THERE WAS NO CENTRAL GREEK COMMUNITY IN BROOKLYN IN the 1950s. Most of the Greeks who came to New York City were drawn to the Chelsea section of Manhattan, from West 20th Street up to the 40s, or to the Astoria section of Queens. Petros Spanakos and his twin brother, Nikos, were Brooklynites most of their lives because their father, who emigrated from rural Sparta in 1914, opened a restaurant in Red Hook, a hardscrabble, rundown area of Brooklyn that could have been right out of the movie On the Waterfront.
The village of Roode Hoek was settled by the Dutch in 1636. It is named for the red clay soil and because it’s a point of land that projects into the East River. (Hoek means “point,” not the English “hook.”) The subway doesn’t go to Red Hook. And when master builder Robert Moses built the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Gowanus Expressway, it effectively cut off the neighborhood from the rest of Brooklyn. To get there you have to take a bus or drive a car. A home to fishermen and longshoremen, Red Hook was always a tough, tough neighborhood.
The Spanakos twins, who were small at about five foot four, one hundred pounds, learned to survive on the mean streets of Red Hook by becoming talented street fighters. Spartan mothers who sent their sons into battle had a saying, “Come back with your shield or on it.” The Spanakos twins were small, but ferocious in battle.
In 1952 they began their formal training in the New York City Parks Department gym in Red Hook. They then moved to the PAL 76th Precinct gym. Their goal was to fight in the 1956 Olympics. Despite the threat from muggers, they would get up at five thirty in the morning to run around the equestrian paths of Prospect Park.
Peter won his first Golden Gloves competition in 1955. That was also the year the Dodgers finally won the World Series.
“Nick and I were in the papers, on TV, and the newsreels, and it was very exciting,” said Spanakos. “That summer I knew the Dodgers were winning, and when they won the World Series, people were drinking, and cars were honking, and I said to my mother, ‘What the hell happened?’
“She said, ‘The Brooklyn Dodgers won.’
“I said, ‘Won what?’ I didn’t realize all the involvement.”
Between 1955 and 1964 Peter was undefeated in Golden Gloves competition, winning ten titles from New York City to Seattle. (Nick won seven titles.) During his reign, Peter became a ring favorite of a neighbor, gangster “Crazy Joe” Gallo. Through his boxing, Spanakos got to know many of the Mafia kingpins, including Sammy (the Bull) Gravano, a hit man whose testimony sent John Gotti to jail.
Peter and Nick were talented enough to try out for the 1960 United States Olympic boxing team. Nick, who fought at 126 pounds, made it. Peter, who boxed at 118 pounds, was one fight away from going to Rome. Though he was way ahead on points, the fight was stopped because of a head cut.
That year, during tryouts for the Pan American Games, he roomed with a sixteen-year-old heavyweight boxer from Louisville, Kentucky, by the name of Cassius Clay. According to Spanakos, even though Clay announced to all he was the GOAT—the “greatest of all time”—Clay was “the last boxer on the team anyone would have picked for stardom.”
Spanakos went on to Brooklyn Law School, where one of his professors was Senator Joe McCarthy’s assistant Roy Cohn. Hating the law profession, Spanakos chose a career in education. After graduation, Spanakos taught in some of the toughest schools in Brooklyn.
PETER SPANAKOS “My father and mother came from Mani, which is Sparta in Greece. Their part of Greece was rural. The land wasn’t arable, so they had to travel. They were merchants, and there were pirates who were basically illiterate killers. The Greeks were persecuted by the Turks. Of course there was poverty. If you were middle-income, why would you leave to go to the boondocks of America?
“In Greece they had famine, and combining that with persecution and poverty, my dad came over at sixteen in 1914. Like most Greeks, he settled in Chelsea in Manhattan, and took a job as a baker working for German people. Most Greeks who came to New York wound up making chocolate, making cigarettes, or working in flower shops and restaurants. My father got a job working as a busboy and waiter in a restaurant.
“They were Laconians, and my father was very Spartan, with its history of being a culture of warriors and men of honor. In their day, in Greece, there were honor killings and vendettas, and it continued when they came to America. If someone hurt your sister or family, you had to do the right thing.
“My father never spoke about these things, but relatives said he was an honorable man who did honorable things. My father was not someone you fooled around with.
“Greeks love to gamble, and before he married my mother, my father got into gambling, was very good at it, and he ran a gambling game in Manhattan. In the 1920s he had a big house on 28th Street called Greek Town USA. He made quite a bit of money. He had a Packard—the Cadillac of its day—and a chauffeur. At one point he was very wealthy. You didn’t fool around with my father. You paid your debts. He was very strict about people keeping their word. His whole contract was a handshake. And God help you if you broke your handshake. He carried this code with him his whole life.
“When my father met my mother, he knew she was from his part of Greece, and that appealed to him, because they were very parochial, and your part of Greece had the best women, the best men. But he wasn’t allowed to date her.
“My mother told her mother, ‘This man is coming. I don’t know him, but he sounds interesting.’ My grandmother didn’t like him, but she didn’t know why she didn’t like him. She showed her strong disapproval when she touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She had ‘heard something’ but she didn’t know what she heard.
“‘I like him,’ my mother said. Every day she kept on her mother for about a week, and when my mother wouldn’t bow, my grandmother said, ‘You’re going to marry this bum?’ My mother said yes. My grandmother threw her out of the house.
“My father was very clever. In those days you had to offer a dowry. You had to pay what the woman was worth: a few cattle, a few buildings, a few sheep, whatever. He told my grandmother, ‘I will take you to Cavanaugh’s,’ which was the best restaurant in Manhattan, ‘and I will pay for the wedding.’ My mother’s mother started to like him.
“My mother made my father promise to give up the gambling game, because she was afraid he’d get killed, and he went into the restaurant business. He opened up in Red Hook in 1928. It was called the Paramount Food Shop, and its motto was, ‘Eat With the Elite’—tongue-in-cheek, because the only ones who ate there were the gangsters, longshoremen, and truck drivers.
“The big thing in a Greek family was to have boys, called dufekes, guns. The more boys you had, the more honor. My parents had eight boys in ten years. My father was a very honorable man.
“I and my identical twin brother, Nick, were born at Polyclinic Hospital near the old Madison Square Garden on 50th Street and Eighth Avenue on July 26, 1938. We were the first identical twins born in that hospital. Nick came first. The birth certificate says by eighteen minutes. My mother says fifteen. Nick was the sixth son. I was the seventh.
“My father was very generous and concerned about people. A lot of Greeks, when they jumped ship or came off the boat, would come to our restaurant, and my father would give them $5 or $10 and wish them well. They helped each other, and if a guy had a problem, they’d call Congressman John J. Rooney, a powerhouse in the ’30s and ’40s. Rooney was elected for thirty years. He was the chairman of the subcommittee on appropriations, so J. Edgar Hoover was terrified of him.
“One time my father was visited by the FBI. They came into the restaurant, and they twisted his arm way high up and handcuffed him, and my mother got very upset, because she didn’t know why they were doing this. She spoke English better than my father. She asked why they were handcuffing him.
“‘Listen, you greaseball,’ the FBI man said to him, ‘you’ve got gangsters eating here, Italian gangsters.’
“‘I don’t know who is a gangster,’ my mother said. ‘They pay their bill like everybody else. Why are you blaming us?’
“‘Shut up. We’re tired of you greaseballs and guineas. You’re all alike.’
“She got on the phone and called Congressman Rooney, and by the time my father arrived at the police station, they were apologizing, terrified because Rooney had called up Hoover. They brought him back and apologized and left him alone after that.
“To the Irish cops and FBI agents, the Greeks and Italians were just greaseballs, hoodlums, and gangsters. They spoke a foreign language, had another religion. The WASPs stepped all over them.
“Years later I belonged to the New York Athletic Club, which at that time was anti-Jewish and antiblack. When the WASPs were running it, the New York Athletic Club had signs: EMPLOYEES WANTED. IRISH NEED NOT APPLY. When the Irish took it over, they didn’t want Italians. When the Italians and Irish came over, they didn’t want Greeks. There was a hierarchy, and later on it became the Jews and the blacks who weren’t wanted. In typical American style, thank God they integrated.
“Red Hook used to be very anti-Semitic. I remember one day the Irish and the Italians were beating up this old Jewish guy with a beard. My father left the restaurant, and he said, ‘Leave him alone.’
“They said, ‘Hey Greek, hey schmuck, we’re doing what we want.’
“My father took out his carving knife from under his apron, and he said, ‘My English isn’t very good,’ but when they saw the knife they knew exactly what he meant, and they stopped hitting the Jewish guy.
“My father said to him, ‘Keep your mouth shut. Get in the back in the family booth. Wait till these guys leave.’ After a few hours, my father gave him a few bucks and told him to be careful. Unfortunately, Red Hook was very anti-Semitic.
“With eight sons in the family, there were always issues of bullying and getting your parents’ attention, and getting hand-me-down clothes. My older brothers would bully my twin brother and me. Fortunately, where we lived, there were a lot of venues for sports. We played soccer, baseball, and basketball, and there were three boxing gyms within walking distance. It was pre-television, and we didn’t have TV, the computer, and video games. We were blessed, very grateful we could play sports all year long on the streets.
“Even though we couldn’t play baseball, in the mid-’50s my twin brother and I got to be on the Knothole Gang. Three of us, Jerry Becklemeister, Nick, and I were on TV before the Dodger game. We were trying out for shortstop. Pee Wee Reese was the Dodger who rolled ground balls to us, and we’d scoop them up and throw them back. Pee Wee threw me the ball five times, and twice it went through my legs. Then I heard a kid say, ‘That’s Jackie Robinson.’ I wasn’t a baseball fan, so I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but the other kids sure were in awe of Jackie and Pee Wee.
“In those days if you went on Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang, they gave you a professional baseball glove. You couldn’t go to the store and buy a professional glove. A year later I sold it to a kid named Pepitone. It didn’t mean anything to me.
“My parents didn’t allow us to just hang out. Maybe at the local candy store. My father was afraid of all the neighborhood bars that catered to the Irish and Italians. He didn’t even want us going near those places. He didn’t even want us doing sports. He hated boxing. We used to have to sneak into the gym.
“I can remember how hostile it was between the whites and the blacks in Red Hook. The projects weren’t built until the 1940s, and the first black family to move in was the Greens. The story I heard was that the first time they swam in the Red Hook pool, a humongous municipal pool, the whites started to drown them, and when they went in the Clinton Theater on Clinton Street, the whites threw them off the balcony.
“I was on a boxing team in the early 1950s, and we had Italians and blacks on the team. There was always tension between them. The Italians would say to me, ‘If we get jumped, you have to help us because you’re a team member.’
“I’d say, ‘I don’t help the whites. I don’t help the blacks. Do what I do. Mind your own business.’
“One of the Italians would say to me, ‘The mulignans are going to get theirs.’
“I’d say, ‘Listen, guys, that’s not my game. Do what you want, but I won’t get involved.’ And it helped my brother and me with both groups, and it kept us from getting locked up.
“The Irish cops were the ones we feared the most. We were fourteen years old in 1953, and we were out on the street playing a game called Skeets and Bananas. Our group that day had some of my boxing friends, white kids and some black kids. The way the game was played, everybody froze, and the first one who moved, everyone would move in and punch him all about the body, beat him up. You didn’t hit anyone in the face. One of the Irish kids flinched, and five or six of us, including a couple of the black kids, started punching him when four plainclothes cops wearing Hawaiian shirts showed up. One of them had a gun, and he was yelling to the other guy, ‘Show your badge. Show your badge.’ They slammed us against the wall, patted us down. My twin brother had a handkerchief full of mucus with a tiny penknife in it. The cop found it, and he put it in Nick’s face, and he said, ‘We know what’s going on here. We have blacks and whites fighting. What are you doing with this knife?’
“Nick said, ‘I clean my nails with it.’
“He smacked my brother in the head, and they told everybody to go their separate ways. The cops were very conscious of gang wars and people getting killed. The cops were Irish, and they didn’t like Italians, and then the Irish and Italians got together, and they didn’t like the blacks. In those days, the 1950s, they used to beat the shit out of the kids. It was unbelievable what they would do. As I said, the kids feared the cops more than anybody else.
“The cop would say, ‘If I catch you doing anything, I’m going to beat the shit out of you.’ And they did exactly that. ‘You fucking guineas get off the corner.’ ‘I told you once, I told you twice…’ ‘I’ll lose my size-nine shoe up your ass.’
“There was nothing you could do. You couldn’t rat on the cop. If you went to the precinct and said, ‘The cop beat me up,’ you got another beating.
“At the same time there was a lot of corruption in the police force. Everybody, the bookmakers, worked hand in hand with each other. One day my friend who owned the corner candy store said to me, ‘Don’t come in tomorrow.’
“‘Why?’
“‘Because I’m being arrested.’ For bookmaking. They had to make an arrest, and it was his turn to do it. There was a lot of corruption.
“A lot of my friends didn’t make it. They wound up with a gun in their hand, or a spike, and they ended up in jail. Nick and I were lucky that we stayed away from drugs, stayed away from crime. Our parents were the reason for that.
“My mother would feed us in the restaurant under our six-family house, and then I’d go out and play and come home and eat and go out and play and come home and go out and play, until school started, and then I was forced to do my studying, because my father didn’t want me to be ‘like the other bums in the neighborhood.’ Because of our father, six of us went to law school, and four of us graduated. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t good enough. He was still embarrassed, because the Jews and the Greeks were the same: if you weren’t a doctor, you were a bum. We weren’t doctors, so he considered us bums.
“He wouldn’t settle for less. It made us strive harder. So we had high expectations. When my older brothers were thinking of dropping out of high school, my father would say, ‘Over my dead body,’ and he meant it. Parental expectations were very forceful. Sometimes I think my father and mother still rule from the grave.
“My mother was a phenomenal woman. In 1962 she was Mother of the Year of New York State, and she was runner-up in the Mother of the Year USA contest. In 1964 she became Greek-American Mother of the Year of the whole country.
“She was interesting. When she was thirteen or fourteen, her father took her out of school, and she worked in a restaurant. Her father was afraid if she stayed in school, she’d ‘end up like the Polish girls,’ who were thought to be loose. God forbid she wouldn’t be a virgin when she got married.
“In those days you had to be married according to what the parents wanted. If you intermarried, it could ruin a family. Today the Muslims have honor killings. If a girl is going out with someone else, they will kill her, and in their tradition it’s okay. It’s only in America where the killers are arrested and locked up. It’s still happening today.
“My wife was a guidance counselor in junior high school, and the Muslim girls were being married off at a young age, because the parents wanted to make sure they were still virgins.
“I can remember much later I was running a rough school in the Bronx. The black kids were hitting on this Muslim girl. She was beautiful. I took her aside, and I said, ‘If your father found out these guys were hitting on you, even though you were keeping them away, he would kill you. You understand that? I’m not telling you what you should or shouldn’t do, but you have to understand your father.’ The Albanian Muslims were killers. They didn’t fool around. They had their own sections of the Bronx, and they ran them. During that war in Yugoslavia, Albanian-Americans were going on their own to fight with the troops.
“We worry about the perils of assimilation, but traditions, mores, customs, they continue.
“When I was growing up, there was no Greek community in Brooklyn. We were the only Greek family, and because my twin brother and I were small, everybody tried to kick our ass. I learned how to street-fight, and when I was fourteen I went into the gym, and it took me a few years to go from a first-class street fighter to a first-class boxer.
Peter and Nick Spanakos, Golden Glove champions in 1960. Courtesy of Peter Spanakos
“Since we lived in Red Hook, we went to PS 27, grades one through eight, which at one point was the worst school in the city. It was terrible. World War II was still on, and there were munitions shops around, and second-graders would come into the school carrying guns. My brother and I were always in separate classes, and we were always getting beaten up by Irish and Italian gang members. They would chase us, and so the school would let us out ten minutes early so I wouldn’t have to run the gauntlet going the four or five blocks back home.
“My mother felt we weren’t learning, so from the fourth through seventh grade, we took the train from Brooklyn and traveled an hour and a quarter to the South Bronx to go to a Greek school. That was a very Hispanic neighborhood, and we had to walk three blocks to the subway, and the Hispanics would beat the hell out of us. This time the principal of the parochial school let us out twenty minutes early to avoid getting beaten up. After a while these beatings reinforced my thinking, This is crazy. I better learn how to fight.
“As I got older, my father didn’t mind me boxing locally, because I kept telling him, ‘Papa, we don’t have any money. My one-way ticket out of Red Hook is to get a college boxing scholarship.’ He didn’t think it was possible, but I did that.
“I won the local Golden Gloves championships ten times. In 1955 I won twice in one night at Madison Square Garden, and then I trained for a week, and now I’m to fight in the nationals, and my father said, ‘You can’t go. I won’t let you out of school.’
“The principal and the dean called my father. ‘Let him go. He’s honoring the school.’ My father said, ‘No, I’m the father. He’s not old enough.’
“The same thing happened the next year. I won the New York State AAU, and I and my twin brother were supposed to go to Boston, and my father called up Sam Levine, the head of the AAU, now USA Boxing, and he said, ‘I’m their father. They’re not going.’
“When I got on the scale, Sam pulled me aside and said, ‘I don’t want to embarrass you, but your father says you can’t fight tonight, and if you win you can’t go to Boston anyway.’
“I talked Sam into letting me fight that night, and I fought and won, but of course I couldn’t go to Boston, and it cost me another national title.
“He was my father. He meant well. He decided what was the best thing to do. He was concerned about my health. He was concerned about our getting punchy. He knew Jerry the Greek, the trainer for Jack Dempsey, and my father knew all the gamblers, and he’d tell us, ‘Boxing is a dirty game, corrupt.’ Of course, I didn’t think he knew what he was talking about. There is an axiom in boxing, ‘The only thing square about boxing is the ring.’ My father knew a lot more than I gave him credit for.
“It was only after he died in ’58 that I was able to go on to the nationals.
“Even though I didn’t live in Bay Ridge, I went to Fort Hamilton High School. My mother saw to that. When I went to Greek school in the seventh grade, I studied English in the morning and Greek in the afternoon, and my mother saw that I was falling behind in grammar, and in math, and she wanted me in a school that concentrated more on English.
“Back then there was de facto segregation in the school system. You were assigned by neighborhoods. The kids from Red Hook went to high school at Manual, now called John Jay, on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope. That was a war zone. My mother didn’t want Nick and me going there. She said, ‘I’m going to give you a phony address and you’ll go to Bay Ridge, the feeder school for Fort Hamilton High School. Bay Ridge Junior High was an upper-and middle-income school. There were no Greeks. There were Scandinavian girls: Olson, Johnson, Lawson. We had dances. These girls were tall, and I was short and I can remember how for forty-five minutes their boobs would bang on my head when I’d dance with them.
“One of my coaches asked me, ‘Peter, why are you always rubbing your head after these dance sessions?’
“I said, ‘I get a delicious headache because those boobs keep bouncing on my head.’ It was a good school. I learned a lot. And I went to Fort Hamilton High School, which is located on 84th Street and Shore Road, a very, very chic neighborhood. It’s right off the Narrows. Fort Hamilton in the 1700s was on the Brooklyn side, and Fort Wadsworth was on the Staten Island side, and all boats had to pass between them on the way to New York Harbor. In World War II we hung up submarine nets to protect the harbor from the Germans. In the 1700s Bay Ridge was called Yellow Hook, because it had yellow clay. Red Hook had red clay. In the 1840s there was an outbreak of typhoid fever, and they changed the name from Yellow Hook to Bay Ridge, because you were on top of the bay and could see the ridges.
“I was the senior class president of Fort Hamilton High School. My cousin was my campaign manager. There were very few Greeks in the school, but somehow we worked it out. It was 1956, and from reading about my boxing exploits in the Daily News, which covered the Golden Gloves very well, the principal discovered that Nick and I lived on Court Street in Red Hook, not in Bay Ridge. He called us down to the office to kick us out of school.
“We sat down and he said, ‘I have perused your records, and you don’t make any trouble. I should throw you out, but I’m not going to.’ So we were able to finish the year and graduate.
“One of the neighborhood guys who was a fan of mine when I boxed was Joey Gallo. Joey lived on President Street a few blocks away. We met when I was in high school. My brother and I were walking down the street dressed in jackets and ties one evening, and Gallo said something like, ‘Look at those faggots.’ Which was dumb. I took it as an insult, and I went over and hit him. My brother faced off with one of his brothers.
“There were five Gallo brothers, and the next day they came down in a gang the four blocks to my house. Waiting for them were my neighbors, my closest friends, the Pepitones and the Monfortes.
“‘What’s going on?’ one of the Monforte brothers asked the Gallos.
“‘We’ve come to kick those twin Greeks in the ass,’ Joey said.
“‘I wouldn’t do that,’ the Monfortes said. ‘They have six brothers, and they box every day in the gym. You’re fooling around with the wrong people. And if you come here, you have the Pepitones and the Monfortes to worry about.’
“Later on Joey Gallo became one of my big boxing fans. I was fighting in the gym, and he took out his gun and started shooting it in the air. ‘Go Pete! Go Pete!’ I turned to see what was going on, and the other guy kept hitting me, and the cops came. They didn’t arrest him. They just took away his gun and threw him out of the gym.
“Joey was nuts. Joey had a lion with no teeth in his basement. Someone knocked up his niece, so he grabbed the kid who did it by the scruff of his neck and took him to St. Mary’s Church on Court Street.
“‘You’re going to marry her,’ he said.
“Gallo was a known mob guy by this time. The kid said, ‘I don’t give a shit who you are. I’m not marrying her.’
“Joey brought the kid to his house, opened up the basement door, and there was Leo the lion, growling away. The kid said, ‘Okay, I’ll marry her.’
“The next day they took him to the church to get married, and just before the start of the ceremony, the kid told the priest, ‘I’m not getting married.’ Gallo went up to him, and he told him the same thing. Joey said, ‘Okay, remember Leo the lion? I’m going to feed you to him.’
“The kid said, ‘Don’t do that.’ And the kid got married.
“Joey went to prison, and in prison he turned gay. After he got out, whenever a thirteen-or fourteen-year-old boy turned up missing, one of the first places they checked was to see if Joey Gallo had him.
“When Joey went to prison, he had quite a mob of black guys. He was offering them buttonships. Joey had some of his black guys shoot and kill Joseph Colombo on the reviewing stand during the Columbus Day parade.
“Joey and his bodyguard, who was called Peter the Greek, and Punchy Liano went to Little Italy for dinner, and Colombo’s men went into the restaurant [Umberto’s Clam House on Mulberry Street] and killed Joey and injured Peter the Greek. I can remember a good friend of mine, Tony Di, wanted to go in with Gallo. I told him, ‘Tony, don’t. You’re going to wind up with a cement kimono.’ Tony was a boxer. He had a pushed-in face and a pushed-in nose, but it wasn’t because of boxing. When he was twelve, he fell down a fourteen-foot sewer and landed on his face. His dream was to be one of Frank Sinatra’s bodyguards. He used to hang out at Jilly Rizzo’s restaurant waiting to be discovered so he could wind up on Sinatra’s payroll.
“One day Tony disappeared. Thirty years later Tony’s body was dug out of a canal. He was wearing cement boots.
“Heroin came in big in Red Hook even before Bedford-Stuyvesant and the black areas. You get a runny nose with heroin. I can remember when I was talking to guys, they kept rubbing their noses. Their eyes would look bleary. Their veins were shot. This was around 1950, and I realize now it was because of heroin.
“The guys who were selling it were making so much money, the mobsters’ kids started to get involved, and so the Mafia don, Carlo Gambino, made a rule that you couldn’t sell heroin, because they couldn’t trust heroin addicts, and because they didn’t want their kids involved.
“Gambino put out the rule, ‘No heroin.’
“And John Gotti broke the rule, because there was so much money to be made. In order not to be killed, Gotti killed the boss of Staten Island, Paul Castellano, and then after Gotti put out a contract on him, Bully Gravano, his underboss, turned on John Gotti. His testimony put Gotti away for life. Bully Gravano was a big boxing fan. He used to take boxing lessons downtown Brooklyn.
“Bully was a real character, small but wide-built. He came into my school once when I was a teacher in Bensonhurst. He was like a cartoon. Some black kids were insulting his daughter. He got out of his white Cadillac. He said to the dean, ‘Any fucking niggers follow my daughter, and I will burn down the whole fucking school.’
“The dean came up to me and said, ‘Peter, who is that?’
“I said, ‘That’s Bully Gravano. He’s an up-and-coming gangster. You better be careful, because he means it.’
“Bully Gravano admitted to nineteen murders that the Feds excused just to get Bully to turn on Gotti. The government even let him keep all his money. He went out to Arizona, and because he’s such a schmuck, he got involved in drugs. The guy didn’t need the money. It made no sense. When it gets into your blood, I guess you can’t get out. They took his son down, and they took him down.
“My brother and I each got boxing scholarships to college. I went to college my first year at Wisconsin. My brother went to Albertson College, a small school in Caldwell, Idaho. My sophomore year I joined him. College boxing was very boring. It wasn’t competitive. As a pro you did body punching, infighting. College boxing discouraged you from hitting hard. As long as you hit him, it was fine. I was raised to be a pro, so you hit him and you wanted to make sure he went down. The coaches had a problem with that, but we had a lot of fun in college. We learned a lot, and it was important to cut our ties to Red Hook. We learned different values. They lived differently, thought differently, in Idaho. We were absorbing the basic Western culture.
“In the summer of 1959 I traveled to Madison, Wisconsin, trying to make the United States Pan American Games team. The Pan American Games are held every four years, one year before the Olympics. The teams that compete are from North and South America. My roommate was a sixteen-year-old by the name of Cassius Clay. He was a kid from Louisville, Kentucky, shooting off his mouth, rapping and rhyming away. The more he talked, the more I was sure he was full of shit. He was afraid of his own shadow, but the kid could fight. He would tell everybody he was a GOAT, which stood for ‘the greatest of all time.’
“‘The greatest of all time?’ I said. ‘You’re nuts.’
The Spanakos brothers, left, with 16-year-old Cassius Clay, right, at the 1960 National Golden Gloves championships.
Courtesy of Peter Spanakos
“Cassius said, ‘You’re a Greek GOAT, the Greek greatest of all time.’ We started to laugh, and we got to be friends.
“In training camp the other fighters, guys who were older, mature men from the armed services, figured out Cassius was a virgin, and one of them said, ‘Cassius, when you fuck a girl, do you fuck her in the first hole or the second hole?’ I was the unofficial captain of the team. Cassius looked at me, and I said, ‘I’m not getting into this.’
“‘The second one,’ he said.
“‘You’re not fucking her,’ they said. ‘You’re cornballing her.’
“Cassius was so arrogant and obnoxious, they would jump on him all the time. He alienated everyone so much a couple of the guys wanted to beat him up. He would say, ‘I’m going to knock you on your ass. I’m the world’s greatest.’ And he could go on all day long with this. The other guys were four, five years older, marines and air force men. I would tell them, ‘Leave the kid alone.’
“One time, Cassius’s coach back in Louisville, Captain Joe Martin of the police, the man who really started him off, sent him $5 by Western Union.
“He said, ‘Greek, what is this?’
“I said, ‘It’s a money order, and you have to endorse it.’
“‘What’s that mean?’
“‘You have to sign it on the back, and take it to the PX, and they’ll give you money.’
“He waved the check in front of the other boxers and said, ‘Oh man, I just got me $50,000.’
“As they all dived for the check, he put it in his pocket. They’re hondling and heckling, and they got him down to $5,000. The other boxers came to me. I said, ‘It’s his business. Leave him alone.’ He was always blowing up facts and figures.
“Bobby Foster, who later on became world light heavyweight champion, knocked out Cassius in the gym, which was unusual with the big gloves they were using.
“Cassius lost in his final match against Amos Johnson, a good marine fighter. The reason he lost was that in the afternoon we all went for dinner, and the NCAA served fish. I was the unofficial captain of the team, and I said, ‘I like steak, and it’s too early for us to eat.’ And I walked out, and six of the other fighters walked out with me.
“Cassius, a really poor kid out of Louisville, stayed, and he saw seven plates of fish in front of him, and he decided to eat all of it. And he ate seven desserts. That night he fought, and every time Johnson hit him in the belly, Cassius ran to the ropes and went to throw up. I felt so sorry for him. He had lost, and I hoped he learned a lesson that when your eyes are bigger than your stomach, you can’t indulge like that.
“In 1960 Cassius and I won a string of Golden Gloves titles. I didn’t make the Olympic team, but my brother and he did. They went to Rome, settled into their quarters, and Cassius calls up Nick and says, ‘Nick, you have to try this water fountain!’
“‘What are you talking about, Cassius?’ Nick said. ‘We’re in Rome in the Olympic dorms. What’s so great about the water fountain?’ Nick comes in, and he sees Cassius drinking out of the bidet.
“Nick said, ‘Cassius, that’s a bidet.’
“‘What’s a bidet?’
“Nick said, ‘Don’t worry. It won’t hurt you.’
“When the coaches and I looked around and asked ourselves which of these guys were going to be not only number one in the country, but world champion, no one ever picked Cassius. The only one who picked him was himself. ’Cause he did everything wrong, but for him it came out right.
“Clay was a good guy but he had a problem with dyslexia. I would help him write his letters home. I never thought he’d make it, but he did very well for himself. It goes to show you don’t always know what makes for success. Is it IQ? Nature? Nurture? He became one of the most famous people in the world.
“My brother and I were managed by Cus D’Amato, who also managed Floyd Patterson. Cus asked me, ‘Pete, call Cassius.’ He wanted to represent him. Cassius said to me, ‘Pete, I have a group here in Louisville. They gave me $10,000, and I’m going to stay with them. With Cus, I’m just going to wind up as Floyd Patterson’s sparring partner.’ I told Cus he wasn’t interested. I thought to myself, This kid is not dumb. He’s right. I was amazed he was so perceptive. He could read situations better than most people.
“Later on, after they took his title away for not wanting to serve in Vietnam, he joined with his muse, Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Muslims [Nation of Islam]. Elijah was about five feet tall, and he was screwing all the young girls, impregnating five or six of them, and that was when Malcolm X went to Mecca and found out what being a Muslim really meant. When he came back, he was a threat to Elijah Muhammad, who had these guys with purple hats and fruits of Islam on them, his personal bodyguards, all recruited from jails, and two of them killed Malcolm X right on the stage of Audubon Hall right near Columbia University. The Muslims went into Malcolm X’s home and kicked out his wife and kids. The guy who took over his house was Louis Farrakhan. Then he moved to Chicago. Farrakhan has a Rolls-Royce for every day of the week. Farrakhan took over the organization after Elijah Muhammad died.
“I called Cassius, now Muhammad Ali, up recently. His attention span is limited, but he still has his cognizance and his sense of humor. He said, ‘Pete, can I ask you a question?’ I said sure. He said, ‘Did you grow any?’
“In 1960 I was a senior in college. I had to win my final fight to go to the Olympics in Rome. I fought a boxer by the name of Charlie Brown, who I had already beaten. I had sebaceous cysts on my head, and during the fight Brown hit me on the head, and I started to bleed.
“I told the ref, ‘It’s okay,’ but he stopped it.
“He said, ‘Peter, I know you’re winning big, but I have to stop it.’
“I said, ‘Why?’
“He said, ‘If you get blood in your eyes, you go blind.’
“I said, ‘Wait a minute. Do you really believe that?’ A lot of guys in boxing did, but there is no such thing as going blind from blood in your eye.
“I said, ‘You just cost me a shot at the Olympic team.’
“Again, the stupidity of boxing.
“In ’64 I went again, and I lost in the trials. But then I was a senior in law school. Nick made the finals. He was the All-Army champion. But they didn’t pick him.”
Both Peter and Nick turned pro. They were represented by Cus D’Amato. Each lost his first fight. Each left boxing. Their education would allow them to make a living with their minds rather than their fists.