A Nationwide Look At Boxing's Straw Bosses

With these extra little embellishments, the freeze-out worked according to plan. Balido was in the Kid's corner during the Graham fight, but then stepped aside and Lopez took charge. But now came a novelty: Gavilan proved to have a mind of his own. He developed a great interest in dancing and becoming a show-business impresario. When he fought Bobo Olson for the middleweight title in Chicago and lost, he went off to Havana in disgust and could not be moved by Lopez' demands that he return to the U.S. and defend his welterweight title. Instead he took his dance troupe, the Sepias, on a Caribbean tour. When Lopez reminded him during one of their many telephone calls that he had a contract to fill, Gavilan replied that he had entertainment contracts to fulfill too, and that these took precedence over his boxing commitments. Lopez was outraged. So, presumably, was Frank Carbo.

Finally, three months ago, Gavilan was lured back into the ring. The place was Philadelphia. The promoters were "The International Boxing Club, James D. Norris, president, and Herman Taylor." The challenger was Johnny Saxton, managed by Blinky Palermo. The result, a wild-eyed weeping Gavilan shouted afterward, was, "They stole my title!"—a belief which the press and most spectators shared. Jess Losada, a leading Cuban sports-writer, put it about as well as anyone when he wrote: "The gangster who represents Gavilan is named Frankie Carbo, and the hoodlum who represents Johnny Saxton is Blinky Palermo. The two got together before the fight and arranged to 'sacrifice' Gavilan, who was guilty of indiscipline, an unpardonable crime among racketeers...In Philadelphia they could win money, purge a rebel and at the same time get a new champion who could be 'sacrificed' when they saw fit."

BOSTON

SI's correspondent reports: "The local picture is confused because there are so many independents. It's like the Boston Tea Party all over again. That's why the syndicate can't get a real toe hold here—too many independents with good connections."

However, amidst the disorder, several men stand out as leaders of boxing in this genteel community, and it is interesting to look at their credentials. The most prominent promoter is Sam Silverman, a former bookmaker. After a couple of arrests in this endeavor, he gave up and went into boxing. His partner, Rip Valenti, has a record dating back to 1918 when he was convicted of assault and reaching to 1945 when he served a term for misuse of federal tax stamps on liquor bottles. Between times he was in court on 13 other charges, ranging from gaming in a public park to assault and battery and receiving stolen goods. He has many good friends in the underworld, among them Frank Carbo. Although it is against the law in Massachusetts, as in most other states, for a promoter or matchmaker to manage fighters, both Silverman and Valenti "cut in" in the classic way. Valenti has pieces of Tommy Collins and the excellent welterweight, Tony DeMarco.

Another, although less important, leader of the sport is Johnny Buckley, who in 1919 was convicted of receiving stolen goods and sentenced to four to four and one half years in prison and who in 1953 was fined $1,500 for allowing his business property to be used for bookmaking operations. Ex-convict Buckley went on to become manager of a heavyweight champion, Jack Sharkey, and many other fighters and is now the prosperous owner of a gym and the manager of a small boxing club. He also owns the building in which the Silverman-Valenti outfit has its office, and the proverbial friction between landlord and tenant seems in this case to have reached an apogee. A recent boxing card presented by his Sharkey A. A. suffered seven substitutions, a fiasco he laid—in testimony before the state boxing commission—to the machinations of the rival Callahan A. C. owned by Silverman and Valenti.

Silverman has had his share of troubles too. In recent years his apartment has been bombed, a shot was fired into his suburban home and almost hit his wife, he has been beaten by thugs twice (once with brass knuckles), threatened often; and once he slugged it out at ringside in the Boston Garden with Landlord Johnny Buckley.

The name most familiarly associated with Boston boxing is that of Ray Arcel, who staged many of his televised Saturday Night Fights from there. Arcel, who moved wherever his promotions took him, is not properly a Bostonian; however, he came close to being killed there in an obscure contretemps symptomatic of the general disease that has afflicted boxing. One afternoon in Sept. 1953, before one of the Saturday Night telecasts, he was standing on the sidewalk chatting with Willie Ketchum, manager of Gerald Dreyer, who fought in that evening's feature bout. Someone came up behind him and slugged him with a lead pipe.

Ketchum, a "front manager" for Frank Carbo, was facing the assailant when he beat Arcel. But Ketchum said later that he did not see the man. Arcel was taken to a hospital, where—with a bodyguard by his bedside-he recovered, except for an oddly specific damage to his powers of imagination. He had no idea, he said, who could have done the deed.

It has been noted, however, that in the months following, Arcel paid $13,000 for advertising in the magazine (since defunct) of the International Boxing Guild, an outfit with which he supposedly had been on bad terms. And that he seemed much more cooperative with the guild in all ways. As we saw in the first of these installments, the guild, the IBC and the Carbo group have common interests. Arcel has not been bothered since.