9

If 1959 was a horrible year for Cus—Floyd losing his crown, Cus losing his manager’s license and being forced into a perp walk—1960 was starting out just as bad. Early in January his attorneys appealed the order to revoke his license. Besides arguing that Cus was now deprived of his “sole means of livelihood,” Julius November and Edwin Schweig painted a saintly picture of Cus. “Your petitioner has consistently aided young and deserving fighters by furnishing them with money, shelter, and the other necessities of life, all at his own cost and expense, and without reimbursement.”

They also argued that Cus “was harassed on all sides, was before the District Attorney’s Office of New York County on various occasions, and . . . that there was never any question of the honesty and integrity of the fight itself and . . . no evidence of any crime in connection thereof.” Finally, they blamed the press. “Many articles were written in the daily press to incite this Commission against your petitioner.”

On January 26, Justice Aron Steuer issued his determination. He wrote that since Charlie Black was a licensee of the commission, they could not ban Cus from consorting with one of their own licensees. He threw out the charge of failure to file a manager’s report, but he upheld the three most serious charges, including the determination that Cus “deliberately failed to attend at the investigation and defied the mandate of the commission to do so.” Cus was sunk.

Two weeks later, Cus was rocked when New York State attorney general Louis Lefkowitz brought an action to dissolve Floyd Patterson Enterprises, a corporation in which Floyd was two-thirds owner and Cus one-third. The attorney general went after Cus on the same charges that had brought down Norris’s empire. “Acting principally through D’Amato, Patterson Enterprises became party to a continuing conspiracy and arrangement to gain and maintain a monopolistic grip on the World’s Heavyweight Boxing Championship.” In detailing Cus’s arrangement with TelePrompTer, Lefkowitz revealed that Patterson and D’Amato were both voted a place on the TelePrompTer payroll, along with Sugar Ray Robinson. Lefkowitz cited all the attempts that Cus had made to foist his friends as managers for Floyd’s opponents and noted Charlie Black’s move to bring Fat Tony Salerno into the Johansson fight’s promotion. Certainly Black, at least, was nothing more than a conduit for the D’Amato/Patterson interests. In its decision dated October 13, 1959, rendered in connection with its inquiry into the conduct of the first Johansson fight, the NYSAC said of Black: “Charlie Black is D’Amato’s trusted adviser and go-between. Whenever there is a Patterson fight, Black appears on the scene either with a part in the promotion or in the boxer management. Black apparently has no occupation. He is friendly with Tony Salerno and has known him for 25 years; has known Trigger Mike Coppola for 25 years, and Velella for a good many years.”

These arguments were compelling enough to have a judge order the dissolution of Floyd Patterson Enterprises. All these legal battles were having an adverse effect on the rematch between Floyd and Ingo. Johansson began to tell the press that he was about to defend his title with other opponents. Cus was worried that he had become a distraction, so he signed a consent decree with the NYSAC that he would never apply for a manager’s license again.

Meanwhile, the situation surrounding the promotion of the rematch was getting more and more bizarre. Remember that Vince Velella, who was the lawyer and front man for Fat Tony, controlled Rosensohn Enterprises, whose only asset was the contract to promote the rematch. Bill Rosensohn, the disgraced promoter of the first fight, was holding on to his one-third interest, which had a $25,000 lien on it from Jim Norris, for the loan he had fronted young Bill when they were plotting to take over the boxing business. Velella had been indicted for perjury when he testified in front of D.A. Hogan’s grand jury, so he decided to cash in on the stock of Rosensohn Enterprises. At the beginning of December 1959, a group of very prominent New York businessmen, including Angier Biddle Duke, who was an heir to the vast American Tobacco fortune and a distinguished diplomat for President Truman, expressed interest in buying out Rosensohn Enterprises. When Velella asked for $325,000 for “his” two-thirds share, the businessmen walked away.

But three weeks later, the stock was sold at a considerably lower price to a most disreputable group headed by the controversial lawyer Roy Cohn. Here’s where it gets interesting. Cohn first came to prominence when he was on the prosecution team in the famous espionage trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the case that Cus was obsessed with. It was Cohn’s direct examination of David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, that was instrumental in convicting and executing the married couple. Years later, Greenglass claimed that he was encouraged to lie on the stand by the prosecution to protect his family.

One of the people who took notice of the young Cohn was J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, who convinced Senator Joseph McCarthy to hire him as his chief counsel in McCarthy’s congressional witch hunts against Communists in the United States. He went from going after Commies to hunting homosexuals with crazy claims that the Communists abroad had been obtaining U.S. government secrets from closeted homosexuals in exchange for not outing them. Cohn and Hoover even convinced President Eisenhower to sign an executive order in 1953 that banned homosexuals from being employed by the federal government. The irony of all this was that both Cohn and J. Edgar were closeted homosexuals themselves!

So Cohn’s group, Feature Sports, went about buying up the Rosensohn Enterprises stock. They paid Rosensohn $78,000 for his one-third share. Rosensohn was supposed to split the $53,000 profit from the sale with Norris but the multimillionaire never asked for his share once his $25,000 was paid back. Rosensohn took his presumed windfall and, after testifying before a Senate subcommittee, faded into obscurity selling dry-cleaning equipment and hooking up some Chicago hospitals with rental TVs for their patients. The last we heard from Rosensohn, speaking of Cohn, was, “I have not yet been paid in full, but I hope to be.”

When it came to buying “Velella’s” two-thirds share of the company, Cohn paid less for the two-thirds than he did for Rosensohn’s one-third. Cohn, it turned out, had a relationship with Fat Tony and would go on to represent him for the next twenty years. In his biography of Cohn, the journalist Nicholas von Hoffman speculated that Cohn was fronting for Fat Tony. “The in-the-know sporting bloods of the time suspected that the reason for this transfer of the ownership of the contract was because Fat Tony, who had promoted the first of the Patterson–Johansson fights, was fast developing a reputation which made it impossible for him to continue to have such a conspicuous position in an activity licensed and supervised by various government bodies. The Roy-Tony relationship was to last many years, and it may be that this transaction was a paper-only deal to accommodate a friend, although Bill Fugazy says they were ordinary business ventures.” Maybe they were both. What wasn’t up for dispute was the hatred that Cus had for Cohn. He despised him for his work against the Rosenbergs and his Commie witch hunts, and soon Cohn would give him more reasons.

Meanwhile, Cus and Floyd’s relationship was deteriorating. The main reason for that was the underhanded behavior of their lawyer, Julius November. November’s advice to Cus that he didn’t have to answer the subpoenas of the attorney general and the NYSAC made Cus look terrible, and it led to both his arrest and the suspension of his manager’s license. Robert Boyle told us that November “drove the wedge” between Cus and Floyd and then “wormed his way into Patterson.”

One of the things November did was to fire Floyd’s ghostwriter, Arthur Mann, who was among Cus’s champions in the press. Floyd got his book deal before the loss to Ingo, and when Mann handed in his manuscript, an associate of November’s shared portions of the book with Patterson, who suggested that it be retitled Cus D’Amato’s War Against the IBC. November immediately fired Mann and hired New York Post writer Milton Gross, who was not a fan of Cus’s. November even tried to remove Floyd’s account of his relationship with Cus but Patterson overruled him.

So we can get a good fix on their relationship at the time by looking at Patterson’s book Victory over Myself: “As much as I dislike thinking it or even discussing it, my manager has been a suspicious man. Undoubtedly he had some reason to be, but over the years Cus allowed his suspicions about the IBC and his fight against its president, Jim Norris, to warp his thinking. Without question, it also warped my career.” Floyd claimed that his loss to Ingo made him furious and convinced him to take control of his life. “Nobody went down with me those seven times that I went down to the canvas. A fighter walks alone and fights alone. If I could be successful the next time, I promised myself I’d be my own man. The mistakes would be mine, the decisions mine. I had to be defeated to learn that. Ingemar made me think for myself. That’s an awfully painful thing, especially for somebody who always had somebody else to do his thinking for him.

“Until Ingemar knocked me out, Cus was my mind, more or less. I had no reason to doubt anything he did or said, because every minute of my relationship with him I was like a son being guided by his father. Eventually, the son grows up. Inevitably he begins to think more and more for himself. Occasionally something happens that makes the boy become a man before it was intended. It is always a shock to the father, but after a while the father becomes resigned that that, too, is the way of life. It seems to me that’s about the most accurate way to sum up what has happened in my relationship with my manager. Nominally, at least, Cus continued to be what he always was, but I tried to show him that too many things had happened for me to allow myself ever to be completely in anyone’s control again. I was Cus’s boy but in defeat and confusion I became my own man. This is a difficult thing to discuss, because I never want to make it appear that I’m deliberately trying to hurt Cus. I was hurt very badly and maybe inadvertently by him. But whatever he did, I know he thought he was doing it solely for my benefit.”

Then he expressed misgivings about how the London fight was handled, horror at Cus’s attempt to make Ingo use his friend Davidow as manager, and disbelief when Fat Tony’s name cropped up. “Salerno was a gangster, Velella was his lawyer, Erickson and Beckley were gamblers with police records. I kept asking myself; what could they have had to do with the fight or the promotional with me or my manager? I began to ask Cus questions, ‘Is all of this true?’ ‘I was only trying to protect your interests,’ he’d tell me. ‘I had nothing to do with Salerno, Erickson and Beckley.’ . . . I began to see that maybe Cus had been taken by his friends. I didn’t mistrust Cus then, but I did begin to develop a mistrust in the people around him, for whom Cus always did favors. The thing that bothered me most, of course, was that some of the dirt which had been uncovered about the promotion had to rub off on me.

“These were the things I kicked around in my mind in all those black months between the first and second Ingemar fights. In the meantime, I wasn’t seeing Cus as often as I did before I lost the title. Maybe Cus understood that for a lot of that time I wanted to be alone. Much of the time too, Cus was away for one reason or another. Maybe he had a lot to think about too. Certainly I gave him a few things to think about when I began to assert myself more and more. In the beginning he found it difficult to accept my new attitude. We argued a bit, but I explained to him that certain things were inevitable. Little by little I had to begin depending more upon my own decisions and it just happened that the jolt of the Johansson defeat hastened the process. Let me say here too, so that nobody gets any other ideas, that as long as I keep fighting, Cus will continue to be my manager. I listen to any suggestions he makes and if they are good, I accept them, just as I accepted advice from my attorney, Julius November.”

Look, it’s not surprising that Patterson rebelled against Cus. Cus was an intimidating figure. And overbearing. Me and Floyd have two very different personalities. Cus can easily scare a person away.

Even though Cus wasn’t in constant contact with Floyd, he was still functioning as his de facto manager behind the scenes. So he began butting heads with Cohn almost from the start. Cus always screwed the promoters on the ancillary rights. Floyd made over $600,000 from those rights for the first fight with Ingo, and the contract for the second fight had Ingo getting 20 percent of them and Floyd netting 50 percent after he paid TelePrompTer 30 percent of his share.

Roy Cohn didn’t like getting shut out of the ancillary rights so he and his partner Bill Fugazy met with Cus in Cus’s office before the rematch was signed. As much as Cus hated Cohn, he might have hated Fugazy equally. Fugazy was an arrogant Ivy League brat who became wealthy when he inherited the family travel business that his grandfather founded. He was married with five children but there were rumors going around that Cohn and Fugazy were lovers. Fugazy was a bit of a dandy. He wore custom-made Italian suits, got daily rubdowns at the segregated New York Athletic Club, and wore pink dinner jackets and white ruffled shirts to the fights he promoted. He also bragged about playing golf at restricted country clubs.

Fugazy started the meeting by requesting 15 percent of Patterson’s earnings before they would give Floyd the chance to win back his crown. If Cus didn’t relent to their demands, they planned to match Johansson with Archie Moore for the crown and freeze Patterson out. Cus was so infuriated that he threw the two promoters out of his office. Then Fugazy and Cohn went behind Cus’s back to Patterson with a contract that called for 10 percent of Floyd’s earnings. “I have had so much trouble with the bad elements in boxing and never gave up a piece,” Cus told a reporter. “Do you think I’m going to change my mind now?”

Another time Cus had a lunch meeting with Cohn and Fugazy. The only reason Cus was even dealing with these snakes was that they had hired Fugazy’s uncle, Jack Fugazy, who was a stand-up old-school boxing guy Cus liked, to run their promotional company. Jack was late for the meeting. When the waiter put a cup of coffee in front of him, Cus refused to touch it. And when Jack finally arrived and was served his own coffee, Cus said, “Jack, is that your coffee? I’ll drink it. Jim Norris isn’t trying to poison you.”

On February 9, Cus found himself on trial in Special Sessions Court in New York City for failing to answer the attorney general’s subpoena. Cus took the stand and testified that he didn’t appear in Lefkowitz’s office on the date he was subpoenaed because November had told him that he need not do so. He also claimed that he had never been physically served with the subpoena by an assistant attorney general because when he saw the man he “instinctively stepped aside” and never touched the document. His story didn’t exactly resonate with the three-judge panel and he was found guilty two days later. On April 18, Cus was sentenced to a suspended thirty-day sentence and ordered to fork over $250 for his crime. Plus he was threatened with jail time if he took up association with the rematch.

Meanwhile, Floyd was in serious training at that old abandoned nightclub in Connecticut with only his trainer Danny Florio and his sparring partner and the rats to keep him company. “His controversial and de-licensed manager, Cus D’Amato, never comes near the inn and seldom calls on the phone,” one newspaperman wrote. Floyd concurred. “Cus would call the camp at Newtown once or twice a week and I would speak to him if there was anything I had to tell him, but most of the time he’d be satisfied to talk to Danny. Toward the end of the training period he came up to camp and spent a few days, but it was not like it once had been between us,” he wrote.

In June, a week before the fight, Cus broke his silence. He invited a New York Times reporter up to his apartment office. Cus explained that he had shunned interviews because “it might hurt the promotion.” But he didn’t see himself as a pathetic figure shunned by boxing. “‘I’m still keeping in touch with things in boxing,’ he said, leaning against one of the two couches in his combination apartment and office just off Broadway in the Fifties. ‘I don’t have to be up there or talk to Floyd every day. I know what he’s trying to do and he’s making progress. That’s enough for me. . . . After the fight, I’ll climb into the ring as the crowd acclaims Floyd Patterson as the first heavyweight champion to regain his title.’”

Cus even had a good spin on his legal troubles. “I think it will make Floyd rise to the occasion and will help him. The trouble we’ve had could serve as an inspiration.” Cus told the reporter that he would have to give up his goal of having three champions at once. “Still, he feels like a general who has lost a battle, but has a good chance of winning a war. ‘I have a definite feeling for the military. Everything I’ve done has been based on military strategy. I’ve gone over all my plans in advance so that pressure would not alter a decision I had arrived at beforehand. Of course, in war, as in chess, you have to give up a piece or yield on some points to gain an objective.’ Cus didn’t have much to say about his war with the IBC except to note ironically, ‘I was fighting the mob and I turned out to be the villain,’ D’Amato said with a whimsical smile. Perhaps the whimsy comes from reading Confucius, which D’Amato uses to fill the many hours he is alone. He also likes to read factual war books, including the memoirs of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, another blunt-speaking individualist. Detective stories help D’Amato to unwind. His apartment office contains a bar, fight posters, portraits of fighters, a sink, faded tan wall-to-wall carpeting and a television set. D’Amato watches news programs and fights and perhaps an occasional cowboy picture on television. He stays with friends frequently and makes trips to the country on the average of three times a week. ‘I don’t like to be too predictable in my movements,’ he says. Once his phone bills used to top $1500 a month as he kept track of developments in boxing in this country and abroad. The bills are still high as a result of collect calls from promoters or boxing figures seeking money. D’Amato tries to arrange help for those ‘on his side’ although he owes $100,000 including $47,000 in legal fees.”

Two days later and a state away, Floyd was talking about Cus to a different Times reporter. “Since Cus D’Amato, Patterson’s unfrocked manager, no longer was at hand to shatter the silences with his brain-washing chatter, training had to be quieter this time. ‘Yes,’ said Floyd, loyalty to Cus surging quickly to the surface. ‘It’s quieter without him. But a man can’t have everything he wants. He has to sacrifice one thing to get another. Once he gets the other, he can call the turn just as he wants it.’ His meaning was unmistakable. If he regains the heavyweight championship from the Smorgasbord Smasher, Patterson clearly intends to fight only in places where D’Amato will be acceptable as his manager.”

—

WITH ALL THE ADVERSE PUBLICITY about boxing corruption peaking with the three separate New York investigations after the first Johansson fight, the federal government got in on the action. Estes Kefauver, a senator from Tennessee, was propelled to national fame when he went after the Mafia in televised hearings in the early 1950s. Now he convened his Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly and began what would be a four-year investigation of the influence that organized crime had on the sport. Kefauver didn’t know much about boxing so he reached out to John Bonomi, Hogan’s assistant district attorney in New York and the man who finally brought down Frankie Carbo. Bonomi became Kefauver’s chief examiner and special counsel.

On the eve of the June 1960 hearings, Bonomi warned the public that Carbo still controlled boxing from behind bars. “Carbo boasts that he has friends in many high places and I know that many prominent people—including millionaire businessmen—have benefitted financially from Frank Carbo’s control of boxing. Reports of payoffs of boxing writers have reached the subcommittee and they obviously deserve full and further investigation,” he told a Cavalier magazine writer who profiled him.

“Bonomi won’t reveal his strategy to anyone but Kefauver. ‘I don’t want to sound paranoid,’ he told a friend, ‘but you never know who you can’t trust.’ Then he stared out at the Capitol dome for a long moment thoughtfully. ‘When you’re dealing with such influential racketeers and immoral tycoons, sometimes it’s a damn good idea to be a little paranoid.’ He stood up and carefully locked his files for the night. ‘Just a little paranoid,’ he concluded with a good-humored smile.” Influential racketeers and immoral tycoons—sounds like he was fighting the same two guys Cus was.

On June 14, six days before the rematch, Kefauver opened his hearings with a mission statement. “In recent years criminal investigations in New York have led to the conviction of Frank Carbo and Gabriel Genovese for undercover boxing activities and the exposure of Anthony (Tony Fats) Salerno, as the financier of the first Johansson vs. Patterson heavyweight championship match. A west coast probe resulted in the indictment of Carbo, Frank (Blinky) Palermo, and others for an allegedly extortive attempt to control the welterweight title. These investigations indicated that many boxing promoters and managers were in league with the underworld figures I have mentioned. I directed the subcommittee staff to determine if the underworld, together with certain powerful figures in professional boxing, were engaged in a continuing conspiracy to monopolize professional boxing.”

The opening testimony centered on rigged matches and bribes that Jake LaMotta received so he could get a shot at the middleweight title. But later that year Kefauver was going to go mano a mano against both Frankie Carbo and Jim Norris.

—

THREE DAYS BEFORE THE REMATCH, Cus showed up at Floyd’s open sparring session at his camp and took questions from the press. He did it openly because Connecticut was outside New York’s jurisdiction. He claimed that he still spoke frequently to Floyd and that he was convinced Floyd would regain his crown, because Johansson was “afraid of him.” But after the workout ended and Floyd took reporters’ questions, Cus lurked in the background. “Cus is my manager,” Floyd said. “He handles business matters. But in all my fights I have never once looked to my corner for advice.”

Howard Cosell interviewed Floyd the day before the fight and saw “rage” in Floyd’s eyes. This time it was personal for Patterson. He had stewed for months watching Ingo do all the talk shows and act arrogantly, displaying his Hammer of Thor right hand. Ingo was like the Swedish Joe Namath, and he was preening on TV and enjoying the spoils of the crown with an outgoing personality that Floyd didn’t possess. Floyd wanted to train like a monk, and for years he had retreated to his camp for months on end, even when he wasn’t fighting. But now he was summoning up the rage that he didn’t realize he possessed.

Ingo was an 8–5 favorite. Many reporters including Sports Illustrated’s Martin Kane picked Johansson to retain his crown. The fight was held at the Polo Grounds, a huge baseball stadium where the New York Giants played. Cohn and his boys put on a totally amateurish production. Thousands of people smashed down gates and rushed past the inadequate security force to get in for free. There were fistfights all over the place.

Cus was sitting six rows from ringside nervously fingering his black homburg hat in his hands. In the second round when Ingo landed a right hand to Floyd’s noggin, Cus winced and bit his lip. Thirty seconds before the round ended, Cus grabbed his neck as if he was choking. Then over the next two rounds, Cus’s body moved with each punch, as if to project his elusiveness up to Floyd in the ring, and his feet, under his seat, were doing a version of the Ali shuffle.

It was a pretty uneventful fight until the fifth round. Early in the round, Floyd snuck in a left hook that put Johansson down. He was up by eight but pretty disoriented. Floyd stalked him and set him up with a few body blows. When his guard came down, Floyd delivered a picture-perfect left hook that sent Ingo to sleep. During the entire ten count his left leg was shaking violently. As soon as Johansson went down, Cus sprang from his seat. He crawled over the press seats, calling out, “Floyd, Floyd, I’m over here!” Patterson didn’t hear him because of the bedlam in the ring. Cus waited until the rush of photographers finished their shots and their eyes met. Then Cus went back to his friends in the sixth row. “I told you he can punch,” he crowed. “Now they all know he can punch.”

Meanwhile, Cosell was in the ring, doing radio interviews. He wanted to talk to Ingo but he was still on queer street. He grabbed Whitey Bimstein, Johansson’s trainer. “For God’s sake, Whitey, is he dead?” “The son of a bitch should be,” Bimstein said. “I told him to look out for the left hook.”

The next day, Floyd met the press at the Hotel Commodore. Floyd was seated, with Cus standing right behind him, his hands on Floyd’s shoulders. Floyd said he fought with “detached viciousness,” which must have pleased Cus. When he was asked if he considered this the high point of his life, he smiled smugly. “Of course I do. Do you want to know why? I’ll tell you. Nothing you fellas can write about me from now on will be accepted by the public. . . . I’m the champ again. A real champ this time.” Then a reporter set Floyd up with a softball question. “Floyd, was that punch you knocked out Ingemar with the hardest punch you ever hit someone with?” “I can’t answer that one because I’d have to go around and ask the others guys that I hit.” Cus went wild with glee and grabbed Floyd from behind and shook him triumphantly. Then another writer asked Floyd who had been the greater influence in his recapturing the title: Joe Louis, who had given him some advice on fighting Ingo, or his manager, Cus. As the question was asked, Cus leaned over and whispered in Floyd’s ear. And Floyd dutifully repeated those words. “Floyd Patterson.”

Floyd’s performance made a lot of the hostile press eat some major crow. Dan Parker wrote, “There is no explanation of Patterson’s strange showing in the first fight or of Manager Cus D’Amato’s remarkable statement on TV while his warrior was still semi-conscious from the knockout, that Floyd would be the first heavyweight ever to regain the title in the return bout. This calm prediction isn’t exactly what one would expect from a manager whose heavyweight champion has just lost the title. But whatever it seemed like then, it turned out to be much better prophesying than your deflated Daniel has ever been guilty of.” Even Jimmy Cannon gave Floyd his due.

The Cus haters took Floyd’s victory as an excuse to bash Cus again. Arthur Daley, from The New York Times, opened his column, “Sometime in the distant future, when Floyd Patterson joins Joe Louis as one of boxing’s elder statesmen, he is likely to pause long enough to think back to the turning point in his career. When cantankerous Cus was refused a managerial license in New York, Patterson had to go it alone. It was exactly what he needed. Suddenly he discovered that he didn’t need all that over-protection, all that mama-knows-best direction and all that brainwashing. Floyd struck off for himself and gained his manhood.”

But Roger Kahn, writing in The Nation, savaged Cus and worried that he was back now that Floyd had regained his crown. “[D’Amato] has plans on exacting vengeance on his oppressors, real and imagined, which presumably will include more contracts under duress. He no longer talks of establishing a utopia for fighters and fight managers. His campaign now seems designed solely to restore the power and the glory of D’Amato.”

But Cus was working behind the scenes to restore the power and the glory of Patterson. He convinced Jackie Robinson and TV superstar Ed Sullivan to cochair a testimonial dinner for Floyd on July 21 with all proceeds going to the Wiltwyck School for Boys, Floyd’s alma mater. It was a lavish affair in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Commodore. Cus packed the dais with celebrities including Rocky Marciano, Jersey Joe Walcott, Barney Ross, New York mayor Robert Wagner, and Branch Rickey. When you look at the seating chart, it is like analyzing the secret power struggles in the Kremlin. Floyd, Cus, and Howard Cosell sat on the dais, along with Roy Cohn, who claimed to have sold one-third of the seats that night. Teddy Brenner, Ned Irish, and the rest of the surviving IBC crew at Madison Square Garden were exiled to table 36. Yet sitting prominently at table 3 were Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Black. Cus would hold grudges for years over the minutest slight and yet Charlie Black was somehow still golden in his eyes.

Cus had a bigger surprise than Black’s attendance. At the dinner, he presented Floyd with a crown. A literal crown. He had asked jewelers to submit designs. “It’s going to be solid gold,” D’Amato told Sports Illustrated. “And it will have genuine jewels in it. I don’t know what it will cost—maybe $20,000 maybe even $35,000. I have no idea and I don’t care. Floyd gave me the greatest night of my life.” Cus settled on a 14-karat gold crown studded with 174 diamonds, 248 rubies and sapphires, and 250 pearls. It had nine crests, and on the highest one was a golden globe to signify Floyd’s domination across the planet. There were also a couple of jewel-studded boxing gloves. Floyd’s initials, in diamond letters, were set into the front of the crown. There was even a band made out of ermine trim to assure a proper fit. “When the crown is presented I want to hear loud oohs and ahhs,” Cus said. Cus was so proud of that crown. He showed me the picture many, many times. And he told me that it had cost him $250,000. I guess he was adjusting for inflation.

Only one other present meant as much, if not more, to Floyd. It was a cablegram of blessing from Pope John XXIII. To the Catholic convert, that meant the world.

A week after the dinner, Cus, or, as the mortgage showed, Camille, went on a slightly smaller spending spree. On July 27, 1960, there was a transfer of property between Creste Sicignano (a.k.a. Oreste Suignano), a Catskill resident, and Camille Ewald, shown residing at 50-05 43rd Avenue in Woodside, Queens—Cus’s love nest. In consideration of one dollar ($1), Camille obtained the old Thorpe estate on the Hudson in Catskill, which included a huge Victorian manor and a carriage house. Now, this is some Mafia comrade stuff right there. You know that, right? That dollar signifies their friendship. That’s what you say so you can get a hit, you say, “I’ll sell you my house for a dollar.”

Camille was probably used as a front. That secret little log cabin in Fishkill that was revealed in the NYSAC hearings—that house was in Cus’s brother Tony’s name. I think that buying that house in Catskill and putting it in Camille’s name was all about eventually getting fighters in there. Everything was about fighting for Cus.

The shine wasn’t even off Floyd’s crown before Cohn pissed off both Floyd and Cus. Cohn and his crew announced that the third Floyd–Ingo fight would go off in L.A. on November 1, 1960. Only problem was they told everybody except Floyd and Cus. Floyd heard it announced on TV and he vowed not to fight on that date. “You’d think that since I’m the champion that the promoters, Feature Sports Inc., would be polite enough to please ask me—that’s all. The guy who is behind all this, I think, is Roy Cohn. He thinks I’m an insolent dumb backwoodsman. Before the last fight, my lawyer, Julius November, asked Cohn if I shouldn’t see the fight contract. And Cohn said, ‘Floyd? Can he read?’ You think I’m going to let those people come to me and tell me I’m going to fight November 1?” Cohn claimed that Floyd’s statement was “ridiculous” and that he had the highest regard for him. But Floyd wasn’t through. “In New York Cus is my ‘adviser,’” Patterson said. “I’m doing the talking. My eyes were opened after my defeat by Johansson. I watched the changed attitude of people toward me. When I lost they dragged out everything against me and Cus—gangsterism, hoodlumism, everything. Even though my name wasn’t associated with all that bad publicity, the public might have put me with some of it. Therefore, I decided if I ever won the title back, I’d make the decisions. I’d see that it doesn’t happen again. . . . Cus had faith and trust in the human race. Not that I haven’t, but we have to be cautious nowadays. There are hoods in every walk of life. And we have been fooled many times in the past.”

Now Cohn went out of his way to woo Patterson. The rumor was that Roy Cohn flipped November for a substantial cash payment and then November, who seemed to have his own designs on Floyd going back years, joined in the snow job and they both began to feed Floyd disinformation about Cus and his business dealings. Floyd and Cus never had a face-to-face argument but the stories began to make Floyd pull away from Cus. Then Cohn came up with the most Machiavellian scheme to befriend Floyd.

Cohn was very close to the Cardinal Spellman, the longtime cardinal of the Catholic Church in New York City. Spellman, like Cohn, was a closeted gay. His biographer, John Cooney, wrote that “in New York’s clerical circles, Spellman’s sex life was a source of profound embarrassment. There were stories about his seducing altar boys and choir boys. He had his favorites among handsome young priests and was known to have lovers outside the clergy.” One of those lovers was a chorus boy in the 1942 Broadway show One Touch of Venus and the boy bragged about the affair to Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s researcher C. A. Tripp. The chorus boy told Tripp that he had once asked Spellman how he could get away with such blatant acts as sending his limousine several times a week to pick up the boy and bring him to his apartment. Spellman replied, “Who would believe that?” Roy and Spellman were never lovers, though. When Spellman vacationed on Cohn’s yacht he was accompanied by an escort he called Uncle Frank.

So Cohn enlisted Spellman in a religious seduction of Floyd. Cohn set up a dinner at the Stork Club, an exclusive club that was owned by Sherman Billingsley, a good friend of J. Edgar Hoover’s and a rabid anti-Communist. Cohn invited his partner Bill Fugazy, J. Edgar Hoover, Cardinal Spellman, and a few other friends. He sat Floyd directly across the table from him, but he ignored Floyd all night and spent all his time joking and laughing with the cardinal. The next day Floyd saw Cus and he said, “Gee, I guess that Cohn’s a good guy.” “What do you mean?” Cus said. “Well, he was with the cardinal at this dinner and him and the cardinal were best friends.” That dinner opened the door for Cohn to begin to wean Floyd away from Cus.

On December 5, 1960, Senator Kefauver gaveled the second round of his investigation into the underworld dominance of boxing. Three months before that, he had charged Jim Norris with “evasion and delay” in dealing with the commission. In September, Kefauver’s office got an “anonymous” letter from a boxing insider. “Be assured that Jim Norris should not try and kid you that he is not connected with hoods. He has admitted that many times in N.Y., proudly. Blink [sic] Palermo and nobody else manages Sonny Liston. Barone [Liston’s “manager”] is only a stooge and cover up. The haven for the boys has been in Chicago where they meet and get all the Wed. TV dates. It has been the [Apalachin] for them with Gibson and Norris head of it. They cornered the fight game and kept it among them. Their hope is for Liston to get title shot and win it then they have control again. . . . Keep punching, Anonymous.”

This session’s star witness was to be Frankie Carbo. Kefauver began with questioning the IBC’s front man, Truman Gibson. Gibson was under indictment in the Jackie Leonard case and he must have thought that his fortunes would be enhanced if he lied his ass off and distanced himself from his co-defendants Carbo and Palermo. From the minute he was called, he minimized Carbo’s influence on the IBC. “Time and again, I told the panel Carbo had not been allowed to influence the IBC decisions and contests. . . . Nobody has ever told us, ‘Pay a fighter x number of dollars’ or a cheap or bargain price.” “The only times the Carbo influence became an issue we discontinued our activity with the individuals.” “We never cooperated with the more unseemly elements, although we did have to live with them.”

But when Gibson was asked whether Carbo “controlled” or merely “influenced” most of boxing’s managers and promoters he had to be candid. Palermo, Wallman, and Glickman were deemed “exceedingly friendly with and close to Carbo.” When Lou Viscusi’s name came up, Gibson had to qualify if he was Carbo-controlled. “The word ‘controlled’ in connection with Viscusi raises certain problems. Viscusi is certainly and has been friendly with Carbo over the years, and yet Viscusi perhaps typifies the way in which these managers operate. When it is to his advantage to make a fight with us, he will do so; and when it is to his advantage to go elsewhere, he will do that. For example, we had the Roy Harris fight in California with our arch enemy and arch foe, Cus D’Amato, the Floyd Patterson fight. At the time of the London–Patterson fight in Indianapolis, Viscusi was one of the representatives at the promoter’s meeting that Cus D’Amato and Irving Kahn called in order to get a new promoting combine.”

BONOMI: Are you not saying, Mr. Gibson, that even though he might have been Carbo controlled, he worked both sides of the fence? GIBSON: Undoubtedly worked both sides of the fence.

And on the other side of that fence was Cus. Gibson brought up Cus when he cited managers who were “hostile” to Carbo. “It is not the numbers that are important, but the persons whom the manager or managers manage. The manager of a heavyweight champion, for example, would be worth 80 percent of all of the other managers in terms of importance to boxing. . . . The heavyweight division has been dominated by Floyd Patterson, Cus D’Amato. So that the majority of the money is in the heavier weight category.”

Bonomi then probed Norris’s decision to pay Kearns, Dempsey’s former manager and Moore’s manager, and Viola Masters, Carbo’s girlfriend, goodwill salaries to keep a steady flow of boxers for their TV shows. Kearns, who hated Carbo, wound up getting $115,000 in payments, while Masters pulled in $45,000 to “counterbalance” the payments to Kearns. She got a few perks too. “At one fight in Chicago Norris gave Masters a mink stole as a token of his affection for Carbo,” Gibson testified. Asked why Carbo’s girlfriend had been hired instead of Carbo himself, Gibson said, “It looked a little bit better on our records, not ever considering the possibility of being called before a Senate investigative committee, to have Viola Masters down instead of Mr. Frank Carbo.”

Rosensohn was called to testify and gave a mostly self-serving account of his short tenure as a boy promoter. He said that Fat Tony and Charlie Black were both close to Cus and that Salerno, Black, Cus, and Kahn pushed him out of his own company. Then he took one parting shot at the NYSAC, which had revoked his license. “I spent many hours before the commission and tried in every way to help them when it came to their rendering a final judgment which I had hoped would exonerate me for what I had tried to do. Instead, the State Athletic Commission, for reasons which are not entirely clear to me, suspended my matchmaker’s license for 3 years. That is the end of the story.” Then Senator Dirksen asked, “You have no dreams at the present time?” “I have dreams,” Rosensohn replied. “But they are nightmares.”

Gibson was called back to the stand to testify about the rising new star heavyweight Sonny Liston. He couldn’t remember whether Palermo told him that he owned a piece of Liston but he did remember Palermo complaining that “his fighter Liston” never got plum TV fights and that was immediately rectified. Then chief investigator Bonomi raised an interesting connection.

BONOMI: Do you recall being present on September 27, 1960, when I interviewed Mr. Norris? And at that time do you recall that Mr. Norris said, in substance, that he was pushing Liston’s career out of animosity toward Cus D’Amato? GIBSON: Well, I think too he said that and I think there are other factors. I think certainly at that time he would have liked to have had a championship or championship fights in Chicago. BONOMI: But about that time there was this rather bitter feud between the Chicago Stadium interests and Mr. D’Amato, was there not? GIBSON: Yes. That had lasted for quite a considerable time. BONOMI: And Mr. D’Amato, as Floyd Patterson’s manager, was refusing to let Patterson fight for the IBC?

Gibson agreed that Norris was pushing Liston as a challenger to Floyd and Cus.

The talk turned to dollars. Gibson testified that in a good year, the IBC would gross $7 million and make $300,000 profit.

KEFAUVER: What kind of salaries do you fellows draw? GIBSON: Wholly inadequate, senator.

Gibson testified that Norris and Wirtz didn’t take a salary. They made all their money from the huge gross of the company, not the paltry $300,000 net. “They had so many interlocking companies it would be almost impossible to ascertain net worth. One company would own another, it would own something else, so that by the time you end up you would be in the Bismarck Hotel after having started from the Chicago Stadium and you would never really know what company owns what, except that all the stock is owned by Mr. Wirtz and Mr. Norris. They had 16 companies just in the boxing business!” Of course, Gibson owned no stock.

A little over a year after these hearings Gibson decided to move on and meet with Wirtz to work out a compensation package. Before the meeting, Wirtz sent Gibson a letter claiming that Gibson owed the Chicago Stadium Corporation $6,000. That was too much, even for Gibson. He had spent years hiding Norris’s criminal activity and wound up being indicted in L.A. and had nothing to show for his participation in the creation of the IBC. “My glory days as the nation’s top boxing promoter were over. [Norris and Wirtz] hadn’t made me, or Joe Louis for that matter, rich. Norris and Wirtz funneled profits in their stadium holdings, bypassing the IBC. I was paid less than ten thousand dollars a year, the deal I struck with Wirtz in 1949 setting my pay at $7200,” he wrote in his memoir.

So he wrote Wirtz an amazing letter. “You refer to the $6,000. What about the balance which was due me but unresolved at the time of payment of the $6,000? . . . So, at our meeting, add all of this and not just the $6,000 to the agenda. You measure everything in money. You are probably correct since you have been so successful. What measure do you put on a man’s life? Was your shrewd bargain, when we last met, your determination? I could not help but think then and now that I never knew Carbo before the organization of the IBC. I never cleared championships with him. I talked with him most infrequently. I certainly did not clear the Akins–Jordan fight with him. Someone did, and the fact that I didn’t indicates who put me in the soup. While you are remembering things in the past, please also recollect that I didn’t collect any of the profits (nor did Joe Louis, despite his agreement) from the split up of IBC operations from behind a nice insulated shield. I thought of all these things in your office. I would not have said or written them except for your last letter. So, at our meeting, let us include everything on the agenda.”

Norris got a carbon copy of Gibson’s letter at his home in Coral Gables, Florida. Gibson never heard from either of them again.

The committee went into closed, private session when Norris came in to testify. His attorney had previously told the committee that Norris was suffering from a very severe heart condition and that the strain of testifying might give him another heart attack. So they compromised by letting him take questions in executive session.

He began by answering some background questions. He was fifty-four, his parents were Canadians, and his greatest love was hockey. Then Senator Dirksen, from Illinois and no stranger to the Norris dynasty, began a series of puff questions designed to put Norris in the most favorable light. The good senator pontificated that talk of Blinky and Carbo being “associates” of this great business leader was flat-out wrong. Wasn’t their association merely “nothing more than people with whom in that line of business you feel that you have to deal”? Norris took the line. “I never had a cup of coffee with Frank Carbo until I went to New York to try and run boxing. I am out of boxing now, so I have no intention of ever having another cup of coffee with Frank Carbo. It has embarrassed my family tremendously. It has embarrassed me with my horses, which I think, after hockey, is my second love. . . . I am not a hero-worshipper of hoodlums. I do not care any more for hoodlums than I am sure you do, Senator, and that is my position.” One statement in that harangue that was probably true. Norris would have no intention of having a cup of coffee with Carbo in the future. They always drank whiskey.

Following up on Norris’s claim that he despised hoodlums, Bonomi brought up Capone’s main executioner, Sam “Golf Bag” Hunt. Norris admitted to a long-standing friendship. But he “was reputed to be, what you would say, a hoodlum. That was his reputation. . . . To me he was not that type or individual that he had been portrayed, and it was hard for me to believe that he did the things that he had been charged with.”

Then Norris went into a bizarre characterization of Carbo. He painted the former hit man as an altruist to “fallen managers.”

NORRIS: Different managers over the years have told me it is a well-known fact that a broken manager would go to Carbo and say, “I do not have room rent” or “I do not have any money to eat with” and Carbo might have $30 or $40 and would pull it out and say “Well, take some of it,” and give them $10 or $20. KEFAUVER: You are not defending Carbo, are you? NORRIS: No, I am not, but I do not think that he has anywhere near the control that I have read in some of these witness’ statements.

Bonomi then asked Norris about a bookie named Max Courtney, who had been hired by Norris at a salary of $2,000 a month, and paid a total of $76,000 to sell fight movies from the IBC library to TV stations. Did he sell any? “I think he sold a few, not very many,” Norris answered. Bonomi noted that Gibson testified that he had no idea what Courtney did for the company. Norris replied that it was up to his partner Wirtz to know what Max did. There were too many interlocking companies for even Norris to “comprehend.”

KEFAUVER: It is just a little strange that you would pay somebody $76,000 and nobody seemed to know what he was doing. NORRIS: I knew what he was doing, Senator, and that was selling fight pictures, which, I think, will be very valuable someday. I think we are just a little bit ahead of that market. KEFAUVER: What made you think he could sell fight pictures? He is a bookmaker. NORRIS: Well, I know Mr. Courtney quite well. He is very personable, very affable. He makes a very nice appearance.

Norris then revealed that he never placed a bet with Courtney and that Courtney still worked for Norris in their St. Louis corporation.

Bonomi then asked Norris to explain his quote in Grayson’s column that Liston “is my fighter.” He said that he told Grayson that he thought Liston could beat both Patterson and Ingo in the same ring on the same night. “And I said, ‘He’s my fighter,’ meaning, and I have tried to explain it time and time again, meaning he was my candidate, the person I thought in my own mind, from just watching fighters and so forth, that might possibly be the heavyweight champion if he ever had the opportunity. And I was doing everything in my power publicity wise, talking to newspapermen, talking to the public, telling them what a great fighter I thought Liston was. Now that is exactly what I mean.”

SENATOR LEVIN: You didn’t mean to imply you owned him? NORRIS: I don’t have 5 cents. I have never met Liston. I have never said hello to Liston. I have never shaken hands with him. BONOMI: You have met “Blinky” Palermo, haven’t you? NORRIS: Very well, very well.

Then Bonomi went for the kill.

BONOMI: Do you recall that on September 27, when you were interviewed by me and Mr. Williams, you stated, in substance, that you were “hustling” Sonny Liston out of animosity toward Cus D’Amato, the manager of Floyd Patterson? NORRIS: That was one of my reasons. BONOMI: So, in other words, you were building up Sonny Liston as a heavyweight contender, through the IBC, is that right? NORRIS: I was trying to build Sonny Liston up because I thought he could box. I thought he had great possibilities. BONOMI: But you were pushing him? NORRIS: Yes. I mean legitimately. If I sat down with a newspaperman, and he would say, “How does the heavyweight situation look to you, there is nobody coming up, is there?” I would say, “The heck there isn’t. There is a Sonny Liston that I think will be one of the greatest we have ever had.” I mean in that type of way, any way I could do it, to help the fighter, publicity wise, or any other way, I was happy to do.

BONOMI: During that period, you could not get Patterson to fight for the IBC, could you? NORRIS: Could not get Patterson at all once I promoted the fight where he won the heavyweight championship. BONOMI: You wanted to build up Liston so that he might get a chance at the heavyweight championship and perhaps win it; is that right? NORRIS: Yes, that is correct.

BONOMI: He was an IBC fighter, of course? NORRIS: IBC fighter— BONOMI: He never appeared in any televised bouts for any other organization, did he, from 1958 to the present? NORRIS: There were no other organizations televising. PETER CHUMBRIS [SUBCOMMITTEE COUNSEL]: In other words, you had exclusive contracts with them? NORRIS: No, sir. Where was he going to box on television, if he did not box for our organization? We had the only two. BONOMI: But it was your understanding that Liston was “your fighter” in the sense that you were building him up through the IBC, is that right? NORRIS: Well, I had no agreement with anybody on that. I mean that I did it on my own.

BONOMI: Do you recall that on June 26 of 1959, Johansson won the world’s heavyweight championship? NORRIS: Yes, sir. BONOMI: At that time, you were still engaged in this feud with Cus D’Amato, the manager of Floyd Patterson, were you not? NORRIS: No, I would not consider it a feud. BONOMI: Let us call it a disagreement. NORRIS: No. BONOMI: You could not secure Patterson for IBC bouts? NORRIS: I did not try. Once he showed no gratitude, every promise he made to me when I broke my neck to get Archie Moore for him, and where he won the heavyweight championship, he just walked away from me, turned his back on me. He made a lot of statements: I was a monopolist, I was this, I was that. He did not believe in television. And he did everything that he could to try and hurt me with the newspapermen. I just washed my hands of him. I had no contacts. I never asked him to box again for me. BONOMI: But anyway as of June 1959, Patterson was not fighting for the IBC, was he? NORRIS: Oh, no. He did not box for the IBC from the time he won the heavyweight championship.

Bonomi then began a line of questioning that got Norris to admit that he paid for the flight and expenses for NYSAC commissioner Helfand to go to Cuba to attend an IBC fight. Helfand was the same man who had actively pushed for Cus’s licenses to be revoked.

BONOMI: Do you feel if the IBC paid considerable expenses for these State athletic commissioners, they would be indebted to the IBC? NORRIS: I certainly do not.

Finally, Bonomi had one last line of questioning for Norris. He asked the entrepreneur if he owned a racehorse named Mr. Gray. Norris said yes. “Frankie Carbo was known as Mr. Gray in boxing, was he not?” Bonomi asked. “Yes, sir. Some people called him that,” Norris admitted. “Was he partly in your mind when you named the horse?” “Possibly facetiously,” Norris said. “Was he a good horse?” Bonomi asked. “He wasn’t worth a nickel,” Norris responded.

Norris’s testimony made all the sports pages but it took the New York Mirror columnist Dan Parker to point out an inconsistency. He noted that Norris testified that Carbo was merely an acquaintance but that in an Eddie Borden column from 1953, Norris was quoted as saying, “Frankie [Carbo] is a friend of mine. If I have to give up his friendship for the sake of promoting boxing, I would just as well as give up boxing.”

The hearings brought out some fascinating tidbits that tied up some loose ends. Detective Bernhard, an undercover officer from New York who was working on Bonomi’s task force to arrest Carbo, testified that while he and his partner were in a restaurant in D.C. watching a fight with Carbo, Palermo, and Billy Brown, Carbo said that Norris was upset and told him that Liston was his fighter. Then Carbo told the group that he had a fight in New Orleans between Frankie Ryff and Ralph Dupas. Carbo said, “[Willie] Ketchum [a prominent manager] got greedy and took $1,000. I called Charlie Black and got that thing straightened out.” So Charlie Black was close to Carbo as well as Fat Tony.

The same undercover cop was in Chicago for the testimonial dinner honoring Jim Norris on March 23, 1958. He reported that Carbo was in room 1150 of the Palmer House, registered under Blinky’s name. Right down the hall was a room occupied by none other than Fat Tony Salerno. “There was constant contact between Carbo’s room and Salerno’s room,” Detective Bernhard testified. The plot thickens.

The hearings wound down with the appearance of organized-crime members. Blinky feigned illness and missed the proceedings but John Vitale, who allegedly had a piece of Liston, was called. He had over twenty arrests on his record, including two on suspicion of murder. But after every question, he refused to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate him. Finally, one of the senators posed a question.

KITTRE: Mr. Vitale, you have refused to answer the questions asked of you up until now. Apparently you feel they would involve you in some of these situations described here. Would you care, on the basis of your general knowledge of boxing, to give the subcommittee some of your own thoughts as to how to eliminate underworld racketeering and monopoly in the field of boxing? VITALE: I take the fifth amendment. What a question!

Now it was time for the headliner. Mr. Gray. The Uncle. The Ambassador himself. Frankie Carbo, looking dapper but a little wan, strode into the room. Kefauver began by telling Carbo’s lawyer, Abraham Brodsky, that Carbo would qualify as an “expert witness” on the sport of boxing.

Carbo began by answering some personal questions. He said that he was fifty-six and that he lived in Miami. Then it was, “I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that I cannot be compelled to be a witness against myself.” They asked him about his associations, if he had threatened any witness before the commission, on and on, and his answer was always the same. The Fifth. Then Kefauver gave him one last chance to answer anything and he conferred with Brodsky.

CARBO: There is only one thing I want to say, Mr. Senator. KEFAUVER: Yes. CARBO: I congratulate you on your reelection. KEFAUVER: That is very nice of you. I appreciate that, Mr. Carbo.

Carbo then asked for an orange juice because he was diabetic. CARBO: I had no breakfast. KEFAUVER: All right. We are about to excuse you, Mr. Carbo. CARBO: I mean I am trying to hold on as long as I can. BRODSKY: He’s a pretty sick man, as Mr. Bonomi knows. KEFAUVER: Very well. You look like a pleasant man, Mr. Carbo. CARBO: Thank you. BRODSKY: He is.

And the multiple-time murderer got up and walked out the door.

The reaction to the hearings was predictable. There was lots of moral indignation about how the sport had been infested by these mobsters. But only Murray Robinson, in the New York Journal-American, took a more cynical view of the hearings. In an article headlined “NOW Ex-Champs Tell Us!” he put these latest hearings into perspective.

“At the hearings Tunney, Dempsey, Louis, and Marciano apparently went along with the widespread and erroneous belief that hoodlum control of boxing is a fearful new development, like intercontinental missiles, or something. They should know better than that. The mobbies got into boxing in the early 1920’s and they’ve been in it ever since. ‘Mr. Gray’ didn’t get his manicured mitts into the middleweight title until 1935 when Eddie (Babe) Risko won it.

“Only Cus D’Amato, to give the Svengali his due and not examining his motives too closely, spoke out against the mobsters while managing a heavyweight champion. And Floyd Patterson still sounds off against Sonny Liston’s hoodlum connections, even though it may be because he just doesn’t fancy fighting that behemoth.”

A few weeks after Kefauver finished his hearings, the real action shifted to L.A. when the trial of Carbo, Palermo, Gibson, Sica, and Dragna began in January 1961. Jackie Leonard, who was the target of Carbo and his henchmen, was so afraid of testifying in open court against these defendants that in November 1959 he tried to take Blinky up on his bribe offer from August of that year. He was ready to cash in for his silence. Leonard sent his wife, who had relatives in Pennsylvania, to meet with Palermo. A deal seemed to have been struck—Leonard and his wife would leave the country in return for $25,000 in cash. But the deal was never consummated and the trial began.

Carbo found himself in the courtroom of Judge Ernest Tolin, who, unlike Kefauver, didn’t characterize Carbo as “a pleasant man.” Carbo was the only defendant who didn’t testify. Leonard and Nesseth withstood hostile cross-examinations. An interesting sidelight was that both Gibson and Daly flew to New York during recesses in the trial to confer with Harry Markson at Madison Square Garden. MSG had said it had scrubbed out all vestiges of IBC corruption, so why were they meeting with Markson? Cus thought that he had the answer.

One of the highlights of the trial was the testimony of Don Jordan, the boxer who everyone wanted a piece of. He proved that he wasn’t working with a full deck when he testified on Blinky’s behalf. When he was asked to recall the specifics of a conversation he’d had with the defendant Louie Dragna, Jordan said, “Roses are red, violets are blue, besamany kulo y alva fong ku.” Or that’s how it was transcribed. But he might have actually said, “Bésame el culo y vaffanculo,” Spanish and Italian for “Kiss my ass and fuck off.” That was most likely lost on all who heard it, and the rest of his testimony proved to be the exact opposite of his previous testimony before the grand jury. It didn’t matter, though. On May 30, 1961, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty all around.

But then on June 11, Judge Tolin died unexpectedly. The defendants moved for a new trial but it was denied. On December 2, 1961, the replacement judge, George Boldt, announced the sentences: Mr. Gray got twenty-five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Blinky got fifteen years and had to pay a $10,000 fine. Poor Truman Gibson got a five-year sentence that was suspended but he had to pay $10,000 also. Sica got twenty years in prison and a $10,000 fine, and Dragna got five in the slammer with no fine. Everyone posted bail except for Carbo, who was immediately sent to Alcatraz. Norris, at home in Coral Gables, ponied up most of Gibson’s legal fees, including most of the $60,000 that was paid to an extorter named Sidney Brin, who had posed as a government agent and told Gibson’s team that he had documents showing that the Department of Justice wanted to dismiss the indictment against Gibson. The exchange was made and Gibson’s lawyers introduced the documents in evidence, only to learn that they were forged. Brin wound up in a federal penitentiary. Norris did not pay his legal bills.

There was some fallout from the trial. After Carbo and Palermo’s ruse of turning Liston over to Pep Barone while they were on trial backfired, they then coerced Liston to announce that he would persuade Barone to release him from his contract just out of friendship. “This would be no more improbable than if Dan Topping, co-owner of the Yankees, gave Mickey Mantle his freedom without a cent of recompense for the investment Mickey represents to the club,” Dan Parker wrote. “The Liston case presents a powerful argument in favor of Federal control of boxing. If State Commissions can’t recognize the danger to the sport involved in letting the undercover criminal element dictate proceedings, it is time their power was limited to licensing ring personnel and weighing the fighters.”

—

THE THIRD FLOYD–INGO SHOWDOWN was set for Miami Beach on March 31, 1961. Floyd agreed to fight there only if the Cohn group would post $10,000 to guarantee unrestricted seating at the arena. At that time much of Florida was still segregated. Meanwhile, the tensions between Cus and Cohn’s group began to boil over. Cohn and Fugazy forced old man Jack Fugazy out of the promotion, which infuriated Cus, since Jack was the only person he trusted at Feature Sports Inc. Eddie Borden described the treachery of the two young upstarts in his broadsheet. “Young Fugazy and Cohn are acting and performing in methods contrary to the accepted forms of boxing etiquette. One practice that is of paramount importance, ‘Never talk to the fighter about business when he has a manager.’ No matter how you feel about Cus D’Amato and his contrary actions you must realize one thing: boxing would never have heard of Floyd Patterson if it weren’t for this same D’Amato. Luckily, Floyd has common sense, far above the average. He is well aware of the pitfalls that face him and sensibly ignores the [counsel] of people who are trying to discredit Cus. He is well aware of the mischief makers who are trying to create dissension between him and his mentor and sagely he listens and says very little. He realizes that Cus has done a superb job. They have gone through too much together to be separated at this stage of the proceedings by meddling interlopers.” Little did he know.

In January of 1961, Gil Rogin of Sports Illustrated went down to spend some time with Floyd and Cus at Floyd’s training camp at Ehsan’s. Both men were in a pensive mood. Floyd looked back at the night before he lost his title to Ingo. He had been driven into the city from camp in a Cadillac accompanied by two off-duty Mount Vernon detective bodyguards because Cus thought that IBC goons might attack him. Once in his room at the New York City hotel, Cus set up a secret knock so Floyd would know it was him. They ate meals together in the room just as they had when they were doing a training exhibition years earlier in Kansas City because all the restaurants there were segregated. Rogin said that Floyd had few friends because he was afraid of “parasitic hangers-on.” So he withdrew into himself.

“God created only one Floyd Patterson,” Cus crowed. Floyd rolled his eyes. “Cus thinks I’m Superman,” Floyd said. “Sometimes I have to run away and shut the door.”

Cus was lying on his bed wearing gold pajamas and black velvet slippers. He was talking to Rogin while he held the real estate section of The New York Times over his head. “I turn around and I find that I am an old man. I want to accomplish something before I die,” Cus said.

“You have,” Rogin assured him.

“No,” Cus sighed. “I’m just trying. I want to leave a scratch on this old stone before I leave it, like the soldiers in a war. They didn’t know what to do, so they left their names all over the place. It all must end, the good and the bad. Così è guerra.” He told Rogin that meant “This is war” or “This is life.” He said it was the same thing.

“Everything will be different in the morning,” Rogin said, trying to cheer him up.

“Everything’s exactly the same in the morning,” said Cus.

Cus’s pessimism was probably due to the fact that he saw Floyd slipping away from him. Both Cohn and November were chipping away at Floyd’s connection with Cus. On February 8, Jackie Robinson wrote a letter to Cus in an attempt to cheer him up. “Floyd’s next fight is so very important that I hope he responds in the same manner as he did last year. I am almost as proud of him as you are, and I sometimes worry about the direction he will take. However, lately, I know I need not worry. His stand on integration at the fight was especially pleasing. Keep him on this path. He is doing a great service. I keep wishing things would straighten themselves out as far as your relationship goes, but as I read the press, I can’t help but wonder how things are going. While the press seems to be down on you, I feel what you have done for Floyd has helped him and his future though the press seems to be taking their gripes out on him because they apparently resent what you have done. Keep up your courage. I am certain the truth will come out. Sincerely yours, Jackie.”

Before Floyd and his increasingly larger entourage departed for Florida, Cus got a very unusual phone call. He had gone on a television show recently where he was talking about his favorite new enemies, the Cohn gang. His host mentioned that they must remind him of James Norris. “Some of the peculiar antics of Feature Sports Inc. make Jim Norris stand out like a diamond in a coal pile,” Cus said. A few days later Cus got a call from a Norris associate. He said that Norris wanted to extend an offer for Floyd to train for free at his racetrack near Miami. “Go look at the facility. It’s got a kitchen and everything. And Mr. Norris would even supply the cook and the food.” Of course, Cus never took Norris up on the offer. Food cooked by Norris’s chef?

Robert Boyle had a field day describing, for Sports Illustrated, the zoo behind the scenes of the fight in Miami. For him it was the “most bizarre cast of characters to hit the road since Jack Kerouac and his buddies careened across the country. . . . D’Amato detests Cohn and loathes Fugazy, Fugazy regards D’Amato as ‘mentally ill’ and is often irked by Kahn, who, in turn, is suspicious of almost everyone. He tapes phone calls and visits in his office. Cohn thinks he hides a microphone on his body, ‘He’s so fat no one could find it.’

“The sole tragic figure in the lot is Cus D’Amato, entangled in all sorts of legal snares. The press often reviles him as a crook. A crook he is not; a kook he may be. He fought the gangster dominated IBC alone for such a long spell that he wound up with a deep and permanent persecution complex. For D’Amato, every night has a full moon. The sad thing about it is he has good reason to feel persecuted. D’Amato attributes his difficulties to Bill Rosensohn, the onetime promoter who accused him of all sorts of shenanigans a year and a half ago. On the face of it, D’Amato, who can be devious in his own fashion, looked completely guilty. His enemies—and he had made many crusading against the IBC—pounced. ‘I was a person on the dirt surrounded by a pack of wolves trying to tear me apart,’ he says. The NYSAC, which rarely said boo to the IBC, revoked his manager’s license. The revocation was upset in court, where it developed that the commission had nothing to revoke because the license had previously expired. Now and then D’Amato toys with the idea of applying for a new license, but he is afraid that if he got it the commission would then ‘frame me for good this time’ and make the revocation stick. ‘That would put me out of business all over the world,’ he says.

“Nowadays, what with having to avoid a managerial association with Patterson in New York, D’Amato leads a lonely life. He spends most of his time in his cluttered two-room apartment at Broadway and 53rd Street, his main companion a boxer dog with a black eye. The dog is named Cus because he looks as though he’s been kicked around, too.

“‘Most of the time I just lay around,’ D’Amato says. ‘I read. I play with the dog. Anything to avoid boredom. Sometimes I just walk around the streets.’ He stays out of bars for fear an enemy agent might stuff marijuana cigarettes into his pockets, then whistle for the police. He avoids the press. ‘I can’t afford to make any mistakes or have what I say misconstrued,’ he says. Although he has a bed in the apartment, he never sleeps there. He stays with friends, and he rarely spends two nights in the same place. ‘I don’t like my comings and goings to be predictable,’ he says. He is wary of what he says over the phone because he says it may be being tapped. Sometimes, though, D’Amato will get carried away and talk about anything on the phone. Reminded of a possible tap, he’ll shout, ‘I don’t care! I tell the truth!’

“At present most of D’Amato’s fire is directed at Fugazy and Cohn. They are ‘depraved’ and they make him long for the old days when he was battling Jim Norris. ‘I never had so much fun in my whole life,’ he says. ‘I would create illusions to have the IBC think one thing and then do something unexpected. I played with Norris and his henchmen. I’d lock all the doors except one, and at that one I’d be waiting with an ax!’

“Fugazy, D’Amato says, tried to shake him down for a 15 percent cut of Patterson’s closed circuit money. ‘Compared to Fugazy, Norris is like a diamond in a coal pile. Fugazy has definite psychopathic leanings. The man has no principles! This man lies to your face, and he believes his own lies. A respectable racketeer!’”

When Gil Rogin visited the house where Cus and Floyd were staying in Miami he found a much different vibe than he had a few months earlier at the training camp. November was constantly around “sweet and submissive, hovering like some huge, pale butterfly in Floyd’s company.” But Cus was being frozen out. “As for Cus D’Amato, whose shadow, like the moon, used to eclipse Floyd’s sun—he lives in the same house as Patterson but Floyd neither knows what he does nor seems to care. Not that the old bindings of love and loyalty have been totally broken, but the roles of father and son appear to have been subtly reversed. ‘I tell Cus,’ Floyd says patiently, ‘that some of the people he knows have been using him and taking advantage of him, but he doesn’t listen to me. My eyes have been opened.’ . . . D’Amato comes frequently to training and then sits in the back and does not visit Floyd. November, however, comes lordly to training. ‘I’m happy to present to you the attorney for Champion Patterson,’ is the astonishing announcement.”

Cus had obtained a license from the Miami Beach Commission, so he was working Patterson’s corner the night of the fight. Floyd looked tentative from the start and he got knocked down twice in the first round. He rallied a bit and knocked Ingo down near the end of the round. But he was befuddled when he came back to his corner. “Cus, I can’t find it. The style. I can’t find the style to fight him.” Talking to a reporter later, Floyd described his mind-set. “When I got in the ring my mind was very blank. I’d backpedal. I did that several times. I’d go back awhile. I thought it would help me find myself and that then I’d tear in there, the Floyd Patterson I know I am. But I wasn’t accomplishing anything. Good thing I got knocked down. It woke me up.”

There was confusion in his corner. Florio and Cus were giving Floyd contradictory advice. By the sixth round Floyd felt he was weakening and he knew he’d have to gamble and try for a knockout. For the first time all fight Johansson started stalking Floyd, who began retreating. But near the end of the round, Floyd threw his leaping left-hand lead and landed it square on Johansson’s temple. Ingo was staggered and Floyd finished him off with two clubbing rights to the head. Johansson crumbled to the canvas and the fight was over.

Everyone agreed that the fight hadn’t added to the reputation of either man. Howard Cosell wrote that it was a revelation to him. “I realized that Patterson was not an outstanding fighter. Johansson was overweight, out of shape, bloated, had virtually no movement in the ring. Yet Patterson was defenseless against Ingo’s right. . . . The more I listened to Floyd talk after that fight, the more I began to wonder about him. On the surface he was still the same—diffident, almost timid. But things were happening. He had broken with Cus D’Amato, the very man who had made him, who had carefully selected his opponents and who, even though D’Amato would never admit it, knew Patterson’s limitations as a fighter.”

Now the drumbeat for a Patterson–Liston fight intensified. Liston went on the offensive. “I won’t get a chance because of Cus D’Amato,” he told one reporter. Patterson seemed to respond by echoing Cus’s argument—when Liston got rid of his mobbed-up managers, they could fight. “I know who those men are and they’ll have to take a backseat.” When Floyd was asked to name the men in question, he just chuckled. “I’m not looking to get bumped off.” Liston responded in Jimmy Cannon’s column. Cannon asked Liston what he thought of Floyd Patterson. “I think he’s a great champion,” he said. “You don’t mean that?” Cannon said. “No. He’s afraid of me. I view it this way. He’s just using any excuse so that he don’t have to fight me. He’s worrying about who manages me. I ain’t worrying about who’s managing him. Patterson’s got a contract with Cus D’Amato. Cus’s name on it. I’m quite sure he don’t sit up all night and watch Cus. He don’t sleep with Cus all night to see what he’s doing every minute.”

“Would you sell the contract if you had a good offer?” Cannon asked Liston’s “manager” Barone. “I’m no piece of furniture,” said Liston, suddenly angry. “I’m no hog or dog to auction off. You want Cus to be my manager?”

By now, the columnist Red Smith had shifted his attacks from Cus to Floyd himself. “Floyd Patterson has made it abundantly clear that he means to have no part of the No. 1 contender. The champion says he is making his own decisions now but he speaks with the voice of his sometime proprietor, Cus D’Amato. He has arrogated to himself the license formerly exercised by Cus to dictate the professional and social existence of challengers, including the right to choose their business associates. The invertebrates in nominal command of boxing have made it equally clear that they have no intention of speaking up for the rights of any contender, no matter how deserving. They may lift the title of a Ray Robinson or harass an Archie Moore but they are meekly subservient to the whim of the heavyweight champion. They approved amateur Pete Rademacher as a bona fide challenger. They sanctioned a title defense against Roy Harris, a comic strip character conceived by Al Capp. They accepted peace-loving Brian London as a werewolf after his own countrymen had rejected him for the role. They will not boggle at Henry Cooper. Taking up where he says D’Amato has left off, Patterson speaks and acts as though the heavyweight championship—indeed, the heavyweight division—were his private property and not merely a bauble which he holds in trust.”

Floyd took the train back to New York from Miami and he was met at the station by reporters. A title defense was planned for the fall, but Liston’s backers had not approached Floyd’s people, they were told. What was interesting about all this was that the person talking to the press on behalf of Floyd was not Cus but Roy Cohn. Presumably Cus was on a different train headed north.

Cohn returned to New York to a lawsuit against him, Bill Fugazy, Tom Bolan, and Feature Sports Inc., filed by Humbert “Jack” Fugazy. Jack was supposed to get one-fourth of the promoter’s share but they froze him out of the company and then refused to pay him. So he sued for $130,000. Speaking of his nephew Bill and partner Cohn, Jack said, “You never met two people who, according to their talk, control the universe. They know who to put their hands on. But when they need something, they come crawling. It makes me sick when I talk about them. Not one of them knows a thing about boxing. They have done more to kill boxing than all the mobsters put together.”

Cus was Jack’s main witness in the case but Roy Cohn had made a career out of delaying cases and he did that here too, getting five postponements. “Cohn is hoping to delay this trial long enough for me to die,” said Jack. “Well, I won’t. I’m in much better health than they think. I’m willing to take all three in the ring and beat their heads off. I will live long enough to see my nephew and Roy Cohn get what they deserve.” He barely did. He was a beaten-down man, near death, when he finally got a judgment from the judge. Now the problem was to collect it. Cohn was also notoriously cheap and notorious for ignoring judgments. But Uncle Jack had the last laugh—one of the court bailiffs seized one of Cohn’s cars, which was parked in front of the Essex Hotel overlooking Central Park, where Cohn was attending a board meeting of Lionel, the toy train manufacturing company that he had taken over from his grand-uncle and eventually ran into the ground. Cus was disgusted by both Cohn and Fugazy and he accused them of killing his friend Jack. “These people were terrible,” Cus said. “They brought Wall Street into boxing.”

In April of 1963, Bill Fugazy wrote a long article in The Saturday Evening Post. It was his farewell to boxing. He and Roy Cohn were stepping down from active involvement in Feature Sports but they were retaining their shares. Cohn had put his law partner Tom Bolan in charge of the day-to-day operations. The piece was a self-serving account of his attempt to “clean up” boxing from mobster influence, which, considering Cohn’s representation of Fat Tony and other Mafia bosses, was laughable. He wrote that “living in boxing was like growing up with a pack of wolves. Let me introduce you to the wolf pack,” and then went into thumbnail sketches of the participants, including Cus, “Patterson’s manager in theory, not in practice”; Norris, “very rich and very powerful but not very good at remembering faces,” specifically Carbo’s when it came to testifying at Senate hearings; and Irving Kahn, the president of TelePrompTer, who “still owes Johansson money from the first fight, owes Feature Sports money from the second and third fights, and he doesn’t trust anyone else.” He even had harsh words for his partner Cohn, saying he had “the greatest ability to alienate and antagonize people of anyone.”

There were a couple of nuggets in the article that blew my mind. Fugazy confirmed that November was moving in on Floyd. He wrote that Floyd was a decent person who was “influenced too much by the people around him. I’m certain he would not deliberately do anything wrong but he sometimes suffers from poor advice. . . . Like his lawyer Julius November, Floyd is overly suspicious. When November barks, ‘Did you hear what he said, Floyd?’ Patterson listens.”

Fugazy traced his involvement with Feature Sports. He was the one who, on the recommendation of his uncle Jack, contacted Rosensohn and Velella, who both had their promoter’s licenses revoked by the NYSAC. They wanted $247,000 for the contract for the return match, two-thirds to Velella and one-third to Rosensohn. He implied that they paid the money and then the two Fugazys went to Sweden in December of 1959 to talk to the new champ Ingo, who told them that he would never fight for the mob. “I don’t want to get involved with Jim Norris,” Ingo said. “He came over here and tried to tell me that I could never fight again unless he tied me up. He wanted to own me. No one’s going to own me.”

So when they came back to New York they applied for a promoter’s license, but NYSAC chairman Melvin Krulewitch’s two fellow commissioners—“young Jim Farley and Julie Helfand, who was obligated to Norris”—blocked their application. Krulewitch then called for a public hearing on the application. But a few weeks later, Fugazy heard that Jim Norris had been bragging at a cocktail party in Palm Beach that “‘these guys think they’re going to get their license. They don’t know that my boy is going to stop them.’ His boy was Jules Helfand. It is a matter of public record that when Helfand was chairman of the athletic commission before Krulewitch, Norris paid his traveling expenses at least once.” Interesting. We just read that testimony before the Kefauver Commission. And Helfand was the driving force to get Cus’s license suspended by the NYSAC, which gave Norris a wide opening to get control of the heavyweight division with Patterson at home in Rockville Center, licking his wounds. Back to Fugazy’s account.

“A few weeks later, Norris told Denniston Slater, who was then president of Feature Sports and had known the Norris family from Palm Beach society, ‘Get your money back, you’ll never put on this fight. You bought your stock from Bill Rosensohn, but you never got his stock certificate. You never got it because I have it.’ It was the truth. Rosensohn had told them that he had lost his certificate but in fact he had borrowed money from a Norris company and when he couldn’t pay it back, forfeited the certificate as collateral.” According to Fugazy, Cohn then called Wirtz and said, “‘Look, this is really going to get Norris in trouble. If he owns stock in a corporation that promoted the last heavyweight championship fight, he’s guilty of undercover promoting.’ So Wirtz gave them the certificate.” Hmm. So, knowing Cohn, maybe Rosensohn never collected any of the money Cohn offered him for his share of Rosensohn Enterprises, and Norris did retain the stock certificate.

Young Bill then complained that they should have had the rematch at Yankee Stadium but the stadium wanted a higher rental fee and “D’Amato claimed that the Stadium was controlled by Jim Norris. Sometimes I suspect that D’Amato feels Jim Norris controls Khrushchev. As preparations proceeded, D’Amato kept telling us that the fight would never take place. He said that Norris would have somebody killed or somebody drugged. He once said that Norris was going to plant narcotics in his coat pocket and have him arrested as a dope peddler. No one was killed, no one was drugged and D’Amato has never been arrested as a dope peddler.” Does sound like Cus.

Fugazy had one funny anecdote from the Miami Beach fight. He met Sonny Liston at the fight and he told Sonny that he had persuaded his pal Bob Hope to buy out Sonny’s contract from Barone and to donate his part of the purse to charity. “Who’s Bob Hope?” Sonny asked. “He’s a comedian,” Fugazy told him. “I don’t need no comedian as my manager,” Sonny snorted.

Cus stood to make some good green off the Miami Beach fight and he didn’t have to shell out for another crown, so he could go on a shopping spree. One of the things he was looking to buy was his own private island in upstate New York. In Cus’s files there is a letter dated March 29, 1961, from a real estate company called Meola and Meola—Specialist in Orange County Property. Harry Meola had written Cus that “we want to let you know that you can now buy the island for $25,000. We are sure that you will never find a more unusual and desirable retreat in New York State.”

But Cus’s desire for the ultimate hideaway got derailed when he received a letter from the IRS on April 12. He was being audited for income from the year 1959. As he would soon find out when the “books and financial records for the year in question” were delivered, November, who was not only an attorney but a CPA too, made some fundamental errors with Cus’s tax payments and that was the last time in his life that Cus would be able to even entertain the idea of buying something grand—an island or a jewel-encrusted crown.

Meanwhile, the boys behind Liston were desperately trying to clean up his management situation. The ruse of Barone “surrendering” his contract with Sonny that had two more years to run didn’t fly, so on April 20, Sonny agreed to pay $75,000 to Barone for his contract. Cus was dubious. “Where did Liston get the $75,000?” he told a reporter. “The plans for Floyd Patterson have already been made. Liston does not figure in those plans now. I am not interested in Liston at present.”

Neither was Kefauver. But Patterson seemed to be. Or at least the Patterson that Roy Cohn and Julius November were talking to. On April 24, an ex-politician from Philadelphia named George Katz was introduced to the boxing world as Sonny’s new manager. Dan Parker was a little skeptical of the arrangement. “George (Pussy) Katz ‘bought’ Sonny Liston’s contract from his alleged owner Pep Barone. The deal was closed in the office of one of Blinky Palermo’s regiment of lawyers the other day. The odor of stale codfish still permeates the vicinity.”

But Floyd was quoted in the papers asking that Kefauver’s subcommittee approve Liston’s new choice. The next day, Kefauver sent out a press release in which he addressed Patterson. “I understand from newspaper reports that you have asked the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly to approve the new managerial arrangement of Charles ‘Sonny’ Liston.” He went on to explain that his committee didn’t have that authority but that if his anti-racketeering bill was passed that authority would be given to a national boxing commissioner. “I would think that the Commissioner’s first order of business would be to examine Mr. Liston’s new management with a fine-tooth comb.”

A few days later Kefauver went even further. His office released a new statement: “The Washington Post of March 15 carried a U.P.I. dispatch stating that the heavyweight boxing champion, Floyd Patterson, may defend his title against the No. 1 contender, Sonny Liston, in September of this year. If this match is held, and Liston wins, we face the ugly prospect of having the heavyweight championship revert to mob control.” He then went on to introduce his legislation to clean up boxing.

On March 31, Kefauver convened follow-up hearings on the need for federal regulation of boxing. Marciano testified that the new boxing czar should be John Bonomi. Gene Fullmer, Tommy Loughran, and others supported the legislation but didn’t nominate anyone. But Jack Hurley, the great Seattle promoter and trainer, testified and agreed that there was a need for a national boxing commissioner. Hurley nominated his old pal Cus D’Amato. “He’s dead on the level, he’s honest, he’s qualified, he’s fearless. Everything he has done has been done for Patterson. Today Patterson is a wealthy fighter, and Cus doesn’t have change for a quarter.”

Kefauver and his aide Bonomi went on a public relations spree the next few months to stir up public sentiment for their boxing legislation. Bonomi kept making the case that even with the convictions of Carbo and Palermo, it wouldn’t end the mob’s domination of the sport. “At this very moment Carbo associates are standing by to gather up the pieces of his crumbling empire,” Bonomi told the National Boxing Association annual convention. He said that enactment of Kefauver’s legislation would finally “boot” the gangsters out of boxing. The legislation never even made it to a vote. And Bonomi was right. Years later a boxing official told Nick Tosches, who was researching a book on Sonny Liston, that “Frankie Carbo and Palermo were running the fight game out of their cells. They were in jail, and they had a phone service at their disposal, and they made matches. They were running the Garden out of jail.” No wonder Cus avoided the place.

Despite all the infighting in Floyd’s camp, Cus still had enough juice to avoid Liston and have Patterson fight Tom McNeeley, a journeyman from Boston, over the objections of Cohn’s group. Cus arranged for Floyd to get 40 percent of the gate and 50 percent of the ancillary rights. Then he made McNeeley’s manager put $1 million in escrow as a guarantee for a return bout if Floyd lost. But Cus cut into Floyd’s purse when he got into a fight with the Massachusetts State Boxing Commission. The only way that Floyd could make money on this fight was for a huge hometown crowd to come out and root for McNeely, who was undefeated in twenty-three fights. But when the local commission refused to allow Cus to bring in an out-of-state referee, the fight was moved to Toronto, where Cus again got into a shouting match with the chairman of the Ontario Athletic Commission over its policy that judges had to be residents of Ontario. The dispute got so heated that people there thought the fight might be in jeopardy. Then Cus complained that McNeely did little to promote the fight, since he had stayed back in Boston to train, which didn’t help the gate.

No one thought much of this fight. Arthur Daley wrote that McNeeley “has a chance all right. So has Outer Mongolia of becoming the first nation to send a man to the moon.” Jimmy Cannon was more sardonic. “There is no need for Frankie Carbo, the underworld commissioner of boxing, anymore. If he wasn’t in jail, the old gunman probably would be drawing unemployment insurance. No champion has to fix fights anymore. You don’t have to give a murderer a piece of your fighter to muscle the other guy into submission. You just find a place like Toronto and put your guy in with a clown like McNeeley. You can’t lose and you won’t be arrested, either.”

The fight went off on December 4, 1961. Once again, Patterson looked bad despite flooring McNeeley eight times in four rounds. Each time he was on the canvas McNeeley got up with tremendous determination and even rocked Patterson in the fourth round before he hit the floor four times and the fight was finally stopped by ref Jersey Joe Walcott. Afterward Floyd rated himself “a 55” for the fight. Cus disagreed, saying, “It was a lot less.” Afraid that the Patterson fight alone would tank on closed-circuit theater grosses, the promoters added a preliminary fight—Sonny Liston against Albert Westphal, a two-time German heavyweight champ. It took Sonny less than a round to knock Westphal down, face-first into the canvas, with a tremendous right hand. It was the first time that Westphal had ever been floored. Arthur Daley noted that Liston had belted Westphal “as enthusiastically as if the German had been a policeman.”

By the beginning of 1962, November and Cohn were making the case for the Sonny fight to Floyd. Cus was being frozen out more and more. At the thirty-sixth annual Boxing Writers Association dinner, on January 14, 1962, Cus wasn’t even sitting at Floyd’s table 5. But November was. Cus was exiled to table 22, where he sat with his assistant George Lattimore, Howard Cosell, and a young man named Jimmy Jacobs, who would become one of Cus’s closest friends and my manager.

Jacobs was the greatest handball player who ever lived and, some say, the greatest overall athlete. He also had a wicked sense of humor. Based out of L.A., he lived around the corner from a memory-training school. He researched the name of the school’s director and waited for him to leave school one day. “George, how are you?” he said jovially. George strained to remember who he was. “George! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me?” he said, and walked away. Jacobs was an avid collector of many things, including comic books and old fight films. In fact, after he won his handball tournaments, he would typically accept his trophy and then announce to the crowd, “I collect old boxing films and if you know of any old boxing films, please let me know.” Robert Boyle was covering a championship in San Francisco when he met Jacobs. They chatted and Jacobs told him that he thought many of the old-time fighters were vastly overrated. Boyle told him, “You remind me of a friend of mine, Cus D’Amato. He says the same thing.” About six months later Boyle was back in New York and hanging out with Cus and he told him about Jimmy. Cus said he’d love to talk to the guy and Boyle called Jimmy on the spot and made the introduction.

Cus met up with Jacobs at a handball classic and their relationship was cemented when Cus came up with an ingenious idea after Jacobs developed a big blister on his palm. At that time you were allowed to wrap your hands, so Cus got a silver dollar and placed it over the blister and then wrapped Jim’s hand. Jacobs went on to win the match and he was convinced that Cus was a genius. But they bonded over their long talks about the role of emotion and fear in sports.

Boyle did an article on Jimmy in 1966, and when Jacobs talks about the role of emotion in sports it’s as if he’s channeling Cus. His favorite superhero was Robin. “Being Robin the Boy Wonder was a tremendous help to me in sports. All of us are susceptible to our emotions when under stress, and when I was younger I would think: What would Robin do? Instead of succumbing to nervous apprehension, I would transform myself into this other character who was emotionally unaffected. . . . Contests are won or lost by mental effort. . . . When I go to play in a championship match I meet an old friend I call Mr. Emotion. He is very predictable. When I want to win very badly he comes right into my body. But so that he doesn’t interfere with what I’m trying to accomplish I have to take more time in the service box. I have to make more conscious efforts to give my arms clear instructions. The way I react to Mr. Emotion is not to get apprehensive. He is nothing but a feeling and he is there to let me know how important this match is to me. He acts as a reminder to me that the application of the physical talent that I have is under the complete dominance of what I call my control system, my brain, and that the orders that come out of this control system have to be very clear and explicit, just as if I were addressing some small child.”

Cus was similarly impressed with Jacobs. “The more I studied this guy, the more impressed I became. He is extraordinary. He not only has an excellent mind, but a tremendous physique and stamina. I have never met an athlete like him,” he told Boyle. Cus said he had only met two people who had the aura of a champion like Jim did: Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson.

Around 1958 Jim began corresponding with Bill Cayton, an advertising executive who owned a fight-film library that he licensed for television use. Jim had in his possession many of the films that Cayton had the rights to but not the actual physical films themselves. Cayton then offered to buy Jacobs’s films and bring him to New York and make him a partner in the fight-film business. Jacobs moved to New York around 1960 and moved in with Cus, who by then was living on 57th Street. Nick Beck, a childhood friend of Jacobs’s, visited them there and he got the impression that Cus was not a great housekeeper. The place was a little “run down” and he felt that Jim seemed a little embarrassed by the boxes strewn around the apartment. “I don’t know if Cus was a hoarder but he had a lot of stuff there that I don’t think Jim had any interest in. And so Jim said, ‘We’re thinking about something else and trying to get something better.’” Cus was the same when we were living in the house in Catskill. If you peeked into his room the rare times the door was open, you’d see boxes and boxes of books and clippings lying around.

At the time of that boxing writers’ dinner in 1962, Jim and Cus were working on a documentary about Floyd that was going to be syndicated to TV stations. Floyd agreed to do the interviews for a nominal fee (one dollar) and participate in a percentage of the profits. The film opened with Floyd’s visit to the White House, where he met with JFK, and then became a retrospective of Floyd’s career. Unfortunately, there was little interest from the networks and the film lost money. Years later, it would become a bone of contention between Floyd and Cus.

—

THE IDEA OF A PATTERSON–LISTON FIGHT took on a life way beyond the confines of the boxing game. Old-school civil rights groups such as the NAACP feared that Liston’s thug image would set black rights back years. “Hell, let’s stop kidding,” the civil rights leader Percy Sutton admitted. “I’m for Patterson because he represents us better than Liston ever could.” But Liston had a supporter in the radical comedian and civil rights leader Dick Gregory, who said, “It certainly isn’t up to Patterson’s manager to determine whether Liston should or shouldn’t be allowed to fight.”

Liston decided to take things into his own hands. Before he got rid of Barone, he went to see José Torres and asked Torres to take him to see Cus. Cus told me that Sonny thought that Cus was intimidated by him. José told him that Cus feared no one and the two of them barged in on Cus in his office, unannounced. José’s such a political animal. He always wanted to be on the right side of everybody. Cus was startled to see Liston but he kept his composure.

“Cus, why ain’t you gonna gimme a fight with Patterson?” Liston seemed pissed. Cus went into his usual rap about cleaning up his management but Sonny cut him off. “You pick my manager, then!” Cus politely said he wasn’t in that business and didn’t want any more discussion about the issue. By then Liston had calmed down and the two of them left.

On May 10, 1961, Liston announced that his new manager was George Katz, who had been investigated by a member of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission, found to be an upstanding citizen, and approved for a license. Seven days later, Liston was told to move along by a cop. “Why don’t you arrest me?” Sonny said, mocking him. So the cop did, and charged him with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. But when he was booked, the charges were reduced to loitering. Sonny was very familiar with the inside of police stations. Back in Missouri he had served a sentence for five armed robberies. Talking back to the cop on May 17 was his eighteenth arrest. His nineteenth came on June 12, when he and a buddy stopped a woman’s vehicle in predawn darkness and then tried to pass themselves off as cops. They took off when a park guard drove up but the guard went on an eighty-mile-per-hour chase and shot at Sonny’s car before they finally stopped. After this arrest, the Pennsylvania SAC finally suspended him from July 14 until October.

Man, people thought I was a bad motherfucker? Sonny Liston made me look like a Boy Scout. My friend Mac, who’s a barber in Vegas, knew Sonny very well. I would tell Mac how I worshipped Liston, and Mac would yell at me and tell me stories about Sonny going into bars, taking a guy’s drink, and then smacking him around. He’d park his car in the middle of the street in Vegas because the cops were too scared to tell him not to. It was so bad that when the cops in a certain town heard that Liston was on the way there they would wait for him at the train or bus station or wait for his car and they’d tell him that he couldn’t stay there. He was actually barred from cities!

He had broken a cop’s jaw! I saw a documentary on Sonny. I’m watching this guy and this is back in the 1960s, when a black man’s life wasn’t worth much, and Sonny was up in a cop’s face talking to him like he was a boy, pointing at him and cursing him. George Foreman told me Sonny was the only guy who could stand up to his punches. He was an animal. He was the quintessential hard, uneducated southern country Negro. He never lifted weights but he looked like he was born in a weight forest. Mofo looked like a human dumbbell.

When I was fighting I identified with Sonny a hundred percent. I don’t know how to explain it, but he was just a freak. Liston didn’t have an emotion in his whole soul. Maybe he smiled three times his entire life. Liston was a force of nature. I identified with him as a person too, because he was misunderstood. But the real thing that separated me from those other Neanderthal guys was that I had been around educated and sophisticated people and I emulated them. I listened to how they talked and comported themselves. I tried to change the image of myself because I wanted to improve myself. Those guys never wanted to or didn’t have the ability or the knack to improve. I was around guys like Cus and Mailer and Pete Hamill, and Sonny was around guys like Blinky Palermo and low-level Vegas mobsters. Those guys couldn’t read or write either.

Look, Cus never wanted Floyd to fight Sonny. First he said that Sonny was the last big fighter who was still mob-controlled. Then a few years later when he was interviewed by Jim Jacobs for a documentary they were making, Cus had a different reason—Cohn and November were messing with Floyd’s mind:

CUS: The Liston fight was made without my knowledge or without my consent. And the reason why I wouldn’t consent to the fight was because Floyd Patterson had been involved with people whose sole objective appeared to be to separate him from his money. Having this objective, which they couldn’t accomplish it with my presence; they took steps to remove me from the scene so that they could accomplish their objective. See, when Floyd spoke with me about this match, I said, “No, this man is a good fighter and he’s a winning fighter and you can beat this fellow, but you have to be at your best to beat him,” meaning his interest was now divided. He did not have the dedicated attitude that brought him to the top and made him the great fighter he was up to that point. JACOBS: You didn’t think he could beat Sonny Liston? CUS: At that time, no. I did not think he could beat Liston at that time. I did believe and I told him that “if you get rid of these distracting influences and get back to training and applying yourself, as you did previously, if and when, at a period of time I feel that you’re now capable of doing what I know you’re capable of, then you will fight Sonny Liston, but not before.”

But years later, Cus told me the truth. “I don’t think he could have beat Liston on the best day of his life,” he said.

Floyd made up his mind to fight Liston after his visit with JFK. President Kennedy told him, “You’re great, stay focused, you’ve got to beat this guy.” That fucked up Floyd’s head. He told David Remnick, who was writing a book about Ali, “I felt all alone in there, completely terrified. You’ve got to remember how young I was, what my background was, and now I was getting advice in the Oval Office. What was I supposed to do? Disagree? I had to take the challenge. I was always afraid of letting people down and now I was in a position where I had to worry about letting down the president.”

And JFK’s telling that to a guy who was completely afraid of the limelight. Just think about the pressure that was on him. Patterson had so many opportunities to grab history, you know what I mean? A guy like me, with my ego and my vanity, I would say, “I’m a dreamer, I’m Achilles.”

On January 10, Sonny supposedly changed managers again and this time he named Jack Nilon, who had a food concession company in Philadelphia. The same old Philadelphia connection. By the end of January, a deal was struck, with Cus involved in the negotiations. Even though the fight had been announced, the contracts hadn’t been signed yet, and on February 12, 1962, Cus’s friend Robert Boyle reported on the split in Floyd’s camp over the fight. “The Patterson camp is a triumvirate: the champion, Lawyer Julius November and Manager Cus D’Amato. Up until Patterson’s defeat in the first Johansson fight, D’Amato was the kingpin, but since then the three have been wrangling among themselves in semisecrecy, much like Russia, Red China and Albania. . . . D’Amato wants nothing to do with Sonny. November would like to see Patterson fight Liston next—at least that is what Liston says November told him—and Patterson, at present anyway, agrees with November. . . .

“All this drives D’Amato to desperation. An intense man, he has become even more wound up. The eyeballs roll more furiously, the black Homburg is clamped more tightly on his head and the mouth stretches even more to the side in conspiratorial grimace. He is a voice whispering in the wilderness. . . .

“At this writing, D’Amato is traveling around the country on mysterious errands doing what he can to prevent a Liston–Patterson fight. ‘When I want to go from A to B, I go to Z first,’ he says cryptically.”

Cus did something else that was very cryptic. On March 12, he sent a letter to his lawyers Schweig and November. “This is to confirm the understanding I had with your firm for some two years, wherein I advised you that although you represent both Floyd Patterson and myself, it is my wish, intention and express desire that if there be any conflict of interest between Mr. Patterson and myself, that Mr. Patterson’s interests are to be considered paramount.” Was this Cus throwing in the towel?

Five days later, November made it official. Floyd–Sonny was on. Patterson got 45 percent of the gate and 55 percent of ancillary rights. Liston got 12.5 percent of each. If Liston won, Patterson’s side could choose the place, date, and promoter of the rematch and Liston would get 30 percent of the gate and ancillary rights. Cus had one thing to say: “My position on his fight hasn’t changed. The only reason that this fight will take place is that Patterson wants to fight Liston.”

Cus was running on fumes. On April 5, he wrote a letter to his roommate Jim Jacobs, addressed to him at the Big Fights office on 40th Street. “Dear Jim, In consideration of your loan to me, I herewith hand you my promissory note as of even date in the equal amount of $10,000 received. This promissory note has a maturity date of September 25, 1962. . . . I agree to make prompt re-payment to you of your loan to me from the first proceeds that I may receive or be entitled to receive from the pending bout between Patterson and Liston. . . . I want to thank you most sincerely for the courtesies being extended to me in this connection. With kindest personal regards, I am Sincerely yours, Constantine D’Amato.”

Meantime Sonny couldn’t stay out of trouble. On April 27, after he had his driver’s license suspended for doing more than seventy miles an hour on the Jersey Turnpike, the NYSAC denied Sonny a license to fight in New York because—as a New York Times article quoted—his past “provided a pattern of suspicion” that could be “detrimental to the best interests of pro boxing and to the public interest as well.” Floyd was irate. “He has already served his time,” Floyd said. “What if they did that to me? You know how many times I went to the police station when I was 9 years old? About a dozen. I used to steal from stores and what not, but they’ve forgotten about all that. I feel sorry for him. People keep pointing to Liston and saying, ‘There goes the ex-con, the criminal.’”

In the same Times article, Floyd told Gay Talese why he took the fight. “One night in bed, I made up my mind. I knew if I’d want to sleep comfortably, I’d have to take on Liston even though the NAACP and the Kefauver committee didn’t want me to take on the fight. Some people said: What if you lose and he wins? Then the colored people will suffer. But maybe if Liston wins, he’ll live up to the title. He may make people look up to him.”

As the fight got closer Cus began to try to influence the outcome of the event. Cus gave an interview where he complained in advance about Liston’s illegal tactics. “If anybody wins the title I want them to win under the Marquess of Queensbury rules and under the rules of the Athletic Commission, not under barroom rules. If the title is won, I don’t want Mr. Liston to be the Barroom Rules champion or a brawling champion. I want him to be the Marquess of Queensbury champion. All the rules must be enforced and carried out.”

Then he tried another tack. It was one of the most bizarre events in the annals of heavyweight championship fight history. According to the hypnotist Marshall Brodien, some people from Floyd’s camp had seen his act one night at the Cairo Supper Club in Chicago, where the fight was to be staged on September 25. The next day Cus called Marshall and invited him to an office he was using on Michigan Avenue. Cus told the hypnotist that he had been granted a formal hearing before the Illinois State Athletic Commission and he needed his help.

On September 10, Cus, Brodien, and a few others trekked up to the Illinois State Athletic Commission offices. Before a crush of reporters, photographers, and TV crews, Cus was given the floor. In his hand he had a letter that had been written to Sonny Liston but that had been mistakenly sent to Patterson’s camp.

“Thank you for giving me this opportunity to present evidence in regards to a matter which came to my attention. I will indicate clearly that a proposal was made to Sonny Liston to hypnotize him and I wish to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the commission and everyone present, the effects of hypnotism on a subject. Under hypnosis it is possible to hypnotize a man wherein he becomes immune to pain, so that a fast, hard-hitting, accurate puncher such as Patterson, if he was rushing up to strike his opponent a blow which broke a bone or jaw or something, with repeated blows on the area affected there would be no sign on the part of the opponent that he’s being hurt or that the injury exists. And I felt that repeated blows on the injured area might cause serious and permanent damage. I was very fortunate in being able to secure the services of one of the best-known hypnotists in the country. Marshall Brodien, who has brought with him subjects, who by demonstration would make very clear the point and the charges that I have made.”

Then a member of the commission read from the letter to Liston.

“‘Sonny, you have plenty of ability, but at times we can all use a little help, especially when there is pressure. I suggest you invite me to your training camp, for two or three weeks before the fight. The atmosphere which I will create will be harmonious. Winning thoughts will dominate the mind. The vibrations and thought waves suggested by me, all around, would make you invincible on a particular night. Send for me, Sonny, I have power you’ve never dreamed of, no fighter has ever lost a contest that followed my suggestion. Sincerely, Jimmy Grippo.’”

Cus continued: “Now to those not acquainted with Jimmy Grippo, he was a former professional fight manager well known in the boxing fraternity. He’s a sleight-of-hand magician and a hypnotist of national reputation. I have with me here now Marshall Brodien, one of the top hypnotists of the country, who will give a demonstration.”

What Cus was saying in a roundabout manner was that if Liston was hypnotized by Grippo and he would be truly impervious to pain, then he would have an unfair psychological advantage over Floyd. And at the same time, Floyd might cause permanent damage to a Liston who felt no pain after absorbing power punches from Floyd. This was either a publicity stunt worthy of P. T. Barnum or an attempt to throw a monkey wrench into a fight that Cus never wanted Floyd to accept.

Brodien called upon a volunteer named John Lane. Marshall put him under and then slapped him across the face and he didn’t even wince. Cus then addressed the room. “To the commission, I think it’s a very good idea to have a member of the press strike a blow.” Cus then laced a boxing glove onto the left hand of Frankie Mastro, a former professional boxer who had become a boxing writer. Mastro threw two hooks into the hypnotized subject’s stomach.

“Now mind you, the blow is struck in an area, a liver punch, which can cause the most excruciating pain. If the first blow caused a fracture and the second blow in the same area would only compound this fracture and additional blows, well I can leave it to your imagination,” Cus said.

Then Brodien brought up a woman named Brenda Green, a twenty-two-year-old receptionist. She was seated next to Lane and hypnotized, and then Marshall had them hold their arms out horizontally and he proceeded to hold a torch under their outstretched palms, to no effect. Then Marshall suspended the petite Brenda across the backs of two chairs and stood atop her body. She had no reaction at all.

“Now Cus, just what does this prove?” one of the commissioners asked.

“It proves that under hypnosis, a man may be hypnotized to an extent and to a degree where he is immune to pain. So that if he suffered an injury, no matter how serious, he may carry on whatever he is doing, without being aware of the injury,” Cus said.

“And you, as the hypnotist, Marshall, believe this can be done?” the commissioner asked.

“Definitely.”

“It was demonstrated to the satisfaction of everyone here,” Cus chimed in.

“Are you afraid that your fighter or Sonny will be hypnotized?” the commissioner asked.

“Sonny is the man to whom the letter was addressed. I am the one who exposed this letter,” Cus said.

It was a compelling demonstration, but the commission didn’t see fit to interfere with the proposed fight. But what the demonstration proved was that Cus was a reluctant showman. It was interesting to find a letter in Cus’s archives dated about a year a half before this demonstration from Jimmy Grippo. Floyd was preparing to fight Ingo in Miami and Grippo offered his services to the promotion. “I am familiar with every phase and angle in boxing and have kept my nose clean. You as manager of the champion, McDonald [the local promoter] and myself with your approval as adviser, or whatever capacity you see fit, can elevate boxing to the seat which it rightfully belongs. May I add my relations with the press have always been good. Best wishes, Jimmy Grippo.” Cus may have finally found a position for Grippo a few fights later.

It wasn’t until almost a year later that Harold Conrad, the legendary press agent who had been hired by Cohn to handle the Liston fight, revealed the whole story behind this scam. “Cus D’Amato is one of the real characters,” he told Robert Boyle. “Of course, maybe D’Amato is for real. He’s a method actor. He can register any emotion, and you believe it. Anger! He’s angry. Amazement! He’s amazed. He’s better than Brando. Before the Liston–Patterson fight in Chicago, Jimmy Grippo, the hypnotist, writes a letter to each fighter offering to hypnotize him so he can’t feel the punches. Grippo is trying to work it so neither fighter knows about his offer to the other fighter. But he scrambles up the letters in the envelopes so Liston gets the letter to Patterson and Patterson gets the letter to Liston.

“This is a natural! I put D’Amato on the Jack Eigen radio show, and he really shouts about how Liston is trying to pull something with a hypnotist. The next morning Cus is with the reporters and I say to him, like I’m disgusted, ‘These guys need copy and you drop a story like that on radio.’ Immediately all the writers get excited and yell, ‘What? What?’ They’re hooked. This is great psychology. Now they’re begging Cus to tell them. If he had told them straight out, they would have said, ‘What are you trying to sell us?’ Now they’re asking for the story. So D’Amato announces he’s going to the commission with a hypnotist. Everyone was all primed. Newsreels, television, everyone! Cus gets a hypnotist and this hypnotist hypnotizes a dame, touched her with a torch, belted her, and Cus says that this conclusively proves his argument that a hypnotized boxer does not feel pain. Boy, we got a lot of space on that. This is what hooks people who are not fight fans alone. You have to get the public aroused.”

A surprising number of reporters and experts picked Patterson to beat Liston. While Joe Louis gave a strong vote to Sonny, Jack Dempsey gave a not-as-strong vote to Floyd, as did Jimmy Cannon. A survey in The Ring magazine favored Patterson. The fighters themselves showed stark differences when they opened camp in Chicago. Patterson was conciliatory toward Sonny. “I have met Sonny Liston several times and I believe there is much good in him. Should he be fortunate enough to win the heavyweight championship, I ask that you give him a chance to bring out the good that is in him.” Sonny didn’t demonstrate the same sportsmanship. “I’ll kill him. I’d like to run over him in a car.”

Floyd’s comments scared his old friend Howard Cosell. He wrote in his autobiography that Patterson seemed “helpless” without Cus and that Floyd seemed to have a “preacceptance of defeat” in Chicago. Cosell’s affection for Patterson was getting tested. “There was no profession of strength, no expression of confidence. . . . Our tie was growing weaker because of his constant excuses, constant escapes from society.”

Harold Conrad realized that Cohn and Bolan knew nothing about the fight business, so he decided to make this fight an “event.” He invited legendary novelists like Norman Mailer, Nelson Algren, and James Baldwin to cover the fight. He set up a debate a few days before the fight between Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr. At one point while Buckley went into a meandering poetic flight of prose, Mailer interrupted him. “Mr. Buckley, you want me to lie down on the railroad tracks, tie my hands to the rails, and wait until the engine of your logic gets around to riding over me?”

Mailer was in Chicago writing an epic piece for Esquire called “Ten Thousand Words a Minute.” Mailer was already friendly with Cus and he spent a lot of time with him in Chicago. His description of Cus might be the best ever written and I can read it again and again.

“Next morning I spent more time with D’Amato. . . . D’Amato talked only about his own fighters. How he talked! He had stopped drinking years ago and so had enormous pent-up vitality. As a talker, he was one of the world’s great weight lifters, not brilliant, but powerful, nonstop, and very solid. Talk was muscle. If you wanted to interrupt, you had to bend his arm off.

“Under the force, however, he had a funny simple quality, something of that passionate dogmatism which some men develop when they have been, by their own count, true to their principles. He had the enthusiastic manner of a saint who is all works and no contemplation. His body was short and strong, his head was round, and his silver-white hair was cut in a short brush. He seemed to bounce as he talked. He reminded me of a certain sort of very tough Italian kid one used to find in Brooklyn. They were sweet kids, and rarely mean, and they were fearless, at least by the measure of their actions they were fearless. They would fight anybody. Size, age, reputation did not make them hesitate. . . .

“The likelihood . . . is that for a period D’Amato was one of the bravest men in America. He was a fanatic about boxing, and cared little about money. He hated the Mob. He stood up to them. A prizefight manager running a small gym with broken mirrors on East Fourteenth Street does not usually stand up to the Mob, any more than a chambermaid would tell the Duchess of Windsor to wipe her shoes before she enters her suite at the Waldorf. D’Amato was the exception, however. The Mob ended by using two words to describe him: ‘He’s crazy.’ The term is given to men who must be killed. Nobody killed D’Amato. For years, like a monk, he slept in the back room of his gym with a police dog for a roommate. The legend is that he kept a gun under his pillow.”

Beautiful, just beautiful. But Mailer got it wrong about the mob calling Cus “crazy.” When we put Carbo’s words in context, when he was responding to Norris’s insisting that Carbo get Cus to have Patterson fight for the IBC, Carbo was protecting Cus. That’s why nobody killed D’Amato, as Mailer noted. But Mailer was right when he described Cus’s feelings of alienation from his prize pupil:

“Patterson had put his faith in D’Amato. . . . The aftermath of the first Johansson fight, however, blew out the set. It was discovered that D’Amato directly or indirectly had gotten money for the promotion through a man named ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno. D’Amato claimed to have been innocent of the connection, and indeed it was a most aesthetic way for the Mob to get him. It’s equally possible that after years of fighting every windmill in town, D’Amato had come down to the hard Bolshevistic decision that you don’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Whatever the fact, D’Amato had his license suspended in New York. He was not allowed to work in Floyd’s corner the night of the second Johansson fight. And thereafter Patterson kept him away. He gave D’Amato his managerial third of the money, but he didn’t let him get too close to training. . . .

“The last sad item was the Liston fight. Patterson had delegated D’Amato to make some of the arrangements. According to the newspapers, Patterson then discovered that D’Amato was trying to delay the negotiations. Now D’Amato was accepted in camp only as a kind of royal jester who could entertain reporters with printable stories. He seemed to be kept in the cabin where I met him at the foot of the hill, forbidden access to the gymnasium the way a drunk is eighty-sixed from his favorite bar. It must have been a particularly Italian humiliation for a man like D’Amato to sit in that cabin and talk to journalists. . . . He could speak, but he could not act.

“Speak he did. If you listened to D’Amato talk, and knew nothing other, you would not get the impression D’Amato was no longer the center of Patterson’s camp. He seemed to give off no sense whatever of having lost his liaison to Floyd. When he talked of making the Liston fight, one would never have judged he had tried to prevent it. ‘I didn’t,’ he swore to me. ‘I wanted the fight. Floyd came up to me, and said, “Cus, you got to make this fight. Liston’s going around saying I’m too yellow to fight him. I don’t care if a fighter says he can beat me, but no man can say I’m yellow.”’ D’Amato bobbed his head. ‘Then Floyd said, “Cus, if this fight isn’t made, I’ll be scared to go out. I’ll be afraid to walk into a restaurant and see Liston eating. Because if I see him, I’ll have a fight with him right there in the restaurant, and I’ll kill him.” I wouldn’t try to keep Floyd from having a fight after he says something like that!’ said D’Amato.”

Yeah, right.

A week before the fight, Liston had been an 8–5 favorite but at fight time the odds had narrowed to 7.5–5. The fight lasted only 126 seconds after a minute and a half of tentative feeling out. Mailer nailed the end of the fight perfectly: “Then occurred what may have been the most extraordinary moment ever seen in a championship fight. . . . Patterson, abruptly, without having been hurt in any visible way, stood up suddenly out of his crouch, his back a foot from the ropes, and seemed to look half up into the sky as if he had seen something there or had been struck by something from there, by some transcendent bolt, and then he staggered like a man caught in machine-gun fire, and his legs went, and he fell back into the ropes. . . . Patterson looked at Liston with one lost look . . . the look of a man saying, ‘Don’t kill me,’ and then Liston hit him two or three ill-timed punches, banging a sloppy stake into the ground, and Patterson went down. And he was out. He was not faking. He had started to pass out at the moment he stood straight on his feet and was struck by that psychic bolt which had come from wherever it had come.

“Patterson rolled over, he started to make an attempt to get to his feet, and [James] Baldwin and I were each shouting, ‘Get up, get up!’ But one’s voice had no force in it, one’s will had no life.

“Patterson got up somewhere between a quarter and a half second too late. . . . The fight was over: 2:06 of the First. . . . Liston looked like he couldn’t believe what had happened. He was blank for two or three long seconds, and then he gave a whoop. It was an artificial, tentative whoop, but it seemed to encourage him because he gave another which sounded somewhat better, and then he began to whoop and whoop and laugh and shout because his handlers had come into the ring and were hugging him and telling him he was the greatest fighter that ever lived. And Patterson, covered quickly with his bathrobe, still stunned, turned and buried his head in Cus D’Amato’s shoulder.

“From the stands behind us came one vast wave of silence. . . . ‘What happened?’ said Baldwin.

“What did happen? Everybody was to ask that question later. But in private.

“The descriptions of the fight [the next morning] showed no uncertainty. They spoke of critical uppercuts and powerful left hooks and pulverizing rights. Liston talked of dominating Patterson with left hands, Patterson’s people said it was a big right which did the job, some reporters called the punches crunching, others said they were menacing, brutal, demolishing. One did not read a description of the fight which was not authoritative. The only contradiction, a most minor contradiction, is that with one exception, a wire-service photograph used everywhere of a right hand by Liston which has apparently just left Patterson’s chin, there were no pictures—and a point was made of looking at a good many—which show Liston putting a winning glove into Patterson’s stomach, solar plexus, temple, nose, or jaw. In fact there is not a single picture of Liston’s glove striking Patterson at all.”

Mailer got it! Floyd died of fear. He was frozen. He had his glove up when Liston hit him. Liston hit him on his glove, he didn’t hit him on his face. Later, in his dressing room, Patterson told the reporters that he had seen all the punches except for the last one. When he said that he’d like to fight Liston again, one reporter spit out, “Fight him again? Why didn’t you fight him tonight?”

Gil Rogin was in that dressing room, covering the fight for Sports Illustrated, the one outlet that Cus trusted to tell the truth about him and Floyd over the years. He wrote that Floyd was destroyed so completely that he didn’t even recall how he wound up on the ropes. “‘Did I come off the ropes like I was going to throw a punch?’ he asked pathetically. He was astounded to learn he embraced Manager Cus D’Amato a minute after he had shakily regained his feet. ‘I must have still been groggy because I have no knowledge of it. It couldn’t have been me. It must have been somebody who looked like me, possibly my brother. You’re sure I was hit? I thought I might have blacked out. Gosh, one of these days I’m going to start taking off my boxing trunks right there in the ring in front of all those people, thinking I’m in my dressing room already. Boy that was a terrible performance! My mind just wasn’t on the fight. It was what I call a lingering mind. Instead of forgetting everything but my opponent, my mind lingered from here to there to the other place. The fact that my mind lingers is something that I cannot control. I fooled him, though. He said it would go five rounds.’”

Rogin then editorialized and wrote some very true words about Floyd. “What a strange champion Patterson was. What a suffering, bewildered and confused man. He fought superbly only twice in recent years against Archie Moore and against Ingo the second time. The rest of his fights ranged from bad to mediocre. . . . Patterson is a good fighter with a weak chin and—even more costly—serious mental problems that prevent him from fully applying his considerable skills.”

As soon as his meeting with the press in his dressing room was over, Floyd got ready to leave. He had two cars waiting for him outside the stadium. One faced the highway that would take him back to New York. The other faced the direction where his hotel was and where a victory celebration had been planned. Floyd said good-bye to his wife and kids, and then he got his disguise out. Before his first fight with Ingo, Floyd had hired an expert to create a beard and a mustache if he lost. He even had a disguise ready if he had lost to McNeeley in Toronto. For this fight Cus had bought a beatnik-style goatee and mustache for $65. Floyd put it on, and he and his friend Mickey Alan got in the car that was pointed toward New York and drove straight through the night all the way to his training camp back on the East Coast.

Mailer took Floyd’s loss so hard he stayed up all night drinking. He was still drunk when he went to the new champion’s press conference the next morning. He was there on a mission. He knew how to make the rematch the largest fight in the history of boxing.

“The idea I wanted to present at the press conference was demented—namely, that the psychic forces that had surrounded Floyd Patterson had made it impossible for him to fight against Liston because he had been knocked out by a psychic vortex. The Mafia had so surrounded the ring, so surrounded Liston, who was their candidate, that they had established the evil eye, and in his vanity Patterson had separated himself from Cus D’Amato, who knew more about warding off the evil eye than anyone alive, and so it was the evil eye that got Floyd, not Liston. Liston was the most amazed man in the house when Patterson went down. My idea was to publicize all this. I was still thinking in terms of movie scenarios, and the notion was to bring back Cus D’Amato, with Patterson winning the rematch. That’s why I said it was demented. As far as I was concerned, I had seen it all—it was absolutely true, there was no question in my mind. . . . I had picked Patterson to win by a knockout in the sixth round and I was still right. You see, it was just that the true scenario hadn’t had a chance to enact itself, because Patterson was knocked down in the first round. And nobody ever was quite certain what knocked him out, so at the press conference I was going to attribute it to witchcraft, which in my grand and demented theory was going to build the greatest gate in history.”

Liston was running late so Norman decided to sit down on a chair on the dais. Some of the newspapermen started complaining, and Harold Conrad made a snap decision and had a few security guards pick up the chair with Mailer still in it and remove it and him from the room. But Norman snuck back in later. By now Sonny was up onstage answering a question about Floyd’s punching power. “He hits harder than I thought he would,” said Liston. “But he never landed a punch,” the reporter followed. “That’s true,” said Liston, “but he banged me on the arm. I could feel it there.”

Then Liston said something derogatory about reporters and Mailer jumped to his feet from his chair in the back. “Well, I’m not a reporter,” he shouted, “but I’d like to say—” Sonny cut him off. “You’re worse than a reporter,” he sneered. There was a chorus of “Shut the bum up” from scattered reporters. “No,” said Liston. “Let the bum speak.” Mailer tried to compose himself. “I picked Floyd Patterson to win by a one-punch knockout in the sixth round, and I still think I was right,” he shouted. “You’re still drunk,” Sonny said. There were more shouts to shut Mailer up and another reporter asked a question and his moment had been lost.

But Mailer didn’t give up. When the press conference started petering out, he approached Liston. “What did you do, go out and get another drink?” Sonny snorted. “Liston,” Mailer replied, “I still say Floyd Patterson can beat you.” Sonny actually smiled! “Aw, why don’t you stop being a sore loser?” “You called me a bum,” Mailer protested. “Well, you are a bum,” Liston said. “Everybody is a bum. I’m a bum, too. It’s just that I’m a bigger bum than you are.” Liston stood and extended his hand to Mailer. “Shake, bum,” he said. Then Mailer decided to let Sonny into his grand plan. He took his hand and drew Sonny to within a foot. “Listen, I’m pulling this caper for a reason. I know a way to build the next fight from a $200,000 dog in Miami to a $2,000,000 gate in New York.” “Say, that last drink really set you up. Why don’t you go and get me a drink, you bum?” Sonny suggested. As Mailer recounted: “‘I’m not your flunky,’ I said. It was the first jab I’d slipped, it was the first punch I’d sent home. He loved me for it. The hint of a chuckle of corny old darky laughter, cottonfield giggles, peeped out a moment from his throat. ‘Oh, sheeet, man!’ said the wit in his eyes. And for the crowd who was watching, he turned and announced at large, ‘I like this guy.’

“So I left that conference a modest man. Because now I knew that when it came to debate I had met our Zen master.”

Liston was on a high from winning the championship and Mailer’s admiration, but when he flew back to his hometown of Philadelphia, no one was waiting at the airport to greet him. In fact, no public figures even congratulated him. He got bitter and told his sparring partner, “I didn’t expect the president to invite me into the White House and let me sit next to Jackie and wrestle with those nice Kennedy kids, but I sure didn’t expect to be treated like no sewer rat.”

But Liston’s manager Nilon put a great spin on Sonny’s victory. He predicted that Sonny would demolish Floyd again and then destroy Johansson. Then he had high praise for Cus. “Nilon has little respect for any of Patterson’s advisers,” Boyle wrote, “except, oddly enough, his manager Cus D’Amato, who did all he could to stop Patterson from fighting Liston. ‘Doesn’t a mother protect her children?’ Nilon asked. ‘There isn’t a man in the United States who knows more about the fight game. But it looks as if he’s out. In my opinion, there are certain people who are misleading Floyd.’”

Cus began to get some sympathy from the press too. Dick Young, a columnist for the New York Daily News, wrote an impassioned defense of Cus a few days after the fight. “If your son comes to you and says he wants to be a fighter, the first thing you do is hit him on the head; if he persists, the second thing you do is send him to Cus D’Amato.

“The only thing bad that could happen to the kid would be that he began to take himself seriously, the way Floyd Patterson did, and that would be regrettable, because you don’t get that big unless you want to find out what you really are.

“So, Floyd Patterson outgrew Cus D’Amato. He made new friends, who convinced him D’Amato was creating for him a craven image, and that he could do better without the old man. And Floyd Patterson listened. He drifted away from the man who had suckled him, and had made him, and had secured his family. . . . D’Amato will be around the fight business long after Floyd Patterson is gone. D’Amato will have other fighters, and he will do for them what he has done for Floyd Patterson.”

The fight did very well, grossing more than $4 million. But that didn’t do any of the fighters or their managers or the promoters any good. Roy Cohn had pissed off JFK’s brother, Robert Kennedy, who was the U.S. attorney general at the time. Kennedy had given an associate of his a ten-man staff of IRS agents to take down Cohn. They even called it “The Cohn Squad.” Its first move was to seize the proceeds of the Liston–Patterson fight minutes after the fight was over. They used a ruling called a “jeopardy assessment” and claimed that the precedent for doing this was when Johansson left the country after his third fight without paying his taxes.

One of the people involved in the seizure was a young lawyer named Robert Arum, who thought the move was justified by existing tax law. Years later he said, “As the head of the tax section of the U.S. Attorney’s office, I was delegated to that case, and in connection with handling that case I met Roy Cohn who was the principal of Championship Sports. I took testimony of all the players involved, including Mr. Cohn, who I realized had a pretty good grasp of the business. . . . After that, years later, when I became a boxing promoter, he always told people that he was the one who taught me the business, and, in a way, that was true.” This is obviously why Cus came to hate Arum so much.

Meanwhile, Floyd, Sonny, Nilon, Cus, and Harold Conrad, they all got swept up into this and all their money was put in escrow by the IRS. And they were pretty pissed, especially Sonny and Nilon. Nilon was the go-between between Liston and Carbo and Palermo. In the good old days, mobsters would just reach into their pockets and pay the fighters off. Those days were over, for the most part. On February 13, 1963, Carbo’s and Palermo’s and Gibson’s appeals were denied, although Dragna’s conviction was reversed. But that meant that Palermo and Sica had to go straight to jail. Carbo was already residing at a federal penitentiary in Washington State. Though Carbo and Palermo still owned a majority share of Liston, they wouldn’t ever be able to attend one of his fights again. Carbo’s ailments would catch up with him and he’d get a compassionate discharge so he could go home to Miami and die, which he would do on November 9, 1976. Blinky would do his time and be released in 1971, about a year after his fighter Liston would die of a heroin overdose under suspicious circumstances. Once Palermo got out, he would have the balls to apply for a manager’s license. He would die in his hometown of Philadelphia at age ninety-one in 1996.

—

THE REMATCH WITH LISTON was scheduled for April 10, 1963, in Miami Beach, but in late March, Sonny strained some ligaments in his left knee as he was swinging a golf club. The doctors told him to take time off and rest but Sonny was itching to fight. “With my leg cut off, they might say it’s a close fight.” The fight was postponed until July 22 and moved to Las Vegas.

Cus then took off for London with one of his other fighters. The British press peppered him with questions about his relationship with Floyd and he was brutally honest about the intrigue surrounding Patterson. “I resent the people around Patterson who have distracted him. . . . I’m completely confident that without distractions Floyd would have proved himself superior to Sonny Liston. To see a man beaten, not by a better opponent but by himself, is a disturbing thing to witness. It is a tragedy.”

Floyd probably didn’t appreciate those honest sentiments. He opened up to Robert Boyle of Sports Illustrated, who was close to Cus. Floyd claimed that Cus had abandoned him in his camp leading up to the Liston rematch. “I don’t think my manager wants to be my manager,” Floyd said. “What’s the expression about leaving a sinking ship? Cus made it seem like I was ducking Liston because I was afraid of him, and after the match was made he acted around the camp as if I were a kid going against my father. He never did warm up. When I needed him most he was very cool.”

Despite Floyd’s laments about Cus deserting him, the reality was that Cus was effectively frozen out of the Patterson camp before the rematch. November and Cohn had won. Cus was like a ghost in Vegas, so he began pursuing his new obsession—fishing. When we talked to Robert Boyle, he told us that Floyd “would have nothing to do with Cus,” so Boyle and Cus would go fishing in the Colorado River. “Floyd struck me as a very flaky kid. He should have had trust in Cus, but you know Cus’s behavior at times was so bizarre that unless you could understand what he was up to, you’d think he was crazy.” Whoa. My wife thinks the same thing about me.

Boyle wrote an amusing piece about fishing with Cus, both in Vegas and upstate, which ran months later in Sports Illustrated. Quoting Cus that he was a fishing “fanatic,” Boyle described Cus’s strategy for going up against the fish. “Never has there been such an angler as he is. He plots against the bass in much the same way he used to hatch schemes to foil Jim Norris. He talks to the fish. He shouts at the fish. He buys lures by the ton. He dreams about fish. He lives to fish. Fishing is all he cares for. ‘It’s a good thing I didn’t fish when I was a kid. I never would have done anything else.’”

Boyle reported that Cus didn’t begin fishing until he went upstate during the outcry over the Rosensohn scandal. Boyle suggested they fish together. Cus didn’t catch anything that first day but on the second day he nabbed a smallmouth bass. “Catching a bass is like getting bit by a mosquito with malaria. You get a disease,” Cus said. The next day Boyle couldn’t fish but he did drive Cus to a creek. “I was all alone and then in a while it began to get dark. I thought I was gonna get caught in a thunderstorm. I began to get the gear together and then suddenly it dawned on me. It was getting darker and darker. It wasn’t a thunderstorm. It was nighttime. The whole day gone! I lost a whole day in my life without realizing it. I wondered whether this is an illness. A particular type of illness where you get pleasure not pain, where you get reinfected each time. Where you want to get reinfected!”

Now Cus started wearing a fishing jacket, creel, hat, all the accoutrements. “If I look like a nonfisherman, the fish won’t want to be caught. They have pride. So I remove this possible area of resistance. The fish look up, and they say, ‘Ah, there’s a real fisherman.’” If the fish balk, Cus pleads with them. “I sort of talk it up. I invent stories for them. I think all the adult fish are telling all the others not to bite. Somebody must be instructing them! If you go out there with confidence and proceed with enthusiasm, you’ll get better results. When I’m there, it seems normal.”

This is the shit I grew up with, right? I love this guy. When Boyle picked up Cus to go fishing in Vegas he saw that Cus was reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau. “I said, ‘Thoreau,’” Boyle told us, “and with that, Cus said, ‘You know the guy?’ as though he was alive.” Boyle told him that Thoreau had died a hundred years ago but that he would have loved Cus.

The thing that struck Boyle the most on that Nevada fishing trip happened back in Cus’s hotel room. Boyle arrived at Cus’s room at five in the morning to wake him up for the fishing outing. Cus started getting dressed. He sat down on the edge of his bed and then he carefully spread his trousers out on the floor. Then “with a joyous whoop, he quickly pulled both trouser legs toward him and in an instant was on his feet with his pants on.” Boyle asked him what that ritual was all about. “I’ve always had a reason for doing that,” Cus said. “You know when one of the mustache guys [he always called the Mafia the mustache guys] come to me and try to put the bull on me, I tell him, ‘Get out of here.’ He’ll say, ‘I’m going to take care of you, D’Amato; you’re just like everyone else—when you get dressed in the morning, you put your pants on one leg at a time.’ He said I’m going to say to him, ‘I’ve got news for you.’”

Boyle told us about one other interesting event that occurred before the second Liston fight. “While I was away [on leave from Sports Illustrated] for a few years, that’s when the uproar started about the first Johansson fight that Patterson lost, and S.I. went off the wall and almost portrayed Cus as a crook with Fat Tony Salerno, with this guy and that guy. That was all bullshit! That was Bill Rosensohn putting out a lot of lies. Cus had been a very wronged guy by the magazine. I mean that was obvious. They didn’t understand him and they believed Rosensohn’s bullshit. Rosensohn confessed to me that he lied and I brought Gil Rogin over to see Rosensohn because he was in Vegas to cover the fight if Patterson won. Rosensohn said, ‘I lied; I made that stuff up.’ I was glad to clear Cus’s name.”

A week before the fight, nobody knew which Patterson would show up to fight. Peter Wilson, the legendary British sports reporter, joked, “I call him Freud Patterson. He is vulnerable to words as well as punches.” But despite being a pariah in his own camp, Cus was still tooting Floyd’s horn. He saw Norman Mailer and told him, “Everything points to an upset. The other man is casual, Patterson has been working hard, all the signs are there.” He talked to Arthur Daley, who was covering the fight for the Times. “Floyd has knocked out every man he met in a return bout.” Of course, that was one guy, Ingo. Then Cus put his spin on the first Liston fight. “Floyd gave him hitting room from up close. This is really correctable. He won’t do it again.”

So much for “Custradamus.” Floyd lasted four seconds longer against Sonny this time but that’s counting the two mandatory eight counts he got after Liston floored him. Once again he ignored his game plan and froze. Despite the pitiful showing, it was Liston who was booed on his way back to his dressing room after the massacre.

Floyd and Cus each reacted to the outcome true to form. Floyd used an interview with Gay Talese that appeared in Esquire as another therapy session. “I think that within me, within every human being, there is a certain weakness. It’s a weakness that expresses itself more when you’re alone. And I have figured out that part of the reason I do the things I do, and cannot seem to conquer that one word—myself—is because . . . I am a coward. I am a coward. My fighting has little to do with that fact, though. I mean you can be a fighter—and a winning fighter—and still be a coward. . . . It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself. In defeat I can’t face people. I haven’t the strength to say to people, ‘I did my best, I’m sorry, and what not.’”

Floyd’s description of being knocked out by Liston was chilling. “Suddenly, with all this screaming around you, you’re down again, and you know you have to get up, but you’re extremely groggy, and the referee is pushing you back, and your trainer is in there with a towel, and your eyes focus directly at no one person—you’re sort of floating. It is not a bad feeling when you’re knocked out. It’s a good feeling. You don’t see angels or stars; you’re on a pleasant cloud. After Liston hit me in Nevada, I felt, for about four or five seconds, that everybody in the arena was actually in the ring with me, circled around me like a family, and you feel warmth toward all the people in the arena after you’re knocked out. And you want to reach out and kiss everybody—men and women—and after the Liston fight somebody told me I blew a kiss to the crowd from the ring. . . . But then this good feeling leaves you. You realize what has just happened to you. And what follows is a hurt, a confused hurt—not a physical hurt—it’s hurt combined with anger and all you want then is a hatch door in the middle of the ring that will open and let you fall through and land in your dressing room. The worst thing about losing is having to walk out of the ring and face those people.”

At the press conference after the fight, Cus talked with the fabled writer A. J. Liebling. Liebling asked Cus what had happened. “It was the same as last time. He didn’t move around. . . . He can still lick anybody else in the world,” Cus said. The two hadn’t eaten yet so Cus suggested his hotel, the Tally-Ho, a new hotel that had no gambling tables but good food. The fact that Cus was staying in a hotel rather than at Floyd’s camp spoke volumes. Over dinner, which for Cus was a rare Manhattan, chicken-liver pâté, calf’s liver smothered with onions, and cherry cheesecake, they talked some more. “I am always at my best when the bottom drops out,” he told the writer.

With Sonny again victorious, Jack Nilon now had his chance. He immediately fired Roy Cohn and Championship Sports, whose option expired after the rematch. That was the end of the line in boxing for Cohn. He could have used the same excuse he had employed after the first Floyd–Sonny fiasco: “Why blame me for a bad fight? How did I know Patterson was going to turn yellow?”

When he got back to New York, Cus tried to patch things up with Floyd. He had someone drive him up to Patterson’s training camp and knocked on the door repeatedly but Floyd, who was inside, refused to come out and talk to Cus. “I tried to see him every day,” he later told Robert Boyle. “He didn’t answer the door, but he was in there. I’d bang and bang on the door and call. Nothing would happen. Sometimes I’d wait half an hour, an hour. Then I’d go away. That happened almost every day for a month. We’d been through so much together. I had to see him. We had an agreement that I never was to believe anything he supposedly said until he told it to my face. He has never told me to my face that I am not his manager. I have no idea why he won’t see me.”

Now Cus began to worry about money. He had spent most of his money in his fight with the IBC. He was working with José Torres, but Cus had never taken a penny from Torres, since he was doing so well with Patterson. With monies still being withheld from the first Liston fight, Patterson asked November for a full accounting in the summer of 1964, but the lawyer never gave him a satisfactory one. It should have been a tip-off when November sued Cus’s friend Robert Boyle and Sports Illustrated for libel for Boyle’s article on the third Ingo fight. November claimed that when Boyle wrote that November told Cus he didn’t have to show up for Lefkowitz’s subpoena, they were “maliciously false statements defaming him as a lawyer and a man.”

So Cus hired the high-powered Washington, D.C.–based attorney Edward Bennett Williams to help him follow the money trail. He figured that he was still owed about $250,000 from the two Liston fights. What they found was that besides the money that had been seized by the government, other money had never reached Cus because Roy Cohn had devised a deferred-payment scheme for Patterson to avoid taxes. Cohn’s promotional company would pay off Floyd literally with the interest of his own money and at the end of ten years it would have paid off the obligation to Patterson and still retained the principal!

Since the payments were deferred, Cus never received his one-third but the IRS still taxed him on the amount he would have earned. It was the same way that Joe Louis had gotten screwed. To make matters worse, Cus’s accounting was handled by November and his handpicked accountants. Cus never recovered from this quagmire. He was broke and he had no way of making a living because he had signed that consent decree with New York State that he wouldn’t manage again. Now Cus felt emotionally betrayed by Floyd and financially betrayed by November.

It got worse. On May 23, the NYSAC approved a one-year pact for Floyd’s trainer Dan Florio to manage him. Cus was now officially out without a word of explanation from his greatest pupil. The next week Sports Illustrated came to Cus’s defense in an item headed “Goodby, Cus.” “Boxing has always been a harsh sport, long on bitterness and short on loyalty. But Cus and Floyd seemed different. They were more like father and son than manager and fighter. D’Amato had signed Patterson with a handshake after Floyd had won the 1952 Olympics. Four years later he got Patterson the title fight with Archie Moore that made him, at twenty-one, the youngest man ever to hold the heavyweight championship. D’Amato insisted on sharing the racial snubs Patterson had to endure. He gave up smoking and drinking to make abstinence easier for the fighter. He dedicated himself to making and keeping Patterson the champion. At times he was too dedicated; he was overly protective and too choosy in picking opponents. He may, as some critics think, have stunted Patterson’s development. On the other hand, his caution may be the reason why Patterson held the title so long and made so much money from it.

“Patterson has always appeared to be an honorable man and a thoughtful man—though, for a fighter, a curiously hypersensitive one. He must have sound reasons for firing his old friend. But whatever the reasons, he did not discuss them with D’Amato, nor did he tell Cus that he was fired. D’Amato learned of his dismissal from a reporter who called to get his reactions, ‘Floyd may have his reasons for doing this—perfectly good reasons. Though the facts point to a complete falling out, I won’t accept it until Floyd tells me face to face. That was our agreement.’” Even after he’s screwed by Floyd, he’s still making excuses for him!

The next month Patterson fought Eddie Machen in Stockholm. Arthur Daley characterized the fight as “two pilgrims along the comeback trail, plodding along the weary road to nowhere.” Patterson won the decision but he was criticized by many, including Johansson, for not finishing off Machen when he had him on the ropes. Patterson said, “I looked in his eyes and I saw hurt and defeat. This is a man who had a hard life. He has been broke and in a mental institution. Should I knock him down further for my own good?” Even Florio, his new manager, was disgusted: “He wants to pick them up. He knocks them down, and he wants to pick them up.”

It seemed that Floyd was missing Cus too. A man who was “close” to Patterson told The New York Times, “He misses Cus D’Amato. He tries to do everything himself now—run the camp, worry about the money, take legal advice, everything. D’Amato used to do all that and keep him away from everyone so that he could concentrate on fighting. And then you have to remember that he was raised by Cus. All he knows and all his attitudes he got from D’Amato, including the suspicions and prejudices and his quickness to resent. He’s got all of D’Amato’s craftiness, without D’Amato’s background and intelligence.”

Three months after he left Cus, Patterson was hit by the IRS. They claimed that he and his wife owed $41,649 for years 1957 and 1958 and that Floyd Patterson Enterprises owed $44,736 for the same period. The IRS disallowed certain claimed expenses—such as travel and training—and claimed his fight profits were higher than reported. They went after his business because they said it was a personal holding company for Floyd and not a corporation, so they should pay personal tax on that income.

Floyd kept on fighting, now out of necessity. On November 19, 1965, Patterson fought Muhammad Ali, who had captured the heavyweight crown and retained it when he beat Sonny Liston twice. Cus was still estranged from Floyd but he was optimistic about his chances versus “Clay.” “Floyd was a confused fighter against Liston,” he told the media. “The only question in my mind is as to whether or not he has cleared it up enough to apply all his assets against Clay. I don’t care what anyone says, I’m still absolutely convinced that Floyd was one of our better heavyweight champions, despite his weaknesses.”

Ali battered Floyd around for twelve rounds in what some people thought was an attempt to humiliate him. Most of the boxing pundits at ringside said that Ali carried Floyd. Even Cus had to admit Ali’s dominance. “The fight proved nothing except that Clay is the most beautiful, the most graceful heavyweight we ever had, certainly the best businessman, maybe someday the best fighter. The more obnoxious he becomes, the more they’ll look for a white hope, a Holy Grail, and that is very good for our business,” he told The New York Times.

Floyd kept fighting, and now, at thirty-two, he was holed up full-time at a new training camp near Newburgh, New York, in a weather-beaten building next to a lodge that had gone out of business. His wife had divorced him and moved to Massachusetts with their children. But Floyd insisted he was happy in an interview with Dave Anderson, a sportswriter for the Times. “I’m living the way I want to live. Nobody around me except one trainer, no one else. I love it. The smell of the gym. The long walks. The road work. The seclusion. I may never get back what I once had but it’s a pleasure trying it my way, not the way others wanted me to go.” Eddie Fowler was training him now and he was managing himself. “If I can be half the manager Cus was for me, I’ll be okay.”

By 1967 Floyd and Cus were still waiting to get paid for the first Liston fight. And that year the Justice Department formally recommended criminal charges against Cohn and Tom Bolan and the rest of Championship Sports. Eventually every agency involved, Treasury, Justice, even the IRS, dropped the charges. But still the money wasn’t released yet. By 1965 Floyd had married a Swedish girl and they had a daughter. And he was telling the press that if he beat Jimmy Ellis in his upcoming fight in Sweden there was “a chance he might get together again with Cus D’Amato.”

The fight went the distance, fifteen rounds, and Patterson lost a close decision that was booed by his adoring Swedish fans. Then he went home and fired Julius November, his longtime attorney. According to Floyd, November had made four large investments using Floyd’s money and they all failed, including a substantial investment of “many hundreds of thousands of dollars” in Roy Cohn’s company Lionel Trains. Now Patterson was suing November for a full accounting of his money.

Cus was in no better financial shape than Floyd. He told his friend Gene Kilroy that if he needed money he could go down to Washington and access the money that the government was holding from the first Liston fight. But in 1980 he did go there only to find that the funds had been released to Patterson. Cus told Joe Colangelo, his close friend in Catskill, that his share was hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Patterson stole that money,” Joe told us. “And Cus still treated him like he was his son and he was going to defend him, no matter what. I used to say to Cus, ‘Patterson ripped you off.’ He would argue that he didn’t and I would say, ‘You can sit here and say anything you want, anything. But you can’t lie to the guy in the mirror,’ that was the old Italian expression. I went toe to toe with him on that issue many times and finally Cus said to me, ‘He knows what he’s done! That’s all that counts. He knows what he’s done!’”

—

WHILE CUS HAD THE HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION in Patterson, he began developing middleweight José Torres. Torres had won a silver medal at the 1956 Olympics, and some of Cus’s fighters from the Gramercy who competed in Melbourne came back and told Cus about him. Cus then took out a full-page ad in El Mundo that read in Spanish: “Manager of the World’s Heavyweight Champ Floyd Patterson interested in signing our champ ‘Chegüi,’” which was José’s nickname.

They developed a close relationship. In the first major article about José in 1958 in The New York Times by Gay Talese, you can sense the affection between the two. “Cus is like a second father to me,” José said. D’Amato smiled and asked, “Have you ever disapproved of anything I’ve done for you?” “No.” “Haven’t I always welcomed suggestions from you?” “Yes.” D’Amato smiled again. “I consider this boy extraordinary. This boy will build up boxing in New York. He will be the hero of the Puerto Rican people, and he will aid the juvenile delinquency problem.” That’s Cus. Always the social reformer.

José began dressing like Cus and adopting his mannerisms. Cus refused to take a penny from Torres’s purses. But José’s career began to be sidetracked; Cus wanted him to fight only unrated fighters and to stay away from televised fights, because he was certain that the remnants of the IBC still controlled them. And when Teddy Brenner joined Harry Markson at Madison Square Garden, Cus refused to allow José to fight there.

The situation was causing controversy in boxing circles and Cus defended his position in a front-page article in the December 31, 1960, edition of Eddie Borden’s Weekly Boxing World. Cus went into a long history of his relations with MSG and Brenner’s constant practice of bringing in out-of-town fighters who could beat and hamper the development of local talent when Brenner was the matchmaker at St. Nicholas Arena. Then Cus rested his case in the last paragraph of his piece, noting that Brenner’s ties to the mob had been established in sworn testimony from a “paid IBC confidant. Now tell me Eddie, how can I do business with the Garden or Teddy Brenner?”

Cus never mentioned that the mob associates Norris met with and who put Brenner into the Garden were Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo.

The debate over Cus’s handling of José raged on. Cus found a defender in a veteran boxing writer named Max Yeargain, whose letter was published by Eddie Borden. Yeargain wrote that he was an early supporter of Cus’s battles with the IBC and that most boxing minds couldn’t begin to comprehend Cus’s strategy of nurturing José. He compared Cus to the then richest man in the United States, J. Paul Getty. “Men like Getty and D’Amato, who dare to be different in thought or action or deviate from the mediocre norm, will be branded as a Bolshevik, a Bohemian, a crank or a crackpot. The General in the Army does not confide with the Private, what his battle plans are, nor does an astute boxing manager map out his strategy to a young protégé, how he will climb to the top in boxing’s jungle of crosses and double crosses.”

The inactivity began to take its toll on José, both physically and mentally. Pete Hamill, then at the New York Post, was a friend of Cus’s and a roommate of José’s, and he wrote a moving letter to Cus on March 9, 1961.

In the letter, Hamill showed concern about the caliber of fighters Cus was matching against José, especially since a year earlier there was word that Torres was to get a title bout. Pete, who knew Torres very well, told Cus that José was into boxing more for the glory than the money. “Torres is a supreme egotist . . . a guy to whom the noise of the crowd is very, very important.” Hamill warned Cus that if he continued to match Torres in out-of-town venues away from his rabid Puerto Rican following, then “you will break his spirit.”

Hamill then had some suggestions for Cus, which included getting Torres a fight at St. Nicholas (and Hamill even offered to get a promoter’s license to put it on), giving him some good opponents, putting him on TV for one sensational fight, and having him in training camp with Floyd. But his last suggestion was the most telling: “Come down to the gym at least once a week to look at Torres.” Word was being spread in the Puerto Rican boxing community that Cus was so concerned with Patterson that he had lost interest in José’s career. If he was present in the gym, Hamill told him, he “could head off any further changes in [José’s] attitude.”

Of José’s next seven fights, the closest he came to New York was the Plaza Ballroom in Paterson, New Jersey. Torres won them all. Cus had felt that José had lost the fire that he had when he first started out. But on July 27, he knocked out Obdulio Nunez in Puerto Rico to win the Puerto Rican middleweight title. Nunez was unconscious for twenty minutes. Now both Cus and José thought that he was ready for a title shot even though he was unranked, thanks to Cus. Paul Pender was the middleweight titleholder then. To get the fight, Torres called Pender in Boston in August of 1962 and impersonated a sportswriter for the newspaper El Diario. “We hear rumors that you have been offered $100,000 to fight José Torres,” Torres said. “I never heard about that,” Pender replied. “In other words, you refuse to fight Torres?” “Listen, I don’t care who my opponent is, all I’m interested in is money. I want money.”

Now all they had to do was raise the money. Cus was broke and told the press that the fight had to be called off because the IRS still had his Liston purse. But Torres went to the press with the real story. Cus had gone to Patterson and asked him to lend him the money and Floyd had turned him down. Patterson still seemed to be harboring a grudge against Torres because when he was sparring with Patterson in preparation for the Harris bout, Torres hit Patterson and he either slipped or went down from the punch and the publicist used it as PR to make Harris look like he had a chance against Floyd. Patterson still resented that.

By the end of 1964, José had moved up to light heavyweight and he was on a roll, winning all six of his bouts that year. On November 27, he fought in the Garden against Bobo Olson, with the winner being guaranteed a shot at Willie Pastrano’s light heavyweight belt. Torres knocked him out in the first round and now he was finally about to challenge for a title. Again José had to put up a $100,000 guarantee for the fight. By then he had acquired a business manager, a black real estate developer named Cain Young. Young had made his money “blockbusting” in Crown Heights, which meant he scared white people into selling their houses for pennies on the dollar by bringing in one black family, block by block.

Cus and Young didn’t get along at all. They were at a Torres fight in Puerto Rico and Cus attacked Young and someone had to separate them. So Young told José that the only way he’d put up the hundred grand was if Cus released José from his contract. José was incredibly loyal to Cus and he didn’t want that to happen, so José went over to his friend Norman Mailer’s house and explained that he needed money to fight for the title. Mailer called his father, who was also his accountant. He cupped his hand and whispered to José, “How much money can we lose if the worst happens?” José said, “I don’t know. Maybe $90,000 at the most.” Mailer checked with his father and said he’d put up the $100,000.

José then called Cus. But Cus was adamant. “We could lose. I don’t want you to screw up your head worrying about your friend’s money.” And three weeks later, Young apologized and put up the guarantee. Torres then refused to fight unless Cus sat ringside and called out the numbers that they had developed using Cus’s Willie (Pastrano) bag system.

The fight was set for the Garden on March 30, 1965. Cus, of course, was predicting that José would knock Pastrano out, even though Pastrano had never even been knocked down in his whole career. José’s fellow Puerto Ricans jammed the Garden and the attendance, 18,112, produced a record gate of $239,956. One of the spectators was a black man wearing a false mustache and goatee and sitting in the balcony. It was Floyd in disguise. Some of the press speculated that Patterson didn’t want to see Cus, but when he was approached he said he wanted to concentrate on watching the fight.

Torres was the aggressor the whole fight and some reporters gave him every round. In the sixth, Cus, who was sitting ringside, yelled out, “Five,” which was a body shot to the liver, and José nodded. There was some speculation that Torres would target the liver because the rumor was that Pastrano was a boozer. José got in a vicious left hook and Pastrano crumbled into the ropes and went down for the first time in his career. He got up at the count of nine. The doctor examined Pastrano in his corner and they let him continue, but after the ninth round the referee stopped the fight.

There was a near riot in the Garden as fans rushed into the ring. Norman Mailer was one of the first to congratulate José but cops stopped Cus from climbing into the ring. Don Dunphy, who was calling the fight for TV, said he had never seen such bedlam in the Garden. One reporter wrote, “When Pastrano fell it was as if every Puerto Rican present felt that he personally had done it.”

José and his entourage went to Toots Shor’s restaurant to celebrate because Torres and Pete Hamill had gone there years earlier and the bartender had looked suspiciously at José, as if he didn’t have the money to pay for his drinks. Then at two forty-five in the morning they all drove to Brooklyn to party all night at Mailer’s apartment. Mailer had won $600 on the fight and he had hired a three-piece rock ’n’ roll combo to entertain the guests. It was an eclectic mixture at Mailer’s—James Baldwin, Ben Gazzara, Leslie Fiedler, George Plimpton, Pete Hamill, Senator Jacob Javits, and Archie Moore. When Torres finally arrived, one guest actually said, “Who is he?”

The party raged on for hours. At one point, Cus commanded the attention of the room. “Nobody in that place could be as happy as I was, nobody. You see how happy you are? You and all of them, couldn’t be as happy as me. I want them to know, because if I was in that corner, you know what I would have said to you, Joe? Joe, you won that championship, you and you alone. I helped in different ways, yes, but you and you alone did that and now you’re going to be twice as good a fighter as you was before, do you know that? You were great before, you’re twice as good now that you know you’re the champion of the world. You’re going to win the heavyweight championship too.”

“Yes, sir,” José agreed.

“You’ve got to admit one thing, I’m not often wrong, am I, Joe?”

“No.”

“And you see, the way I say things that’s the way they come out. I tell you now, Joe, I’m going to say it in front of your wife, you have the best wife in the whole world. I’m telling you, that’s the truth.”

José was good, but he didn’t want to take any punishment in the ring. He was never the same after Florentino Fernández dropped him in Puerto Rico in 1963. Cus was wary after that and never put him in with big punchers. That’s why he put him in with Pastrano. Willie was a masterful boxer but he was a little bit over the hill and he couldn’t punch hard.

One night I was in a club and I met Willie Pastrano’s granddaughter. Once I see somebody and they tell me they’re related to a fighter, their night is ruined because they’ve got to listen to me fire off question after question—I want to soak up as much as I can about the greats. “Tell me about him, what kind of guy was he?” She told me that Willie was poisoned before the Torres fight. Somebody put something in his drink and he felt drugged that whole fight. It’s funny because Dunphy was talking during the whole fight about how Willie looked sluggish and couldn’t find his rhythm.

Now Cus was back and he wasn’t shy about it. His friend Robert Boyle wrote a big article in Sports Illustrated called “Svengali Returns!” It was vintage Cus. He scorned the doubters who, he said, “penalize me for their ignorance.” He defended his peekaboo style. He told Boyle that he gave José his release because Markson and Brenner wouldn’t let José fight for the title if Cus controlled him, then went after them. “As far as I am concerned, the fight is not over until I win. I may not win the battles, which I look upon as only temporary advantages to my opponent, but I’ll win the war! And the war will go on till I win out, till Teddy Brenner and those characters go.”

Then he went after the press and the pundits. “If every newspaperman, every commission, thinks my fighter should fight some fighter of a better class, that doesn’t impress me. I alone have the responsibility for the development of the fighters. These so-called experts are ignorant. They think a fighter should fight a certain fighter, and if my fighter loses, who gets blamed? The critics? No. Me. I didn’t let Torres fight at times, and the reason I didn’t is secret. To reveal the reasons is to make the fighter susceptible. I could avoid all this criticism by sitting down and educating the critics and after I got through, they would agree with me. But I let the results speak for themselves.”

Cus told Boyle he had some “tremendous surprises planned, but I can’t say what they are because they wouldn’t be surprises if I did. These surprises may very well make headlines.” Then he landed the knockout punch. “There is no man in the whole world who knows as much about the whole boxing picture as I do. I don’t say that I’m smarter than other people, but I had the opportunity available to me in the last 10 years, and I was almost alone. It’s like a doctor given the chance to study under a great surgeon way ahead of everybody else. That’s not bragging. That’s simple fact.”

After the fight, Torres immediately announced that he was going after the heavyweight crown. In an article he wrote for Boxing Illustrated in November 1965, he vowed to fight and beat Patterson. “We were once very good friends. But, when he had a chance to do something big for me, he let me down and he let Cus down. . . . Against him, I’ll be double mean. . . . I have my ambition to become heavyweight champion. I have my ambition to get even for Cus with Patterson, and I have my ambition to make myself a better, and a cleverer, voice to help my people in the future, whatever way it’s possible.”

None of that happened. The day after he won his crown, José told Pete Hamill that he couldn’t believe he was champ, that it was like a dream. But something was strange. “It still didn’t feel right,” José said. He defended his crown successfully three times yet he never had the same fire as when he was young.

Cus blamed Torres’s decline on his friendship with famous writers. Cus was interviewed for a book about Norman Mailer and said, “The only change I noticed in José after he became friends with Mailer was a definite loss of interest in boxing. José would go out to bars, stay out all night, and so forth. It was all the writers that Torres used to meet when they’d go and drink—Hamill, Budd Schulberg, Harvey Breit, Gay Talese. And since José was interested in writing, he looked up to these people.”

José lost his title in December of 1966 to Dick Tiger, then he fought three more times before retiring and, after being mentored by Hamill and Mailer, became a writer. He stayed loyal to Cus for the rest of his life.

Now Cus was a go-to analyst again, popping up all over the media. In April of 1965 he was quoted in Sports Illustrated commenting on the upcoming second fight between Ali and Liston. “If I had Liston, he could beat Clay. Liston is confused by mobility. I would show him how to neutralize Clay’s mobility. That may make me sound conceited, but I’m not.” Liston lost that second fight, getting knocked out for the first time in his career by “a punch of dubious velocity,” as Arthur Daley called it. Six months after he lost the rematch, Liston reached out to Cus to manage him for his comeback. Cus thought that it would be a challenge but he said that there was a “distinct possibility that I could make Liston the heavyweight champion again if he divests himself of the people around him.” Sonny agreed, saying, “It’s the onliest way.” But that was the last anyone heard of that union.

Cus’s image was so rehabilitated that he was called to Washington to testify at hearings on introducing legislation to create a federal boxing commission. He appeared alongside Marciano, Dempsey, and Tunney, who all supported the bill. On July 8, 1965, he appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce to talk about boxing regulation. After introducing himself, he talked about his struggle to fight the boxing monopoly.

“Once [Patterson] became champion of the world, I tried to influence the situation by introducing promoters who were not affiliated with those that controlled boxing. I wanted the boxing people to know by dealing with these promoters that a heavyweight championship fight could be conducted without the people who controlled boxing, that this was possible; and . . . I had hoped to influence the managers who had other fighters who, being encouraged by my success, would follow. This did not happen. But in the process of doing this, Floyd Patterson, the heavyweight champion of the world at that time, made more money than any other fighter in the history of boxing. He made that money because I dealt with people who were willing to pay because we had competition in boxing for the first time; a monopoly did not exist. I had hoped by my example to influence the others and to stir up a spark so that they would fight too. But they could not and they would not.”

At one point Cus was interrupted by Representative Torbert Macdonald of Massachusetts.

MACDONALD: At that juncture, Mr. D’Amato, I would like to make my position clear. I have never met you, but I have admired you for a number of years for your fight against the monopoly of boxing, and also for the care that you gave to your fighters. I think when you say that Floyd Patterson has made more money than any boxer ever has, I think that is a tribute to you for which you have been criticized and how you handled him or not that is a testimonial to you. I think one thing should be said for the record that you, perhaps, would be too modest to say, is that after you developed the now light heavyweight champion of the world and the one who might indeed be the heavyweight champion, in my judgment, you gave him his release . . . D’AMATO: I did. MACDONALD: After you had expended a number of dollars in developing him. D’AMATO: Many thousands of dollars. MACDONALD: I would think that your example in the boxing field is not only exemplary but extraordinary, and I personally would like to congratulate you on your conduct in the area.

Cus must have eaten that up.

Cus seemed to be back but he began spending more time upstate. Cus had always had an upstate retreat where he would secretly meet Camille. It was the house in Fishkill that was referred to in the NYSAC hearings. Everything about Cus was complicated and this house was no different. The house was in his brother Tony’s name. But the first mortgagee was Einer Thulin, Cus’s Swedish fight-reporter friend. And the fire insurance policy was addressed to Cus c/o Robert Melnick, Cus’s old trainer friend.

During the Ali–Patterson fight in Vegas on November 22, 1965, Cus was interviewed and talked about moving upstate. “It was very tough coming up here to live, because I was very bored and the loneliness and the quietness was something,” he told a CBS television program. “I couldn’t sleep, I just couldn’t sleep. I had to get used to everything, the idea of dying. It’s something a person gets used to and accepts it.” Little did anyone know that the following year I would be born and our mission for world domination would be destined.

But he kept trying to keep busy. He devised a scheme to get the great basketball player Wilt Chamberlain to fight Muhammad Ali. Cus offered Chamberlain a contract to turn pro and Ali and Wilt even did some promotional interviews together but in August of 1965 Chamberlain used the offer as leverage to sign a three-year deal for $110,000 a year with the Philadelphia 76ers.

Around the same time, he tried to sign Buster Mathis to a pro contract. Mathis was a promising amateur who had beaten Joe Frazier in the Olympic Trials but couldn’t compete for a gold medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics because of an injury. He was six feet, three and half inches tall and weighed 290 pounds, and he was surprisingly light on his feet for such a heavy guy. But on August 17, 1965, Mathis signed with Peers Management, a syndicate that included two sons of the owner of the New York Jets. They named Al Bachman as Buster’s manager and Charlie Goldman as his trainer. At the press function to introduce Mathis, Cus was giddy about him. “He’s a monster who performs like a little lightweight,” Cus said. “He has more ability, coupled with audience impact, than anyone in boxing today, and that includes Cassius Clay.”

The boys at Peers must have remembered those kind words seven months later when they fired Bachman and Goldman and hired Cus to train Mathis. Cus wanted to manage him but took the lesser position on two conditions—that he would have complete creative control over Mathis’s boxing and that he himself would work for free until the Peer Group recouped its initial $50,000 investment. After that, they would split their share of Mathis’s annual earnings.

Cus’s first move was to pull Mathis out of a fight with Jerry Quarry at the Garden because of a last-minute “injury.” Brenner then vowed to hold Mathis to his original contract. That led to a new feud with Brenner and more fights being canceled by the Garden.

In April of 1966 Cus took Buster up to Pawling Health Manor, the holistic health retreat in Rhinebeck, New York, started by Cus’s friend Dr. Bob Gross and his wife, Joy. People from all over the country came to the Manor to lose weight, eat well, and rejuvenate. They had a small gym on the property and Bob told Cus he could put his boxing ring in the gym. Buster was put on a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet and he dropped fifty-five pounds. Cus also began introducing Buster to the Willie Bag and had him box five rounds with it every day. Once, after Buster complained, he had him throw twelve thousand more punches. “When I first met Cus, I didn’t get along,” Mathis told Robert Boyle. “I didn’t know how to hang up my clothes and clean my room. I’m not A-1 yet. He’s hard to get along with, and sometimes he’s miserable. But he wants to make me champion. This is the only man I met who didn’t lie, and he doesn’t bite his tongue for anything. There are times I get so mad at Cus I cry. But he’s a heck of a man. I have learned more from him than I have from anyone,” Buster said.

One of the first things Cus did was to win over Buster’s girlfriend, Joan. “Cus, he was really a good man. I’m just a country farm girl, so when Buster introduced me to Cus, Cus looked at Buster and said, ‘If you don’t marry this woman, I’m going to disown you,’” she told us. “And Buster said, ‘Why would you say that, Cus?’ Cus said, ‘I am a very good judge of character and this woman will stick with you, whether you make it or not.’”

Cus knew he’d need an ally to get to Buster. Cus had a keen perception about people and he used it to his advantage when needed. Before long he had Joan working as a spy for him!

“Cus could just read people,” Joan said. “Sometimes Buster would come home on breaks from camp and Cus would call me, ‘Did he run this morning?’ I said, ‘No.’ Because I would tell Cus exactly the truth, because that’s the only way I know how to do it. Cus would ask, ‘Is he sticking to his diet?’ and I would say, ‘No.’ He would tell me that he won’t mention it when Buster comes back to camp. He never knew that Cus was checking up on him that way.”

I can just picture him doing that.

Buster’s son, who was named Buster D’Amato Mathis, remembers his father telling him that Cus was a “militant” trainer and everything had to be done his way. He mentioned that all of Cus’s fighters had to fight going forward. It was hard for them to go backward, he said. But that was all about entertainment. If you’re going forward, you’re entertaining the crowd. Backing up meant you were retreating. No action. No entertainment value. Cus encouraged Buster to be a showman. He liked it when Buster danced a jig on his way to his corner. He encouraged him to blow kisses to the crowd. And he taught him to growl at his opponent as he threw a punch. Buster seemed to be happy with his new arrangement. “When I walk into the ring, I figure I gotta win,” he said. “No one trains as hard as me, runs as hard as me, or has had Cus on his back.”

But by May 1967 there was trouble in paradise. The New York Post had a big headline, “Will Buster’s Backers Split over D’Amato?” Lester Bromberg reported that there were splits among the six investors in Peers Management. After a year of working with Cus, the investors thought that Buster hadn’t made enough progress or gotten enough experience in the ring. Jim Iselin, the originator of the group, was spearheading the move to oust Cus. But one dissenter was willing to buy out the other five and keep Cus. Iselin refused comment.

But Cus commented on Buster and a lot more in a very revealing interview he did with Lenny Traube for the August 1967 issue of Sport magazine. They started by talking about Mathis.

Q: Is Mathis really a fighter? A: I think he’s a potential champion providing I can iron out some of his emotional problems. He’s really ready now to step out with some of the better fighters.

Then Traube asked Cus the questions most fight fans were interested in getting answers to.

Q: What was the big reason for your split-up with Patterson? A: To this day, I don’t know why we separated. All I can say is it must have been due to outside influences. Patterson and I had a verbal agreement that if he ever wanted to leave me, all he had to do was come to me and I would release him, contract or no contract. But under no condition was he to accept anything said by anyone else without discussing it with me. He agreed to do this. Since he has not yet in so many words told me that we are no longer associated, I still consider that we are bound by that verbal agreement.

Q: Did you sincerely feel at the time that Liston was dominated by the underworld, or was this just an excuse to avoid making the match? A: Let’s say it was certainly a means by which I accomplished my objective, which was to not let Patterson fight him until I felt that Patterson was at his best.

Whoa. Here’s Cus going out of his way once again to avoid saying anything about the mob even when anyone who listened to the testimony in the Kefauver hearings knew that Liston was cut up to five different mobsters. Now he’s saying that the mob owning Liston was just a tactic to avoid the fight? Then Cus lets it all hang out about his break with José, even if José didn’t know they’d had a break.

Q: Torres once said that he’d like to fight Patterson to punish him for what he did to you. Has that loyalty Torres displayed then, since disappeared? A: Well, I don’t know. All I know is he objected because I fired a trainer whom I caught lying and cheating. He thought that because he was champion of the world I should bow to him, but to me he was another fighter, that’s all, and so I just walked away from him.

Q: You have always maintained that the fight game was gangster controlled. Do you still believe that? A: No. I don’t believe the fight game is gangster controlled. At one time it was, but it is not anymore.

Q: Of all the fighters you’ve handled whom did you admire most as a man? A: I admired Patterson both as a man and a fighter up until the time he allowed himself to be distracted. My admiration suffered somewhat as a result of his being influenced.

Q: What’s been the happiest moment in your life in boxing and the unhappiest? A: The happiest moment of my life was when Floyd Patterson won the heavyweight championship of the world. The unhappiest was when he was defeated by Liston.

Q: How does Clay compare with Louis and Marciano? A: You are picking three completely different styles. I would say that Clay is a great fighter. I do believe, however, that he has certain areas of weakness, which can be reached but which I would rather not go into until Buster Mathis demonstrates them.

“Within a month after our interview with D’Amato,” the magazine pointed out, “there were rumors that Buster Mathis’ backers were considering hiring another manager to replace D’Amato. According to the published reports, some of the group was dissatisfied with Mathis’ progress as a professional fighter.”

Well, they weren’t just rumors. After a while, Cus and Buster were at each other’s throats. “I’m a man,” Buster told Sports Illustrated. “This guy takes away my pride.” Gene Kilroy remembered a time when Cus got into an argument with Buster and then challenged him and Buster wouldn’t hit him. “It kind of disappointed me,” Cus told Gene. “But now I knew he had no guts.”

At one point, the investors had to order Cus out of the house in Rhinebeck where Cus was staying with Mathis. Cus refused to leave. So the Peers guys locked the refrigerator and tried to get the electricity cut off but Cus ran down the steps at the utility workers and threatened them with a realistic-looking water pistol. They finally had to call state troopers to evict Cus, according to Mark Kram’s account in Sports Illustrated.

Then Jimmy Iselin, one of the Jets owner’s sons, gave his rationale for dumping Cus. “I just couldn’t communicate with D’Amato anymore,” he told Kram. “He was impossible. He’d call up at 1:30 in the morning and say, ‘Jimmy, the refrigerator’s locked.’ What the hell am I going to do about that all the way down here in the city? He was muttering about bombs being hid in his car. He wanted a pistol to protect himself from the sparring partners, God knows why. He was always feuding with the fighters and neighbors, and finally he tried to cause a split between my partners and myself. This guy belongs in another world.”

By July, Cus made it clear to Buster that is was him or the young Turks. Buster went with the money. “Well, I’d like to say this,” Mathis told the press. “I had to go through a learning process, so Cus worked with me. But I was with Jimmy Iselin from when I started and I couldn’t leave them, because without them, there would have been no Buster. Cus wanted me to go with him and Iselin wanted me to go with him. I’ve got this far, and if the good Lord’s willing, I think I’ll be champion of the world. Well, this is what this is all about. If I didn’t think I’d be champion, I wouldn’t be doing it.”

Cus didn’t take all this too well. He announced that he was suing Peers Management for $8 million. But some of Cus remained with Buster. He still used Cus’s tapes of Cus calling out the numbers for his Willie Bag workouts. And a few months later, Mathis sounded like he was channeling Cus when he told reporters his new mantra. “C’mon, Bus, it’s gonna be a good day, don’t let your mind make you lazy. You’re full of confidence now, Bus, ’cause you know your turn will come.”

It didn’t take Buster or Joan too long to realize the mistake he had made. “I think that was the most hurting thing I ever could witness,” Joan said. “I did not want him to leave Cus. I don’t know anything about boxing, but I liked Cus and I knew Buster was making a huge mistake by leaving him. Later Buster called Cus up and told him the worst thing he could have done was when he left him. After he left Cus, it bothered him so much I think it contributed to his death. He would always say, even during the time he got sick, ‘If I only listened to Cus, if I only had stayed with Cus, I would have been the heavyweight champion of the world. I came so close.’”

Imagine if Cus were alive to hear all this. Cus was always like, “If only he listened to me.” That’s the thing with Cus, it always came back to him. “Because he didn’t listen to me, he never became anything.” Cus talked to me about Buster. He told me that Buster didn’t have the fortitude or the heart. He was at a certain level, but he’d never get to that big level. But Cus still got Buster to get on my case. One time they were talking and Cus gave me the phone and Buster told me to listen to Cus. To be honest, most of these guys just didn’t have what it takes. To be a great fighter you have to have humility, and some fighters can’t bring themselves to that.

By 1968, with the financial help of Jimmy Jacobs, since he still had a tax lien on him, Cus left the city and settled into a small apartment a few miles outside Rhinebeck. One of the problems was that Cus couldn’t drive, so Joy Gross became his designated driver. Joy got to know Cus well from his nonstop monologues on those drives. “He was a very interesting man. He was paranoid. I can remember taking him to the train station in Rhinebeck on a cold winter day. Because there were famous rich people who lived around here, it was a very fancy station. So I dropped Cus off and there was nobody else there. When I went back to my car I could look down and see the railroad tracks. Cus was down there waiting for his train all by himself. It was as quiet as a mouse, cold as hell, and he had his trench coat up around his neck and he was walking up and down the platform, and he continually looked back as if he thought somebody were following him. He was suspicious of everybody.”

Brian Hamill, Pete’s brother, had once been a pupil of Cus’s at the Gramercy Gym and he decided to visit Cus, along with a few of his “hippy-dippy” friends. He drove into the driveway, got out of the car, and rang the bell to the upstairs apartment. Brian told us the rest of the story. “Nobody answered, so I rang it again, and he opened the door, but I couldn’t see him, I just heard a voice. He said, ‘Who is that?!’ I said, ‘Cus, it’s Brian.’ ‘Who?’ I said, ‘Brian, Brian Hamill,’ and he came out onto the landing and he had a rifle in his fucking hands. I said, ‘Cus, it’s Brian Hamill.’ He went, ‘Oh, Brian.’ He couldn’t see, he was always squinting. So he said, ‘I’m sorry, Brian, I couldn’t hear you.’ So me and my friends went upstairs, and that was their first introduction to Cus. Holy shit, this fucking guy was ready to shoot us if we were the wrong guys.”

Cus was alone again. He wasn’t working with any prospects. He was upstate full-time and the Gramercy Gym had been inactive for years so he “sold” the gym to two of his boxing cronies for one dollar. Then sometime in 1970 he made a hasty exit from Rhinebeck. Joe Colangelo remembers that Cus told him that a “Norris guy” had moved into Rhinebeck and Cus “ran out of there and went to Camille’s house. The main reason why they weren’t living together back in the day was that he was still involved in boxing and he did not want to bring Camille around because then these guys would find out who Camille was and then they’d start strong-arming her.”

Not only did Cus leave Rhinebeck in a flash, but he also immediately sold his log cabin at a bargain price. Cus’s niece later revealed that her father, whose name was on the title, disposed of it to the first buyer. Cus was obviously paranoid about whoever this “Norris guy” was.

By the end of July 1971, Cus filed for bankruptcy in Federal District Court. He said he had liabilities of $30,276 and assets of approximately $500. And now, a half year away from hitting sixty-four, Cus was in total exile. To help kill time, he worked with kids in Catskill who had gotten in trouble or involved with drugs and needed discipline. And, in a last desperate attempt to forestall death, he started conjuring me up.