CHAPTER TWELVE

Sparky and Barney

The pool hall mentioned by Richard Gustadt was in the West Side of Chicago, in a neighborhood known to the locals as Lawndale, situated along a strip that attracted Jewish members of the underworld and teenaged boys, truants, and vagrants who wanted a starter job like running numbers or handing out and collecting football parlays. Alongside the pool hall and boxing club complex was a restaurant frequented by Chicago’s underworld, where perhaps the idea for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was hatched.

The pool hall in question was Davey Miller’s place—Davey Miller the boxing referee, forty-eight years old. Davey’s brother Max was a hoodlum, but Davey was mostly legit. He’d been a tomato-can heavyweight in his youth, but he could still handle himself in a pier-sixer with his decidedly non-Kosher hamlike fists.

Miller had a heroic reputation with the West Side’s Jewish youth. For as long as anyone could remember, he’d been an enemy of anti-Semitism, often flattening the nose of a Polish thug he saw picking on a Jewish kid.

There are many stories about Miller inside the ring, giving pep talks of a sort to boxers who were having their heads handed to them. One wet-behind-the-ears pugilist named Abraham Marovitz, a Twentieth Ward kid who later became a judge, remembered fighting himself into exhaustion in one fight that Miller reffed.

“I said, ‘Mr. Miller, I can’t lift my arms to fight another round,’ ” the future magistrate whined.

“Get in there and fight, you punk,” Miller replied.

As our story begins, Miller had just worked his biggest fight, Joe Louis’s devastation of Harry Thomas in the Chicago Stadium. At the fight’s conclusion, with Thomas taking a snooze and the Brown Bomber standing calmly in a neutral corner, Miller proved he could count to ten with the best of them. Two months later, Louis would fight in New York’s Yankee Stadium in what would be called the Fight of the Century.

Miller’s pool hall was different from many of the hundreds of Chicago’s pool halls in that it had a gambling room upstairs where the poker games ran 24/7.

The widespread belief was that Miller had been in Al Capone’s pocket. If Miller was quick to stop a fight, the hoods in the front row grumbled (quietly) that Scarface must have had money on the winner.

Miller had been considered for the ref job for the Gene Tunney–Jack Dempsey rematch at Soldier Field in Chicago back in 1927 but had been passed over by the Illinois Boxing Commission because of his closeness to Capone. The job instead went to Dave Barry. Boxing historians will recall that the referee played an unfortunate role in that fight. With Tunney winning on points in the seventh round, Dempsey trapped him in a corner and unleashed a vicious combo—right, left, right, left, on the button—that felled Tunney, the first time he’d ever been knocked off his feet. Trouble was, there was a new rule in play. After a knockdown, the count didn’t begin until the standing fighter had retreated to a neutral corner, which Dempsey failed to do. Time passed as Barry reminded Dempsey of the rule and the fighter complied. In the meantime, Tunney’s head was given a chance to clear, and he returned to his feet before completion of the ten-count. With more than 103,000 in attendance, Tunney then defeated Dempsey by unanimous decision. Thus, the fight became known as the “Long Count Fight.” For Davey Miller, not getting the job was a big disappointment, but because of the way things turned out, it might have been a blessing in disguise.

Now, Miller’s pool hall was no Bensinger’s, the roomy billiard parlor on Randolph opposite the palatial Oriental Theatre. Bensinger’s—the inspiration for the 1961 Paul Newman–Jackie Gleason movie The Hustler—was dramatically lit, a place where a crowd might gather just to watch Willie Mosconi work out over a rack or two. There were even separate sections for those who preferred snooker and a row of bowling alleys with spectator seating.

Miller’s lighting was merely dim. The joint wasn’t action free, of course, none of the pool halls in Chicago during the 1930s were, but the stakes were small and the winner of a game of straight pool to one hundred might make enough to fill his flask. It was also a place where you could sit in a folding chair for hours and kibbutz, eventually learning all of the neighborhood’s gossip.

Directly next door was the boxing club that Miller also operated, where kids, many of them still in their teens, honed their pugilistic skills while trainers blew whistles and shouted out combinations by number. There, too, a guy could come in off the street and watch all day, but it wasn’t free like the pool hall. You had to throw a dime in the bucket at the door. On Friday nights, the price of admission went up to twenty-five cents as Miller put on a series of three-round amateur bouts, usually drawing guys who couldn’t get tickets to the pro fights at the Chicago Stadium that night.

Miller was sometimes confused—but not for long—with Davey “Yiddles” Miller, a South Side torpedo known for the mean-spirited and thoroughly professional manner in which he dispatched his enemies. Our Davey Miller had a stronger sense of public relations and had the common sense to name his pool hall the Edmille Health Club. What Jewish mother wouldn’t want her son hanging out in a place so healthy?

“Your contact at the Edmille Health Club will be a young man named Jacob Rubenstein. Everyone calls him Sparky. Do you know him?” Richard Gustadt asked Herb Brin.

“The little guy who is sometimes in Barney Ross’s corner?”

“Yes.”

“I know him. Funny guy. Tough.”

“Good. You give your report to Sparky, and he will take care of the rest,” Gustadt said.

Brin thought about Barney Ross. The legend. The kid had done all right for himself. He had been born on the Lower East Side of New York in 1909 as Barnet Rasofsky, but the Rasofskys had moved to Chicago when the boy was two, and Chicago remained his home for the rest of his life.

As a kid, Barnet had dreams of becoming a Talmudic scholar or maybe a Hebrew teacher—such a good boy. But that all changed when he was fourteen and watched in horror as his father, a rabbi and grocer, was shot and killed during a robbery of the family store. His mom promptly had a nervous breakdown and was sent to “live with relatives,” causing Barnet and his four siblings to scatter, the youngest three placed in an orphanage. Barnet went to live with a cousin, but his days of being such a good boy were over for the time being. He stopped dreaming of being a scholar and teacher, renounced his religion, and turned to a life of crime, running numbers for the racket boys, busting anyone in the chops who looked at him funny, and stealing enough to eat regularly. After a few years of that, his pal Sparky, himself a small-time hood wannabe with a mom who had mental issues, suggested Barnet go see Jack Eile at the Edmille boxing gym. If he kept walloping kids on the street, he was bound to end up in jail, and a gym might help him get rid of excess energy. The name Barnet was turned to Barney on the street, but Rasofsky was switched to Ross only after he became a pro boxer and didn’t want his mom (whose health had returned) to know he was fighting for a living.

Not that he was effeminate in any way, but Ross did have a pretty face that he’d inherited from his mom. Having a better offense than defense in the ring, he would start fights looking like a debutante and end them looking like Quasimodo. But, as they say, you should’ve seen the other guy.

Ross, Herb Brin thought to himself, was the toughest son of a bitch in the city, but maybe he’d had his picture in the paper one too many times to be useful in an undercover operation.

Trainer Jack Eile recalled the first time Ross walked into the Edmille boxing gym. The kid was already partly hood, collecting for the rackets, the awesome size of his hands speaking for themselves when a debtor whined that he didn’t have the dough. But he was trying to get out of that scene. He wanted to make it legit.

“He was eighteen, nineteen years old, and he had thick black hair that he combed back, but which tended to flop down over his forehead the instant he began to mix it up in the ring,” Eile said. “When he came into our club, he showed little ability, but he was willing to hurt and a sparring partner could hit him with everything he had and Barney wouldn’t even flinch. I showed him how to jab and hook with his left—and how to clinch when he forgot to duck.”

Barney never became a boxing purist, and his fights were slobberknockers, crowd-pleasers. He had a left hook from hell and almost always won. He traveled to New York City’s Madison Square Garden in 1929—with Davey Miller himself as his sponsor—and won the national featherweight division Golden Gloves championship before a packed house. And that was it for him and anonymity. He promptly turned pro and fought prelims in Chicago billed as “Barney Ross, West Side Jew Kid.” When he had made enough money, he used it to reunite his three youngest siblings, still in an orphanage, with their recovered mother.

Ross earned his first of three championship belts on March 26, 1933, when he defeated Tony Canzoneri by a majority decision at the Chicago Stadium. The fight was close—so close that the referee ruled it a draw. One ringside scribe called the action “bitter and vicious.” There was an unwritten rule that to take a man’s belt you had to knock him out, so Ross’s victory via decision, not even a unanimous decision, was enough to make the crowd boo. Canzoneri had dominated the first half of the fight but had tired. Ross, known for his endurance throughout his career, came on at the end, including a final round in which he “let go with everything he had,” forcing a hurt Canzoneri to repeatedly clinch.

Ross won the rematch against Canzoneri less than three months later at the Polo Grounds, the Giants’ horseshoe-shaped ballpark on East 155th Street in Manhattan.

Ross’s most famous fights were the three he fought against Jimmy McLarnin, the first two in 1934, the third in 1935, all in New York City, all outdoors, the first two at the “Madison Square Garden Bowl,” which was a huge hole in the ground dug in Woodside, Queens (the setting for the 2005 movie about James J. Braddock, Cinderella Man), and the third at the Polo Grounds. He won the first and the third, but took a terrific beating in the second, the only fight in his pro career in which he was knocked down.

By 1938, Ross’s career as a fighter was just about over. He was only twenty-eight years old, but was battle-worn and past his prime. His final fight was against the champion, Henry Armstrong. The fight went the distance, and Ross stayed on his feet the entire time but endured a fearsome battering. From the middle rounds on, fans pleaded with the referee to stop the fight or for Ross’s corner to throw the towel, but Ross told his corner men he wanted to go out like a champion, that is at the final bell and on his feet. When it was over, Ross took weeks to recover and never fought professionally again. Like many ex-boxers who drew a crowd, Ross opened up his own restaurant, and that was where he was when his old pal Sparky Rubenstein said he needed volunteers to kick some Nazi ass.

Rubenstein and Ross had been a team since they were kids. They had a bleak upbringing in common, a bond made of loneliness and pain, and remained life-long buddies.

Rubenstein’s dad had been a medical assistant, a man worthy of respect, but his mom, Fanny Rokowsky, was a pixilated redhead who chattered mindlessly even when she was alone. She was probably bulimic and prone to temper tantrums. Fanny and Joseph Rubenstein, Jacob’s dad, had an arranged marriage, so there was nothing like love in the home. There must have been some spark, though, because the Rubensteins had eight kids, Jacob being the fifth in line. Joseph took to beating Fanny in hopes that that would shut her up. She’d apparently fallen on her head as a baby, and Joseph hoped maybe another crack on the noggin would snap her out of it. But it never worked. When Jacob was four years old, Fanny had Joseph arrested multiple times and twice charged with assault. Fanny was eventually institutionalized; her illness characterized as deteriorating paranoia. In the hospital, she told the doctors she never liked any of her kids. (In 1909, one of Fanny’s children, Jeanette, had died at age two from a scalding incident in her kitchen.)

The Rubensteins lived in a cold-water apartment on Johnson Street, now known as Peoria Street, in a neighborhood known at the time as the Maxwell Street ghetto. Jacob learned to fight when the Italian kids visited from Taylor Street in Little Sicily to beat up Jews. Jacob made sure he dished out more than he got. He got his nickname from his sister Eva, who called him “Spark Plug” as a boy, after the horse in the popular comic strip of the day, Take Barney Google, F’rinstance. There were also hit songs from 1923 by Billy Rose and Con Conrad based on the same strip: “Barney Google” and “Come On, Spark Plug.”

Jacob became a truant, a kid of the streets, an angry kid who tried to stifle his urge to babble on endlessly just like his mother. At sixteen, he was scalping tickets for Bears football games outside Soldier Field and at William Harley’s Mills Stadium, the small wooden ballpark at Lake Street and Kilpatrick Avenue west of Garfield Park, home of DePaul University football games, Negro League and barnstorming baseball, and an annual Fourth of July fight card. He got to know some of the fighters and began hanging around the Edmille Health Club, where a kid could make a buck running errands for the mob guys. Sparky and his pal Barney were given a crisp one dollar bill every time they delivered a message or went to the corner store and bought a pack of cigars for someone, including the number one guy, Al “Scarface” Capone, who pretty much owned the whole block the Edmille was on.

Jacob worked legitimate jobs too, but always in a venue where one was apt to see gangsters. He sold racetrack tip sheets near Capone’s off-track betting parlors. He sold candy and cheap jewelry to the chumps at the burlesque shows who thought the almost-naked dancers were sweet on them.

At least three times a week, he’d get into a fight. He was determined to prove to the world that Jews were tough, years before Judge Perlman gave Meyer Lansky free reign to fight the German American enemy.

As a young man Jacob Rubenstein left Chicago for a few years in Los Angeles—a city where the cops and the hoods were often one and the same—to live with his sister, but he could never adjust to all of that sunshine, and by 1937 he was back on Kedzie Avenue working as a union organizer for Leon R. Cooke, who wanted junk business laborers to earn more than fifteen cents an hour. Rubenstein’s job was to pick up skim money, but he was again unemployed after Cooke got himself whacked. Rubenstein played pool and worked out in the gym. He kept himself in great shape and liked to brag while working the heavy bag that he could hit harder than Joe Louis. He continued to make most of his income by scalping tickets at all of Chicago’s major venues—Wrigley Field, Comiskey Park, Soldier Field, and the Chicago Stadium.

Each Monday and Friday night, Rubenstein attended the fights at Marigold Arena on the southwest corner of Halsted and Grace, on the North Side, boxing Monday, wrestling Friday. The place held two thousand and almost always sold out—but he never worried about having a ticket. If Barney Ross was fighting, Sparky got in free by going in the boxers’ entrance, carrying his friend’s gym bag. Even on Fridays, when Barney usually wasn’t around, Sparky knew the guy at the back door and slipped in with no complaint. Sparky could always get in—a skill that would one day contribute to his legend. By the main event, the air would be so thick with cigar smoke that you could see the fight but not the spectators on the other side of the ring. Betting was plentiful and out in the open. Some guys would just bet one corner all night, or the guys in the white trunks. Irv Schoenwald ran the Marigold shows and knew plenty of cops. He’d comp them when he saw them on the street and never once was anyone busted at his shows, no matter how obviously they were making a fight book. Sparky observed the behavior. There was an advantage to being friendly with the police. You got more with sugar than vinegar.

Herb Brin knew that his appearance meant everything in the world he was entering. Just as racists judged African Americans by the shade of their skin—the cream in the coffee, they used to call it—so anti-Semites judged Jewish people by their appearance. Brin worked for a time at Sears and Roebuck alongside unashamed anti-Semites.

“How can you work alongside me?” Brin asked one of them.

“You’re special, you’re a white Jew,” his coworker replied cheerfully. It also helped that Brin was a big guy, six feet, one and a half inches, and not one to be easily bullied.

The idea that the intelligence Brin would gather might result in a few anti-Semites getting hurt didn’t bother him. He didn’t like to brag about it, but he stomped one of those German American meatheads himself once.

Flashback. Herb Brin is on a bus, standing, holding a strap, and there’s one of those guys on there, a loudmouth, “Jews this and Jews that.” Nothing clever, just the usual drivel. He’s got a seat, sitting next to a gray-haired woman holding a paper sack with a naked loaf of bread sticking out of it.

Eventually, Brin has had enough.

“Shut up or I’ll knock you to Kingdom Come,” Brin says.

The guy quiets for a moment but just as the bus is passing James Garfield Park, less than a block from the movie theater where Brin found his name, the idiot starts in again, muttering.

Brin takes one step, waits for the sitting woman to get her groceries out of the way, and busts the guy in the chops.

The bus driver calmly pulls the bus to the curb and stops, although this is not a normal bus stop. Brin grabs two handfuls of the guy’s shirt and drags him off of the bus and onto the park’s expansive greensward.

Brin beats the man from “one end of the lawn to the other” and leaves him laying there, his nose somewhere near where his cheekbone should be. Brin then brushes himself off and gets back on the bus, to thunderous applause from all of the other passengers.

Return to present.

Brin began by attending marches and outdoor meetings that were open to the public at Harm’s Park in Skokie, a northern suburb. He would later realize that the gatherings there were especially ugly because the park bordered on a Jewish neighborhood.

He didn’t have to try very hard to be recruited. He expressed an interest in learning more about the movement, and everyone was his friend. Each time he held his hand out, someone gave him printed propaganda and advised him of the next meeting place. After his face became more familiar, Brin signed up as a Bund member at the Hausvaterland on Western Avenue.

So Brin found out the details of a private meeting, and one icy Tuesday afternoon, he relayed the info to Sparky Rubenstein at the pool hall. For Brin, it was a nostalgic moment. The place was exactly the same. Even the smell was the same, an oddly pleasant combination of cigars, sweat, and blue chalk.

Less than an hour later, Sparky gathered his volunteers around him. They were kids, most of them, fresh-faced and eager: Milton Marks, Dave Forman, Max Kamm, Herman Lieb, Irv Botnek, Seymour Brodofsky, Aaron Ragins, and others time has forgotten. One familiar face was missing: Barney.

“Where is he?”

“Next door working out.”

“Get him.”

A few minutes later, a shiny Barney Ross entered the pool hall from the icy street, wearing nothing but shorts and shoes, well lathered with sweat, steam rising from his shoulders. That got a laugh because it was snowing outside and the temperature was in the single digits. Ross had an expression like he was less than enthusiastic about being there.

“What?” he said. His gloves were off, but his hands were still taped. Written on the tape in black crayon was “DM,” for Davey Miller. Rule was you had to initial the tape for a sanctioned fight, so Miller got in the habit of doing it even for workouts so he wouldn’t forget some night and get a kid in trouble.

“We’re making plans to bust up them Nazi fuckers,” Sparky said.

“I know, but I can’t go,” Ross said, sounding genuinely sad.

“Why not?”

“You guys get caught, it’s assault. I get caught, attempted murder. My hands are lethal weapons.”

Sparky stared at him without blinking for a solid ten seconds, then blinked several times in rapid succession and said, “I got it. You don’t use your fists. You use a sap.”

Sparky produced from his back pocket a professional-looking blackjack—a leather sack filled with ball bearings with a leather handle looped and held in place by a metal clasp.

“Thanks, Spark,” Barney said, and everyone was smiles. “When?”

“Tomorrow night,” Sparky said. “We meet outside the Germania Club, across the street. That’s on West Germania Place, Near North Side.”

The boys were told that if a scribe asked who they were and whom they represented, they should say they were “Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” Or if they couldn’t spit that out, “Americans who believed in liberty.”

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