Baldwin
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Was Sonny Liston killed by the Mob? Did he throw both his fights against Muhammad Ali? And why was J Edgar Hoover so interested in him?
A new book investigates the theory that the former world heavyweight champion was controlled by the Mob, who paid him to throw crucial fights and then decided to get rid of him.
It suggests that Liston threw his return fight with Ali in 1965 because of the money riding on his defeat. And it examines why the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and the writer James Baldwin both wanted Liston to lose his earlier fights with Floyd Patterson.
The Devil and Sonny Liston by Nick Tosches suggests that much of what was known about Liston was a lie: from his age and place of birth to the way in which he ended up losing his title to the young pretender, the then Cassius Clay, in 1964.
When Liston died at his Las Vegas home in 1971, at the given age of 38, the sheriff’s men found nearby a quarter ounce of heroin, a .38 revolver and a stuffed rattlesnake. There were also traces of heroin in his system. Officially, he died of natural causes, “pulmonary congestion and oedema”, but rumours have persisted that the criminal underworld had disposed of him for their own reasons.
Tosches, the author of biographies of Dean Martin and the Mafia financier Michele Sindona, suggests that Liston’s connection with the Mob goes back to the very beginning of a career always clouded in mystery.
Liston’s place of birth was changed, according to his mother, to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, from Forrest City because “his manager told me to give him a big town”. Neither he nor his mother was ever apparently sure of the year he was born; his date of birth shifted from 1929 to 1932 during his career.
As the illiterate Liston progressed through the ranks, he faced not only problems from the white authorities – he was constantly pulled in by the police – but also from black organisations, who felt that his criminal record and moody demeanour presented the opposite image to that of Patterson, the popular and articulate champion. After Liston’s victory Baldwin headed for a bar “to mourn the very possible death of boxing”.
Hoover, the director of the FBI, took an obsessive interest in Liston and was furious when the then vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, met him at a charity event.
Liston was apparently none too impressed with Johnson and after a few minutes in his company whispered to an associate: “Let’s blow this bum off.”
Tosches quotes one gangster who was involved in betting on the first Ali- Liston fight: “This guy didn’t just take a dive, he did a one and a half off the high board. It was so bad. I figured we blew everything.”
In the return match Liston fell to what was known as the “phantom punch”. Tosches suggests that Liston showed “less acting ability than in the episode of Love American Style in which he later bizarrely appeared … The fight was not merely a fix – it was a flaunted fix.”
The book has reopened the debate about fixes in boxing. The boxing writer FX Toole, reviewing it in the Los Angeles Times, quotes an old friend of Liston: “I don’t know about that first Ali fight but I know about the second.”
Toole accepts that the Mob might have taken vengeance for a gambling debt – “a bartender friend of mine was strangled for that, his genitals sewn into his mouth” – but he ponders whether Liston might even have killed himself, “sick at heart for allowing himself to be debased and exploited”.
Tosches thinks that “he took too much dope and died”. And he suggests that, far from being the sombre heavy, Liston had a cutting and subtle sense of humour: he once asked his lawyer, should he ever be sentenced to the electric chair, to arrange that his manager George Katz got “10% of the juice”.