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  Sugar wasn’t there for even a year, but he was there long enough to encounter Robert Villemain, whom he’d decisioned in June in Philadelphia. The promoter of Sugar’s European tour, Charlie Michaelis, took advantage of the fortuitous meeting and quickly arranged a December 22 bout in Paris between them. Sugar shook hands in agreement. With Michaelis, he would never need a contract: His word was his bond, and he never violated his trust with Sugar. But before a return engagement with Villemain could be realized, there were two other contracts he had to fulfill on the Continent. In Brussels, he stopped Luc Van Dam in the fourth round; a week later in Geneva, it took a little longer to earn a ten-round decision over Jean Walzack. These would be minor events compared with the buildup for the showdown with Villemain.

  On the day before the fight, the owner of a clothing shop came to Michaelis requesting half the tickets. He did not blink when told it would cost him fifteen million francs to buy up the nine thousand tickets, which he planned to make available at his store as part of a publicity campaign. The idea backfired, however, when the next day thousands of people descended on his shop and practically ripped it apart in their rush to buy the tickets. To salvage his shop, the owner called Michaelis and pleaded with him to take the tickets back. Michaelis obliged, and the man and his shop were spared any further damage.

  To Michaelis’s delight, the Palais des Sports was completely sold out. It was a record sales event, grossing thirty million francs, or eighty-five thousand dollars. When Villemain came in over the weight limit at 164 pounds, it disqualified the fight from being a championship bout. Thus, Sugar’s title was not at stake.

  In their previous match, Villemain had managed to stay on his feet for fifteen rounds; he didn’t make it nearly that far the second time, and was sprawled across the ropes taking a pounding when the referee mercifully stopped Sugar’s onslaught in the ninth round. Once more Sugar heard his name attached to a variety of pleasant-sounding French adjectives: magnifique; brillant; l’artiste ultime! The adoration of the French was still ringing in Sugar’s ears when he departed for Frankfurt, Germany, to meet Hans Stretz, who lived up to his name as he lay stretched across the canvas in the fifth round. It was Christmas night, and poor Stretz had received a most unwanted present.

  As Sugar related in his autobiography, he had earned fifty thousand dollars within a month, and given the bills run up by his retinue, he needed every penny and more. Edna Mae alone had done considerable damage during her forays at the designer ateliers, including Schiaparelli’s and Jacques Fath’s. The spree embellished her already fabulous collection of fur coats, which included a full-length ranch mink coat, a Russian lynx coat, a Persian lamb broadtail coat, a platinum mink jacket, mink stole, and a silver-blue mink stole.

  Before their departure from France, Sugar learned that he had been granted a title match against Jake LaMotta, who had won the middleweight belt from Marcel Cerdan, the Frenchman who died in a plane crash before he could have a return match with LaMotta. The other good news was that the Boxing Writers’ Association (BWA) had voted him the Edward J. Neil Memorial Plaque, named for the former Associated Press boxing writer who was killed in 1937 while serving as a war correspondent in Spain. The plaque was awarded to the boxer who had done the most for the sport that year.

  Hearing these announcements as the entourage boarded the Liberté for home only added to Sugar’s celebrity and made the voyage all the more pleasurable. Sugar had conquered France, Belgium, and Germany with the same panache that had made him such a star attraction in Harlem.

  His exultation was clouded by only one thing: Reporters kept baiting him to talk about any racism he might have encountered in Europe. They wanted him to refute the charges made by Paul Robeson regarding rampant discrimination in America. “Mr. Robeson speaks for himself and not for Americans,” Sugar commented to the press, doing his best to dodge an issue that had ensnared Jackie Robinson, and which had compelled the baseball star to denounce Robeson before the House Un-American Activities Committee the year before. Sugar refused to accept the bait, adroitly avoiding the sucker punch, and thus any controversy.6

  CHAPTER 14

  THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE

  Another person licking his chops for Sugar to return was Jake LaMotta. Now that the way was cleared for them to face each other for the sixth time, the Bull was practically pawing the turf, eager to charge across the ring and punish the man who had beaten him four out of five times.

  Sugar was looking forward to the match as well, but there were a few things he had to do before the February 14 date. First of all, there was the BWA award ceremony to attend. The event took place at the Waldorf-Astoria, and Sugar was resplendent in his tuxedo. Of all the accolades and praise he received that evening, one thing stuck out in his memory. It was a telegram from LaMotta, reminding him of their bout. Sugar smiled when he heard the message read by the master of ceremonies. He was stunned that the Bull knew about the event and knew exactly where to send the telegram. Later, while training at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, a change from his regular site, he realized that the telegram was less LaMotta’s doing than his manager’s or someone close to him, since the gesture was not characteristic of the Bull.

  That person, he assumed, was Frankie Carbo, who was not only close to the Bull, but also very close to the mob and to the International Boxing Club, a major organizer of fights. The suspicion was verified a few days later when Carbo, using an alias, phoned Sugar at camp and requested a meeting. Because of his experience with Blinky Palermo, the mobster who had tried previously to entice him into a fix, Sugar knew what Carbo was up to. When they met near the camp’s entrance, Carbo made Sugar an offer: Sugar was to win the February 14 match with LaMotta, then lose the return bout; the third and final fight would be left for the best man to win. “You got the wrong guy,” Sugar told him, rejecting the fix. Unlike LaMotta, who had thrown a fight for the mob in order to get a title shot, Sugar was not about to capitulate, no matter how much money was involved, no matter how dangerous it was to refuse these notorious underworld figures. Sure, he’d carried a few fighters and pulled his punches on occasion, but he had never taken a dive or cut a deal by betting on his opponent. If the mob hadn’t gotten to him when he was younger, it was too late now, as he reached the apex of his career.

  “Throughout the fifties, to read Dan Parker in the New York Daily Mirror or Jimmy Cannon in the Post was to scan a bill of particulars against a dirty fight game run entirely by mobsters—mainly Italian and Jewish mobsters,” David Remnick observed. “After the war there was not a single champion who was not, in some way, touched by the Mafia, if not wholly owned and operated by it. [Senator Estes] Kefauver (with substantial help from his chief counsel, John Gurnee Bonomi) intended to prove the case and instigate a reform of boxing.”1

  Sugar was neither squeaky clean nor a Goody Two-shoes, but if there was any evidence of his being in bed with the mob, it escaped detection by a gaggle of nosy sleuths and inquiring reporters. Moreover, if the reporters of the day didn’t have the wherewithal to ferret out the dirt, the Senate investigating committee did, and it could sling the mud too.

  With varying degrees of sympathy for Sugar, Dan Parker, Jimmy Cannon, Hype Igoe, Arthur Daley, James Dawson, Lester Bromberg, Bill Gallo, and Bert Sugar infused sports journalism with a dash of analysis and literary flair, though, in general, it was a far cry from the singing, zinging prose of the writers of the previous generation—Heywood Hale Broun, Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice, Paul Gallico, and Ring Lardner.

  Bromberg was a particular favorite of the Robinsons, and he made sure they received all his clippings and photos from the New York World Telegram and Sun. Perhaps Bromberg was eternally bothered by his testimony in 1947 before the New York State Athletic Commission, in which he divulged that Sugar had in fact been approached by the mob and offered a deal not to fight Marty Servo. For not disclosing the information, Sugar was fined five hundred dollars and suspended for thirty days.2 Bromberg died in 1989, a f
ew months before Sugar.

  Reaching the top of his craft had not been easy, and Sugar had used all sorts of tactics and strategies to keep his opponents off balance. Sometimes he psyched them out—as he may have with LaMotta at a luncheon a few days before their fight. Sitting near the Bull, Sugar asked the waiter if he could have a large glass of beef blood. Both the waiter and LaMotta were puzzled by the request. Sugar stressed his order, clarifying that he did not want gravy, but actual beef blood, extracted “before the meat is cooked,” he said. The waiter obeyed and returned with a glassful of blood. Sugar downed it in one long gulp. Wiping his mouth, he explained to a bug-eyed LaMotta that he had been drinking it for years on the advice of Chappie Blackburn, Louis’s trainer. It was the equivalent of a stare-down at the weigh-in. He told the Bull that it was his secret weapon and gave him the strength to overcome bigger and stronger opponents. LaMotta told Sugar that he was out of his mind.

  Sugar would have likewise questioned LaMotta’s sanity when he drank two or three shots of brandy before their fight. LaMotta said he did this to give him a sense of false courage to hide his real fear. He knew he wasn’t in good enough shape to fight Sugar. One fighter was half drunk on brandy and the other was juiced up on beef blood. If the bettors had known, there would be no guessing where their money would have gone.

  At the sound of the bell, the din in Chicago Stadium increased, and the Bull, as was his style, leaped from his stool and rushed headlong across the ring, his gloves locked to his side like padded horns. Sugar was faster than ever in sidestepping the charges, delivering stinging jabs and swift counterpunches to the Bull’s awkward flails. And this would be the pattern for the first several rounds, with Sugar slicing and dicing LaMotta with such rapid, laserlike precision that the Bull became more frustrated with each blow.

  There was very little toe-to-toe punching during the first seven rounds, though there was plenty of superb boxing by Sugar “the matador” and headfirst assaults by the Bull. However, over the next three rounds Sugar battered LaMotta unmercifully. But the Bull was as stubborn as ever, refusing to fall. When it was over, LaMotta lay sprawled across the top ropes, his face bloodier than a slab of beef. He had only the strength to mutter, “You couldn’t put me down, you black bastard. You can’t put me on the deck.” These were the words Sugar heard, but in his autobiography LaMotta remembered the slaughter this way: “Robinson had me but I wouldn’t give the son of a bitch the satisfaction of knocking me down, so I told the referee I’d murder him if he tried to stop the fight. I got my arm wedged around one of the ring ropes and stayed there, defying Robinson to knock me down. He couldn’t, but I got about as bad a beating as I’ve ever had.”3

  The referee, Frankie Sikora, stepped in and halted the match in the thirteenth round. Under Illinois regulations, Sugar was awarded a technical knockout, and indeed, the Bull was virtually out on his feet. Because of the beating LaMotta took on this day, February 14, 1951, the fight was called “the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” recalling the mob-related execution on the same day in 1929 in the Windy City. In LaMotta’s own words: “Well, Robinson didn’t have a machine gun and there was only one victim, but it was still a massacre…. If the fight had gone another twenty seconds, Sugar would have collapsed from hitting me so much.”

  But it was the self-deprecating LaMotta who was on the verge of collapsing, causing the doctor to order an oxygen tank to relieve the gasping fighter. “LaMotta collapsed in my arms,” said Al Silvani, who worked in the Bull’s corner that night.4 For a half hour he was on the tank, and was not allowed to leave the stadium for two hours. All agreed: LaMotta had been the recipient of a thorough shellacking. “Sugar and I fought so much that I should have died from sugar diabetes,” LaMotta quipped during an interview after the fight. This was their last bout, and it was the worst one for the Bull, who had taken a severe beating and lost his title. But then, he should have known how much of a challenge it was going to be to whip somebody revved up on beef blood.

  Boxing authority Dr. Ferdie Pacheco ranked the thirteenth round of this fight as one of the greatest rounds in fight history.

  CHAPTER 15

  IT’S TURPIN TIME

  By spring, Sugar was once more in Europe, and once again back with Edna Mae. On this trip he had an even larger troupe than before. Sugar, the middleweight champ (he had to relinquish his welterweight title because it became too difficult to make the weight), was shopping for fresh adversaries. His favorite promoter, Charlie Michaelis, had scheduled fights that would take him across the Continent, including a bout in England.

  While the Toast of Harlem was in Paris, the Toast of Paris was in Harlem. May 20, 1951, was Josephine Baker Day in Harlem, and the chanteuse/dancer rode at the front of a long motorcade throwing kisses to a crowd of cheering fans—estimated at one hundred thousand—who lined the streets, braving a gloomy wet Sunday. The police convoy had a hard time keeping a gaggle of admiring kids from leaping onto her car. When the caravan completed its run, the festivities continued at the Golden Gate Ballroom, where diplomat Ralph Bunche, a recent Nobel Prize winner, presented Baker with an award for her work against prejudice in the theater. The daylong celebration concluded that evening at the newly reopened Savoy Ballroom. Throughout the day, former dancer and later to be the first New York state assemblywoman, Bessie Buchanan—who was also the wife of the owner of the club, Charlie Buchanan—was Baker’s personal escort (and rumored to be her ex-lover), making sure everything went off as planned.1

  Comedian Timmie Rogers, songstress Thelma Carpenter, Duke Ellington, Billy Daniels, Juanita Hall, and the Whites—Walter and Poppy—were among the famous entertainers and political leaders who dropped what they were doing to come and honor “La Baker.” The eighteen-hour-long celebration was sponsored by the New York branch of the NAACP, and Baker went nonstop “from the moment she left the Statler Hotel in Boston until she went to bed in her suite at the Theresa that night.”2

  On May 21, Sugar arrived in Paris to fight Kid Marcel, the French welterweight champion, who had put on extra weight for the match. Sugar was welcomed by a massive turnout. The French cheered him lustily, many of them thanking him for beating LaMotta, who had beaten their champion, Marcel Cerdan. Later, with the Kid Marcel fight behind him, Sugar caused quite a stir at a reception when he kissed the wife of the president of France, twice on each cheek. At first, the action stunned the upper crust who’d witnessed Sugar’s goodwill gesture. But they, like the first lady, Madame Vincent Auriol, quickly warmed to the occasion, and applauded, particularly after the champion placed a check for ten thousand dollars from the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund for Cancer Research in her hands. Some of the dignitaries at the reception, which was held in a gilded salon near the Arc de Triomphe, were a bit put off because of Sugar’s late arrival. “I got lost in traffic,” Sugar apologized after stepping from his pink Cadillac wearing, according to him, a pink tie, a neat gray suit, and a gleaming white handkerchief in his breast pocket. Michaelis had imposed only one condition on Sugar’s sojourn—that he bring his Cadillac this time. After Sugar’s speech, a crush of grave old men and women with diamonds glittering from every part of their personages pushed to meet him.3

  A few weeks after Sugar’s glorious reception and his knockout of Marcel in the fifth round, things took a turn for the worse: He was asked to leave Paris’s luxurious St. Cloud Country Club at the request of members. Sugar felt the request to bar him from the links and a few rounds of golf had been made by American members of the exclusive club. “I was told we could only play in the mornings, when not many golfers are on the course,” Sugar told the press. “Finally, they asked both myself and two friends to leave.” The club’s manager said the exclusion was a result of Sugar’s violation of a rule that permitted nonmembers to play only three times every six months, and only on a member’s invitation. Apparently some members became disgruntled when they noticed that Sugar was bringing along his friends with him. If the specter of racism entered Sugar’s mind, he nev
er expressed it.4

  Extremely hurt by his treatment at the club, Sugar packed his golf clubs and headed for Italy for a scheduled warm-up bout with Cyrille Delannoit in Turin, Italy, before meeting Randy Turpin in England for the biggest match of the tour. Sugar easily bested Delannoit, knocking him to the canvas to stay in the third round. This provided some solace for Sugar and his wife, who two days earlier had reported to the police that her watch and diamond ring, together valued at seventy-five hundred dollars, were missing. They could not say if the items had been stolen or lost.5 A greater loss was awaiting them in London.

  In Randy Turpin, the black Englishman and former bricklayer, Sugar found more than he bargained for. He was hoping it wouldn’t be a repeat of the fiasco that had occurred in Germany two weeks earlier against Gerhard Hecht, when he had been disqualified for landing a blow to Hecht’s kidney area. (Later the commission reversed its ruling and called it a “no-decision.”) The West Berlin fans were so upset by the outcome that they began hurling bottles into the ring, one narrowly missing Sugar’s head. Sugar and his crew had to scramble for their lives.