Jacobs Beach by Kevin Mitchell

Author:Kevin Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

11

SONNY AND THE MOB

Joe Miceli was just making a living, doing the best he could. But Estes Kefauver had little time for fighters’ hard-luck stories. He viewed the professional wing of the sport as an aberration, a vulgar outgrowth of man’s baser instincts. But he was determined to clean it up, just the same.

The catalogue of suspect fights, rumours of arm-twisting hoodlums forcing managers to sell pieces of their fighters to silent partners, dwindling crowds and a general sense of disenchantment spreading through the fight game, even in its hardcore constituency, convinced the senator the fight game was rotten right through, like a good apple that had been left in the sun too long.

But his first investigation into organised crime had proved largely inconclusive, at least legally. Carbo, Costello and all the other suspects, advised by the smartest of lawyers, simply played dumb at his inquiries. When he took his investigation – called, in full, the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce – on the road, bad men did not exactly tremble in their spats. They hit fourteen cities and took evidence, if it can be called that, from about six hundred witnesses, many of whom blanked the senator with practised insolence.

The roll-call of criminals Kefauver quizzed was impressive enough. As well as Costello and Carbo, he asked tough questions of the gambling boss Willie Moretti, who was Costello’s cousin and a member of the Genovese family, and Joe Adonis, who was born Giuseppe Antonio Doto and who deserves credit, at least, for choosing a striking new name. Joe was a petty thief, pimp, rapist and an associate of Lucky Luciano. After his walk-on part in the hearings, he was eventually deported back to Naples.

Thwarted by the Mob, Kefauver decided on an easier assignment: running for president. He put himself forward as a candidate in 1952 and, to the amusement of many, he hit the hustings wearing a coonskin hat, in homage to his Tennessee roots. The Keef won twelve of fifteen primaries, including a shock result over Harry S. Truman, but lost out to Adlai Stevenson on the convention floor. Stevenson pipped him for the nomination again in 1956, but he ran as his vice-presidential candidate – to no avail, as it happens.

So, his ambitions to lead his country lay in ruins. A lesser individual might have walked away from politics altogether and resumed a lucrative calling at the Bar. But zeal still burned in Kefauver’s heart. He was still on the Mob’s case. One way or another, he reckoned, he would get the bastards.

For the International Boxing Club, meanwhile, business was not so much as usual as weird. Their monopoly of the business was so great it was embarrassing, even for them. Between 1949, when they captured Joe Louis and his heavyweight title, and 1955, when the investigators came calling again, the IBC staged forty-seven of the fifty-one world title fights held in the United States, all of them in their own stadiums.

Norris and his

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