Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (7 page)

Russo would have loved to take back those careless demonstrations of his skill now, that cover he had so foolishly blown on a few lousy games of “low ball.” But he could not. Stepping up to face a spare that everyone in the house had seen him make many times before, Russo assessed the situation with the cunning acuity of a born thief. He could make the spare for a win and get shot by his own backer, or miss the spare for a loss and get shot by his opponent’s backer. In either case, he knew one thing for sure: Tonight would be the last night of his life.

Gangsters have a habit of simplifying decisions in people’s lives, a benevolent service one of them afforded Russo when, just before he picked up his ball to throw the shot, he felt the gun of Feely’s backer nudged in his belly and received his orders: “Miss this spare, and you’re a dead man.”

Russo grabbed his ball and stood on the approach, facing the spare that was about to bring on his demise. Then he dropped his ball to the floor, clutched his chest, and collapsed.

Russo was older than most action bowlers. Most action bowlers were in their teens or twenties. But Russo was in his forties, a guy known by neighbors as a mild-mannered family man with kids and a job. The people who populated the life Russo lived by day had no clue about this other Russo, the one who descended into the underworld of action bowling at night. And no one who populated that underworld had any idea what, exactly, Russo did during the day. Fewer could understand how a married family man could also live the life of an action bowler. When did the man sleep? Or did he sleep
at all? At his age, though, the probability of a heart attack at least seemed likely enough to be taken seriously. Someone called an ambulance. Paramedics carted him off on a stretcher.

Action bowling’s preeminent escape artist had decided to fake a heart attack.

And that is where tales of the most infamous heart attack ever to occur in a New York City bowling alley diverge. Some say Russo jumped out of the ambulance at the first red light. Others say he made the trip all the way to New York General before skipping out on the doctors. Most of them, though, say the gangsters either torched his car to a crisp or poured sugar in the gas tank. Nobody saw Russo’s face at Avenue M Bowl for months after that, but it was not the only time Russo pulled his heart attack trick. This became the ace up his sleeve he resorted to in similarly desperate circumstances at other bowling alleys throughout the five boroughs, and it is the primary reason why those who witnessed this shyster at work never understood how he always made it out alive.

Russo may have screwed a lot of people in his day, but some of his victims asked for it. One night Russo was bowling for $1,300—a minor fortune in the early 1960s—against a kid who stepped over the foul line on almost every shot, which should result in a score of zero for that shot. With the foul lights not turned on and no foul-line judges in attendance, the kid likely figured no one would notice. Russo felt the kid was doing it on purpose to get a half-step closer to the pins. But he said nothing about it for most of the match, and continued to let the line-step happen. After leaving a 10 pin in the 10th frame, Russo picked his ball up from the rack, strolled down the entire bowling lane, laid out on his stomach, and knocked over the pin with the ball at point-blank range. After he stood up again, he walked back down the lane to the scorer’s table and picked up the $1,300. Splotches of lane oil smudged his shirt.

“You fouled, I fouled!” Russo squeaked in his falsetto to his surprised opponent.

You did not have to be a hustler with a clown act to provoke the wrong man. One night, Johnny Petraglia got the idea to take Mike McGrath, his buddy from California, for a taste of the Brooklyn action. Petraglia knew McGrath was one of the most talented bowlers on the west coast. When McGrath came to visit Johnny in 1963, Johnny smelled an opportunity to score an easy buck. Both later would go on to bowl the PBA Tour. In 1963, though, they were just two more kids looking to turn the thing they loved into the thing they did for a living. Avenue M Bowl was just the place for kids like that. That, at least, was what Johnny thought.

Some who witnessed what happened next would remember gun shots fired through the ceiling. Others would remember shylocks in sharkskin suits standing at the doors with bowling balls in their hands, daring anyone to leave. No matter who told the story, though, the details made it clear that McGrath had seen enough that night—both before he walked into Avenue M Bowl and, certainly, long after he left the place alive.

Johnny got his first taste of the action in 1961 at a place in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn called Fortway Lanes, where the owner let him bowl for free as long as he agreed to clean tables, mop floors, and get the place ready for league after school. Johnny was not a great bowler yet on the road, but he was great at Fortway, a place loaded with shylocks on the prowl. A lot of action players had what they called their “home house,” the place where they bowled most often and rarely, if ever, lost a match. If you beat a guy at his home house, though, you left the place with pockets full of money. That was the reason Fish Face’s gambit with Mac and Stoop took off. Everybody wanted a piece of them at their home house because victory promised a handsome payday.

Fortway Lanes was Johnny’s home house, and the shylocks knew it.

“Hey, kid,” one of the shylocks said to Johnny one day, “I am going to bring some guys down here to bowl you. I will put up all the money, and you get ten percent.”

Johnny was fourteen years old at the time, but he looked like he was twelve. The shylocks knew it would be easy to lure a guy into a match against him. What gambler was going to turn down an opportunity to bowl for money against a kid who looked like a grade-school altar boy? It would be some time before Johnny looked like anything more than a little kid, in fact. Even when he made the tour years later, he still cut the figure of a high-school sophomore: a body as thin as a horse hair, a gaunt face framed in thick, black sideburns that stretched from ear to chin, and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Long before the Petraglia name meant anything outside of Brooklyn’s Fortway Lanes, it was a shylock and his bodyguard’s Cadillac that gave the teen his first notion of the life that awaited him.

Two weeks after Johnny got his orders at Fortway, the shylock’s bodyguard pulled up in his Cadillac as Johnny hung out on the corner with some buddies. It was time for the match. The bodyguard carted Johnny off to Fortway, where he encountered a group of grown men twice his age with bowling balls in tow.

“This is who ya want me to bowl?” one of them said.

“Yeah, let’s go,” the shylock grunted. “Now.”

Johnny’s father was supporting a family on $63 a week. Johnny himself was making about a buck a day with his after-school gig at Fortway. But the first match he bowled that day was for $1,000. The shylock peeled off a series of $100 bills and put them on the score table. Johnny had never seen a $100 bill in his life. At first, the pressure of all that money lording over
him proved a bit too much to handle. He lost the first game. Then he pondered the consequences, which, in the imagination of a fourteen-year-old, weighed just as heavily as all those $100 bills.

“This guy is gonna kill me or shoot me,” Johnny thought.

But the shylock had no interest in shooting anybody. This was not some James Cagney movie; this was gambling, and the shylock was going to make money on his boy. There was nothing else to think about.

“Relax,” the shylock said. “There will be a lot more games.”

Johnny won the second game. Then he lost the third, but won the fourth. By then, Johnny started feeling it, and he won the fifth and sixth games. The match continued, and Johnny crushed his opposition.

“Ya did real good, kid,” the shylock said. Then he peeled off a couple of those $100 bills, handed them to Johnny, and had his bodyguard take him home.

A hundred bucks went a long way in early-1960s Brooklyn, where life was as cheap as it was simple. It was a world where a nickel bought you a chocolate bar, any stoop was a front row seat to the nearest stickball game, and the pompadour was almost out of style. It also was a time when bowling alley food was about more than a greasy basket of fried cheese and a soda. Weekday specials at another Brooklyn bowling alley—Maple Lanes on 60th Street and 16th Avenue—included meals such as Greek salad, brisket, meatloaf, or chicken parmesan. In 1961, you could have ordered all four dishes at once and still hardly spent more than five bucks.

“What the hell am I gonna do with these?” Johnny asked the bodyguard. “I don’t even know how to break a hundred-dollar bill!”

A few years later, Johnny hoped his biggest problem bowling with Mike McGrath would be remembering how to break
a $100 bill. When a shylock known only as “Black Sam” invited him and his friends for a night of action at Avenue M Bowl, McGrath thought of the kind of people who break things that have no business being broken—things like kneecaps and jawbones—and not the kind of people who reward talented kids from the block with more money in an afternoon than his parents made in three weeks. McGrath knew about those rumors that swirled in Brooklyn—the guns and the people who were not afraid to use them. He knew the answer to Black Sam’s offer: Hell, no.

Johnny told him those rumors were overblown. He had nothing to fear, Johnny said, and told McGrath, “Mikey, you and Richie could bowl doubles there, because no one knows who you are.”

That was the advantage of bringing a California kid to Brooklyn. The less familiar bowlers were with your crew, the more likely you were to find a fish. Telling McGrath he could bowl with Richie was like telling him he could bowl with God. “Richie” was Richie Hornreich, otherwise known as “The Horn,” and he was the greatest action bowler in Brooklyn. Richie was Johnny’s buddy. They both were growing up on the streets of Dyker Heights. Johnny knew he could count on Richie to make the trip out to Avenue M worth everyone’s while.

Though everyone on the action scene agreed that Richie ranked among the greatest bowlers on the planet, and though Richie himself knew he was damn good, he did not regard his talent with much pride because bowling, for him, was merely a way to generate the income he needed to blow his money at the horse track. The ponies were Richie’s weakness. He would win $5,000 at the bowling alley only to blow $6,000 at the track.

There was no shortage of tales about Richie’s hunger for the thrill of another night at the races or at the craps table
which he would later call his “downfall.” For Richie, the point was the action itself—not bowling. He found that action by placing bets on which raindrop would slide down the bowling alley windows the fastest on rainy days, or taking a $500,000 inheritance from his father’s trucking business and blowing it in Vegas in about six months. He once told a fellow action bowler named Pete Mylenki that if he found money in his pants when he took them off at night, he could not sleep.

“I gotta go empty those pockets before I can sleep,” he said.

Richie possessed the unsmiling self-assurance of some Russian gangster, his jet-black bangs gushing over his tan forehead like a cresting wave. His angular jaw was shapely enough to have been chiseled out of stone, and his dark eyes seemed to stare a hole through the cameras that flashed as he posed with the first-place checks at big-time tournaments throughout the northeast. His shiny fingernails and button-down bowling shirts with stitched trim completed the manicured appearance of a guy who entered his place of work every time he walked through the doors of a bowling alley. Let the squares punch their cards between the hours of nine to five; the real money was made here on the lanes between dusk and dawn.

Anytime Richie needed to strike out in the 10th to win a match, it never crossed his mind that he might throw a bad shot. He almost never did. One night, he and another brilliant action bowler named Mike Limongello were bowling a match for quite a bit of money. Richie was up and needed a strike in the tenth to win. As he picked up his ball, he glanced at the clock on the wall, turned around to the throng of people watching the match, and said, “Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!” It was three
A.M.
, so three cuckoos. Then he turned back around and
bang!
threw a perfect strike.

By age sixteen, Richie got invited to the World Invitational, one of the most prestigious bowling tournaments on the planet in his day and an event dominated by the biggest stars in the sport at the time—older and significantly more experienced guys like Don Carter, Dick Weber, and Carmen Salvino. But Richie did one better than merely earn an invitation: He advanced to the finals.

Clear as Richie’s head may have been, his need for gambling funds bordered on a crack addict’s need for a fix. Like an undisciplined blackjack player, he did not always know when to call it quits. One night, he was bowling Ernie Schlegel at a place up in White Plains, less than an hour north of New York City. For once, Richie was losing, and he was losing big. He kept trying to nudge Schlegel to raise his bet. In action bowling, that nudging could have included anything from impugning your manhood to slandering your mother. But Schlegel would not budge. He had learned his lesson in Philadelphia. So Richie pulled out a gun.

“What the fuck is that going to prove?” Schlegel said. “That I’m going to raise my bet so I can take all of your money?”

Richie, finally, called it quits.

Other times, Schlegel was not so lucky. One night Schlegel bowled Richie at a place called Ridgewood Lanes in Brooklyn with an Everest of cash piled on the score table. Richie needed at least a spare on his first shot in the tenth frame to make the money his. But on his first shot, he left the nearly impossible 7-10 split. The 7 pin is off to the farthest left-hand corner of the pin deck, while the 10 pin is off to the farthest right-hand corner. The only way to convert the split, really, is to throw the ball as hard as you can at one of the pins and hope it bangs off the sideboard or out of the pit. Then you have to hope it knocks over the other pin. Schlegel, figuring he had the game won after he saw Richie leave the dreaded 7-10, began picking
up his money and counting it. Then Richie blasted the 10 pin out of the pit and watched it tomahawk the 7 pin to convert the split. Schlegel lost.