Frankie
DePaula’s match up with Bob Foster, the light heavyweight champion of the world
was perhaps the most improbable match up between a club fighter and dominant
world champion until, well, Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed. (I will conveniently
ignore ‘The Bayonne Bleeder’s’ bout with ‘The Louisville Lip’.) Just two years
earlier, at the beginning of 1967, Frankie had been classified as a ‘Class D’
Band fighter by boxing’s ‘Bible’, The Ring, and appeared content and
comfortable with his neighbourhood celebrity status. Fighting –in the ring that
is- was something he did when he needed a few extra bucks.
Then
Frankie’s manager Patty Amato dies and Gary Garafola, who ran the Rag Doll Club
where Frankie worked on occasion as a bouncer, becomes his manager. The deal
was this: If Frankie could ‘straighten’ himself out by training harder and
cutting out, or shall we say, cutting down on the booze and chasing the ladies,
Gary would get him fights at the Garden and Frankie could say bye-bye to the
off the beaten track venues in New Jersey and New England that he’d seemingly
settled for.
So while
Frankie almost grudgingly sets about developing a new found work ethic; albeit
that he splashes water from Lincoln Park’s fountain -after hiding in the
bushes- in an attempt to affect a vigorous work out, Garafola and the
curmudgeonly Al Braverman get him the bouts at the Garden. Although he is taken
down by Charlie ‘The Devil’ Green in a brief but memorable shoot-out, there are
impressive wins over Rocky Rivero and ‘Irish’ Jimmy McDermott. His handlers
take a chance and pit him against an aging legend: Dick Tiger. Both are up and
down like yo-yos (two knockdowns apiece) before Tiger wins the decision.
BUT here’s
the funny thing: the bout with Tiger had been announced as an elimination for
the light heavyweight title. What they didn’t tell the people was that the
winner would be eliminated. The Garden decided to match Frankie with the
champion, Bob Foster. This actually made a lot of sense. Tiger had been
brutally mowed down by Foster’s rapier-like combinations the previous May and a
rematch would do scant business.
Frankie on
the other hand would be big business for the Garden. “I’d like to see more of
that Frankie DePaula”, the venerable but shrewd director of boxing at the Garden,
Harry Markson said to his publicity men the day after the fight with Charlie
Green. The merry band of Frankie’s supporters were not limited to the Hudson
County area but had spread to places like Scranton and Philadelphia from where
the Garden would arrange for specially chartered bus loads of support.
The disparity
in experience between Frankie and Foster was palpable. Foster had fine-tuned
his skills during a lengthy period as an amateur and although he didn’t prove
to be adept at handling heavyweights on the occasions he stepped up from his
division, he was already shaping up to be, in the eyes of the scribes, one of
the all-time greats.
Certainly, he
was good enough to be avoided by champions like Willie Pastrano and Jose
Torres. Contrast this with Frankie, by the time of the match no higher than a
Band B fighter. In other words, well outside of the top ten class of
contenders. While Frankie had been the light heavyweight Novice Division Golden
Gloves champion for New York in 1962, he hadn’t had the sort of
‘learning-the-trade’ type amateur background involving successive national and
international competitions. And his professional career had been disrupted by a
spell at the Hudson County jail and was not helped by his many extra-curricular
distractions.
Still, one
thing Frankie had was his knockout power. He could knock anyone dead in the
ring. Frankie of course, had already had possibly a thousand knock outs in and
around his neighbourhood. The plan of attack was to crowd Foster and turn it
into a street brawl and his handlers worked a lot on his psychology by
frequently referring to his prowess as a street fighter.
Of course,
this would not be enough to bridge the gap with a man of Foster’s pedigree and
he appeared to train earnestly at his camp in Grossingers up in the Catskill
Mountains. He was upbeat in his pronouncements in the build-up and confidently
predicted an upset victory in his favour; sort of like the victory his friend
Joe Namath had predicted for the New York Jets in their Inter-Conference
Championship confrontation just days before he would fight Foster.
But it was a
different Frankie who appeared at the weigh-in on the day of the bout. Trainer
Braverman in later years would reveal that Frankie was virtually shitting
himself. The plan according to Braverman was that at his prompt, a squeeze
behind Frankie’s neck, Frankie was to tell Foster: “I’m gonna knock you out you
mutt”. The first squeeze brought about a barely audible mumble from Frankie and
the second one nothing.
The bout
itself brought not just the Jersey rooting section but a host of celebrities
many of who had come to root for Frankie. His friends Frankie Valli and Joe
Namath were ringside as was Frank Sinatra; Hoboken-born but claimed by Jersey
City, Jimmy Rosselli and Lou Monte.
After scoring
a flash –and hotly disputed- knockdown of Foster, Frankie proceeded to hit the
canvas on three occasions. The ‘fight’ was ended after the last one on account
of the Three Knockdown Rule operating in New York State.
While some had
found the making of the bout ‘funny’ in the first place, many more found it
even ‘funnier’ after it had taken place; as Red Smith would write “as in funny
peculiar and funny ha-ha”.
The hints
that ‘funny business’, or more to the point dirty work was at play, began right
after the bout. If boxing in the public’s perception was a murky and tawdry
world inhabited by gangsters and shysters, a cursory look at the handlers of
the participants gave credence at least of the potential for foul play.
Gary Garafola
was a front man for the Mob. The man who ‘shadow managed’ him during his career
as a pro-boxer in the 1950s, James Napoli (AKA ‘Jimmy Nap’), a caporegime in
the Genovese family, actually owned The Rag Doll and by extension Frankie.
Also, in there were the leaders of the Genovese mob based in Hoboken. Foster’s
backers were no choirboys either. Morris ‘Mushkey’ Salow, his manager, was a
loan shark from Washington D.C. and he’d sold a part-interest on Foster to Joe
Nesline, the Mob-czar of the capital city.
No evidence
of collusion between both parties exists. Indeed, a typically fixed bout would
have had the underdog (Frankie) upset the betting favourite (Foster). But what
if the deal was a one-way transaction solely involving Team Frankie? What if
the plan was for Frankie, club fighter no doubt but a resilient type capable of
taking shots, to unexpectedly go down in the first round and some people in the
know bet heavily on this scenario?
This is
precisely what Joe Coffey, part of a joint FBI-NYPD task force that had been
monitoring Napoli, claims to have happened. The bugs he’d planted at a
Manhattan restaurant later on that night picked up Frankie telling Garafola who
had asked him for change to give the hat check girl “I scored today man. All I
got is hundreds”. He hadn’t been to the races that day. His purse money had not
yet been released to him and he’d blown all the money earned from the Dick
Tiger fight at the gambling tables of the Sands Hotel three months earlier.
Not that this
will convince many boxing people. Frankie didn’t have to do a ‘tank job’
because he had simply been overmatched. Sure he might have had a chance with
his phenomenal punching power, but he got the jitters when he knew what he was
up against in Foster and blew his chance.
Stories
abound. But one thing is clear: Frankie would be dead before the end of the
following year. Between the Foster fight and his death would be the indictments
for stealing copper and for perjury in relation to the fight-fixing
allegations. There would be a trial for the alleged hijacking and a suspension
imposed by the New York State Boxing Commission. Finally, there was the
gruesome demise at the Jersey City Medical Center.
Why was
Frankie shot? For his dalliance with the step-daughter of a mafia kingpin? For
giving up information related to the copper heist? For becoming embroiled in a
narcotics deal gone wrong? A combination of the above?
The New York
District Attorney badly wanted Frankie’s testimony and the devise of indicting
him alongside a man like James Napoli while serving as a ploy to get such
testimony, may also have sealed his fate. In the annals of organised crime, the
receipt of an invitation to an interview following a Grand Jury indictment led
to the deaths of many.
Somewhere
deep down inside the dark labyrinth of reasons for Frankie’s shooting lies the
spectre of his match with Bob Foster.
© Adeyinka
Makinde (2009)
Adeyinka
Makinde is the author of Dick Tiger: The
Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal.
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