a gambling instinct. He was particularly close to Masterson. Bat—or Bartholomew, as his mother would have preferred he be called—was a cardsharp gunman of the mythic West, a referee of dubious prizefights and, when he ran out of all those high-class options, a journalist. As for Alfred Runyan, he was a whiskey-wet hack and born liar, an adventurer of the first order who loved the sound of his tales as much as the substance. His famous son, Damon, worked words for a living to rather more lucrative effect. He was a storyteller who bothered not a lot with such fiddling details as the spelling of his surname (he stuck with Runyon after a newspaper got it wrong in his early days) and would go on to bestow on his part of the twentieth century a narrative of consistent unreliability. In young Runyon's genes were the seeds of romance and fantasy. And among the many myths he left us was one for which we should all be grateful: Manhattan.
All in all, you'd prefer to believe Runyon's stories than not. Masterson—for whom the cards fell kindly through the dexterity of his mind and fingers—knew both father and son and liked both, but he was in awe of Runyon the younger, who aspired to be remembered as America's twentieth-century reincarnation of Mark Twain. Masterson believed what Runyon said: that life was mainly 6-5 against, that the little guy always had it tough.
They were all addicted to aphorisms.
“There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I'll swear I can't see it that way.”
Those were the words stuck on a slip of copy paper in Masterson's typewriter when they found him dead at his desk on the evening of Tuesday, October 25, 1921, in the offices of the New York Morning Telegraph.
In all likelihood, Masterson was down at the Pioneer Sporting Club earlier that evening to watch Gene Tunney stop Wolf Larsen in seven. If he were not, Runyon would have had him ringside in any account he wrote. Runyon loved Bat Masterson and everything anarchic and wild he stood for. Years afterward, he would resurrect his friend as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls.
Runyon and Masterson are from long ago but, without them, and scores of like-minded characters, the landscape inhabited by those who followed them would have been a rather dull place.
In the fight game, the game of six degrees of separation is a fruitful exercise. Sometimes you don't get to six. It goes like this: Masterson was on hand at several of the major fights of his time, having an intimate association with fighters, managers, and promoters whose legacy ran through the business for much of the twentieth century. The man who'd stood side by side with Wyatt Earp in Dodge City and Tombstone (although he missed the infamous Gunfight at the OK Corral) went on to cement a reputation as one of the Wild West's legendary enforcers.
Runyon, besides sitting at the shoulder of boxing's premier entrepreneurs, such as Rickard and Kearns, not to mention all the great and mediocre fighters of his day, helped create the cartel at Madison Square Garden (with the help of his stinkingly rich publishing boss William Randolph Hearst) that would make the Mob's grip on boxing health-threateningly strong. And Jacobs, the urchin from the West Side, was right in the thick of it with all of them.
Into this rich mix came men of suitably dubious character. You can imagine they were not turned away. This was a milieu that relied on a certain degree of laxity in morals. And then, the party crashers got a helpful little nudge they could hardly believe.
How the Mob got into an unchallengeable position of power in boxing from the 1920s until at least 1960 can be laid at the door of two well-meaning fools from America's Midwest. Andrew John Volstead was a Republican lawyer from the hamlet of Granite Falls, Minnesota, and Wayne Wheeler, of little Brookfield, Ohio, was a stiff-necked, teetotal hick who also went into law and was behind the hugely influential Anti-Saloon League.
In 1920, Volstead, advised by Wheeler, had voted in the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, banning the manufacture and consumption of any drink containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol. In New York, authorities closed down 15,000 licensed premises. Before they had poured the booze in the Hudson, 30,000 speakeasies had opened their hidden doors. Within five years, that number had grown to at least 100,000.
And still fans thronged to the Garden, juiced up illegally and not giving a damn.
Crime, meanwhile, outpaced the zeal of the crime busters chasing down illegal booze. And there to cash in were gangsters who now had a sympathetic constituency of millions—ordinary, thirsty citizens who came to view the police with growing irreverence.
“The national prohibition of alcohol—the ‘noble experiment’—was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America,” wrote the American economist Mark Thornton.
Instead, it spawned the most complete expansion of organized gangsterism the world has ever seen. Prohibition gave birth to the Mob as we know it. It changed the moral landscape forever. Legal jobs disappeared. Decent people were driven to crime. What was considered wrong once became the norm. Stealing, casual violence, and deceit spread. And, most tellingly, so lucrative was bootlegging, the preserve of the established mobsters, that they turned themselves into businesses. This was the genesis of organized crime in America. The phenomenon grew with names attached: the Syndicate, the Outfit, and, chillingly, their dedicated killing unit, Murder Inc.
Variously, the virus-strength spread of brilliantly marshalled illegality has been seen as the work of the Mafia, as well as the myriad ethnic gangs in ghettos all over the country. Really, they should share the credit with Volstead, Wheeler, and the boneheaded politicians who voted for Prohibition. But for their puritanical idiocy, we might never have heard of such successful criminals as Al Capone, Bugs Moran, and the O'Bannions.
It's hard to comprehend the impact of this legislation from a distance—except by the startling statistics: murders and serious assault went up by 13 percent; lesser crimes increased by 9 percent; prisons bulged by an extraordinary 561 percent.
So, sloshed and wild, New York, indeed all of America, danced the Charleston. They hung from the wings of biplanes that flew over Manhattan. They believed for a while in their own immortality. It was a decade made for Gatsby and excess, all the time pregnant with the certainty of retribution and collapse.
The working classes made heroes of the bootleggers. The Mob seized their opportunity and established such underground hegemony they were virtually untouchable. Americans did not believe, for a variety of reasons (fear, complacency, convenience), that there was anything in it for them to snitch on the criminals who sold them their rum and beer.
A far greater ill visited upon society than sly drinking was the spread of the protection rackets, which instilled fear even in men of physical courage. Some of those boxed for a living, but their fists were useless against the hoodlums who raked the streets of New York and other cities with submachine guns from the safety of their passing Model T Fords.
The lotus-eaters were being driven underground, into the speakeasies, dealing in the dark. Then, at the very time the reactionaries were winning socially, boxing, of all sports, decided to reach for respectability.
Fist fighting in all its forms had, since Georgian days, struggled to stay a step ahead of the law. The National Sporting Club, formed in 1881, regarded itself as boxing's gatekeeper, regulating titles and weights. But boxing grew with such speed after World War I that no private members’ club in London was going to contain the ambitions of the trade's rising entrepreneurs in New York.
On the face of it, the urge to cleanse seemed to be spreading from the bars to the ring. The New York State Athletic Commission was formed in 1920 to oversee the Walker Law, a piece of legislation that entertained professional fighting as long as it subscribed to the law's jurisdiction of the commission. In time, the NYSAC established influence over similar organizations in other states—and the world.
Inevitably, however, there were splits from the very start. In 1921, the rest of fighting America set up the National Boxing Association. Anarchy was up and running.
This served only to