Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion by Gianmarc Manzione Read Free Book Online

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 ofaction 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, sothe 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.
    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