net of suspicion over almost everyone in Las Vegas politics. Suddenly mothers with placards started materializing on the steps of City Hall, shouting, “We need Sleeper.” Two deputies would be hauled into the grand jury and questioned at length about his claims.
Sonny had to be worried about these developments. Since he lived in the same neighborhood as Pittman, he would have followed the arrest closely, especially since the people of Paradise Palms weren’t used to seeing SWAT teams swarming across their streets. It was the talk of the neighborhood.
And there was the startling involvement of the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The feds were supposed to be paying attention to things like casino skimming and mob hits, not a beautician who sold cocaine between romantic trysts or a charity doyen who specialized in selling heroin in high schools.
If the feds were going to start getting mixed up in cases like that, it represented a new and alarming escalation of the burgeoning drug war.