Читать книгу Jacobs Beach. The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing онлайн

11 страница из 104

He would know.

LaMotta's time and place stretched from prewar New York and other fight towns on through the fifties, a decade in which the Mafia—historically voracious movers of meat in the fight game—wanted to control him and every other worthwhile pug of the era. They carried out most of their shenanigans in the Garden, a place that housed as much deception as it did heroism. That particular establishment is the most famous of the four to have worn the name on various sites in Manhattan, never more than a cheroot spit from Broadway, since 1879. For 17 of his 106 fights, it is where LaMotta established his reputation, on good nights and nights when he didn't look as good as he might have done.

Other men, characters who never threw anything more threatening than a glance, were the real rulers of the ring, not the likes of LaMotta. Professional boxing would not survive without either the compliant fighter or the scheming moneymen, and this story is full of them: the old Garden promoter Mike Jacobs; Mafia servants Frank Costello, Frankie Carbo, and Blinky Palermo; along with their more presentable business associates, Jim Norris and Truman Gibson; plus a large cast of faceless cronies. These were the men who ran boxing for a generation, the black-and-white days either side of the last world war, mainly in the atmospheric old auditorium situated on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, in the middle of the most exciting city in the world.