One day I was walking with Cus in New York and this monster of a Dominican guy, over three hundred pounds, came running up to us. He was crying and hugging Cus. “Cus, do you remember me?” He was an older guy Cus had trained years and years ago. That’s the effect Cus had on people—reducing them to tears. All the people we talked to for this book, and probably most any fighter Cus ever came across, if you had a conversation today with them about Cus, they’d start crying. That was the power he possessed. You know what Cus did to us? He exposed our biggest flaws to us, our biggest weaknesses. He’d put us to the test and then he’d try to get us to work on our flaws. He was always trying to make strength out of weakness.
Everyone who ever worked with Cus continually quotes some of his most striking insights. In fact, I’m continually quoted as saying, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” I learned that from Cus. He actually said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” That’s the way they talked in the forties.
But Cus was the furthest from being a dry intellectual teacher. Being around him was exciting. Again, he was another P. T. Barnum. One time after he got divorced from his first wife, Joe Colangelo brought a date over to meet Cus. His new gal was having trouble with her kids. Cus began to talk to her and after a while they were talking about out-of-body experiences and stuff like that. “When she walked out the door she was three feet in the air,” Joe said. “She was ready to take on the world. Cus had built up a euphoria in her mind that she could solve all her problems.”
Cus would love me talking about him like this. He always wanted his story told. There was so much misinformation out there about Cus; he wanted the truth to come out. He started on a couple of book projects when he was alive but they never came to fruition. But he was always concerned about his legacy. Part of Cus’s legacy was the allegations of impropriety that surfaced after the first Patterson–Johansson fight and resulted in Cus losing his NYSAC licenses. One of the central issues that Cus was grilled on was a series of phone calls from Cus’s home to the mob boss Fat Tony Salerno. Both Cus and his friend Charlie Black and his nemesis Bill Rosensohn all testified that they never made those calls. But the lingering suspicion helped the commissioners revoke Cus’s licenses. During the course of researching this book, we found out who made those calls to Salerno. Near the end of our research Ratso called Cus’s niece Betty, Tony’s daughter, and she finally solved the mystery. “It was Emil Lence. He was the cause of all that trouble because he made the calls on my uncle’s phone that got him in trouble and got him suspended from the NYSAC.”
That made sense to us. Lence was the independent promoter who bucked Norris and the IBC and who helped propel Patterson’s career. He was also the promoter of Patterson’s first title defense after Cus publicly denounced the IBC and said that Patterson would never fight for Norris again. But we also know that Lence himself was connected. Again, it was a case where the mob-connected guys in boxing, including Carbo and Palermo, would act in their own interests and oppose Norris when it suited them. But why would Betty remember Lence’s involvement in those calls after all these years?
“Lence screwed my father,” Betty said. “Most of my father’s earnings were from his bar and back then owners didn’t have to pay into Social Security. When he closed his bar my father got a job as the manager for a bowling alley that Lence owned. But Lence illegally withheld the money he should have been paying into Social Security for my father. So when my father retired he couldn’t collect on those earnings.”
But other issues surrounding the first Patterson–Johansson fight and Fat Tony still remain unresolved. Could Cus really have been kept in the dark about Fat Tony’s involvement by his best friend, Charlie Black? Or did Cus secretly agree to Rosensohn’s getting financing from mob sources in order to make sure the bout came off? We’ve seen that Cus was apprehensive about making any kind of move that could potentially screw up any of Floyd’s defenses of his title because that would give Norris, Cus’s archenemy, a chance to climb back into the promotion of heavyweight championship fights. Cus was willing to work with mob-controlled fighters such as Roy Harris as long as Norris was shut out.
Ultimately Cus’s beef wasn’t with Carbo and Palermo, it was with Norris and Gibson and the IBC. Don’t forget that Bill Daly, in his wiretapped conversation with Jackie Leonard in L.A., admitted that Carbo and Blinky never have any problem if you make it to the top without their help. Then they don’t muscle in. It’s only when they get you the fights and then your fighter wins the championship, that’s when you’ve got to pay. And that’s what Cus did, he made it to the top without their help and he outsmarted Norris, so Carbo and Palermo had no beef with Cus. It was Norris who Cus really got over on. Carbo and Palermo never controlled the heavyweight champ. Al Weill used to pay them off for Marciano’s fights but they never controlled Marciano. And when Gibson and Norris put pressure on Carbo to force Cus to put Patterson up against an IBC contender for the title, they never did. They only shrugged and said that Norris could never get that match because Cus was “crazy.”
During the course of doing this research on Cus, a lot of stuff about myself and Cus resurfaced. I remembered that Cus once told me that after the IBC had been dissolved, Norris came to him and asked him if he wanted to train or manage his fighters. Cus couldn’t believe the guy’s audacity. Cus looked at Norris and said, “What? After all you put me through, you want me to work for you? Get the hell out of here!”
If you look closely at Cus’s statements, he’d always say that he was fighting the IBC, not the mob. I think he was making a distinction there between Norris and his guys and the old-time mob guys like Carbo and Palermo. But we know that Norris was connected to mob guys who were on a whole other level beyond Carbo. It’s known that Norris was connected to Capone’s gang. Through his and Wirtz’s involvement in casino gambling and liquor distribution to Vegas, as reported by his own employee Truman Gibson, he would have known the top mob bosses including guys like Meyer Lansky. He was close to Albert Anastasia because when Norris was in a New York hospital after one of his heart attacks, he got fresh flowers sent to his room every day from Anastasia. So when Cus was fighting Norris, Norris had access to the mob, but a whole other level of the mob.
Cus made this distinction to Paul Zuckerman, a writer who was working on a book about Cus when I was living in the house. Cus told Paul, “I wasn’t fighting the mob, I was fighting the IBC. I’d rather you wrote that. I don’t want to challenge these people. I got along, I never challenged them, I challenged the IBC. The IBC had undercover associates. That’s how they referred to them in those days. Those fellows are still around today. I don’t want to stir anything up.” Sometimes Cus would go to ludicrous lengths to confuse the issue of who he was really fighting. Confusing the enemy. In a biography of Norman Mailer by Peter Manso that came out two years after Cus died, Cus was quoted about his involvement with Salerno and Carbo. “It’s true, just like Norman wrote in his article, I tangled with Fat Tony—Fat Tony Salerno, the gambler. But he wasn’t part of the IBC. The guy I really tangled with was Frankie Carbo. Contrary to what people assumed, Carbo wasn’t Mafia, but he was the tough guy who controlled the fight managers by using the Managers’ Guild, which had been a good organization, but then when Joe Louis retired, the IBC tied up all the top contenders so they weren’t permitted to fight anyone else. They got control of all the titles, not just the heavyweights.”
Whoa. To be clear, Mailer never said that Cus “tangled” with Fat Tony. In fact, he said the opposite. Remember? “It was discovered that D’Amato directly or indirectly had gotten money for the [Patterson–Johansson] 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.”
Then Cus said that the guy he really tangled with was Frankie Carbo, who, he added, “wasn’t Mafia.” That would be news to all the guys Carbo executed in the service of the mob.
Cus would talk about his battle with Norris and the IBC to his dying day. He saw himself as a white shining knight fighting off all these bad heathens. Cus was on a mission to clean up boxing. But to clean it up, you’ve got to clean it up by being dirty. You can’t clean it up legitimately or else somebody is going to feel some pain. If it was a case of breaking eggs to make an omelet, Cus wasn’t particularly proud of that fact.
Cus knew that Norris and his friends were so powerful that if you did something to them and went to Europe, they can make something happen in Europe like they were right next door to you in America. He knew those guys had long tentacles and he knew what they were capable of doing.
After his battle with the IBC, many people believed that Cus had a huge target on his back. Jimmy Glenn, who was a trainer for Patterson and who owns the best dive bar in New York, called Jimmy’s Corner, told us, “Cus needed some protection because he was a strong-headed guy. Somebody had his back, because mob guys didn’t care, they’d bump him off.”
We can’t forget the horrible fate that befell Ray Arcel in Boston. Even Joe Louis talked about fighting the mob. In 1972, Joe Louis told a reporter, “Since 1969, I’ve had a little trouble with the Mafia. At one time my life was in real danger. They tried to put me out of the way. I wasn’t sick at all when they put me in that hospital in Denver. The Mafia put pressure on my wife to put me in the hospital. But it’ll be straightened out.” When he was asked if he felt safe right then, he said, “Oh no. They might come back at any time. One thing I know. Your best friends can set you up. Your best friends can kill you.”
Several books and documentaries maintain that Sonny Liston was murdered via a hot shot of heroin by the mob. Jackie Leonard survived ratting on Carbo and Palermo because he left the country and worked as an engineer on construction projects in Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, two places where the mob’s tentacles might be too short to reach.
So was Cus really in danger or was he just paranoid about the wiseguys? Cus had told me that the IBC had some hits out on him, but I was young then and I certainly didn’t know the whole backstory that we’ve discovered doing this book. Now that statement is very meaningful to me. He said that’s why he never walked home the same way. But it’s probably also why he tried to never sleep in the same place two nights in a row. It’s also why he kept Camille in a secret apartment in Queens that he would sneak away to.
One question that kept eating at Ratso and me was Cus’s relationship with Charlie Black. The fact that Cus stayed friendly with him till their dying days suggested that Charlie had done some great things for Cus that far outweighed the trouble that Charlie got Cus into, if you want to give Cus the benefit of the doubt and say it was Charlie who got Fat Tony involved in the Patterson promotion without Cus knowing about it. Well, near the end of the research for his book, we finally found out the depth of their involvement. Ratso had called Rocco D’Amato’s daughter Carole D’Amato Rothmund, Cus’s niece. After talking to her for a half hour, Ratso had a hunch. “Does the name Charlie Black mean anything to you?” he asked. “Yes, it does,” she replied. “I remember my father mentioning his name all the time.” “Do you remember the context in which his name was mentioned?” “He said that Black stopped the mob from killing my uncle. They had him marked down to take his life. I would believe it too, because my father would never tell me a lie.”
Now it gets really interesting. By 1966, Cus began retreating to upstate New York, and by the late sixties he had moved permanently from the city. When we talked to Nick Beck, a close friend of Jimmy Jacobs’s, Nick reported that when he visited Cus and Jim at their apartment and was a bit shocked at Cus’s shoddy housekeeping, Jim told him, “We’re thinking about trying to get something better for Cus.” The next thing Nick heard, they were talking about getting Cus out of the city. “Cus had made a lot of enemies in his lifetime,” Jimmy told Nick cryptically.
Cus himself confirmed that his move upstate was related to his dealings with the mob. Lisa Scott, writing for Fightnews.com, interviewed Kevin Rooney, who told her that Cus said of his move upstate, “I wasn’t paranoid. I just assumed that they would hurt me if they could and I acted accordingly.” And when Ratso called Nick Beck again to dig into the circumstances of Cus’s leaving New York, Nick remembered that Jacobs had told him that he got Cus out of town because they were worried about a mob hit. So Cus moved to Rhinebeck, New York.
Here’s where Charlie Black comes in. Black’s close friend and associate, the man he “dragged” into the Patterson–Johansson fight and who saved the fight with his infusion of cash, was Fat Tony Salerno. It just so happened that Fat Tony had a huge estate in Rhinebeck. In fact, Joy Gross, wife of Dr. Gross, whose health retreat was in Rhinebeck, told us that a lot of gangsters congregated in that area “but it was kept quiet. There was a group of gangsters and Fat Tony was one of them and they would meet in hidden places. That was part of the gang that I think was helping Cus.”
Mike D’Attilio, a student of Cus’s who went on to work for the FBI, confirmed that Cus was friends with a close relative of Fat Tony’s, but he “kept that very confidential. There’s another example of Cus being manipulative. He stayed away from those guys, but when it would serve his purpose, he’d get in there and manipulate them.”
Cus’s involvement with Salerno was no secret to many in the boxing world. Don Majeski, a fight agent and matchmaker, told an interviewer that he was sitting in Patsy’s Pizzeria in East Harlem with Bill Daly, the fight manager who brought that message to Jackie Leonard to play ball with Palermo. Daly pointed out a guy with a big-brimmed hat and told him that he was the “real manager” of Patterson. It was Tony Salerno. He said the rumor was that Fat Tony bought a house for Cus in Rhinebeck. “He just had his own mob that protected him,” Majeski said.
Cus stayed in Rhinebeck until 1970, when he moved almost overnight to Catskill after an IBC “associate” turned up in Rhinebeck. So when Jimmy brought Fat Tony to watch me spar in Cus’s gym in Catskill shortly after I started living with Cus, was this a mere social call? Or was Salerno coming to get a piece of me for a very big favor he had done for Cus years earlier? By then, Fat Tony was an underboss of the powerful Genovese crime family and had been designated the “front boss” to take the heat away from Vinnie “The Chin” Gigante. “I think Salerno wanted a small piece of the action,” said Joe Colangelo, who was there. “I believe that they came out with some sort of working arrangement. There was no way of stopping Salerno if he wanted to muscle in. So you had to work something out.”