Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (6 page)

But risking your life to make good on a bet was no unusual thing. One day somebody bet a gambler named John McNichols that he could not swim across the Hudson River. McNichols swam it one way. Then the guy bet him he could not swim back, and McNichols, unable to resist, took him up on that bet too. He never made it.

If the gambling did not kill you, sometimes it made you wish it had. Al Rosa was a married twenty-something guy who made more money than he needed by working as a fur cutter. When he moved with his wife to an apartment across the street from Avenue M Bowl, he found just the place for people who made more money than they needed and had an itch to spend it. He also found a place where the vultures of action bowling laid in wait for the uninitiated, and Rosa definitely was among the uninitiated. One such vulture was Bernie Bananas, a fifteen-year-old Jewish kid with glasses and good grades who spent his time away from the lanes with his face in a book. Once Bernie found Avenue M Bowl, though, he was spending a lot more time rolling on the lanes than he was spending with his books. No book or classroom possibly could have furnished Bernie with the street wisdom he gleaned at Avenue M—wisdom he used to victimize Rosa.

Rosa got a taste of action at Avenue M Bowl that kept him coming back every payday. Bernie was as adept at spotting fish as any other action bowler, and was reeling Rosa in. He would clean Rosa out of his paycheck every time. Then he would bowl Rosa yet another match on credit so Rosa would have
to pay up the next time he got his paycheck. Whenever Rosa walked into Avenue M Bowl it was like a drunk walking in to tend bar. He had to bowl Bernie again, despite the abundant evidence that he had no chance. Word on the street was that Rosa’s taste for the action cost him his job and, ultimately, his wife. Some might say Bernie ruined him; others might say Rosa ruined himself. Regardless of how Rosa’s paycheck fell into Bernie’s hands or what it cost him in things far more lasting than money, the teenaged Bernie was happy to count his cash and keep it coming. Bernie was a thin rung shy of the upper-echelon of great bowlers. Only a handful of bowlers attained those heights, but Bernie still averaged around 195. His peers knew him for a strange approach in which he looked like some bird descending out of the sky to land on the foul line as he made his shot. But Bernie did not need to be great, even though he was close to it. He just needed to know when he was facing inferior talent—better yet, inferior talent with a loose wallet. That helped Bernie accomplish two things: He did not have to bowl exceptionally well to win; and by not bowling exceptionally well, he preserved the image of a guy who could be beaten. A guy like that could always find willing challengers. With all the bowling practice Rosa had given Bernie by then, his game was more refined than ever, further lessening what slight chance of winning Rosa had.

To another enterprising teenager living on 57th Street and 20th Avenue in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, sneaking out to Avenue M Bowl despite a strict father’s curfew seemed like a perfectly good reason to risk his life. Fifteen-year-old Clifford Nordquist woke up at three
A.M.
in an anxious sweat, dreaming of the legends he heard about all day at Avenue M Bowl but had never seen for himself. By then, Nordquist was spending so much time at Avenue M Bowl that the place had become his second home. The old timers who kept their eyes
on the kid meant only to entertain him with their stories of what they had seen the night before. But to Nordquist, those stories felt more like torture. His father’s ten
P.M.
curfew fell far too early for him to glimpse the gamblers, gangsters, and shylocks who filled Fish Face’s coffers while the rest of Brooklyn slept. Finally, Nordquist had had enough. He stuffed his blanket with pillows in the hope that it might be enough to allay his father’s suspicions. Just in case, he also left a bullshit note about leaving early to go fishing with buddies. Then he opened the window of his second-floor bedroom, lunged from the sill to the peach tree in the yard, climbed down the tree, and walked the half-mile to Avenue M Bowl in the middle of the night.

The sight he beheld as he neared the corner of Avenue M and McDonald was one he would never forget: Rows of pricey cars, double- and triple-parked, circled the block that by day had tractor trucks and beat-up clunkers at the curb. Flood lights over the front entrance cast a glowing spotlight on a gaggle of gamblers loitering outside, the deafening rattle of the elevated subway strung along McDonald Avenue intruding on their conversation. As Nordquist made his way inside, he found every one of the alley’s twenty-eight lanes teeming with action—bowlers and gamblers shouting bets and challenges from one end of the place to the other. The place was so thick with people he could hardly make his way through the crowd. It was official: Fish Face had turned those sleepy late nights at Avenue M Bowl into a midnight carnival that seemed to attract every degenerate within a thousand-mile radius.

No one who frequented Avenue M Bowl rivaled the degeneracy of a hustler known as Iggy Russo. Most action bowlers were kids in their late teens or early 20s, but Russo was different. He was older, a guy in his middle forties with a wife,
kids and a day job. Given Russo’s many rumored transgressions against men who made a hobby of lodging bullets in the temples of those who crossed them, everyone expected Iggy to be found in the Hudson River someday with a boulder tethered to his ankle and a skull freckled with bullet holes. And there was something else everybody knew about Russo: The man never knew a day in his life when he felt the slightest bit of shame—a flaw in his character to which he owed his improbable survival.

Russo contrived the appearance of a no-talent noodle begging to be fleeced of his lunch money. He dressed like a clown, rolling the legs of his pants up to his knees to expose a pair of plaid socks. He wore his black hair closely cropped, and sported a thick pair of glasses and occasionally a duckbill cap. He spoke in a squeaky falsetto many would remember as his most bizarre idiosyncrasy. His reputation as a shyster was so renowned that some suspected the falsetto, too, was part of his act. The standard bowling ball most men used weighed sixteen pounds, as lighter balls were considered to be inferior because they provided less hitting power than a ball of maximum weight. But Russo drove up with a trunk full of balls and pins loaded with lead that made them harder to knock down, just as John Vargo did with the pins in his tournament to make conditions more challenging. If you wanted to bowl Russo for any amount of money, you accepted his props as part of the deal. You played by Russo’s rules.

Russo was not fooling those in the know, however. The good bowlers knew Russo had far more talent than he let on. On a Friday night in 1958, Russo showed up at another Brooklyn bowling alley called Park Circle Lanes, got on the microphone, and challenged anyone in the place to a match. Any bowler with common sense knew that somebody who had the balls to walk into a Brooklyn bowling alley and take on the house had
some serious game; no one took him up on his offer. Russo, as always, was there to make money, not to cater to a house full of cowards. So, lacking any takers for a head to head match, he found someone who would take the bet of $100 that he could bowl 120 on the nose. Russo promptly strung together five consecutive strikes in the first five frames—which added up to a total score of 120. A strike is ten points plus the next two balls. So a game that begins with five strikes followed by nothing but gutter balls, which are worth zero points, adds up to thirty points in the first frame, sixty in the second, ninety in the third, one-hundred-and-ten in the fourth and one-hundred-and-twenty in the fifth. No one needed to explain the math to Russo. If the man knew anything, he knew how to keep score in a game of bowling. The other thing he knew was that he could walk into a bowling alley and string together five strikes at will. But that was a flourish of ability he preferred to exhibit only before an audience of disbelievers who paid in cash. He swiped his C-note from the score table and asked his victim if he cared to do any further business.

By the time Russo made Avenue M Bowl the locus of his machinations, he learned that there was a lot more money in hustling than there was in stunning the unsuspecting with his skill. Why bother showing them how good you were if no one dared to bowl you? Russo needed to feign vulnerability; he needed to play that game Ernie Schlegel called “the spider and the fly.” Russo would prove to be one of the city’s most able spiders. He became a “dumper”—the epithet reserved for bowlers who secretly bet against themselves and then bowled badly on purpose to score some easy dough. Russo hardly was the only dumper in the action bowling scene; he just happened to be the most brazen and notorious of them all. The specter of dumpers soon would imperil action bowling as it was known, as bowlers tired of trying to discern between
gamblers and crooks. If your opponent missed a spare, you wanted to believe he missed it because he threw an errant shot, not because he secretly was scheming to bowl badly on purpose for his own personal gain. You wanted to believe that the difference between an action match and a boxing match in the 1960s was that the action match was not fixed. As dumpers eroded that notion, they eroded an era. Even Ernie Schlegel regarded Russo as a bad apple that threatened to ruin the batch, the kind of con man who might have driven away many fish who thought, thanks to Russo’s shenanigans, that the whole action bowling scene was rigged. But on one night in particular—the night witnesses would tell about for the rest of their lives—Russo, for once, proved too smart for his own good.

Russo was locked in a match against a bowler named Pat Feely, who also was known to dump matches. Russo, as usual, had bet against himself and was bowling as badly as he possibly could. He had to bowl particularly poorly on this occasion, though, because Feely, unbeknownst to Russo, happened to be betting against himself as well. By the 10th frame, Russo was leading by a score of 156-155, which was exceptionally low for bowlers of their well-known talent level. Russo and Feely each had their backer, guys who funded the match with their own stolen cash. Most backers fit the same profile: tobacco-stained fingers the size of meat hooks; huge, gnarled noses that looked like tubas; massive, balding heads of silver hair, and suits tailored so expertly they looked like a layer of skin. Their expressions remained as unsmiling in times of fortune as they did in times when they had to rain unspeakable harm on enemies and debtors. Most people thought they were in the mob. But if they ever considered making that suspicion known to others, they usually thought better about it. Backers prowled the action bowling scene
for good bowlers to bet on and, if they were as good as they thought they were, ride them to riches. With each backer betting on the other guy to win the match between Russo and Feely, and with the scores as miserable as they were, the backers started to suspect foul play.

The problem for Russo and Feely was that most backers—especially those at Avenue M Bowl—were the kind who brought guns to the party.

Russo got up in the 10th frame and left the 2-4-5 on his first shot. That spare combination, a cluster of pins in the left half of the rack, is one of the most common leaves for a right-handed player, and it often is the result of what bowlers call a “light” hit. The ten pins in bowling are arranged in four rows, with the headpin having the first row to itself. The headpin, or 1 pin, is followed by a row of two pins, the 2 and 3. That is followed by a row of three pins, the 4, 5 and 6, which is followed by the final row of pins in the back of the rack, the 7, 8, 9 and 10. The addition of one pin per row allows the rack of pins to be arranged in its triangular shape. When a right-handed player properly strikes the area between the 1 and 3 pins known as the “pocket,” the ball itself actually only collides with four of the ten pins in the rack—the 1 pin, the 3 pin, the 5 pin, and the 9 pin. Each of those collisions sets the rest of the strike in motion. The 1 pin takes out the 2, 4, and 7 pins; the 3 pin takes out the 6 and 10 pins; the 5 pin takes out the 8 pin and the ball itself takes care of the 9 pin.

If a right-handed bowler throws the ball too hard or too far right of the intended target, then the ball either will skid too long down the lane and get into a roll too late, or it will be forced to cross more boards than it can cover on its way back to the pocket. The variable that causes the ball to skid through the front part of the lane is the heavier application of oil there, which helps protect the surface of the lane from the bruising it
takes. Additionally, the amount and distribution of oil also can vary the difficulty of the game. Lanes with less oil in the front of the lane will cause the ball to hook sooner and lose energy by the time it nears the pins, while lanes with more oil in the front of the lane have precisely the opposite effect. The amount of oil applied to the lane diminishes the farther it gets from the foul line as friction intensifies between the bowling ball and the lane surface. These forces cause the ball to stop skidding and get into a roll as friction slows its forward speed and allows it to grip the lane surface. Players who naturally throw the ball harder or straighter might prefer “drier” conditions—lanes with less oil on them. Bowlers who throw the ball more slowly or hook the ball especially will appreciate more oil in the front part of the lane and even more oil down-lane as well.

On a spare leave such as the 2-4-5, the ball has come up just a bit shy of the pocket, or “light,” sending the 1 pin twirling around the 2 and 4 and into the left gutter, where it slaps out the 7 pin on its way into the pit. The resulting pin action still allows for the 3, 6, 8, 9, and 10 pins to fall, leaving the 2, 4, and 5 pins remaining. The 2-4-5 is not just one of the most common spare leaves for right-handed bowlers; it also is one of the easiest to pick up for a player of Russo’s ability, and everybody in the bowling alley knew it.

Russo had made a lot of mistakes over the years, but leaving an easily makeable spare standing in the 10th frame of this particular match would soon prove to be the biggest mistake of them all. No amount of effort to portray himself as just another fish would convince those who knew better that he was anything less than one of New York City’s most accurate bowlers. None of them would believe it if Russo whiffed this spare. One of the side games Russo most enjoyed, in fact, was a game known as “low ball.” It involved trying to bowl the lowest score on purpose, but you had to hit at least one pin on every
shot. If you threw a gutter ball, it counted as a strike. Such was Russo’s accuracy that he almost always bowled a 20, hitting just one corner pin—the 10 pin or the 7 pin—on each shot without touching any other pin on the deck. That required a level of skill envied even by the greatest bowlers who ever lived.