Canadian boxer, George Chuvalo, told
a different story about the competition
between the noi and organized crime.
He said that Glickman, a representative
of Tony Accardo, the mob boss of
Chicago, who had links to Frankie
Carbo, told Ali’s manager that if Ali
beat Terrell, he’d end up in a cement
box. The Fruit of Islam paid a visit to
Glickman and rendered a beating from
which he never recovered. He died in a
mental institution. Terrell “complained
about training expenses or some
baloney like that,” said Chuvalo.
“What happened was Bernie Glickman
was in the hospital at that time in
Chicago, beaten within an inch of his
life. Why was he beaten within an inch
of his life? He went from there to a
mental institution where he lost his life.
He never saw the light of day again.
He was questioned by the police but
never said who beat him up. Let me try
to figure this out for myself; he must
have gone to see Herbert Muhammad
(Ali’s manager) and threatened Herbert
Muhammad much the same way
that he threatened Irving Ungerman.
If Ali wins he ends up in Lake Michigan.
All Herbert Muhammad had to do was
snap his fingers, and all his Islamic
guys are right there and bing-bam-boom
that’s it. And that’s why I got the fight
with Ali.”
Former abc reporter, Martin Wyatt,
told me “Elijah Muhammad really
wasn’t all that hot on Ali’s fighting, but
he wanted to make certain that he
wouldn’t be ripped off and that’s why
he chose Herbert Muhammad to
manage Ali — to protect the boxers
from people like the interests that
Bernie Glickman represented, gangsters
and crooks, who surrounded the
boxing game.” His being tied to the
mob, specifically, Frankie Carbo, was
used to thwarting Liston’s boxing
career, yet some of his accusers were
also tied to the mob. Cus D’Amato
used Liston’s mob connections to deny
Liston and championship with Floyd
Patterson. Though Floyd Patterson’s
manager Cus D’Amato was squeaky
clean (his brother was cited by the
Kefauver Committee as having ties to
organized crime), the first fight between
Patterson and Ingemar Johansson
was promoted by an organization of
which mob figure “Fat Tony” Salerno
was a partner.
Frankie Carbo owned other boxers
as well. Not only boxers, he owned
sports writers and the managers of
boxers. He owned Rocky Marciano’s
manager Al Weill. Teddy Brenner, who
worked for Al Weill in the late 1940s
and subsequently became president of
Madison Square Garden Boxing, later
acknowledged, “Carbo had his fingers
on the throat of boxing. If he did not
own a certain fighter, he owned the
manager. Weill was a boxing politician
who held hands with the mob. When
Weill was Marciano’s manager, he was
controlled by Carbo.” Gangsters like
Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo ran
boxing until 1960. In an earlier time,
the notorious mobster, Legs Diamond,
was involved in fixing fights. Some give
credit to Herbert (named for Herbert
Hoover) Muhammad for ending mob
control of boxing, but others contend
that organized crime maintained partial
control by using a black promoter as
a front. Bob Arum identified him as
Don King to me in 1978.
“In 1959, when he was already well
known to the Manhattan District
Attorney as a ‘gambler, bookmaker and
policy operator,’ an investigation into
the Mafia’s involvement in promoting
boxing found that Mr. Salerno had
secretly helped finance a heavyweight
title fight at Yankee Stadium between
Ingemar Johansson and Floyd
Patterson. Mr. Salerno was not charged
in the case,” (nytimes, July 29, 1992).
Anthony Fat Tony Salerno died in
prison at the age of eighty.
It is obvious that Liston became
bogey manned by boxing promoters
and sports writers because he was not
pretty and telegenic like Ali, Sugar Ray
Leonard and the current box office
attraction, Alvarez. He was also big
and black.
14
Was Liston the only boxer, who
had connections to Frankie Carbo,
described as “the underworld czar
of boxing?”
As Nick Tosches, author of Night Train:
The Sonny Liston Story, reminds us,
“In those days, bad niggers were
not the darling middle-class iconic
commodities and consumers of white
ruled conglomerate culture. In those
days bad niggers were bad news.”
So why was Sonny Liston’s gang ties
singled out and those of others ignored?
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