Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (9 page)

Unlike Goldfinger, Daley was playing the extreme outside portion of the lane to the right of the 5 board, a strategy known in bowling as “playing the gutter.” He was drubbing Schlegel from out there. Schlegel decided to move in to the 10 board and play the the track like Goldfinger had. It worked; he beat Daley seven games in a row. He beat Daley so soundly, in fact, that the shylock loaning Daley money to keep him in the match ended up running out of money himself. In a twist of fate perhaps unprecedented in action bowling history, the shylock, for once, was the one asking for cash. He asked Schlegel if he would spot him some. By then, Schlegel had made enough money. Rather than spot the shylock to continue the match, he took his winnings and headed out to beat the rush-hour traffic.

As might be expected of a guy with a nickname like “Goldfinger,” however, ultimately he proved to be a bit too cute for his own good. He tried to cheat the kind of guys who cheated for a living—the shylocks and backers who flocked to Gun Post as surely as the action bowlers did. Goldfinger had a reputation for lodging lead in his bowling ball to give it more “side weight.” He did this through a process called “plugging.” It involved drilling a hole in the bowling ball, embedding lead or pouring mercury into the hole, and then topping it off with a liquid that hardened overnight like glue, trapping the lead or mercury inside. According to the crooks and shysters whose income depended on the extent of their mastery over the various measures of deception, side weight turned the ball so
sharply toward the headpin that it obliterated the pocket with an authority no ordinary bowling ball could possibly achieve. He made a lot of money this way. Steve Harris, who ran his own pro shop at 4840 Broadway on the corner of Broadway and Academy in upper Manhattan, would buy mercury from the drugstore and use it to “plug” bowling balls. He did the same with lead sinkers he would get from bait and tackle shops, but he insisted it was impossible to control bowling balls after manipulating them. The density of lead or mercury gave the bowling ball more hitting power—the kind of advantage Goldfinger sought. One bowler, Al Sergeant, unknowingly became a beneficiary of this practice. He bowled with a white towel draped over his shoulder and a cigar pinned between two fingers in his left hand while he threw the ball with his right. Sergeant’s ability as a spare shooter earned him recognition as the “king of the clean game”; he averaged about a 189 throwing his ball straight up the 15th board, rarely missing the pocket and never missing a spare. He threw the ball with so little angle and power, however, that he rarely carried pocket hits for strikes; he left a lot of 8-10 splits, 5-7 splits, 5-10 splits, and 10 pins. One night, a guy named Eddie Fenton, who owned a pro shop on Broadway and Dungan Place in Inwood, removed Sergeant’s ball from his locker, took it to his shop, and plugged it with lead. Sergeant, known to be as honest a man as he was accurate a bowler, never would have participated in the practice himself. But the ball he removed from his locker the next day made him a new bowler. Those 8-10 splits he left before now were just 10 pins he converted for spares; those pocket 10 pins he left now were strikes. If Sergeant had any idea what was going on, he never let on.

Goldfinger hoped to enjoy some of the magic Fenton had bestowed upon Al Sergeant. He had just won four consecutive matches with a loaded ball when a group of gangsters betting
on his opponent noticed the same peculiarity in the movement of his bowling ball. Unfortunately for Goldfinger, the gangsters were not interested in giving him a snappy nickname for the move; they were interested in making him pay for it.

“He’s throwin’ a loaded ball,” one of the gangsters growled as he pulled his cigar out of his face.

One of the gangster’s goons took Goldfinger’s ball back to the pro shop to check it out. He weighed the ball and found that it had half an ounce of extra side weight. So they grabbed Goldfinger, laid him on the ground, held his bowling ball high over their heads, and smashed it down on his bowling hand. The blow blasted the bones in Goldfinger’s hand into so many little pieces they could have been used as mulch. Everybody in the action bowling scene got the message: it may help to load your bowling ball, but having your hand pounded to a pulp by gangsters did not sound like fun. His next trip back to Florida would be the last time he headed back home after a night of action up north; he never bowled again.

But mercury plugs and lead sinkers from the local bait and tackle shop ranked among the crudest deceits employed by the more refined practitioners of hustling. Like Avenue M Bowl, Gun Post provided the stage on which many of action bowling’s most inimitable characters performed with subtlety and style.

Ralph Engan, who then was nearly forty while most other action bowlers were in their teens and twenties, was renowned for his smooth delivery and deadly accuracy. To beat Ralph Engan—the elder statesman of the action bowling scene—was to beat the best. Being known as “the best” was a double-edged sword, however; bragging rights are great, but ultimately they are only as good as the money that comes with your next win. It is awfully hard to win when no one can find the courage to bowl you, and that is why con men like Iggy Russo were on to something. Why blow people away with your skill when you
can fool them into thinking you had no skill at all? Engan was no Iggy Russo; he wanted to bowl you man to man and beat you with his best. But he also wanted to make money, and after spending too many nights sitting through hours of action waiting for challengers who never came, even Engan had to use some wiles. Sometimes he headed out to bowling alleys beyond the five boroughs, places where he could be reasonably sure people did not know of him. He would plant his bowling ball among the regular house balls on the ball racks. Then he would feign cluelessness as he fumbled through them while his prospective opponent prepared to wager any amount of money on a match against a bum who owned no ball of his own. Engan always seemed to find exactly the same ball on the rack—his own. And when he did, the match was his before anyone threw a shot.

Engan, in fact, was the guy who first tutored Ernie Schlegel in the art of the out-and-out hustle. One night Schlegel kept hearing Engan complain about how tired he was, and a chance to seize the largesse that surely would accompany a victory over the great Ralph Engan was one Schlegel could not pass up. Ralph bowled Schlegel all night, telling him how tired he was all along, until Schlegel passed out from exhaustion. Engan won big. It was a lesson Schlegel never forgot.

But by the mid-1960s, Schlegel himself was dishing out far more lessons than he received. He was no longer the green rookie who scoured Philadelphia for fish. Some even considered him the greatest action bowler they had ever seen. Now in his early twenties, he was bowling every night of the week and making more money in a month than his parents made in a year. He had sharpened his game to the point where he felt ready to take a shot on the PBA Tour. For now, however, he still was catching enough fish to be content with his life as an action bowler. The tour would come, but only when he found himself having to
resort to Engan’s antics to get somebody to bowl him. Schlegel did not mind rubbing bourbon behind his ears or faking the gout now and then, but when things got desperate enough for him to pretend he had never seen a bowling ball in his life, well, that was when he would know the time to move on had come. Schlegel considered himself a businessman before he considered himself a bowler. For him, Gun Post was a kind of crooked accountant’s office he would happily occupy as long as the money kept coming in. As the gamblers of Gun Post would learn, Schlegel’s version of a businessman was one who feared nobody and stopped at nothing to protect his cut.

One night Schlegel had a score to settle with a man named Psycho Dave, who had conned him out of $600 in a game of Gin Rummy. Psycho Dave had trounced Schlegel and his buddy Stevie, only for them to find out later that Psycho Dave had been cheating. So Schlegel took Stevie out looking for Psycho Dave one night. Stevie, a scrappy guy who stood 6’1” and 190 lbs., was the kind of buddy you bring out when you needed to issue non-refusable offers to those who owed you. They found Psycho Dave up in the Bronx at a place called All-Star Lanes. Stevie walked up to Psycho.

“Where’s my money?” he asked.

“What money?” Psycho Dave replied.

Then Stevie round-housed him hard enough to send him flying over a ball return.

“I am only gonna ask you once,” Stevie told him. “And that was it. Now, where’s my money?”

Psycho Dave may have been psycho, but there is something about a swift fist to the face that restores sanity. Psycho Dave knew exactly what Stevie was talking about. He proved sane enough to pay up on the spot.

The kind of company Schlegel kept was the kind that played a little game he liked to call “You hurt me, and they shoot you,”
which was a pretty pointed reference to the mobsters who liked to gamble on him. But he had other means of protecting himself against the unsavory elements any sworn gambler had to run with on occasion. Years later, sports writer Herm Weiskopf would document the kind of garb Schlegel donned as a kid to keep the street gangs off his back: “He was fond of dressing in black stovepipe pants, a white silk shirt, an iridescent raincoat and high Roman heels,” Weiskopf wrote. “He also sported a Mohican haircut and carried an umbrella with its tip filed to a point.” What fool would step up to a kid who dressed that way in places where the people were as threatening as the weapons their coats concealed? Only the craziest of the crazy, and that alone made most folks steer clear of him.

But if they did step up, Schlegel concealed his own assortment of weapons. One night he spotted some talent up at a place on 168th Street and Webster Avenue in the Bronx called Webster Lanes, a twenty-year-old kid out of Long Island named Mike Limongello. “Lemon,” as he was known, already was the king of the Long Island action scene. Nobody beat Lemon out there. Now he was making a name for himself in the five boroughs, where he heard he could make some real money. It would not be long before people uttered Lemon’s name in the same breath as guys like Schlegel, Richie Hornreich, or Johnny Petraglia.

Lemon rivaled Schlegel’s flare for fashion as much as he rivaled his ability. At a ceremony in which he accepted the New York Metropolitan Bowler of the Year award in 1965, he sported a ducktail hairdo slathered in Pomade, a sharp, ivory-white suit with a flowered lapel, and a black bowtie that sparkled in the flash of reporters’ cameras. He could just as easily have been standing in for Frank Sinatra at a Rat Pack gig as accepting a bowling award. His remarkably huge, green eyes earned him
the nickname “Banjo Eyes” on the action scene; he always had the look of a doe staring directly into the headlights of an oncoming truck.

Schlegel’s concern was money, not fashion, and he saw plenty of it in this brash bulldog from the Island who almost never missed the pocket and took on all comers for any amount of money, anywhere, anytime. One guy who could have told Schlegel about Lemon was Richie Hornreich, who already had clashed with Lemon at a Long Island house called Garden City Bowl. Hornreich was bowling league there one night when in walked Lemon and his crew, looking for action. The Horn gladly supplied it, but quickly fell behind as Lemon crushed him 220-170 in the first game, then did it again in the second. Then Hornreich got an idea.

“Mikey, I got nothing on this pair,” he said. “If you want to keep bowling, we need to move to a different pair.”

So move to a different pair of lanes they did, and the action exploded. Lemon started losing shooting 250s to The Horn’s 260s. But the action would not last for long that night. Just as Hornreich thought he was on his way to cleaning Lemon out, his thumb ripped open and began gushing blood. It was time for another idea. The Horn always had another idea, especially when it came to money.

“Mikey, I can’t bowl, but I’m not gonna quit on ya,” Hornreich said. “Bet whatever you want and I will bowl one last game, blood and all.”

Just in case Lemon thought he was kidding, Hornreich put down $2,500. Then he threw the first ten strikes in a row. On the second ball in the tenth frame, he left a 10 pin. Lemon had started the game with a spare and then strung the next nine consecutive strikes. Hornreich finished with a 279, easily enough to beat most players. Most players, that is, with the exception of Mike Limongello. Lemon needed at least the first
two strikes in the 10th frame to win. He did one better: He blasted three perfect strikes, and the money was his.

That was the thing about Lemon; he was more action bowler than hustler. All he knew how to do was bowl his best every time he hit the lanes. And Lemon’s best almost always was better than anyone else’s. Schlegel, on the other hand, was a hustler. He only bowled well enough to win and rarely more than that. That was how the smart hustlers preserved the air of vulnerability they needed to attract challengers. Here was the goldmine Schlegel had been dreaming about—a doubles partner he could count on to blast the pocket all night long while Schlegel did just enough to keep them ahead. Why bother bowling better than 180 or 190 when the guy you were bowling with could bowl 250s and 260s just as effortlessly? Schlegel knew where to take his new partner in business: Gun Post Lanes.

“If you really want some action,” Schlegel told Lemon, “come to Gun Post Lanes in the Bronx. Bring anybody you want, and bring lots of money, because there will be people there from all over the place and you can get any match you want.”

The best way for Schlegel to size up Lemon’s talent was first to bowl the man himself. So Schlegel teamed up with a good bowler from the Bronx named Johnny Masarro, who once bowled for the New York Gladiators team in the short-lived National Bowling League. Unlike the Professional Bowlers Association, which focused on a singles-competition concept fashioned after professional golf, the NBL focused on team competition inspired by professional leagues in other sports such as football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. NBL players would earn annual salaries just like pros in any pro sports league.