Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (8 page)

Schlegel loved seeing guys like Richie walk in after a night of big wins at the horse track because he came with loaded pockets and an unthinking willingness to throw all that money down on a match. Making money was not the point for guys like Richie. The point was making enough money to place the kind of bets that made grown men quiver. Schlegel knew that Richie was one of a few action bowlers who could beat him. He also knew that Richie may have been the better bowler some nights, but he was never the smarter bowler. Schlegel was a hustler, the kind of gambler who only bowled when he knew he had the upper hand. He knew when to bet and when to quit. He knew what amount of money to wager in a given situation and why. He knew numbers and scenarios the way a horse-race handicapper knows the names and shortcomings of jockeys. He knew when to bowl his best and when to bowl just good enough to win—just good enough, that is, to keep the other guy thinking he might have a chance if he kept trying. Richie had talent, but his thirst for gambling would always give Schlegel the upper hand.

Like those wise guys who showed up at Avenue M Bowl to seize the largesse that came with beating Mac and Stoop at their home house, sometimes Schlegel could not pass up the chance to go home with Richie’s pony winnings. Some nights it worked; other times, not so much. That is how it went when you bowled Richie Hornreich. Richie was never interested in the nuances of hustling; he was interested in bowling his best at all times, no matter the opponent or the situation. If you were good enough, Richie thought, then place your bet and take your shot. For a bowler of Schlegel’s caliber, it was always
worth a shot—especially when Richie came back grinning from the horse track.

Looking at the other “team” that fateful night, the opportunity to bowl in a place where no one had any clue of his talent, and to partner with one of the greatest action bowlers in the world in the meantime, proved too tempting for McGrath to resist. He took Johnny up on the offer, and off to Avenue M Bowl they went. The thought would soon occur to them that it might be the last trip they would make in this world.

That night, an Avenue M regular challenged Richie to a singles match, and Richie promptly accepted. A loan shark got wind of the match and figured he would bet on bowling the way he bet on the ponies: Why put your money on the favorite when you can put it on the underdog and count on an upset? Several hundred dollars down into the match, the loan shark found, like so many before him, that he had bed against a guy who did not lose. Hornreich’s opponent kept at it for a while but eventually called it quits. The Horn was just too good. And that was when the loan shark let the gun in his waistband help everyone understand how he felt about that.

“What d’ya mean, ya quit?” the shark said before taking a bowling ball in his hands, standing before the front doors of the place, and gently suggesting that the action continue.

“Nobody leaves this building until that guy bowls one more game,” he said, the bowling ball clutched in one hand by his side.

“Take it easy, take it easy,” someone from the loan shark’s posse advised.

Those were the evening’s final words of reason. The shark dropped the ball and raised a gun.

McGrath, seated within terrifying proximity to the shark and his gun, began slinking away, seat by seat, until he reached the other end of the bowling alley and tried to figure out a way to
climb inside the wall. All those rumors Johnny told him were not true about Brooklyn had turned out to be truer than he had imagined. This would be one of those nights when rumor and reality got a little too cozy with one another. Hopefully, it would also be a night McGrath would live to tell about. Right now, he was not so sure.

The kids bowled another game, all right—a couple of terrified 120s riddled with open frames as they attempted to master the underappreciated skill of bowling while simultaneously pissing themselves.

“Ya little prick,” Black Sam’s bodyguard told the shark, shoving the mouth of a gun in the back of his head. “For what you did to those kids, I should take that gun and shove it up your ass.”

The bodyguard turned to Black Sam and asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Just give me the piece,” Black Sam advised before looking up at the shark and taking his gun. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

“You said we were gonna be safe,” McGrath squeaked on the way home from the back of Black Sam’s Cadillac. “I will never come back here again.”

Black Sam turned to McGrath, his bodyguard behind the wheel.

“If you open your mouth again, I’ll leave you out in the street right here and you’ll
really
see what it’s like!”

It was four
A.M.
in a part of town where a west-coast kid like Mike McGrath might have looked like food to the locals. He shut his mouth, a precocious act of wisdom to which he probably owed his life.

Sadly, that sort of wisdom might have helped preserve the life of a local tough guy known as Mattie. Mattie lacked as much in wisdom as he possessed in brawn, and this flaw in his character soon spelled the demise of the action at Avenue
M. Mattie ran with a bike gang out of Coney Island that had a reputation for robbery and the guns and fists they used to carry it out. People knew him as the type of guy who could slap your back and laugh one minute and crush your face with a single blow the next. So when he broke in on a card game at Al Rosa’s apartment one night with a mask and a shotgun looking to clean the place out, nobody uttered a word of protest, even those who knew it was him. The mask could conceal Mattie’s face, but not his voice. He made everyone strip to their bare asses. Then he took their clothes and their money and ran.

But Mattie never did his due diligence about who he came after, and by the end of 1963, he crossed the kind of guy you did not run from: a member of the Gallo gang. Mattie, strung out on drugs and booze, thought it would be a good idea to make fun of Gallo while the gangster had a drink at a local bar. What a big mouth on this guy, Gallo thought. Gallo was the kind of guy who knew how to take care of people with big mouths. One night two Cadillacs pulled up to the bowling alley. Four guys in suits got out and went looking for Mattie. They found him, of course, in the lounge upstairs. They asked him to step outside. It was the kind of question that Mattie always eagerly answered in the affirmative to ensure everyone understood he feared no one. It was the last question he would answer in his life. The four gangsters took Mattie out into the street and each fired one bullet into his mouth.
This is what we do with guys who have big mouths
, their action seemed to say.

The cops heard that message as loudly as anyone and circled the premises for weeks. Not surprisingly, the proximity to police officers made underage gamblers uneasy, and soon the gambling den that originated with Fish Face and his bait, Mac and Stoop, returned to the days of hushed nights and
slow business. As would be the case with many bowling alleys that became hotbeds of action bowling, the Mattie incident ensured that the action at Avenue M Bowl died just as it seemed to have reached its zenith. The circus that was action bowling needed a new home. It would be no time at all before it found one.

3

CENTRAL

T
he circus moved to a place where even the street names had guns in them. Gun Post Lanes was on East Gun Hill Road in the Bronx. A huge expanse of French windows flanked the front doors, making it impossible to conceal the debauchery within. This architectural quirk would soon become the source of yet another upheaval in the action bowling scene. Gun Post was a two-story bowling alley with forty-eight lanes and a manager everybody called “Skee,” a guy who possessed the same acumen for promotion that made Fish Face a genius. Skee had come up with a game he called “Boomerang” in which bowlers would toss some money into a pot, throw one frame on each of twelve lanes, and the top two or three bowlers would divide the cash. Then they would return to the first pair of lanes and do it again. As entries went up, so did the money. Soon, the big boys started coming around. Saturday nights at Gun Post saw action on every pair of lanes,
upstairs and down, beginning at 1
A.M.
and persisting through dawn. The carpets gave off a reek of gangsters’ cigars as gamblers penciled their debts into the score table from one end of the alley to the other, every lane crowded with a shouting rush of gamblers looking to get their bets in.

The craps games that had flourished around the lockers at Avenue M now found their home in the men’s restroom at Gun Post. Gamblers who came to the party a bit late and found the men’s room filled to capacity with craps players took the action to the ladies’ room instead. So acute was their addiction to gambling, in fact, that one bowler known as “Psycho Dave” once arrived directly from a wedding and bowled in his tux. Another bowler in his early twenties, Mike Ginsberg, was surprised when his parents appeared just after dawn, imploring him to leave because they had a family road trip to get on with. Ginsberg refused. So his father muttered something about the bums he kept for company, then went back out to the car, dumped Ginsberg’s clothes into the street, and left him behind.

The whole cast of characters the cops scared away from Avenue M made Gun Post their new haunt. Iggy Russo with his lead-filled bowling pins and his clown act. The Kangaroo and The Leaper. Freddy the Ox. But Gun Post saw the emergence of new names, too, such as One Finger Benny, who could bowl 180 using just one finger in a lighter bowling ball—eight pounds—and usually made money doing it; Ira “The Whale” Katz, as famous for his girth as Freddy The Ox; or Bobby Pancakes who, rumor had it, was afflicted with an unending appetite for pancakes. Others wore their jobs like nametags. There was Mike the Cab Driver, Tony the Milkman, Morris the Mailman, or Bill “Pepsi” Vanacore, who worked for the Pepsi-Cola company.

The names may have sounded funny to some people, but few would dare laugh, especially not a bowler known as
“Goldfinger,” who earned his Bond villain-esque name in a way Bond himself would have relished. Goldfinger got his nickname because of the bowling ball he used. Brunswick, one of the main manufacturers of bowling balls, was making a series of balls called “Crown Jewels.” One, called the “Gold Crown Jewel,” was flecked with flakes of gold. Some thought it was real gold, while others insisted the flecks were nothing more than sequins or glittery, plastic specks. That was Goldfinger’s ball of choice, and he made enough money with it to justify the extravagance. Unlike most action bowlers, who were natives of New York City or New England, Goldfinger actually lived in Florida. So talented a hustler was Goldfinger that he made enough to hustle for a few days throughout the five boroughs and then buy himself a plane ticket back to Florida. Then he would board a plane a few weeks later and head up to New York to do it again.

Goldfinger was so good, in fact, that even Ernie Schlegel learned a few tips from the man. One night, Schlegel was bowling Bill Daley, who was as renowned for his bowling ability as he was for his cunning as a gambler. Daley drubbed Schlegel for the first three games. Schlegel’s backers started getting worried. Then Schlegel remembered something. He had heard that Goldfinger had beaten Daley at this same bowling alley weeks earlier, and he knew also that the only line Goldfinger could play on the lane with any success was the 10 board or the second arrow, a portion of the lane known to bowlers colloquially as “the track.” That part of the lane became known as “the track” because it is a part of the lane most right-handed bowlers commonly play. Consequently, the track becomes worn down over time, causing the oil there to dry up or become depleted more quickly than on any other part of the lane. Just as a guy with a snow shovel digs a path from the front door of his house out to the street in a winter storm,
a bowling ball carves a path through the oil on the lane that provides a reliable avenue to the pocket. Ridges of oil to the left and right of the track essentially cradle the ball and guide it toward the pocket as it proceeds down the lane. Bowlers who speak of “playing the track” mean they are taking advantage of this quirk in the lane conditions. The track can enable a capable bowler to strike at will for hours on end.