Frankie & Jimmie

Once upon a time, there was a boxing manager who was so honest that to keep himself in coffee and cakes he also had to run a gymnasium that catered to hopeful fist fighters. (No spitting on the floor, put cigar butts in cuspidors.) There he developed a surefire system for picking winners. "Their built don't matter so much," Bobby Gleason liked to explain. "What they gotta be if they want to get along in this racket is a little stupid."

Stupid may be a harsh word for the hard-muscled men who get paid for beating each other's brains out for the television audience, but all last month it seemed a mild word indeed for the men who really cash in on the boxing racket. Managers, seconds, two-bit camp followers and big-shot promoters trooped down to the New York State Athletic Commission to put on a command performance for Julius Helfand, New York's crusading new commission chairman, and showed all the symptoms of psychosomatic lockjaw. For sheer, simple-minded effrontery, there had been nothing like it since 1951, when Gambler Frank Costello told Senator Estes Kefauver: "I want to testify truthfully and my mind don't function."

No Address. Commissioner Helfand could hardly have been surprised. A onetime racket-busting assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, he has been around long enough to know that buying a piece of a fighter is one sure way to buy underworld class--it gives a guy the taint of respectability. So when Helfand tried to find out why a slick young welterweight named Vince Martinez was getting the brushoff from matchmakers, it was not exactly news that witnesses began to mumble about a Murder Inc. alumnus named Frankie Carbo.

Everybody knew Frankie--in a way. James D. Norris, millionaire president of the International Boxing Club--which is the heart, pocketbook and sordid soul of American prize fighting--had known him for 20 years. Used to dunk doughnuts with him, as a matter of fact. What did Frankie do for a living? Well, Jim Norris wouldn't know about that. They were just sort of social friends.

Nobody else knew much about Carbo, either. Such assorted characters as Hymie ("The Mink'') Wallman and Willie ("The Undertaker") Ketchum, a sullen pair of part-time managers, had heard that Frankie was interested in boxing--but never from Frankie, of course. Never nothing from Frankie. Wallman, who had invited Carbo to each of his three daughters' weddings, did not even know his friend's address. How were the invitations delivered? Well, Frankie and The Mink just happened to "bunk" into each other.

No Change. It was a frustrating performance, but Helfand piled up enough points to feel justified in setting down "Honest" Bill Daly, the manager who collaborated with the IBC in giving Vince Martinez a rough deal. Last week Helfand suspended his hearings and sailed for Europe. From Jacobs Beach to The Bronx, he left behind a mob of worried wise guys, convinced that this boxing commissioner meant business. They would have to mend their ways -- at least for a while -- or hang up their gloves. But there was no hope for any real change. By the nature of things, professional boxing was still the racket in which it is necessary to be a little stupid -- and more than a little forgetful, especially on the witness stand.

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