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

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In 2005, Margolick took Jacobs's niece, Roz Rosee, to the area—and she couldn't be sure where the old rascal's office had been, even though she had once worked nearby in the Brill Building. In fact, it stood on a site now occupied by a garage on the north side of the block. “He was very smart,” Rosee, then eighty-nine, said of her Uncle Mike, “but he was not what you would call a gentleman.” You would hope not.

The gangsters who mingled on Jacobs Beach did not go unchallenged in their dealings. What happened there and across the wider landscape of the sport in the fifties was described and dissected by two U.S. Senate inquiries, at the start and finish of the decade. These were instigated by an old-fashioned Democrat lawyer from Chattanooga called Estes Kefauver. When Americans turned on the few TV sets they had in 1950, they saw the upright, earnest senator, a decent man who yearned to be president, trying through the rigor of the law to rid the country of the mysterious men who organized crime, as well as the fight racket. The first of Kefauver's televised investigations—as gauche as the good senator himself—met with qualified success. In the process, however, he became America's original and most unlikely reality-TV star. Every night America saw, for the first time, flesh-and-blood images of the bad men Kefauver was trying to put away.