Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (11 page)

The comprehensiveness with which the cops dismantled the debauchery at Gun Post was that of someone who empties half a can of Raid on a roach and then steps on it to kill it again. The cops swept the place clean of cash. Then they handcuffed a scorekeeper to the table into which he scratched the names and debts of all in attendance, unscrewed the table from the floor, and took both down to the station as evidence. It was the last night of action Gun Post ever saw—and the beginning of an era’s demise.

Action bowling took its final breath at a place called Central Lanes in Yonkers, just north of New York City. Central Lanes was a long, low building that housed fifty-two lanes straight across and an enclosed coffee shop with fifteen stools and windows overlooking the parking lot. A frenetic scene buzzed in the air of that coffee shop when the action got thick late at night. Hustlers, con artists, and gamblers were brought together by matchmakers who would arrange matches as bets came in from all directions through shouts and fists full of cash. The bowlers drew their lane numbers from a pillbox full of numbers someone shook, and the match would be held on the lanes whose numbers were drawn. To adrenaline-hungry kids with dollar signs for pupils, this truly was a paradise straight out of their wildest dreams.

Gamblers trying to find the place for the first time could count on any number of signs that they had found it. They might spot the legion of kids pitching dice for cash in the parking lot. They might look through the windows enclosing the pool room at one end of the building and see the high-stakes games of eight ball raging inside. They might notice a parking lot bloated with the cars of fellow gamblers in the middle of the night and have a hard time finding a spot themselves. And if some nor’easter happened to be dumping another blast of snow over Yonkers in winter, that, too, failed to deter the circus. It was not uncommon to see cars twirling down the icy streets toward the bowling alley. Gamblers would sooner leave their cars lodged in snow piles in the middle of the street than miss a night of action at Central. A snowplow could gnash their cars into little foil balls for all they cared; Central was a place where those who placed their bets wisely could leave with enough cash to buy new ones anyway.

It also was a place where bowlers who placed bets with money borrowed from shylocks sometimes needed to be
reminded of the penalties. No one at Central Lanes received that reminder more clearly than a kid known as “Checkbook” Al. Al was a skinny kid with glasses in his early twenties whose nickname said it all. At Central Lanes, he was known as much for writing bad checks as he was known for his bowling. He nearly became known for dying, too, after he borrowed money off a feared, Jewish shylock known as Maxie. Maxie was a stocky guy with fat fingers who spoke with a voice that sounded like it came from somewhere in the bottom of his gut, and he always sat the wrong way in a chair with his chest leaning up against the back of it. At any given moment kids could hear him grunting offers from behind the lanes at bowlers whose luck was running thin.

“Joe, how much you need,” he’d say in his husky growl and Brooklyn accent. “Mikey, how much you need?”

Bowlers would walk up to Maxie and say “Gimme five,” and Maxie would snap out five crisp $100 bills. His rate was ten percent per week, and everything went fine—as long as you paid him back. The smart ones paid him back right away. One night, Schlegel borrowed about $1,200, then won that much and more in a match and paid back Maxie on the spot. That was how you handled shylocks like Maxie if you knew what was good for you.

Maxie always wore a rumpled suit. He had a balding bull’s head of gray hair and always kept a lit Camel pinned between two tobacco-stained fingertips. Many presumed him to be a gangster, but he always carried himself with an avuncular manner that disarmed those who otherwise might have feared him. The shylocks knew as much about catching flies with honey as the hustlers did. You didn’t get customers by scaring them anymore than you caught fish by letting on how good you were. Even when some customers needed to be scared because they hadn’t paid up, Maxie issued his threats
gently enough that it was almost possible to believe he was kidding.

“You don’t want me to have to hurt you,” Maxie would tell them.

But Maxie wasn’t kidding, especially not the day he sent one of his goons to find Checkbook Al. When the goon found him inside the coffee house at Central Lanes, everyone knew from that moment forward that Maxie never was kidding. Checkbook Al rushed in one day as kids hunched over their hamburgers at the counter. He pestered each of them for money.

“Hey, ya got forty bucks?” he asked.

“Get the fuck away from me,” one kid told him. “You owe
me
money!”

Then the goon arrived. He was a ruddy-faced moose of a man with broad shoulders who looked like he played left tackle for the New York Giants. The strange thing was that as tough as the guy looked, he nonetheless was wearing a bright pink, fuzzy, pullover sweater. No one quite understood what to make of that bizarre detail.

The goon walked up to Checkbook Al.

“OK, your time is up,” he said. “You got Max’s money?”

“No, I don’t have it,” Checkbook told him.

The goon grabbed Checkbook with one arm and hoisted him up in the air. The two paused nose-to-nose for a second, Checkbook dangling limply in the air. Then the goon tossed him like a football. It was like he had shot the kid out of a cannon. Checkbook went blasting through the windows of the coffee shop and out into the parking lot in a hail of shattered glass. That was all it took to separate the rest of the crowd from their hamburgers. Everybody promptly got up and left. No one looked back. They did not even look left or right. The point was to get the hell out of there. No one bothered to see if Checkbook was alive or dead, and nobody ever talked about it.
That was how it went when you took money off a shylock. You weren’t just borrowing money; you were also borrowing time. That night Maxie returned to his backwards chair with his suit and his Camel, barking offers to those in need as though nothing had happened.

Many bowlers sent their opponents off to borrow from Maxie more often than they would have liked. Few bowlers put people in that uncomfortable position more frequently than Schlegel. By the time Central Lanes became established as action bowling’s new gathering place, Schlegel exhibited the raging brazenness of a gambler who knew he couldn’t lose. He sported a T-shirt that said “World’s Greatest Bowler,” pounding his chest like a gorilla and challenging all comers. Gobs of Vaseline from his duck’s ass hairdo melted down his face on muggy summer nights. The proprietor of Central Lanes kept a giant trophy on display beside the check-in counter in front of lanes 17 and 18; it was reserved for the first bowler to shoot a 300 game at Central Lanes. Schlegel claimed the trophy in a match against a brilliant, seventeen-year-old talent named Dewey Blair.

Blair was the phantom of the action bowling scene. Everybody had heard about this high school kid nobody could beat, but no one ever saw him. Blair’s home house was a place called Dutchess County Lanes, about 50 miles north of New York City. There, he took on, and nearly always beat, all challengers. He made a name for himself when he stepped out of the cushy confines of Dutchess County Lanes and went down to nearby Skytop Lanes in Hartsdale, a place made famous by the legendary Ralph Engan. There, he got on the microphone at the front desk one night and challenged everybody in the house. He bowled Engan’s protégé, a bowler named Hank Burroughs, and dominated him. News of his destruction of Burroughs quickly spread to the city.

The word on the street was that Blair had a backer named Dobber, another beefy, strapping shylock like Maxie, who funded Blair against all challengers. If he wasn’t putting his money down on Blair, he was betting it on a hand of cards or at the horse track—any place where he thought he could leave with more money than he had when he arrived. But the difference between Dobber and Maxie was that Dobber was known to be as cunning with his fists as he was with his money. The streets taught him enough about how to throw a right hand that he became a fighter while honing his craft as a professional gambler. Dobber never sent in any goons; his fists were the goons. And if his fists were not fearsome enough, many believed Dobber packed heat wherever he went. Blair knew that was not true, but he also knew it was best to let those fears fester in his opponents.

Sometimes Dobber took Blair on the short drive from Dutchess County into the five boroughs to see if he could catch some fish with his seventeen-year-old bait. Dobber marched Blair into bowling alleys in the Bronx or Manhattan and asked the locals which of them had the balls to bowl his boy. This was no hustler like Russo or Schlegel; this was a kid who didn’t mind letting others learn the hard way that he was better than they were. Blair almost never lost. His accuracy on the lanes was that of a kid that would have tried to fit a spitball through the eye of a needle from a few feet away. The kid never missed his target.

Then Dobber started taking him down to Central. Schlegel and Limongello could not believe their eyes the moment Blair walked in. His presence whipped the place into a buzz about the arrival of the great but largely unseen prodigy, and Schlegel had to have first dibs. If this truly was the best bowler anyone had seen, he would have to beat Schlegel to prove it. Schlegel battled him for several games, one of which culminated in his 300 over Blair’s 268. Scores of that magnitude were almost
unheard at the time. A bowler who averaged a mere 195 back then was a bowler who rarely lost.

All the “smart money” in the house was on Blair. His reputation was enough to convince the gamblers and shylocks where their money ought to go. But when Blair stepped up to bowl Lemon man-to-man after bowling Schlegel, the contest yielded perhaps the most anticlimactic match in action bowling history. Lemon won the first game 269-268. Then he started the next game with six consecutive strikes. So did Blair. Lemon got up and blasted yet another strike. Blair returned the favor, tossing his seventh straight strike of the game. And that was when the match ended just as soon as it began. Blair’s thumb ripped open on that seventh strike, and he had to withdraw from the match. Any number of factors could cause a bowler’s thumb to rip open. Sometimes the ball was drilled poorly—maybe the span was too long, or the finger holes were measured improperly. Sometimes the way a bowler released the ball caused the thumb to grate against the thumbhole at the release. Sometimes the skin on a human thumb can only take so many games before it gives way. Whatever the reason, Blair’s thumb ripped open that night, and Lemon was furious. There was too much money on the line here, too much of an opportunity to claim the kind of street cred that came with beating a kid who commanded so much respect that every gambler in the joint rushed to put their money down on him.

Lemon never saw the kid again. Blair enlisted in the Navy shortly after graduating high school, leaving a legend in his wake.

While Lemon had Blair to contend with, Schlegel’s arch rival in those days was a kid whom he described as the Joe Frazier to his Muhammad Ali. He was also one of the most corrupt shysters to roam Gun Post. His name was Kenny Barber, age 20, better known as “The Rego Park Flash” after his hometown
of Rego Park in Queens. Barber’s game already had earned him enough of a reputation that writer Jim Kaull produced a feature story about him titled “The Restless One” for the April, 1963 issue of a premier bowling industry magazine called
Bowlers Journal
. Barber’s name appeared on the cover. Kaull described Barber as “hanging around street corners, racing around in hot rods and having a good time at society’s expense. He never got arrested but he admits that it wasn’t because he shouldn’t have been.” Barber started bowling at age 15. He dropped out of high school by age 16 intent on pursuing a life on the lanes as ardently as he pursued life on the street corner. His father, a great bowler in his own right as well as a traveling musician who played bass and tuba with the likes of Louie Armstrong, Arthur Godfrey, and Tommy Dorsey, had hoped music might be his son’s ticket out of the streets and into a life. Barber told Kaull he liked music, too, but “couldn’t stick with it.”

He spoke with a thick Queens accent and a peculiar lisp that made him sound like he had a mouth half-filled with water. One year, Barber bowled a three-game series of 666 at the American Bowling Congress tournament, one of the most prestigious events in which a bowler could compete. When he got back home, his friends were fond of asking him to tell them what his series was. Barber, who never minded a joke at his own expense, would say “666” with that lisp, and he and his buddies would fall on the floor laughing. That lisp never hampered his skill with the ladies, however. A handsome, bronze-skinned Italian kid with grease-slicked hair and jewel-green eyes, Barber rarely slept with the same woman twice.

Barber was as much a prankster as he was a philanderer. His antics rivaled even those of Iggy Russo. To sabotage opponents, Barber would plant a greased rag on the ball rack. Once they reached for it to wipe the lane oil off their ball, they’d spend the rest of the night trying to figure out why the ball kept slipping
off their hands. Barber thought it was hilarious. Another thing he thought was hilarious was “accidentally” slipping and falling on the approach while throwing practice shots before a match. Barber only did it to make his opponent wonder if the approaches were sticky—anything to get the other guy thinking about something other than the task at hand—and worry that they, too, might fall on their asses. Barber, of course, knew the approaches at Gun Post were no more problematic than the approaches anywhere else. He also knew he had his opponents’ money in the bag the minute he got them thinking otherwise.

But Barber was equal parts con man and clown. One night he thought it might be a good idea to set off firecrackers inside the bowling alley, so he did, scaring the shit out of everybody there. Most people suspected the culprit was Crazy Vito, a neighborhood gangster for whom Barber collected. Exactly what those collection activities involved, nobody wanted to know. That was the thing about Barber. You never knew which one of his faces was the real Kenny Barber. Maybe the clown was just the mask the con man wore. Maybe the real Barber was the guy who did whatever it took to collect what you owed to Crazy Vito. Nobody knew for sure.