On the ride back to Tryon, I just knew I was going to be a success. Even though I talk negative and project myself as a bum, my inner core thinks I’m a god and I know I’m going to be successful. Every time I say, “I’m a piece of shit,” or “I want to kill myself,” that’s all confusing the enemy. Everything I say is for a reason: to confuse the enemy. That’s a concept that I would soon learn from Cus.
When I saw Bobby the next day, he said, “Now we really got to work.” We worked out every day and then he’d call Cus on Sunday and report on my progress. Every second week we’d drive down to Catskill and have a session with Cus. Cus would talk to me and tell Teddy what new moves to show me. Then, back in Tryon, Bobby and I would work on those moves. We’d spar three nights a week and on the other nights Bobby would throw punches at me and I’d move from side to side to avoid them, practicing what Cus showed me.
I was doing well in my classes too. Bobby told me, “I don’t care if you flunk every subject, but you try and behave yourself in class.” A few weeks later he got a call from one of my teachers. “What the fuck happened to this kid? He went from a third-grade to a seventh-grade reading level. He’s doing great!”
On one of the early visits to Catskill, Cus took Bobby and me aside.
“Listen, most kids don’t want to go to the grown-ups’ prison, so they say they’re younger than they really are,” Cus said. “He’s too strong, too big, too coordinated, and too fast. He’s got to be an older guy.”
Bobby looked confused.
“Mike, listen. I’m talking to you. How old are you for real?” Cus asked me.
“I’m thirteen!” I said. But I didn’t look it. I was only five-six then, but I weighed 196 pounds.
The next time we came up, Bobby brought some documentation from the state that proved I was thirteen years old. Cus almost had a heart attack.
“Listen, you will be the national champion. You will be the Olympic champion. That’s who you are. Do you want to do this?” Cus asked.
I didn’t know if I wanted to do all that. I was scared. But I didn’t want Cus to think I was a punk.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Okay, let’s get to work,” Cus barked.
From that day on, Cus began to talk with me along with giving me boxing instructions. “Do you realize why you’re doing this?” “Do you feel good doing these things?” “Don’t just do something because I tell you to do it.” One day he looked at me and said, “Would you like to change your life?” I nodded yes. “From what I’ve seen and if you listen to me, with no distractions and not allowing people to mess your head up, you will be the youngest heavyweight champion of all time.” I was thirteen years old and he thought I was invincible! Of course, I told him that I wanted to be the world champion, and he liked that. But mostly it was Cus doing all the talking. He’d talk to me about my feelings and then he’d tell me why I was feeling that way. Cus wanted to reach me at the root. It wasn’t just about the physical aspects of boxing; it was getting at the mental side—why a fighter got bubble guts, why our minds play tricks on us so that something seems more difficult than it is. I didn’t understand everything he was saying, but I did. Cus knew how to talk my language. Cus was really a street kid who had improved himself as a person.
After a few more months of these gym visits, I was getting close to being paroled. Bobby Stewart came to my room one day.
“Listen, do you want to stay with Cus? I don’t want you to go back to Brooklyn. I’m scared you’re going to get killed or go right back to prison.”
I didn’t want to go back to Brooklyn either. I was looking for a change in my life. I liked the way these people made me feel good, made me feel like I was part of a society. Before you’re released from Tryon you get three home visits. For my first home visit I went to Brooklyn to see my mom.
“Just remember, if you get in freakin’ trouble, that’s the end of everything,” Bobby warned me.
I was home for an overnight visit and nothing much happened. I might have smoked some weed and gone up to Times Square with my friend App, but other than that I didn’t do anything. I talked to my mom and she was drunk, hanging out with her friends. My brother wasn’t around and my sister was with her friends. But I told everybody I was going to be a fighter.
My second home visit was down in Catskill. This one was for three days and two nights. It was the first time that I saw Cus’s house. I couldn’t believe my eyes as Bobby drove down the long, winding driveway. It was like coming up on Diamond Jim Brady’s driveway. They had named the road for the family who initially lived in the house, the Thorpes. The house itself was a big-ass white Victorian with something like fourteen bedrooms. I’d never seen anything like that. There was a path out the back of the house that led right to the Hudson River.
“I’m going to stay here?” I asked Bobby. He nodded.
“What am I going to have to do, take the garbage out?” I asked. I was a real sarcastic kid.
Cus wasn’t home but I got to meet Camille Ewald, his companion, who actually owned the house. She was a strong-looking Ukrainian lady but she seemed real sweet.
“Hey, sit down and have tea with me,” she said. “Talk to me.”
It was just like some girl talk. Where was I from? Have I been other places before? Was I excited? After a while she showed me my room and I just sat on the bed waiting for Cus. He came in with some of the other kids who lived there and we ate something and I did some chores and then we all went to the gym.
I spent the three days just training and reading boxing magazines and watching old fight films with Cus. I didn’t even feel different being out of prison, because after I got involved with Cus, even when I was in prison, I was out of prison. Do you feel me? Cus had been putting gasoline on a raging fire that was consuming me. When I left to go back to Tryon, I had a large book that Cus had lent me. I’d been looking through the books in the living room and I’d stumbled on Nat Fleischer’s Ring Boxing Encyclopedia and Record Book. I started reading it and I was just overwhelmed. I fell in love with all those old fighters. The book had all their records and their bios. There were pictures of some of them that showed their bodies and, wow, they fucking looked beautiful! They were ripped to shreds, ready to fight. I don’t care if they were 119 pounds—they were ripped. It was so impressive knowing how much work went into looking like that. When you went to a boxing match or a weigh-in, the people were more excited looking at the fighters’ bodies than at the pretty girls around them. That’s why, ever since, I’d do the old-school turn-of-the-century shit and go up there in my underwear, because that’s the impression those boxers left on me—they’re beautiful. That gave me motivation to work hard too, because I knew I had a tendency to get fat. I wanted to have that six-pack. Every time they threw punches in that book, the frame stopped and every muscle, every vein in their body, was showing. I fantasized about me being that guy.
Cus saw me thumbing through that book. “Do you like that? Take it with you,” he said.
That was it. Once he gave me that book, it was like looking at a Penthouse magazine. By the next time I came down to Catskill I had memorized that whole encyclopedia. And I began to barrage Cus with questions about the fighters. I’d say a name like Freddie Welsh, and Cus would tell me everything about him. If I mentioned a name like Armstrong or Canzoneri or Ray Robinson, Cus would go, “Whoa! Now, that’s a fighter!” and then my fucking senses would go out of this world. I wanted to learn all about these ancient champions and master their philosophy. They worked hard but they played hard too, and people looked up to them like they were gods. These guys were immortals to me. And Cus was my conduit to them, so I wanted to impress him. I looked forward to going to the store for him, cleaning the gym, carrying the bags, being his servant. I was Cus’s slave. Whatever he told me to do, I would do it. And I was happy to be his slave. I wasn’t as close to the other boxers in the house at first. I would walk around the grounds and go down to the river and just stare out at it. This country living was new to me. I talked and participated in the goings-on in the house but I had a weird attitude. I wasn’t confrontational. It was more that I just spoke a different language than the rest of them.
My mother didn’t like the idea of me going up to Catskill. She went for it because I wanted to go but I could tell that she wasn’t thrilled. My sister said, “Why are you going up there with those white people?” And I would reply, “Because I’m going to be champ of the world.” As my release came closer, we had to make plans for me to come under Cus’s supervision. My mom felt bad about me moving upstate but she signed over the papers. Maybe she thought she had failed as a mother.
I was helped out by a wonderful social worker named Ernestine Coleman. She was a big black lady from Hudson, New York, which was just miles from Catskill, and she went out of her way to smooth my transition. She had a lot of empathy for me and I knew how to play on that. She was a little easier to deal with than Bobby Stewart but she was no pushover.
I think Cus immediately realized that I suffered from low self-esteem and had been scarred by years of being bullied and abused, so from the very first time that I started coming up to Catskill he began to work on building up my ego.
“You’ve got to believe in yourself,” he’d tell me in the gym. “Tell yourself that every day. Look in the mirror and see how handsome you are. Look at your powerful hands.” At first I was thinking that he’s a fag. From the world I come from, older guys do that shit when they want to suck your dick. Anybody that tells me I’m good-looking, that sends off triggers in my head. I didn’t think I was good-looking, I felt ugly from being abused all my life. I felt so ugly I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. But there he was, every day, “Listen, you’re a good-looking guy.” And when I’d protest and say, “Get out of here!” he’d come back, “No, you go look in the mirror and tell yourself how good-looking you are. Go shadowbox and say, ‘Look how beautiful I look!’ You’re looking more handsome every day—you might just turn into an actor!”
But there was no loving feeling when he was saying this. He was dead serious. It was all about a mission—the heavyweight championship of the world. He didn’t treat me like a kid. He was making me feel that I was worth something, that we had a mission together.
Bobby Stewart used to say that I was a born follower, and it’s true. Back in Brooklyn, I followed Barkim into a life of crime. Barkim lived in my building and taught me how to rob and steal but I always had to watch out because if he was doing bad and I had money, he might flip on me too. But Cus was a much different mentor. Barkim didn’t put the law down like Cus. Cus put it down that we were on a mission to the crown and at the end of the road there was going to be some good shit. When I would go into the ring and fight, I had to fight until I had nothing left. You can’t quit, you’ve got to fight until you die.
Cus promised me that nobody would ever bully me again. He’d tell me about old fighters who had been beaten up in life and were able to overcome their feelings. As I got older, I realized what Cus’s psychology boiled down to. He gave weak people strength. You give a weak man some strength and it becomes an addiction. Cus didn’t want boys who were well-adjusted—he wanted to work with the kids who were flawed. He wanted the dregs of society who came from the worst neighborhoods. He was so happy when I told him I was from Brownsville. “Oh man, a lot of tough fighters came out of there. Al ‘Bummy’ Davis, Floyd Patterson grew up nearby.”
Cus told me he thought the best fighters were the guys who had endured the most. José Torres told me later that Cus was sure I’d become champion when he heard that I used to get on public buses and wait until the passengers were warned about pickpockets and then I would go ahead and pick their pockets. He saw I had a native intelligence and that I could transfer my antisocial skills into the ring.
Cus would listen to me talk about my street escapades. Then he would look at me with no emotion, cold as steel, and say, “‘No’ will be a foreign word to you.” Cus was totally consumed with what he was capable of doing. “Will you listen to me, boy? Do you hear what I’m saying to you? People of royal descent will know your name. The whole world will know who you are. Your family name will reign, people will respect your mother, respect your children. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? Are you going to do this?” Can you imagine a thirteen-year-old kid hearing that?
—
WE TALKED A LOT about Cus’s childhood. Costantino D’Amato was born on January 17, 1908. His father, Damiano D’Amato, left Italy in 1899 and arrived in New York. Six weeks later his wife, Elisabetta, arrived with Rocco, Cus’s oldest brother, and the family settled in Manhattan, where Damiano began a coal and ice delivery business. Cus didn’t remember much about his mother because she died when he was five years old. By then Cus had three older brothers, Rocco, Gerry, and Tony, and one younger brother, Nick. Cus seemed to take his mother’s death in stride. “I was lucky,” he told a reporter. “My mother died when I was five years old, so I had to learn to think and act on my own at an early age.”
Cus said that he was named Costantino after his maternal grandmother, Costanza, but his father didn’t get along with her so he told Cus that he was named after the first Christian emperor, Constantine. That was probably the first time that Cus thought that he was special. The family legend that they were somehow related to Napoleon through his maternal line only added to Cus’s sense of being unique.
When Cus was six, the family migrated to the Frog Hollow section of the Bronx. The neighborhood was tough and became infamous for spawning gangsters like Dutch Schultz. Even though Damiano couldn’t speak English, he became a community leader among the Italian immigrants and people would come to him with their business problems. He was known for his honesty and impressed that trait on all his children. He was also very generous, and while the family never had much money, Damiano would always share with neighbors who were having a hard time.
Cus told me that his dad was a very accomplished Greco-Roman wrestler and a big fan of boxing. He also had a great voice and after his work was done he’d light up a pipe and play mandolin and sing old Italian folk songs.
Damiano was also color-blind. One time, after he brought back another wife from Italy, Damiano invited a black friend of his, a coal miner, to have dinner. Cus’s stepmom asked, “Do you think your friend wants to go to the bathroom and wash up?” She had never seen a black person before and she thought he was just dirty from the coal dust. Damiano’s attitudes about race had a big impact on Cus. He never judged people by the color of their skin. He also became close to his Jewish neighbors. When he was sick, they’d send over some chicken soup for him. Cus returned the favor by turning on the lights for his Orthodox Jewish neighbors on Saturdays.
By all accounts Damiano, with his old-school emphasis on discipline, wasn’t the easiest guy to get along with, and Cus’s older brothers all left the house as soon as they could. It was hard on Damiano to raise all the boys alone, and when he found himself without a wife for the second time, he made a trip to Italy to get a new wife, his third. Cus was twenty-one by then, and usually he and Nick would stay with a relative when Damiano made his frequent trips back to Italy. But this time his brother Tony found both Cus and Nick sleeping in a doorway. He took them to his home. It was Christmastime and Tony had a young daughter. He and his wife woke up on Christmas morning to the sounds of Cus and Nick playing with their little niece’s Christmas toys.
Whenever I’d tell Cus about my lousy childhood, he’d tell me he went through similar experiences. They never had much money and sometimes he’d steal apples and share them with friends. “Nowadays, they say you can’t eat behind somebody, you’ll get germs,” he told me. “When I was a little boy, my friends and I shared apples. Give him a bite, I’d eat after. We got sick all the time.” One time he starved himself for five days as a test to make sure that nobody could ever intimidate him with threats of starvation. He concluded that he could abstain from food for a couple of weeks “if you don’t ask too much of your body.”
Cus was also bullied growing up. He got picked on by neighborhood kids because his parents would dress him up “like little Lord Fauntleroy.” His older brother Gerry was a tough guy and he had given Cus some fighting lessons. One time one of their neighbors was getting the shit kicked out of him by seven guys and Gerry just plowed into that melee and knocked out six people with seven punches. Gerry was Cus’s hero and he was the first of Cus’s brothers to join a gang. Cus followed in his footsteps and joined a gang and used to fight in the streets all the time.
Cus would talk about the time when he was in his twenties and he was sitting outside his house. Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, a notorious gangster affiliated with Dutch Schultz, came up to Cus and put a gun to his head.
“You’d better tell me where so-and-so is,” Cus recounted the story.
“I don’t know where he is. You’re just going to have to kill me.”
Mad Dog realized that he had the wrong guy and left. It was only then that Cus began shaking.
Cus told me that he had lost his eyesight in one of his eyes in a street fight. But here’s where it gets murky. Over the years, Cus told about four different versions of what happened. He told me that he lost his eye defending a neighborhood kid who was getting bullied by a guy with a knife. In 1958 he told Sports Illustrated, “I could and should have boxed. But I had a street fight when I was a boy, just 12 years old. It was with . . . one of those men who push kids around because they know they can’t push men around. He gave me a bad eye, my right eye. I was blind in it for years but I made the man run and I chased him.” But then he told Gay Talese in The New York Times Magazine that he had lost the vision in his left eye after he was struck by a stick in a street fight. The stick version was elaborated on as he told of staring at himself in shop window with his eyeball hanging out. Yet another time he said that he had lost his vision when he tried to stop a kid from tormenting a kitten.
The real story may be a lot more horrifying. One of Cus’s nieces said that her father, on his deathbed, revealed that Cus lost the sight in his eye when Damiano disciplined Cus with a belt buckle. Cus always told me stories about his father beating on him.
“No one got beatings like me, I got the worst beatings in the world, but I deserved them,” he told me. Cus would come home late and before he’d even open the door, he’d cover up, and as soon as the door opened, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, his father would attack him and beat the shit out of him. Cus would refuse to say he would never be late again. That was Cus’s whole thing—you can kill me but you ain’t gonna break me. His father would cry as he hit him. Then one time Cus couldn’t take it anymore and he gasped, “Maybe I won’t do it again.” Damiano started crying and the two of them embraced.
“It’s a lot of nonsense when I hear people say that beatings crush a child’s spirit,” Cus told a reporter. “I never lost respect or love for my father, and it didn’t crush my determination.” I wonder if the reason Cus told me all about his beatings was because he knew that I had been beaten by my mother continually when I was young. We had those horrific experiences as a bond.
Cus was never interested in school. He quit high school in his sophomore year. He also had no interest in getting a job. Cus’s father would constantly be on his case to get out and look for work. He didn’t want to lie to his father, so once a week he would go to a local icebox factory and stand in the back of the room filled with job applicants so he would never get called. The place was run by religious Jews and one week one of the owners went to the back and told Cus how impressed he was by Cus showing up to look for work every week, so he hired Cus and put him on the assembly line. Now, Cus was never meant to work for anyone and he was so mad at actually having to work that he worked twice as hard as anybody there. The owner wanted to make him assistant foreman. Cus came up with new methods to increase productivity, which didn’t sit so well with the ex-cons and Hispanic immigrants who didn’t want to be bossed around by a seventeen-year-old kid. After a year and a series of brutal fights, Cus left the job.
Cus seemed to hate authority figures, but for a few years while he was a teenager he was fascinated by Catholicism. Even though his father was never religious, Cus started going to Sunday school because one of his friends went and Cus won prizes in his Bible classes. He would never think of committing a sin, and he obeyed the Ten Commandments to the letter. He was even thinking of going into the priesthood. Around the same time, he became preoccupied with death. He would watch funerals go through his neighborhood and he would think, “The sooner death, the better.” If someone he knew died, he would consider them lucky because now they could be happy all the time. He told me that he would go into cemeteries at random and look at all the names on the headstones.
Then someone gave him a book and it turned his mind around. It was Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. Paine hated organized religion and challenged the legitimacy of the Bible. That’s what got his book on the Catholic Church Index, which meant it was a sin to read it. So in Cus’s mind he was no longer a Catholic.
He wouldn’t be a priest but, in his own way, Cus began a true life of service. He always said that he learned by example from his father and I guess he was impressed by his father’s selflessness. Suddenly Cus became the neighborhood fixer, the go-to guy if you had a problem. He would translate for people, he would fix things, he would intercede with their landlords if they were having trouble paying their rent. He even became a youth counselor to the kids in the neighborhood. Of course, he refused payment for any of his services. Otherwise, he wouldn’t consider what he was doing a favor.
More than anything else, he hated to see rich people get over on poor people. Cus found out that his friend Angelo Tosto’s father-in-law was getting ripped off by phony land developers in Deer Park, Long Island. The scammers targeted recent immigrants from Slovakia and swindled them out of their life savings by selling them land that they didn’t have title to. Cus spent years researching the scammers. Finally, one Friday he went down to the company’s lawyer’s office, pretended he was a son-in-law to Angelo’s father-in-law, and waited there until he was seen. He told the lawyer that if the family didn’t get a check for a full refund he was going to go straight to the DA’s office and have them charged with fraud. On Monday morning there was a check for the full amount. But that only infuriated Cus more. Now he knew the outfit was fugazi so he went to Riverhead, where the Long Island land transaction records were kept, and found proof that it was a scam. By the end of December 1937, thirty-nine individuals and twelve corporations had been indicted, and on July 7, 1938, the ringleaders were sentenced to jail terms of three to six years for swindling over $2 million from 1,800 Slovaks. His pal Angelo must have been incredibly grateful to Cus for his help, because twenty years later he was acting as Cus’s chauffeur and driving him around town.
Cus always was a creative guy. But he had a strange explanation for his creativity. He once told a reporter, “It’s almost like I never was a kid. I didn’t learn very much in my lifetime because of these things I understood when I was young. How did I get so wise? I don’t know. I used to think everybody was like that. I found out later in life it wasn’t so. I don’t talk about it usually. What’s the sense of talking about something people don’t understand?”
Cus was always inventing things but he never bothered trying to make money off his creations. He came up with a toy plane that was outfitted with a firecracker in a heavy metal cap on the nose of the plane. When the plane’s nose hit the ground the firecracker would go off, sending the plane back into the air, and then it would descend through a series of loops and dives. His greatest invention was a sanitary sheet to use on public toilet seats. He even patented it when he was thirty years old. But Cus never pursued this, perhaps because a lady from Louisiana had filed her own patent for a sanitary toilet seat cover sixteen years earlier.
Cus’s ingenuity was helpful to his family during the Great Depression. Cus was almost twenty-two when the Depression started. He told me about reading in the papers about old people starving to death because they were too proud to go and beg for help, but I think that they weren’t too proud. It was Cus who was too proud. He made it so he knew how they were feeling, but I think it was that he wanted to look at people that way. He was coming from an antiquated place. Cus was living his life like a chivalrous knight and projecting his feelings. He was very morally conscious.
The food riots in lower Manhattan made a lifelong impression on him. Sometimes twenty thousand people would cram into Union Square and riot because they had nothing to eat. Cus was there once when he saw a guy in a lumber jacket standing on a tailgate making a speech. He found out that this guy was a member of the Communist Party. Cus watched as he made a speech and then got the shit beat out of him by the cops on horseback. But what was amazing to Cus was that as soon as one guy got beaten unmercifully, another guy would spring up on that tailgate, knowing that in minutes he was gonna get the beating of his life. Cus admired their guts and dedication. His dad kept telling him to stay away from those people, that they were going to get him in trouble, and I’m sure that added to his fascination.
One thing that never wavered in Cus’s life was that he was pro-Italian like a motherfucker. He was fanatic about that heritage. Beatrice, his brother Tony’s wife, was Irish. Right after Betty, their daughter, gave birth to twins, she was rushed back to the hospital. Cus called her to see how she was doing, and the nurse told him Betty couldn’t get on the phone because she was getting a blood transfusion. Cus rushed over to the hospital and stormed into her room. “I had to get here fast to make sure your mother’s Irish relatives weren’t giving you blood,” he said. “I didn’t want your blood diluted further.”
Man, Cus thought that the Italians were the niggas of the world. He was still bitching about the execution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti when I got up to Catskill. They did get a lousy deal, being framed for an armed robbery, and convicted for first-degree murder, and then frying in the electric chair in August of 1927. It took until 1977 for Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis to issue a proclamation that they were unfairly convicted and “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.” But Cus would still go around the house and grouse about them.
One outlet for Italians and Jews, who were both marginalized in society when Cus was growing up, was boxing. Cus came from a boxing family—his brothers, his cousins, they all got turned out by boxing. Both his older brothers Tony and Gerry were fighters who rode the rails and fought in the streets, earning some money from the proceeds of the bets that were wagered. Lots of times if Cus got into trouble, it was Gerry or Tony who would bail him out. Tony was so tough that he used to sit on the stoop of their building with knitting needles and defiantly knit away, challenging anybody who passed by to fuck with him.
Gerry eventually became managed by Bobby Melnick, and Cus used to carry his bag to the gym. Back then boxers were heroes to every young kid. The National Police Gazette was in every barbershop and the magazine had a section devoted to boxing. Every neighborhood had a local hero who was a boxer, and whenever he left his house for a fight he’d be trailed by kids as if he were the Pied Piper.
Cus was enthralled by the atmosphere of a boxing gym. He told the story of having met Jack Dempsey and then going back to his neighborhood and having his friends line up to “shake the hand that shook Jack Dempsey’s,” but that might have been a stretch. According to his niece Betty, her father, Tony, met Dempsey at a fight club one day when he was sixteen. Dempsey asked Tony to be his sparring partner, but after Tony saw the vicious way that the Manassa Mauler destroyed his sparring partners, he nixed the job offer but managed to shake Dempsey’s hand. Then he came home and told everyone, “I’m not going to wash my hand because I shook hands with Jack Dempsey.”
Cus told one interviewer that it was his brother Gerry and not Tom Paine who dissuaded Cus from considering the priesthood. Gerry took Cus under his wing and taught him how to defend himself. And then, when Cus was sixteen, a tragedy struck the family that rocked everybody to their core. Gerry was shot dead by an Irish cop.
Throughout his life Cus didn’t like to talk publicly about the murder. He did tell me that Gerry had been the star of the family and that his death “broke my father’s heart.” Cus was there when Damiano found out about his death and he said that he could never forget his father’s piercing wail. He told a close friend who was preparing a biography of Cus that Gerry and his wife were at a social function and an off-duty cop started getting “fresh” with his wife. A struggle ensued, they broke through a plate-glass window, and instead of the cop “receiving his just punishment,” he shot Gerry. It was a strange way to describe a fight. The official police report tells a different story.
“Gerald De Matto—White—Married—Italy—Bartender was arrested & charged with Felonious Assault by Patrolman George Dennerlein . . . while resisting arrest, struck the patrolman several times with his fist, took his night baton from him and threatened to strike him with it.” Then Dennerlein shot Gerry and he died at Lincoln Hospital at seven p.m., October 21, 1924, six days after the shooting. The report goes on to say that Gerry was drunk walking home, and when told by the officer to go home and get some sleep, he grabbed the officer, was arrested, and then knocked the officer to the ground and attempted to strike him with his own baton. “The officer sensing his life was in danger, drew his service revolver and discharged one shot the bullet entering the left groin of De Matto.”
The night Gerry was shot, his brother Tony gathered together some friends and, armed with bats, marched on the police station seeking revenge. Luckily Damiano rushed there and calmed down the mob. After Gerry died, Cus visited the local parish priests and demanded to get answers as to why his brother had been killed by a “corrupted” cop, but the priests told him to “have faith and stop questioning.” It was then that Cus finally decided that the path of the priesthood was not for him and that he had to, as he said, “train myself as a warrior and train other men to become warriors too.”
Patrolman Dennerlein was transferred to Staten Island but the story didn’t end there. Years later, when he had the money, Cus hired private investigators to investigate the case. Cus even told me that he knew where the cop lived right now, and that freaked me out. But he never tried to get revenge. I always wondered about that. Tony’s daughter Betty said that the cop wasn’t on patrol, he was off duty, and he and Gerry were in a bar when the altercation happened. But the fight was over Gerry’s wife. She had been having an affair with the cop. Perhaps that was what Cus meant with his cryptic statement that the cop should have just received “his just punishment.”
—
CUS WAS A BELIEVER in destiny. Even as a young boy, he felt that he’d be famous someday; he always had a feeling that “there was something different” about him. I had the same exact feeling. So it felt right that I would move in with Cus and Camille. Cus was so happy. I couldn’t understand why this white man was so happy about me. He would look at me and laugh hysterically. Then he’d get on the phone and tell people, “Lightning has struck me twice. I have another heavyweight champion. He’s only thirteen.”
One of the first nights that I stayed over at the house on one of the home visits, Cus took me into the living room, where we could talk alone.
“You know I’ve been waiting for you,” he told me. “I’ve been thinking about you since 1969. If you meditate long enough on something, you get a picture. And the picture told me that I would make another champion. I conjured you up with my mind and now you’re finally here.”