Where Are They Buried? (83 page)

Though he never won a major professional pool tournament, Rudolf Wanderone Jr. was—and still is—the best-known player of all time.

A fast-talking hustler with no regular income, Rudolf carved an erratic living in Brooklyn’s darkened pool halls by betting on his own prowess and winning more games than he lost. Making the rounds for thirty years, the consummate gambler with a colorful demeanor and hulking frame earned a reputation in increasingly greater circles and along the way picked up the moniker “New York Fats” or usually just “Fats.” In time, almost
nobody
of the legions who professed knowledge of his smoky backroom exploits actually knew his real name.

In 1959 Walter Tevis wrote
The Hustler
, a fictitious account of a skillful player who roams from town to town conning people into thinking he’s an easy mark until he meets his match in a player named Minnesota Fats. The book was made into a well-received movie by the same name two years later and it was then that Rudolph Wanderone Jr., ever the cocky huckster, capitalized on the movie and “became” Minnesota Fats.

While pool and billiard professionals and their supporters howled, Minnesota Fats snatched the limelight, passed himself off as the greatest ever and soon became a household name. To be sure, Fats was an excellent player but his skills paled in comparison to the game’s true champions and his critics’ disparagements included pointing out that he’d never even
been
to Minnesota.

With one excuse after another, Fats wisely avoided national competitions that would reveal his charade to the generally unknowing public but, eventually, he was cornered into competing in a series of televised matches against pool star Willie Mosconi. The expert Mosconi took him apart with surgical precision but the audience hardly noticed because Fats stole the show with humorous banter and trash talk. Fats never did yield his pretense as “the greatest player ever” and, in a fitting twist, the man derided by purists for decades became the game’s greatest publicity mechanism ever. In 1984 the Billiard Congress of America relented and inducted Minnesota Fats into its Hall of Fame for “Meritorious Service.”

At 82, he died of congestive heart failure and was buried at Hermitage Memorial Gardens in Old Hickory, Tennessee. His epitaph reads, “Beat every living creature on Earth. St. Peter, rack ‘em up!”

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From the intersection of Routes 45 and 70, follow Route 70 east for a mile and then turn right on Shute Lane. The cemetery is then a short distance on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Drive straight into the cemetery, go halfway around the circle, turn right, then make a left at the T and stop after about a hundred feet. The Garden of Peace is the lawn on the left and Fats’ flat stone can be found here in Section C, six rows from the road.

APRIL 23, 1932 – JULY 20, 1984

Concerned about a family history of heart disease, Jim Fixx took up jogging at 35 and, after losing 60 pounds and feeling physically and spiritually stronger, he wrote
The Complete Book of Running
. The book spurred the jogging craze of the late seventies and, as a self-styled guru of running, Jim became popular on talk shows and the lecture circuit, spreading the gospel that active people live longer and healthier lives.

After so adamantly extolling the virtues of jogging, Jim dropped dead of a heart attack at 52—while jogging. His death was an all-too-convenient defense for couch potatoes who choose to continue sedentary lifestyles but, after his autopsy, doctors agreed that if Jim had never jogged at all he’d still have died of a heart attack, many years earlier.

Jim was cremated and his ashes entrusted to his family.

At the place where Jim collapsed, a memorial has been erected in his honor. It’s on Route 15 in Hardwick, Vermont, just 50 feet north of the Village Motel.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Follow Shaughnessy Street north from the center of town, turn right onto Prairie Avenue, then left onto Oxford Avenue. The cemetery is a short distance on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Walk to the lower area of the cemetery and Terry’s knee-high black stone is in the middle toward the back.

JULY 2, 1968 – JUNE 12, 1994

MAY 19, 1959 – JUNE 12, 1994

In the whole sordid mess of the Simpson murder case, there seems to be only one thing on which everyone agrees: on June 12, 1994,
somebody
brutally stabbed and slashed Nicole Brown Simpson and
her sometime-lover Ron Goldman to death at Nicole’s posh Brentwood, California, nest.

Nicole was the estranged wife of former football star O.J. Simpson, and soon nearly everyone in America would be pointing at him, convinced for many good reasons that he was the murderer. First of all, O.J. was insanely jealous, thus giving him a motive. Prior to the murders, he had purchased a knife from a cutlery shop that would’ve caused wounds compatible with those suffered by the victims, and he was never able to locate it later. DNA tests whose margin of error was in the neighborhood of one in a billion linked blood found at the scene to O.J., and blood found on his car and his socks to the victims. Missing gloves and bloody shoe prints were linked to O.J. Furthermore, he never established a verifiable alibi. Instead he jumped from one story to another as they crumbled beneath his inconsistencies. Immediately after the murders took place, O.J. boarded a flight to Chicago.

At this moment, thousands of people are in prison after being tried and convicted of murder, beyond a reasonable doubt, on much less than half of the evidence that was accumulated against O.J. But in October 1995 the millionaire hotshot walked away from his destiny, having been found not guilty.

The next year, the Goldman and Brown families pursued O.J. in a civil suit in which the burden of proof is lower than in criminal proceedings. In a civil case, guilt need only be proven according to a “preponderance of the evidence” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” After hearing four months of testimony, including O.J.’s (during the criminal trial he had invoked the fifth amendment, which is not an option in a civil trial), the jury found O.J. liable for the deaths of Ron and Nicole. The Goldman family was awarded $8.5 million in compensatory damages, while another $25 million in punitive damages was to be shared between both families.

Justice was served, except that the money was never paid. O.J. was “broke” and he retreated to Florida where the law does not allow the seizure of future income. For a while, he lived in his $1.5 million house in Kendall collecting some $20,000 per month from a football pension, but in 2007 O.J. found himself again in the headlines after breaking into a Nevada hotel room and stealing some of his own memorabilia from a group of collectors at gunpoint. The following year karma prevailed, finally, when The Juice was sentenced to 33 years of hard time.

Ron was 25 at his death and is buried at Valley Oaks Cemetery in Westlake Village, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS FOR RON:
From Highway 101, exit at Lindero Canyon Road, head east, and the cemetery is a short distance ahead on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS FOR RON:
Drive into the cemetery, turn at the first left, then stop at the pine tree on the right. Ron’s grave is beneath the pine tree.

After her death at 35, Nicole was buried at Ascension Cemetery in Lake Forest, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS FOR NICOLE:
Lake Forest is a village that doesn’t appear on all California maps. It’s about ten miles south of Santa Ana on I-5. Take the Lake Forest Drive exit and follow it east for 2½ miles to Trabuco Road, then turn left and the cemetery is half-mile ahead on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS FOR NICOLE:
Nicole’s grave is directly behind the office, three rows from the hedges.

OCTOBER 27, 1940 – JUNE 10, 2002

John Gotti quit school in the tenth grade to pursue a career as a professional criminal, and after a decade of relatively tame thievery and robbery, hooked up with the Queens-based Gambino crime family in 1966. He quickly graduated to truck hijackings and assorted murders. In December 1985, Gotti masterminded the murder of mob boss Paul Castellano in the midst of bustling throngs of Christmas shoppers as he stepped from his car in front of a Midtown Manhattan restaurant. With Castellano gone, Gotti assumed leadership of the Gambino family but, much to his surprise, his criminal enterprise was driven into the ground less than a decade later.

By the mid-1980s, law-enforcement agencies had finally begun to dismantle the foundations of organized crime with the help of technological advances in listening and tracking, tougher new laws, and a flush of appropriations set aside by the federal sector. Unfortunately for Gotti, his ascent to power coincided with the government’s new efforts, and he unwittingly placed himself directly in the cross hairs of prosecutors.

Gotti was the classic gangster, and for the next half-dozen years, the government was obsessed with putting him away. But
Gotti beat all the charges during three different trials and, for his habit of coming through criminal prosecutions unscathed, as well as for the air of importance he exuded in his expensive attire and fashionable pinky ring, he earned two monikers, “Teflon Don” and “Dapper Don.”

But in 1992 the government showed up in court with a secret weapon: the testimony of Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, Gotti’s second-in-command henchman who cut a deal and fingered Gotti as the criminal mastermind. The prosecution also presented tapes in which Gotti was heard ordering mob hits and, this time, his fate was sealed. He was sentenced to life in federal prison without the possibility of parole.

After ten years of living alone in a 6-by-8-foot cell in Marion, Illinois, Gotti died of a cancer that had ravaged his neck and head. At 61, he was laid to rest alongside his son, Frank, at Saint John’s Cemetery in Queens, New York.

Twelve-year-old Frank had been killed in March 1980 when he was struck by a car after darting into the street on a minibike. The driver of the vehicle, Gotti’s neighbor John Favara, was hustled into a van four months after Frank’s death and hasn’t been heard from since. How’s that for bad luck?

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From either I-495 or the Interboro Parkway, take Woodhaven Boulevard to Metropolitan Avenue. Then the cemetery entrance is just west of Woodhaven Boulevard at Metropolitan Avenue and 80th Street.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
John is interred in the enormous mausoleum that sits in the cemetery’s center, which is called the Saint John’s Cloister. Drive past the office, turn right, then take the next right and the next left to get to the cloister. You’ll have to park along the side, but then return to the front and enter at the entrance with the red awnings. Go up the two short flights of stairs, then turn left and go up the stairs to the next floor. At the top of the stairs, turn right and immediately left. You’ll see the wooden-faced crypts of John and his son Frank on the bottom row on the right.

After Gotti was led away in handcuffs in 1992, his son John “Junior” Gotti took over as acting boss of the once-mighty Gambino family, and soon earned a reputation as being numb between the ears. In 1997, after Junior left piles of cash and a handwritten roster of Mafia members lying out for agents to find, tabloids nicknamed him “Dumbfella,” and his father remarked that his offspring should not be imprisoned but instead should be “sent to
an insane asylum.” In 1999 the bumbling gangster was sentenced to 6½ years on a variety of racketeering charges.

After squealing on Gotti, Sammy the Bull did five years of hard time himself, then, courtesy of the Witness Protection Program, he received appearance-altering plastic surgery and settled in Tempe, Arizona as Jimmy Moran. But Jimmy the swimming pool installer soon adopted his old habits as Sammy the hood, and in 2000 he was arrested on charges of trafficking the designer drug Ecstasy. In September 2002 Jimmy-Sammy was handed a twenty-year prison sentence.

MAY 3, 1947 – FEBRUARY 7, 2000

Doug Henning became fascinated with magic after watching a levitation act on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. At fourteen he placed a classified ad that read, “Magician: Have rabbit, will travel,” and was soon performing at parties as “the Great Hendoo.” After college Doug applied for a Canadian Council grant, funding usually reserved for more mainstream artists, and after convincing the board that magic was indeed an art form, he used the money to develop a rock-opera magic show that he named
Spellbound
.

The show was a great success in Toronto, so Doug moved it to Broadway in 1974, revamping the staging and costumes and changing the name to
The Magic Show
. Again the show was well received, and soon he was offered his own television program. In December 1975, a tie-dyed and longhaired Doug waved hello from the stage of his inaugural “World of Magic” special. On that program, Doug was careful to point out that, though this was television, there was a live studio audience and no cheap camera tricks or “old-style devices” would be used. Viewers loved it and, annually over the next seven years, were enthralled as Doug recreated Houdini’s “water-torture” trick, turned himself into a shark, walked through a brick wall, and made a horse disappear.