As he packed his trumpet for an out-of-town gig, Robert Chudnick was blunt with his son: “I don’t want you hanging around Sonny anymore.”
The arrest of Ava Pittman, so close to them in Paradise Palms, had unnerved the musician in a way that his son, Mark, wasn’t used to seeing. The old man was laying off big burglaries, cutting off deadbeat customers, and refusing to take new ones. He even gave his crew a little extra to make sure they remained loyal. The sheriff’s race, with its emphasis on heroin and property crime, was leading both candidates to deploy all their resources in a contest to see who could get the biggest preelection headlines. With so much manpower on the street, all it would take was one mistake to bring them down. And, increasingly, Chudnick had come to believe that Sonny was the one who was going to make that mistake.
When Chudnick visited Sonny and saw a car parked nearby that he thought could be a cop doing surveillance, he stopped knocking on the door. Instead he let himself be seen visiting an acquaintance down the street and then secretly circled back to 2058 Ottawa Drive through the golf course. But even that had become too risky. A member of his crew had recently dealt to someone who OD’d and the sheriff’s department narcotics unit was nosing around.
“I don’t need Sonny’s problems, okay?” he said, putting his trumpet into its velvet-lined case. “If he calls while I’m away, just hang up. Tell him I’ll be in touch. Tell him anything. I just don’t want him coming over here. There’s no telling if we’re being watched or he’s being watched. Maybe we’re all being watched. Just keep him fucking away, okay?”
Mark nodded obediently. The last time he’d seen Sonny was when they’d ended up in that bar on the North Side and Mark waited in the car for an hour, making him late getting home with the day’s collection. His dad was still furious about that. It was a miracle Mark didn’t get robbed.
“I’ll be back in a week, two tops,” he said. “Just lay low and things will be fine.” The teen followed his father’s advice, and for a few days things did stay quiet. But once Sonny heard that Red was out of town, he showed up on the Rodneys’ doorstep.
“It had been a while. I was kind of glad to see him,” Mark would tell me. But then he realized that Sonny was sweating and shaking and he wasn’t looking at the man he knew. He was looking at something at once stranger and more familiar: a junkie who was jonesing.
“Where’s your dad?” Sonny snarled. “Is he hiding from me?”
“No, no, man, he’s out of town,” Mark said, taking a very small step back.
He could see that Sonny’s pupils were tiny, as if there was just one thing they could focus on, and he tried to distract his former sidekick with small talk. “So how’s the fighting, man? Got anything lined up?” But Sonny wasn’t interested in being distracted. He filled the doorway with his enormous frame and growled, “You got something for me?”
Mark kept a small stash for his personal use in a dresser in his room, apart from the larger quantities that his dad had buried in the backyard, and he fetched it for Sonny, who by then had moved into the living room. Sonny grabbed it and put his forefinger inside the baggie, letting a taste touch his lips. It was real, all right. But there was so little that he shoved it in his pocket and started tearing through the house, looking for more. He looked in Chudnick’s bedroom, the basement, the kitchen. Still not convinced that Mark was telling the truth, he returned to the living room and backed the teen up against the wall. “Where’s your dad?” he said again, this time expecting a different answer.
It was a threshold moment, the kind you either came back from or didn’t. The two were alone. Plenty of bad stuff could happen at that hour of the night. But all at once something seemed to snap in Sonny’s mind, as if he’d adjusted a mental kink. Maybe it was the fear on Mark’s face. “I’ll tell you what, I was plenty scared,” he told me. Or maybe, just maybe, Sonny wasn’t so far gone that he was willing to threaten a kid.
Whatever the reason, Sonny collected himself, muttered thanks for the heroin, and left without saying another word.
—
If there was one person who might have been able to save Sonny from himself, it was his friend and neighbor Joe Louis.
After Sonny knocked out Patterson in 1962, he called Louis “the greatest champion of all and my idol. He did everything I want to do. I intend to follow the example he set.”
That turned out to be harder than Sonny imagined, mainly because Joe just seemed to be naturally better at everything. To start, Joe was outwardly friendlier. When a tourist approached him in the lobby of Caesars Palace to ask for an autograph, thinking he was the retired Brooklyn Dodgers star Don Newcombe, Joe quietly asked a friend how to spell the pitcher’s name. Then he signed it without ever correcting the fan.
By contrast, when a middle-aged woman approached Sonny while he was playing blackjack at the Frontier and said, “You’re Sonny Liston!” he replied, “Yeah, I knew that.” The Esquire writer Bruce Jay Friedman captured Louis and Liston’s dynamic perfectly when he watched the two play craps together and start arguing over which one should throw. Louis settled it by grabbing the dice and saying, “I’m the idol around here.”
The men understood each other with the fine antennae of country boys who, at the heights of their careers, were still regarded as dumb black men. A Washington Post columnist once quoted Louis talking as if he were Uncle Remus, saying, “Ah din’t uh pick’in no spots. I sure do wish I could g’home and tak a leetle nap. I ain’t had no sleep in almost an hour now . . .”
They also had similar appetites for gambling and women, although Louis’s tastes ran to the higher end. He lent his name to everything from soda cans to cigarettes so he could pay off the debts he’d run up putting a thousand bucks on holes of golf and bedding starlets. (He was rumored to have had affairs with Eartha Kitt and Jayne Mansfield.)
The relationship wasn’t entirely one-sided. When Joe was losing his shirt promoting fights in Los Angeles early in the sixties, Sonny took time out of his schedule to make an appearance, helping to put a few thousand bucks in his friend’s pocket. And when he went to Vegas in 1963 to get ready for his rematch with Patterson, he gave Louis a job in his entourage.
But there was no escaping the fact that Joe had done what Sonny couldn’t, which was let white America adopt him as its own. Seventy million people listened on the radio when Louis met Max Schmeling for the second time in 1938 and battered the German so mercilessly that his cornerman finally threw a white towel into the ring. Writing in The New York Times, James P. Dawson observed: “It was as if [Schmeling] had been poleaxed. His brain was awhirl, his body, his head, his jaws ached and pained, his senses were numbed from that furious, paralyzing punching he had taken even in the short space of time the battle consumed.”
Black America was delirious with the win. “There never was a Harlem like the Harlem of Wednesday night,” wrote the Daily Worker. “Take a dozen Harlem Christmases, a score of New Year’s Eves, a bushel of July 4ths and maybe—yes, maybe—you get a faint glimpse of the idea.” In later years, veterans of all colors treated Louis with reverence, often remembering the day they signed up to serve and saw the poster of him at the U.S. Army recruitment center, dressed in uniform and lunging forward with a bayonet. That was the image they clung to, and not the one that Red Smith chronicled in the New York Herald Tribune after Louis’s last fight in 1951 with Rocky Marciano, when he wrote: “Memory retains scores of pictures of Joe in his dressing room, always sitting up, relaxed, answering questions in his slow, thoughtful way. This time only, he was down.”
If Smith could have traveled ahead to Las Vegas in 1969 and seen the life Louis made with his third wife, Martha, a successful Los Angeles trial attorney, he would have seen a man who’d discovered the pleasures of buffets, jogging suits, and the desert air. “I hear people say how the casinos took advantage of Joe, but that’s bullshit,” his close friend, Gene Kilroy, told me in an interview. “He could take two people or twenty people out to dinner without paying a dime. He loved it. Vegas was a new world for him.”
Heroin was just another thing that Joe did longer and better than Sonny. He started using in the early sixties and for most of the decade managed to hide his habit behind that big, gregarious smile. But it became harder to pretend everything was just fine. Martha noticed the change in late 1969, when Joe began acting strangely in their apartment in Los Angeles. First he started taping up the electrical outlets because he was afraid that poison gas might leak in. Then he moved their bed to the dresser and built a cocoon out of furniture and window shades so he could climb inside it fully clothed in the hopes of curing his insomnia. As Martha told Joe’s biographer Barney Nagler, “It was the most pathetic thing in the world.”
She hoped whatever it was would stop on its own. But it didn’t. In January 1970 they went to Tuscaloosa to see Jesse Owens, another good friend, get inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. When Owens stopped by their room, he found Joe detaching an air-conditioning vent and mumbling, “I ain’t scared. I’m Joe Louis, heavyweight champion of the world.” The next month, while the couple was in Miami on business, Martha caught her husband smearing mayonnaise into imaginary cracks in the smooth ceiling, trying to stop the gas that he was sure was leaking through.
And then there was the sleep. Joe couldn’t fall asleep at night because he was convinced that a sinister character he called “The Texan” was following him. By late spring, his mind was so bent that Martha begged him to see a doctor they knew in Detroit. But as Louis would later write in his autobiography, My Life:
He told me I should go to a hospital. At first I agreed with him and said yes. Then I thought to myself, if I agree with him, I’m saying something’s wrong with me. So I cut out of there. . . . I went to all the secret places I knew about in the country. . . . What was wrong with me? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I wanted to keep moving. I stayed in some odd places with people who didn’t want any publicity so nothing got in the papers and I kept hidden from America for a while.
Ash Resnick, for one, thought Louis was just being eccentric. “Joe was harmless, even though he had these hallucinations,” Resnick told Nagler. “He wasn’t hurting anybody. He was like a kid. He wanted to tape up the ventilators in his room and stuff up the cracks and open the windows wide, so what? He’d say don’t turn on the television set, there’s poison gas coming out of there. Those were things within himself.”
Only when Louis’s advancing dementia started to interfere with his work at Caesars did Resnick seem to take notice. “I got very much concerned one day in Las Vegas,” he went on. “A friend of Joe’s was playing blackjack. This guy was playing high stakes and Joe just stood near him, looking over his shoulder. Now, there was this other fellow standing behind Joe, looking at the game, an absolute stranger. All of a sudden Joe turned around to the guy and says, ‘I know you’re following me. You’d better get out of here. I’ll knock you right on your ass.’ . . . I really got concerned, you know, because I felt, God forbid, if any violence showed up in Joe, it was time to do something.”
It’s hard to overstate how dependent the two heavyweight champions were on each other. Lem Banker recalls them coming to his Sahara Health Club for long saunas and steams and laughing like high school kids. They went to fights together, shot craps together, ate sumptuous meals at Caesars’ Bacchanal Room like Greek gods together.
But by late April of 1970 that friendship was breaking apart. Martha became so convinced that Joe needed professional help that she got him to take a spring vacation at their place in Denver without mentioning that she’d found out that Colorado allowed for involuntary commitments, and Joe’s son, who was going to school there, agreed to sign the papers to commit him. On May 1 three sheriff’s deputies and a probate officer showed up to the Louis home and patiently explained to Joe that they were there to take him to the Colorado Psychiatric Hospital for his own good. In his then state of mind, he concluded his only option was to reach for the phone and call Richard Nixon to let the president know he was about to be kidnapped. “Our biggest problem was convincing him that he needed help,” Martha told reporters when word of his hospitalization leaked out. “And I’m still not sure he realizes that.”
If Sonny needed to be reminded how deeply the public cared for Joe—and how little it seemed to care about Sonny himself—it came in August, when Motown’s Berry Gordy threw an all-star televised “Salute to the Champ, Joe Louis” program at the Cobo Arena in Detroit to help the Louises pay their medical bills. Joe was supposed to make the trip but got scared at the last minute and stayed home, leaving Martha and his kids to sit front and center for a lineup that included the Jackson 5, B.B. King, and the Four Tops. Gordy asked Sonny to make a cameo with Redd Foxx, who was still playing Vegas, and when their time came they walked on with a canned shtick in which Foxx quipped that they were “a fox and a bear on the same show for the first time.”
But even there, in Joe’s darkest public hour, Sonny still was made to feel like the lesser man. Ebony magazine devoted a five-page pictorial to the benefit that was accompanied by a story about the so-called heavyweight jinx. It said, “When one looks at the heavyweight champions who followed Louis, it would not be difficult to become convinced that there must be a jinx on any black man who holds the title. . . . Sonny Liston, well into his 40s, is still trying to make it as a boxer.”
Still trying to make it? Sonny must have thrown the magazine across the room when he saw that. His record was 50–4 and he’d been part of the four biggest title fights of the decade. He didn’t need false praise. But shit, after all of that, was a little respect from those “educated Negroes” who were supposed to be his own people too much to ask?
—
John Sutton drove into Las Vegas from Los Angeles in a two-tone blue Buick Electra 225 with mirrored rims and a horn that blared “La Cucaracha.” It was one of the sweetest cars he’d ever laid his eyes on, and from the moment Sutton saw it at the LAPD’s impound lot, he knew they were made for each other.
It was standard procedure for a visiting agent to announce himself to local law enforcement, but in this case Sutton went it alone because he wasn’t sure who to trust. A recent front-page story in the Sun announced, “Top-level federal authorities have decided Las Vegas isn’t any place to investigate organized crime.” In ripping the curtain off a botched grand jury investigation of mobsters, the paper quoted a federal source as saying that clashes among the local cops, judges, strike force agents, and U.S. Department of Justice officials had paralyzed law enforcement. “We could not get a case through the courts in Las Vegas,” the source told the paper.
Well, Sutton figured, if the shit hit the fan, he could always call the BNDD’s station chief in Las Vegas to bail him out. But he wasn’t planning on letting that happen. Notwithstanding the flamboyant ride, he wanted to keep a low profile, and he chose a hotel, the Villa Roma, that was a few blocks off the Strip and just far away enough from the action to suit his purposes.
Once he unpacked his things, he opened a briefcase full of files. There were assorted locations he’d been asked to check out and a couple of sources to meet. The bureau was also interested in a network of blackjack dealers who were taking orders at the big hotels and passing them to couriers for door-to-door delivery. But most of all he looked forward to making headway with the Sonny Liston file that had been sitting on his desk for weeks.
Looking into the mirror, he checked out his appearance. He’d bought himself an ankle-length leather coat, a wide-brimmed hat, and fake diamond rings that drew attention to his almost impossibly thick fingers. Satisfied that he looked “fly,” he set off to try his luck on the Strip.
First he tried Caesars. Then he hit the Sahara. Finally he wound his way to the Riviera. At each stop he’d get a drink, nurse it, and then case the casino before he settled on a blackjack dealer to approach. These were cold hits, meaning nothing had been set up, so he played up his act, sidling up to the tables as a gangster and striking up conversations. At some point he’d slip in a casual drug reference, something along the lines of “Who’s got it?” that was supposed to mean “Who’s holding dope?”
He hadn’t had any luck by the end of the last evening, when his last stop was the Union Plaza hotel, a kitschy landmark that overlooked the heart of Glitter Gulch. Sutton did his usual act, but this time he felt a pair of eyes following him as he canvassed the room. Deciding to cut his losses, he left the hotel and bundled himself back into the Electra, when he saw a guy jotting down his license plate.
Sutton kept his cool and drove back to his hotel, so exhausted that he didn’t even remember climbing into bed before he was asleep. He was awoken at dawn by the room phone. Who the hell? Nobody had his number.
He grabbed for the receiver to hear the voice of the BNDD’s station chief in Vegas, Dick Robinson. “You’ve been made,” Robinson said.
Sutton cleared the cobwebs from his head to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Then he remembered the guy from the night before. The one scribbling the number of his license plate.
“Who?” he asked.
“One of ours,” Robinson replied. “You’re lucky.”
A BNDD informant had noticed him at the Riviera and figured he was a new player in town.
The agents managed to have a laugh over the episode. But it meant that Sutton would have to cut his work short on this trip. If one informant had made him, there was a pretty good chance another one might have as well.
Sutton would regroup and make a run at Sonny on his next visit, when he’d be sure to be less conspicuous.