Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (5 page)
Authors: Gianmarc Manzione
Persuading the kid he had not been hustled had been worth a shot, but there was not much Harris could do about his Jewishness. His first instinct was to tell the kid that no, he was not a Jew. But then he figured that if being Jewish was the thing he was about to die for, he would rather die proudly than die a coward.
“Yes, I am,” Harris told the kid. “What about it?”
For a moment, everyone was silent.
“No shit?” the kid said. “Me, too! Gimme five!”
The hood put away the blade and stuck out his hand. Harris could not believe it. He hesitated a moment and slapped him five. Then he noticed the kid’s expression change.
“What’s wrong?”
The kid mewled pathetically about not having any money for breakfast.
If enough dough to buy breakfast was all it would take to spare Harris his life, then breakfast was precisely what these boys would get. Harris learned enough on the streets of New York City to know a can’t-miss deal when he saw one. He promptly curled off thirty bucks from his roll of the night’s winnings—easily enough in those days to buy breakfast every day for the next week. And, just as quickly, he and Schlegel followed Nagai out of the place, making sure to offer a few kind goodbyes for good measure.
Nagai’s Cadillac may have been the reason Schlegel and the boys headed south on Route 1 that night, but there was another reason they liked having the old man along when they went fishing: They knew they could count on him to deliver an ass-kicking as much as they could count on him for a ride. Nagai may have been older and smaller, but he was a guy you did not mess with. Nagai and his cohorts were at least as tough as any of the gangsters they encountered in bowling alleys. One of Nagai’s buddies, who stood barely five feet tall and
weighed about 150 pounds, once was held up by a few muggers who were twice his size. He told them he had $8, and that he would give each of them $2 and keep the last $2 for bus money to get home. The muggers did not particularly care for diplomacy, however, and demanded all the dough. Seconds later, the biggest of the three was out cold on the ground and the other two were running as fast as they could. Nagai was like that, too, having trained in martial arts himself.
Just as Harris and Schlegel made it to Nagai’s car in the parking lot, they found themselves confronted by the whole gang they thought they had bought off inside—only now they were armed to the teeth with chains, knives, pipes and various other implements of persuasion. In the few minutes it took to reach the car, it dawned on the gang that if a knife flash got them $30, a real fight would get them even more. Fortunately the only weapons Nagai usually needed were his own bare hands, and he managed to nearly single-handedly take on the entire gang, with Harris and Schlegel heading for Nagai’s Cadillac.
“When you lose, that should be a lesson to you,” Nagai admonished with a scowl as he performed a brutal karate chop on the fender of another parked car.
Then Nagai told Schlegel and the boys it was time to get the hell out of there. He knew as well as they did that scaring the hoods was a great way of attracting more of them. Nagai twisted the keys in the ignition of his Caddy and, as he peeled off into the street, lifted a long iron bar from under his seat and twirled it around in his hand. From their vantage point, the gangsters must have sworn he was wielding a gun. If the objective was not to scare the poor bastards, then at that point they could consider the night a total failure, because fear attracted more teens looking for a fight like moths to a porch light. Nagai screamed up Route 1 at about 80 miles an hour with a car full of ‘hoods
on his tail. They pursued the Caddy for nearly forty miles and, only then, finally conceded that the money they put on the wrong man that night was money they never would see again. Neither Harris nor Schlegel ever considered taking weapons of their own into bowling alleys after that, because the incident was such an aberration in their experience.
It was also the last Nagai and the boys would ever see of Federal Lanes. It was not, however, the last time a coterie of young gamblers went out looking for action and instead found themselves on the wrong end of a gangster’s weapon. As 1962 drew to a close, one bowling alley in Brooklyn, New York was emerging as a place where the trouble was at least as plentiful as the treasure. Those who walked the precarious line between the two had stories to tell for the rest of their lives.
B
y 1963, the Brooklyn action bowling scene swirled with rumors about gangsters who packed heat, shylocks who had ways of making sure you did not forget the debt you owed, and con artists who swindled the wrong crowd. Rumor and reality rarely make good bedfellows, of course; most action bowlers who went fishing in Brooklyn made it back home no worse for wear. Others, however, headed home with tales to tell and never dared set foot in the Brooklyn action again. But the promise of a big score overruled any fear the gamblers felt as they headed to Brooklyn for a night of action. Most of the time, they found that action at a place called Avenue M Bowl.
An imposing but otherwise unremarkable edifice, Avenue M Bowl was a two-story bowling alley with lockers and a lounge upstairs. The building stretched from McDonald Avenue to East 2nd Street on Avenue M in Brooklyn, just
beside the elevated subway. The owner, Howie Noble, had a face so gnarled with pockmarks that most knew him by his nickname, “Fish Face,” an appropriate moniker given his famous tuna sandwiches served at the lunch counter. Served on thick slices of New York deli rye with chips and a Coke for $0.50, the tuna salad contributed to Fish Face’s reputation as one of the cheapest guys in town. Patrons suspected that the tuna, tasty as it was, consisted largely of a lower-grade fish called bonito.
The building itself served as the most vivid illustration of Fish Face’s frugality. The joyless monotony of its brick exterior, void of even the slightest decorative flourish, amplified the endlessness of its expanse from McDonald Avenue to East 2nd. There was not much more to see inside, where a yawning stretch of blank, white walls deadened the decor. Many bowling alleys display trophy cases, wall murals, plaques, or scoreboards honoring the highest scores ever bowled there. The interior of Avenue M Bowl, however, betrayed a ruthless opposition to such indulgences. Indulgences, after all, cost money, and Fish Face preferred to keep his money where he liked it best—in his pocket. But if the ambiance lacked distinction, the clientele most definitely did not. Avenue M Bowl housed one of the most eclectic collections of characters the action bowling scene ever assembled under one roof, and it was the locus of some of the most unforgettable drama in action bowling history.
Fish Face may have been cheap, but the man knew how to make a buck. Avenue M Bowl, like many New York City bowling alleys at the time, was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fish Face always made a killing on Sunday afternoons, when it seemed as if every family within five miles took their kids out for a few games, and bowling leagues packed the alley most evenings. Late at night, when league
bowlers headed home and families had long ago put their kids to bed, the place struggled to rent out a lane or two at a time. Fish Face was not the only proprietor struggling to rent out lanes at the time. Like any bubble bound to burst, proprietors were finding by 1963 that the abundance of bowling alleys built after the automatic pinsetter changed the business forever made it difficult to corner the market of bowlers in a given neighborhood. Bowlers were spreading their patronage across a variety of bowling alleys, all of them close to their homes. Business suffered; bowling alleys began to close down. The Brunswick Corporation repossessed nearly 20,000 pinsetters and more than 15,000 lanes between 1962 and 1966. This misfortune soon proved to be action bowling’s gain.
Bubbles may be bound to burst, but good businessmen are bound to hatch good ideas. And Fish Face had an idea. He spotted talent in a couple regulars, a pair of bowlers known as Mac and Stoop who were as renowned for whoring as they were for bowling. When Mac and Stoop were not out on the prowl for women, they were bowling for the money they needed to do so. Fish Face decided to bill them as the most invincible doubles team New York City had ever seen, daring other local players to challenge them to doubles matches for any amount of money they cared to wager. Mac and Stoop happily obliged, taking on challengers after the last leagues concluded, at about midnight or one in the morning. Soon, word on the street had it that there was this place in Brooklyn where a couple of wise guys thought no one could beat them. That was a surefire way to attract many more wise guys, Fish Face soon discovered. And each of them, of course, ranked his ability at least as highly as Mac and Stoop ranked theirs.
Some of the guys who showed up to challenge them matched Fish Face’s nickname with monikers of their own, names like
Bernie Bananas or Freddy the Ox, who owed his nickname to the 6’4” frame into which he stuffed his prodigious girth; or Joe The Kangaroo, who took a three-step approach and then hopped around the approach on one leg after each shot.
One night an action bowler from Brooklyn named Johnny Petraglia was watching Joe the Kangaroo bowl a guy called Frankie the Leaper. They both averaged around 130. Johnny watched them throw some practice shots before the match, Joe hopping around in circles and Frankie falling into a push-up position after each shot and leaping back up to his feet. That was just how Joe and Frankie went about things on the lanes. Nobody asked why; they just gave it a name. There was no eccentricity a good name couldn’t manage.
Then Johnny heard some gambler say, “I think I’ll bet on the Kangaroo tonight. He looks lined up.”
The gambler was dead serious. Johnny laughed hard enough to keep laughing for about a week.
But sometimes the real names were just as inimitable, names that evoked visions of murderers convening in alleyways to determine whose bed would receive the next severed horse head: Sis Montovani, Doc Iandoli, Nunzio Morra, Tony Riccobono. Two of the era’s greatest characters comprised a fearsome doubles team known as Fats and Deacon. They were Fats Carozza and Deacon Deconza, the ones who bowled Ernie Schlegel and Johnny Campbell to a bloody draw in a match that began at dusk and ended at dawn. Those were the days before Schlegel had to look for action outside New York because he ran out of willing challengers back home. Schlegel encountered many other characters then, but none of them blasted the pins more emphatically than the Ox, and Fish Face wanted to capitalize on that.
Fish Face only meant to drum up a little more late-night business. He would soon go down as one of the pioneers of
action bowling. By 1963, Avenue M Bowl was attracting the greatest action bowlers from New York City and beyond. They came from all five boroughs. They came from Connecticut. They came from Long Island. They came from New Jersey. They came from Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston. They came from everywhere. From custodians to criminals, bankers to bakers, superintendents to salesmen, they came from every station in life in pursuit of the same thing: the rush of adrenaline that promised to come with the next big bet. Gambling, it seemed, was the one unifying passion that dissolved any differences of status or class that resumed the moment they walked out the doors at dawn.
Legions of shouting gamblers waved fistfuls of money at scorekeepers and matchmakers from coast to coast, betting on anything that was betable. Kids flipped coins for money at the lunch counter. Gamblers crowded the locker room with games of craps and cards, following fights and races. And cigar smoke and salty banter thickened the air in the lounge upstairs, where gangsters and shylocks engaged in a number of illicit activities. Those activities included, in no particular order: drinking, cavorting with the revolving door of beautiful women attracted to all that power and money, negotiating loans with dead-broke gamblers who swore they had a fish in their sights, or plotting the demise of other dead-broke gamblers whose debts had grown to such a size that they soon may be just plain dead.
Taking loans you could not repay from the kind of people who made you regret it was only one way gambling could kill you. Sometimes the debauchery at Avenue M Bowl made its way across the street to Danny’s Luncheonette, where one day a married salesman who frequented the bowling alley on his off time bet another guy named Paul that he could drink a fifth of scotch straight down. Paul told him he was nuts, so
the salesman walked Paul to a nearby liquor store and showed him how real men drank. He drank a fifth of scotch straight down for $50, a lot of money back then. It was the final demonstration of machismo he ever performed. Walking toward East 2nd Street on his way home, he promptly dropped dead in the street.