Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (14 page)

It was no different in 1962. He sold everything he owned, saved everything he earned, and soon had what he needed—enough money to make a lawyer care what happened to him. Schlegel’s girlfriend at the time knew a guy named Mr. Richardson, who knew a lawyer. Schlegel stuffed a suitcase with every dollar he had scrounged and went to see the lawyer in his office. He pushed his money across the lawyer’s desk and explained what had happened in the street outside Manhattan Lanes that day.

“I can’t go to jail,” he said.

The lawyer took the money and proceeded to request more time from the judge every time he went to court on Schlegel’s behalf. And so began Schlegel’s war of attrition against Mike Ginsberg, who kept taking days off from his job with Jonathan Logan, a wildly popular brand of dresses in the 1960s, to attend court hearings only to discover that they had been postponed. Finally, after so many postponements that Ginsberg did not bother showing up anymore, the charges were dismissed. Neither the cops nor the prosecutor could turn up enough evidence
to prove definitively that Schlegel had, in fact, stabbed Ginsberg. The only hard evidence Ginsberg himself could provide were the few butterfly stitches it took to heal the wound.

But the fundamental problem had not been dismissed. If anything, his triumph over Mike Ginsberg proved a pyrrhic victory at best. The charges may have been dismissed on paper, but they lingered in the minds of the men who guarded the gates of the PBA. A bowler needed signatures from three sponsors as well as the approval of a PBA executive before he could compete on the PBA Tour. Schlegel soon learned there was something about kids with attempted murder charges in their pasts that made it tough for potential sponsors to find their pens. Nobody wanted to sponsor him. Then Schlegel dug himself a deeper hole while at a bowling alley called Paramus Lanes in Paramus, New Jersey. Frank Esposito, a founding member of the PBA, opened the place in 1955. His contacts in the TV business played a big role in helping the PBA secure its contract with ABC, the network that broadcast the championship round of PBA tournaments each week. He eventually expanded Paramus Lanes into a 42-lane establishment that attracted the greatest stars in the sport. It also was one of those places Schlegel referred to as his “office,” a place where the action was as big as the names it attracted, and the money flowed for those who had what it took to take it home. Schlegel was one of those who had what it took.

One night Esposito took exception to the kind of crowd Schlegel brought with him, an unruly posse of hangers-on who talked like sailors and let the ashes of their Lucky Strikes smudge Esposito’s new carpet. They might as well have soiled the man’s living room rug. Schlegel was not there to babysit his buddies; he was there to make money. Esposito knew how to keep out the riff-raff: Kick out the guy they followed in. He
told Schlegel to get the hell out and not come back. That was a lot like sacking Schlegel from his job, as it meant he no longer could count on the money he made there fleecing lesser players of their lunch money in the middle of the night.

The implications of Schlegel’s run-in with Esposito extended much further than that. Esposito’s dual role as owner of one of the most famous bowling alleys in the northeast and an executive board member with the PBA meant Schlegel had little chance of going pro so long as Esposito had anything to say about it. Esposito had heard enough about Schlegel—the knife he buried in Ginsberg’s chest, the zip guns he wielded outside Boy Scouts meetings. And he had finally had enough that night at Paramus. The PBA was a place for groomed men with pressed slacks, parted hair, and wooden smiles; it was not, Esposito thought, a place for Ernie Schlegel. So Schlegel watched helplessly as buddies like Petraglia, Limongello, and Lichstein bowled for real money on national television. Schlegel did not understand how it was possible that one man, Frank Esposito, could wield so much authority as to single-handedly deny him his dreams. To deny him his dreams also was to deny him his livelihood, as his reputation as a great action bowler was making it harder than ever to find an opponent willing to put money down on a match against him on a rapidly shrinking underground scene. He needed the pro tour because he needed to live. Schlegel was the king of the action, and any gambler with half a mind knew it was a lot cheaper to let him be king than it was to try to steal his crown.

One afternoon Steve Harris phoned with news of action bowlers in Jersey who knew so little about this reluctant king that they would put up money to bowl him. Harris, at this time in his life, was earning an advanced degree in the art of bullshitting that served him well in the action. He was
working customer service for the Baumritter Corporation, the company that later became Ethan Allen. Harris was taking complaints from customers by phone and repeating them into a Dictaphone, which he then delivered to a pool of typists to transcribe. Company policy mandated that Harris work under a phony name. His name at Baumritter was James Warren. The pseudonym used by his neighboring colleague, an African-American woman named Judy Brown, was Douglas Reed.

“What’s wrong with Steve Harris?” Harris would complain to his bosses. “Why do I need a phony name?”

“Steve Harris will leave someday,” they told him. “James Warren will be here forever.”

One day Harris took a call from a guy in Mississippi with a thick, southern drawl asking for “Douglas Reed.” Harris played the part.

“This is Douglas Reed,” he said.

“Hi, Doug! How are you?” the exuberant southerner drawled.

“I’m fine, sir. How are you?” Harris said.

“Doug, I got a question for you,” the man said. “I hear that Baumritter Corporation is full of niggers and Jews.”

“Fuck you!” Harris shouted, and then hung up the phone with an angry bang.

Harris was petrified; Judy Brown nearly fainted. He explained the reason he hung up on the guy.

“Good!” she said. Harris’s feisty personality was beginning to shine through.

Harris spent his working hours making deals with disgruntled customers, offering them discounts and other perks to keep them off his manager’s case. He thought he had spotted a deal of his own the night he called Schlegel with news Schlegel had received from Harris before.

“Ernie, we got fish in Jersey,” Harris said when his friend answered the phone.

Schlegel hardly made it past “Hello” before he and his crew were halfway up the Major Deegan Expressway, looking for an easy score. The fish Harris found this time were a group of Jersey milkmen who would bowl for money after their runs at about 5
A.M.
on Sundays. Nagai was tied up with business at his restaurant that night, so they called up One Finger Benny, the man who could bowl 180 using just one finger. He would find gamblers willing to spot him thirty or forty pins, sure they were good enough to beat him anyway if he was going to bowl with just one finger. Benny won almost every time. It was as lucrative a gag as anything Iggy Russo ever pulled off. But Benny also had a car. He called his friend Sammy Mauro, an ex-con and an excellent bowler whose soft-spoken manner belied his brawny frame and chiseled arms. Together they picked up Harris and Schlegel and headed down to Jersey.

By the end of the night, a penniless Schlegel found himself on the side of a freeway, walking home with his bowling bag at his side and yet another reluctant title to add to his reputation: accomplice. Those milkmen they met down in Jersey proved at least as proficient at bowling as they were at leaving milk bottles on doorsteps. They wiped out Schlegel and his crew. With less than $10 between them, they got into Benny’s car and headed back over the George Washington Bridge. Then Sammy got an idea.

“Take Ogden Avenue,” he told Benny. “A guy there owes me money.”

It was about 7
A.M.
by then. Harris and Schlegel were half asleep in the back seat. Benny pulled up to an Ogden Avenue deli. Sammy got out. Moments later, he stormed back into the car and screamed, “Hit it!”

Benny peeled out and said, “How much did you get?”

“One hundred and sixty dollars,” Sammy said.

Benny headed back for the Major Deegan.

“Ernie, we got one hundred and sixty bucks to play with!”

Harris woke up.

“Did you just hold up that place?” he asked.

“What do you care?” Benny said.

“Ernie, these guys just held up a deli,” Harris said.

Harris saw mug shots and prison pajamas in his immediate future. He told Benny to stop the car and let them out right there and then. They did, and Harris and Schlegel—who was still nervous from his near miss with the Ginsberg stabbing—walked home together in the blue-black dawn, broke and desperate for a bed to help them forget the night. The farther Schlegel travelled in pursuit of an anonymity he no longer enjoyed in the five boroughs, the more his life reminded him that it was time to move on. Schlegel was getting older; he was watching friends find glory on tour just as he struggled just to find willing challengers in a fading action bowling scene; and he was certain that the life of a bum awaited him, a long nightmare of squandered talent, thwarted ambition, and dead-end jobs.

If Schlegel had any notion of pursuing a career in bowling, he would have to flee the underworld of action for the legitimacy of the pro tour. But thanks to Esposito, that would not be happening anytime soon. Bowling, the one skill Schlegel had mastered so thoroughly as to squeeze some kind of living out of it, teased him with dreams he once took for granted. He had no money now after giving it all up to cleanse his record of attempted murder charges. He was smoking dope and dealing it. He no longer saw any future in bowling, and that hurt most of all. It hurt watching buddies bowl on national
TV while he was kept off the tour by bad breaks, bitter men, and his own temper/impulsive decisions. Schlegel descended into the driftless life of a dope dealer hawking stolen TVs and old Jaguars. He dumped his bowling ball and bowling shoes off the George Washington Bridge; maybe if he didn’t have to look at them anymore, it would be easier to smudge out the hurt in his heart.

Only the streets would welcome him now—streets whose story Schlegel knew too well. In the late 1950s, when Schlegel was in his mid-teens, they were streets where gangs like the Hearts, the Vigilantes, and the Alleycats convened around their territory’s candy stores with leather coats and thick hair greased into a duck’s ass. Schlegel ran with gangs of German and Irish friends from around the block. They ran down Bennett Avenue armed with clubs and knives. They ran from maniacs in rival gangs who chased them out of Fort Tryon Park with axes. They ran through yards and alleyways and jumped fences to evade dragnets. Sometimes they ran from their own mistakes.

But that was then. Now, as America entered its post-Kennedy delirium in Vietnam, the ducktails and gang wars gave way to the spectacle of kids coming back from the war hooked on heroin. One of Schlegel’s best friends, a local kid known as “Tiny,” died on the roof of his Sickles Street apartment building. Tiny had been shooting up with some friends when a few of them came banging on Schlegel’s door.

“What the hell are you doing?” Schlegel shouted when he opened his door.

“Tiny’s OD’ing! Tiny’s OD’ing!” they screamed.

They told Schlegel to get some salt. They wanted to shoot salt water in his veins, thinking it would dilute the drugs in Tiny’s body and save him. Somehow, they succeeded in bringing the kid back to life, but he died two weeks later. The New York City
Schlegel knew in the mid-1960s was a place where the madness of the times claimed many other friends who were just as acquainted with the forces that drove Tiny to his death—the needle, the bottle, the war—and how easily those forces withstood injections of saline on the rooftops of Inwood. One was killed in Vietnam. Another survived Vietnam only to die drunk in a car accident soon after coming home. One drank himself to death at twenty-five and was found in a Harlem alley. Two others overdosed on heroin. Still another was sent to jail for heroin and came out crippled.

You knew a lot of things as a kid on the streets of Inwood back then, and not all of them had to do with drugs. You knew to stay away from the food at Al’s Candy Store, where “Dirty Al’s” oily hair had a habit of finding its way into your bacon and egg sandwich. You knew to stay away from Father Martin, whose altar boys were as likely to cross themselves as they were to get a hand down their pants. You knew to stay clear of Clancy the Cop, a sadist who fell in love with the sound his stick made when it cracked the skulls of kids in his precinct.

Another thing Schlegel knew back then was that he had friends who would not let him give up the dream he surrendered after his misadventures with Ginsberg and Esposito. One friend in particular, an action bowler named Pete Mylenki, showed up at the door of Schlegel’s apartment one night. The place looked like a bomb had hit it. Schlegel himself looked like a guy who lived in a taxi. He had not shaved in weeks, his clothes were disheveled and soiled, and he kept his strawberry-blond hair long and wild.

Schlegel had won a lot of money with Mylenki. Mylenki was such a clutch action bowler that Schlegel often found himself picking up the money from the score table anytime Mylenki needed to strike in the 10th frame for the win, so certain was
he that Mylenki would come through. He always did. Unlike most other action bowlers, Mylenki was a clean-cut kid who showed up to bowl in a white, button-down shirt and big, black, horn-rimmed glasses. Most of the other action players showed up in jeans and T-shirts. They looked the part; Mylenki didn’t. Schlegel picked him up as a doubles partner because no one knew who he was, and a kid who dressed like that in the action looked an awful lot like a fish to the scene’s usual suspects. Until he started bowling.