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

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In the age before rock and roll, before TV took a grip, before the Pill, as the horns swung from big band to boogie to blues, New Yorkers loved a simpler version of the boxing universe: they loved Toots, the Garden, great fights, as well as the smell and thrill of Manhattan's throbbing ribbons of light. For a while, there was no place else to be for those in search of sanitized depravity.

It was in these clubs and bars and coffee shops that men in their thin-brimmed porkpie fedoras, tugging on their Romeo y Julietas, stinking of Pino Silvestre cologne, talked quietly with men whose flat noses betrayed their calling. These were not innocent men. They were players. They made boxing what it is, for better or worse.

The Mob had been deep in the heart of boxing since the early days of Prohibition. The handing over of power from one set of thugs to the next had not been seamless, but it had been unstoppable. By the late forties, the International Boxing Club, run at one remove by Frankie Carbo, had slipped without ceremony on to the throne. Usually one step ahead of the law, they controlled boxing late into the fifties, by which time complacency would weaken their grip on the business and on reality. When Kefauver went after the Mob one last time in 1960, he came closer to delivering a knockout blow than he and other agencies had in previous efforts. This was partly through the belated confession of LaMotta, but mainly was down to the staggering hubris of the bloated and arrogant warlords who reckoned they could continue to rule the lives of thousands of people in the fight game for as long as they chose to. Even as they sneered at Kefauver's righteousness, the wise guys were compelled to acknowledge Joe Louis's own ring maxim: you can run, but you can't hide.