These days the Moulin Rouge on West Bonanza is the same overgrown magnet for vagrants and junkies that it was when Sonny wheeled by it in his pink Cadillac. A fire ravaged the hotel about ten years ago and the city has been at war with preservationists to knock it down ever since. In 2014 a New York investment group bought the hotel site as part of a bid to open a $250 million complex that it hopes can draw traffic from new development downtown. But the chasm between that hope and reality is still stark. To keep their gaming license, the owners had to put a trailer on the fifteen-acre site and let a few blue-haired ladies pull slot machines for an afternoon.
Jackson Street, too, seems stuck in its worst days. A Nation of Islam mosque stands stoic sentry over what used to be a rollicking world of music and unhinged desire. Out front, bow-tied men offer grim-faced warnings to anyone who lingers along the vacant boulevard, which is mostly marked by bail bondsmen and boarded windows.
A mile away, Tony Hsieh, the San Francisco‒bred billionaire who wasn’t even born when Howard Hughes was buying up the Strip, is trying to create an open-air city out of the abandoned buildings downtown that once served as a glorious gateway to Glitter Gulch. He’s pouring $350 million into high-rise apartments and tech-friendly office space using Silicon Valley lingo to talk in terms of a start-up city. As one executive blogged: “Imagine if Walt Disney ran Silicon Valley but everyone lived on the set of Cheers.”
In this atmosphere, the only history that Las Vegas has room for is the kind that fits under polished glass and recessed lighting. The Mob Museum, which opened in 2012 in the old federal courthouse on Stewart Avenue, curates a century of homicides into exhibits that are ready-made for school outings and, remarkably, weddings. (“The Mob Museum is Las Vegas’ most arresting venue,” its website boasts in a section dedicated to event planning.) Not far away, the open-air Neon Museum allows visitors to walk through a graveyard of old hotel marquees, including the one for the Moulin Rouge. On one visit, New York Times architecture critic Edward Rothstein remarked: “You want stardust? Here it is.”
Amid all this processed nostalgia, no one really wants to remember Sonny Liston the way he was in his last days: strung-out on junk and pouring drugs into the bloodstream of a sick neighborhood.
In a feel-good ceremony at Caesars Palace in August 2014, the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame inducted Liston into its “Home of Champions” with a sepia-toned slideshow and loving testimonial from a social services worker from Philadelphia who has claimed in interviews to be one of Sonny’s illegitimate children. When I talked to William Wingate, he remembered Sonny as a gentle giant who used to bring him ice cream and take him for rides in his Cadillac. “He’d come by and hold me and say, ‘Are you all right? Are you okay?’” Wingate told me. “It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that my mother told me that was my father.”
The temptation is to turn all of this into a requiem for a heavyweight—a sad story about a champion who didn’t know what to do when the cheering stopped. And it’s true that, after a lifetime of beatings from the press and the public, Sonny was profoundly insecure. He was so insecure, in fact, that he fell back on the only thing besides boxing that he’d ever done well: crime. But let’s be honest. He also got plenty of breaks along the way. As much as he was harassed early in his career, he was coddled later in it. The Vegas cops cut him more breaks than he had a right to expect. The only thing they didn’t give him was a homicide investigation.
Craig Lovato, who found the set of works in Sonny’s bathroom, discounts the idea that he was killed in a violent struggle. “Finding the kit right there in the bathroom, the only thing that made sense to me was that he shot up, stumbled backward, and collapsed there on the bed with his feet still on the ground,” he says. Still, the veteran agent acknowledges that an accidental overdose might not be the whole story. “If it was foul play, the people who sold it to him knew it was a hot shot,” he told me.
Others are less equivocal. “Knowing Las Vegas like I did, and knowing Sonny’s history, I always felt he was murdered,” says Bill Alden, the BNDD agent who was part of the Earl Cage raid and later rose to the very top of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “There was just too much there.”
It’s hard not to keep returning to the image of Geraldine throwing herself at her husband’s casket and asking, “Can you tell me what happened to you, Sonny?” Whatever she found in their home hadn’t satisfied her skepticism about the manner of his death. An accidental overdose? It was too pat, too convenient.
Obviously, the first step should have been finding out where Sonny got the heroin that he injected. But thanks to the conclusion of the Clark County coroner, Mark Herman, investigators never took that step.
Herman wasn’t an expert in pulmonary disease. Far from it. But after studying toxicology reports, he concluded that Sonny had died from a rare malady called Syndrome X, in which someone with perfectly healthy large blood vessels has small ones that are inflamed. As the writer Nick Tosches has noted, women and diabetic men tend to get it most. It was almost unheard-of for Syndrome X to be diagnosed in a non-diabetic adult male like Sonny.
It’s worth noting that Herman had been in his job only a few months when he was asked to render the conclusion. And while not a political employee, he wasn’t exactly immune to politics, either; Herman, formerly an assistant health officer, stepped into the job when the county’s top health officer, Otto Ravenholt, resigned to run for Congress in the 1970 elections.
Yet Herman forged ahead with his finding, dismissing the heroin metabolites that were found in Sonny’s blood in favor of the more exotic diagnosis. He focused on an “an increase in fibrous tissue” in the small blood vessels going to Sonny’s heart and surmised they caused a shortage of oxygen to the heart, or a “probable myocardial anoxia,” which triggered his lungs to fill up with fluid. Lung congestion was ruled as the “immediate cause of death.”
At least one enterprising cop, however, wasn’t so sure. On January 20—the day after Herman’s report was released—a lieutenant who worked on the sheriff’s department homicide squad paid a visit to the doctor who treated Sonny after his Thanksgiving Day accident. According to a copy of his report, he asked the doctor, Richard Browning, what he thought of the coroner’s conclusion. Could Sonny have died of natural causes “without some other contributing factors”?
Browning explained that the EKG tests he did on Sonny showed that the massive impact of the crash had caused “a contusion to his heart.” His patient had shown such “considerable improvement” during his hospitalization, however, that Browning seriously doubted that contusion could have been the sole reason for Sonny’s death. If Sonny’s “improvement had continued at the expected rate, [his] heart would have been in a condition not to have resulted in death without other contributing factors,” Browning told the lieutenant.
Nonetheless, Herman’s ruling stood. And with that bit of postmortem misdirection, the acting coroner single-handedly ended the prospect that Sonny’s death would be investigated as a homicide.
There’s no way now, more than four decades later, to trace that heroin back to its source. But instead of asking who had access to the heroin that killed Sonny, the better question is: Who had access to Sonny?
—
Maybe Gandy is onto something with Earl Cage. He had a vicious temper, a long memory, and an intense hatred for snitches, which would have led him to keep returning to the evening in February 1969 when everyone in his home was arrested by the feds and hauled off to jail. Everyone except Sonny.
Gandy argues that singular act signed Liston’s death warrant. “I was careless once and one of my snitches got killed as a result of it,” he told me. “So I’ve always been very guarded about how I act with them. I think Earl Cage put out the contract. But John Sleeper was the one who got him killed. See, Sleeper was a great guy, real nice, but he was in way over his head. You can’t do what he did. You can’t let just one guy walk out. Everybody’s got to go to jail.”
A story that appeared in the Sun in the fall of 1970 plays into this revenge theory. It involved a drug trafficker who’d been convicted of slaying a police informant and given the death penalty. As it happened, the inmate was innocent and got released after the real killer confessed. But the underlying murder of an informant sent chills through the Vegas underground. As a narcotics officer told the Sun, “The murder made it very difficult to get informants to work for us in West Las Vegas.”
Of course, by heaping suspicion on the beautician, Gandy conveniently takes it off himself. There’s also the issue of timing: the raid occurred nearly two years before Sonny’s body was found. That’s a long time between insult and injury. Why would Cage have waited two years to go after Sonny?
“See, that’s how they get you,” Gandy explained coolly. “They always wait a little while so there’s no suspicion.”
—
Robert “Red Rodney” Chudnick, the criminal trumpeter, was one of the small handful of people who could have gotten in to see Liston.
True, he’d recently been staying away. With Ava Pittman on trial and the federal BNDD raising its profile, he feared that Sonny might make the kind of mistake that could send them both to prison. Despite all that the men had been through, it wouldn’t have taken much for Chudnick to drop by and give the junkie his final fix.
A couple of things, specifically, raise Chudnick’s profile as a suspect. According to Mark Rodney, one of his dad’s crew members had recently sold drugs to a client who overdosed. That suggests he had some pretty powerful heroin on hand. The bandleader also had a way of sneaking in and out of Sonny’s house unnoticed. As Mark remembers, he’d visit a neighbor who lived down the street, go out the rear door, and snake along the golf course until he got to Sonny’s home unseen.
Red, according to his son, was unemotional when he heard that Sonny had passed. He crinkled his face and said, “I told you the idiot would kill himself.” He seemed more upset about the two men in suits who visited the house soon after. Mark assumed they were cops. “They asked me for my dad and stuck their feet in the door so I couldn’t close it,” he recalled. “When I went to get my dad, he gave me all the drugs we had in the house and told me to bury them in the backyard.”
If that heroin had been tested, what would it have shown? Chudnick wasn’t going to give the cops a chance to find out. Rather than risk answering their questions, he left town for a while, telling his son to get rid of whatever they had left. Eventually, Chudnick suffered a stroke that left him unable to play. But teetering on bankruptcy, he was able to turn his life around in the early 1980s by rediscovering jazz, and he had a late-life renaissance a decade later as a teacher at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Mark, who’d found his own fame on the West Coast in the early seventies as half of the light-rock duo Batdorf & Rodney, remembers having dinner with his father shortly before he died in May 1994. Over the meal, his father leaned in and told him, “If things back then were like they are today, we would have been goners.”
—
Ash Resnick was Sonny’s gateway to the good life. From the moment he waited for Sonny on the tarmac of McCarran Field in his Thunderbird in 1962, he was the player, the fixer, the hookup. Not only did Resnick help Sonny give up his title in Miami, he may have convinced him not to win it back in Lewiston. Sonny thought that in return he was going to get a cut of Ali’s future earnings—a payday that was about to pay off in the winter of 1970. But no one else seemed to agree.
Irwin Peters alone popularized the idea that Resnick was involved in Sonny’s demise.
Even the FBI, which was willing to listen to the conspiratorial ravings of a manic-depressive swindler like Barnett Magids, found the idea too preposterous to open a case file on it.
In fact, Resnick’s defenders think it’s highly improbable that he ever would have met someone like Peters in the fragmented social orbit of Las Vegas. Resnick was at the top of the most fashionable resort on the Strip. He wined and dined his friends in the Bacchanal Room and dropped tens of thousands of dollars on craps. Peters was a twitchy alcoholic who worked at a transmission shop.
Still, Peters was able to weave the story about being in the middle of a war between Resnick and Liston in the waning days of 1970, when, he said, Sonny needed money to support his heroin habit and was badgering Resnick to give it to him. Peters claimed that when Resnick refused, Sonny hired Peters and Gandy to shoot up Resnick’s car as he left Caesars one night. “Talk about a scared mutherfucker,” Peters told Martin Dardis. And he was able to drag Gandy into the middle of it. According to the transcript of his interview with Dardis, he claimed Gandy was the cop who fired the shots into Resnick’s Lincoln when he was stopped at the traffic light.
Gandy emphatically denies being the shooter, and denies the next chapter in Peters’s story: that Resnick called them to a meeting in the parking lot of Caesars to hire them himself with this suggestion: “As heavy as Sonny is using right now, it would be easy to overdose him.” Sliding toward me, Gandy said, “The only people I’ve ever killed in my life were in Vietnam and I’m still paying for them.”
Give Peters credit. As implausible as his story might be, he had an uncanny ability to get people to listen to it, not least because he was shrewd enough to make it sound familiar. Take the part about him being in the backseat of Gandy’s car when they shot up Resnick’s Ford LTD. That seems to be appropriated from a 1974 story in which an unidentified assailant opened fire on Resnick’s Ford with a .38; not long afterward Resnick found sticks of dynamite under his car. As Frank Sinatra once joked, “Ash said he’d lend me his car the other day, so I went out and rented one.”
Resnick also had reason to be concerned about Sonny’s reckless behavior. The FBI was crawling all over his casino, and the $2 million it seized from the secret deposit boxes of top executives was just the beginning. An FBI memo from the period called Caesars “a front for some of the most notorious fixes and swindles in the history of sport” and concluded about Resnick: “To break AR would bust the entire place open and flush out the last of the mob cancer. He is vulnerable as there are too many weak links.”
If Resnick had even a hint that Sonny was the subject of a federal drug investigation, or that he was hedging his bets as a part-time informant for the Las Vegas PD, he might have concluded that Sonny was one of those weak links.
It’s a long way from that to surmising that Resnick commissioned a hit. But it’s not so long as some would suggest. He knew how to play the odds. At a minimum, Resnick might have pulled his protection of Sonny, freeing someone else to do the job.
—
After my long interview with Gandy, I decided that the man was impossible not to like. But as I said good-bye to him and walked into the fading Las Vegas afternoon, I also had to remind myself that dead bodies had a way of collecting around him.
In late 1970, Gandy was a hero cop who by his own admission had come back from Vietnam so mentally scarred that the only way he could cope was by doing suicide runs into the worst drug precincts of Las Vegas. He took chances no one else would take. He lived among junkies. And he had access to the strongest smack on the street.
During the most self-destructive period of his life, he turned to crime, only to get turned in by the otherwise irredeemable Peters. “If I’d never started doing drugs, I wouldn’t have ever got caught and then I’d probably still be a thief,” he told me. “The best thing that ever happened to me was getting caught.”
Gandy has a gift for putting people at ease and a belly laugh that goes on and on. Best of all, he can laugh at himself, which is an endearing trait. Yet between the belly laughs come remarks that stop you cold. Like when he says he doesn’t answer his phone because that’s “kept me alive all these years.” Or when he wonders why people were ever scared of him and then quotes a friend as saying, “Because you wanted them to be afraid of you, Larry. You were scary.”
Gandy also speaks in the kind post-traumatic stress group lingo that helps people distance themselves from their pasts. But there’s no unseeing what he’s seen. Like a small knot of other cops who try not to look back, he was a witness to an era when Las Vegas was torn apart by race, heroin, and corruption on its police force. It’s the same world that Sonny lived in, which is why Peters’s allegations about Gandy hover over the Liston case.
It’s not beyond belief that Peters and Gandy stole heroin out of the leaky evidence room at LVPD headquarters, or that they sold it to Sonny. Gandy even admits to being a drug dealer. It’s just a question of when he started. Did he wait until the mid-seventies, when he left police work in disgust? Or did he begin earlier than that? Maybe five or ten years earlier?
Gandy, of course, insists he was always a clean cop. And he claims to have met Sonny only once, in a chance encounter outside Friendly Liquor Store, and that he never sold him heroin. He also has an alibi for the period when Sonny died: he said he was with his partner on the LVPD, Joe Crocetti.
Crocetti confirmed that they were on one of their weeklong benders when they learned that Sonny was dead. “We heard a call for narcotics detectives to come to Ottawa Drive,” Crocetti told me. “I stayed in the kitchen with a couple of other detectives while Larry walked in the bedroom. The whole thing lasted five minutes and we just went on our merry way.” Lapsing into mockery, he added: “If Larry [killed Liston], he did it while he was with me and two hookers, and we had a big party while we were doing it.”
In the realm of airtight alibis, being on a weeklong acid trip with a hooker in a dingy motel isn’t exactly Perry Mason material—especially coming from a witness who admits he was once able to “smoke my weight in weed.”
But I would have felt more comfortable about it if Gandy hadn’t added his own curious detail: After he left Liston’s home on January 5, 1971, he visited Irwin Peters. “I told him how horrible it was seeing that body,” he confided. “You know, when it’s somebody you’ve admired over the years, it’s pretty traumatizing.”
I found it hard to believe that, with all he’d seen, looking at the body of a dead heavyweight would be traumatizing. The man had chased a heroin dealer to his death, killed at close range, and done enough blow to bend himself backward. Seeing Sonny’s bubbling body during a hooker-and-weed bender should have just been another day at the office. But even more disconcerting was that he felt the need to tell Peters about it. Maybe it was as innocent as he said. Maybe he just casually mentioned it to his snitch and Peters blew it out of proportion by doing what con men do: weaving a little strand of truth into a big lie in an effort to set Gandy up for a fall. But the little details weren’t adding up.
—
There’s one last piece of the puzzle that’s never been adequately explained. It’s a strange story that appeared in the Sun on the day after Sonny was discovered: “Narco Agent Last Person Known to Have Seen Sonny Liston Alive.” The story read:
The last person known to see Sonny Liston alive was an undercover narcotics agent. Sheriff’s detectives said yesterday Liston, known as the “bad man” of professional boxing, was visited at his home Dec. 30 by the agent. They refused to divulge the nature or reason for his visit but did say Liston was apparently in good health at that time.
I’d come up empty trying to find the mysterious visitor on my own. Dick Robinson, the BNDD agent, said it wasn’t him, just as his two colleagues from the era, Bill Alden and John Sutton, did. Karl Albright, a sheriff’s sergeant who worked closely with them, said he hadn’t been near the place, as did Gary Beckwith, who worked under Albright in those days. Beckwith said he hadn’t heard of anyone in his department who had.
“I can tell you this,” Crocetti told me when I showed him the story, which he said he’d never seen. “If somebody visited him before his death, it wasn’t me or Larry, because we were busy. We were busy. Honest to God.”
My personal choice for the mysterious visitor is John Sleeper, who died in 2004 at the age of seventy-seven. Once he’d risked everything on his ill-conceived campaign for sheriff, Sleeper couldn’t have protected Sonny from a parking ticket. But he still had his ear to the ground. Maybe he heard something that made him think Sonny was in danger. Maybe it was bad enough that he felt he had to come to Sonny’s house to warn him in person. “Sonny, I can’t help you anymore, but you have got to watch out for . . .”
When I ran that idea by Crocetti, he waved it off. He was so eager to implicate Irwin Peters that he argued, “I don’t believe it could have been Sleeper. It sounds like Peters was the one. He was the one that could get in there to visit Liston. If Liston wanted heroin he could have gotten it from Peters, who wouldn’t have had qualms about killing anybody. He could have gone to the guy [and said], ‘Hey, look, I’ve got this great dope,’ and then overdosed him. How’s that for a fucking story?”
Pretty good. But maybe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Sleeper knew Peters from the snitch’s work as an informant for the LVPD. Maybe he’d heard something about Peters taking a contract that he felt he needed to share.
It’s just a theory. But it would tie together some loose ends. Irwin Peters takes a contract to kill Sonny by giving him some pure-grade smack. Maybe the contract came from Earl Cage. Maybe it came from Ash Resnick. Who knows? But just before Peters can pull it off, John Sleeper, in a final act of fidelity, comes to Sonny’s house to warn him. “Sonny, I can’t help you anymore, but you have got to watch out for . . . Irwin Peters.”
—
In the end, Irwin Peters tried and failed to hang Sonny’s death around the neck of Larry Gandy. But he wasn’t crazy. As a creature of his city, he understood how deals got made, debts got paid, and lives got taken. His story may have suffered from having an implausible ending. But it’s foolish to dismiss its period-piece details: the cops who were on the take; the judges who were on coke; the casino bosses who dealt drugs as well as cards; and the fading fighter who couldn’t see what everyone else in Vegas did—a problem who needed to go into the ground.
All these years later, the immediate cause of Sonny’s death seems plain enough: he shot himself up in his bathroom, stumbled backward in his underwear, and collapsed on his bed. But it’s what happened afterward that turned a seemingly accidental overdose into something suspicious. Over the next week, as methane was building up in his body and his skin was beginning to bubble, no one seemed concerned enough about the champ’s disappearance to investigate it or even apparently knock on his door. It was a sign of how thin his friendships were and how uncertainly he’d been clinging to life.
Of course, that was a sign of how Las Vegas operated in that era, too. Before cell phones and twenty-four-hour surveillance cameras, everyone disappeared at one time or another. Howard Hughes did it. Frank did it. Even a hero cop like Larry Gandy could vanish for days on end—shacked up with his dopehead partner and a couple of hookers in a dingy motel room—without raising questions.
What’s strange is that Geraldine would wait until five days after New Year’s to come home when she hadn’t been able to reach her husband. Maybe she just assumed Sonny was on one of his benders. But there’s also the lag between when she finally got home on January 5 and when she called the cops: that three-hour missing window when she drove to a friend’s home and then returned to her place. What did she find there?
A more thorough investigation would have pursued that, as well as where Sonny got the heroin he injected. The house could have been dusted for prints. The Westside could have been torn upside down, with experienced investigators rousting drug dealers and pressing their informants. But that was never done. No one ever seemed to identify or question Sonny’s junkie girlfriend, either.
Maybe the best question to be asked is: To what end? What would the cops have found if they went all CSI? A hero cop? A high-level casino exec? A famous trumpeter? No, that’s not the way Ralph Lamb ran his town. It was best to keep things quiet.
In 1977 prosecutors charged Lamb with taking payoffs to finance his lifestyle, and even though a friendly jury acquitted him, he was turned out of office, never to return. I approached him several times for an interview during my reporting for this book, getting as close to the front door of his home for a prearranged meeting. We’d talked briefly on the phone, and although he was ailing, he seemed willing. But as I stood on his threshold, a nurse who answered his door told me he wasn’t feeling up to it. At her suggestion I returned a few hours later, but nothing had changed. I called him for months afterward, to no avail. Lamb died in July 2015 without ever publicly shedding more light on the Liston case.
With so many other people from that era dying, the chance to find new evidence is rapidly shrinking. But there are still those who can help, including Rabbit Watkins, the former bellman who was close to Sonny.
On the day in May 2014 that I visited him at his home, Watkins was sitting in a living room that reeked of the gas oven, left open in the kitchen to heat the place. A situation comedy was playing full-blast on the television and he rocked back and forth in his recliner, chuckling out of sync with the jokes. The curtains were pulled tight.
Even though he knew what I’d come for, it took Watkins a while to warm to the subject, and me a while to understand what he was saying. He spoke quickly, giving up on most sentences halfway through. In an hourlong interview, however, there was one thing he was firm about: “That wasn’t no accidental overdose.”
I asked him why and he described meeting Jimmy Gay, the mortician whose job it was to get Sonny ready for his funeral. “He told me Sonny had a big hole in the back of his head,” Watkins said, his eyes suddenly narrow and clear. “Sonny was murdered.”
It may have been that Sonny’s body was so badly decomposed, someone who handled it dug a finger into his head. But maybe not. It’s one more lead that was never followed up on in a case that doesn’t fit neatly in the museums Las Vegas is building these days.
Personally, I think the answer to what happened to Sonny Liston lies in a cemetery in Las Vegas. But it’s not in Plot A-2-20 at Davis Memorial Park, where the headstone for Sonny Liston reads: A Man.
I think the answer lies ten miles to the east of there, in the Palm Mortuary on Boulder Highway, where Irwin Peters Jr. was laid to rest. Sonny wasn’t the only one who went into the ground without a homicide investigation. Peters was pushed into his final resting place with just as many secrets.
The two deaths that occurred sixteen years and a thousand miles apart are regarded as accidents. But I don’t think there was anything accidental about them. I believe that finding the killer of Irwin Peters will unravel the real story of what happened to Sonny Liston.
It will also open up a chapter of Las Vegas history that a lot of people would just as soon keep buried.