Frank Sinatra,

A Thrown Fight,

& The Rise of Pop Warner Football

_{Copyright © 1998, 2007 David G. Tomlin}

When Frank Sinatra and his Philadelphia friend, Frank Palumbo, came under investigation in 1947 owing to a fixed boxing match, Palumbo turned to my father to help enhance his public image. The result was the first Pop Warner Santa Claus Bowl.

The game featured youth football teams named after both men. The Philadelphia Daily News falsely claimed that it outbid four cities to sponsor the contest and tried to cover up the role Madison Square Garden played in it.

The November 14 fight saw Billy Fox TKO Jake LaMotta. While no charges resulted, LaMotta finally admitted that he took a dive in 1960. Before the match, his manager, who was a member of Sinatra's inner circle, met with Palumbo's partner, who managed Fox.

At certain places in this presentation you are invited to 'click here' in blue print. These are links to external websites that more fully explain a certain topic. To return to your reading place, USE YOUR BROWSER'S BACK BUTTON.   WARNING!  DO NOT USE THE  

After Frank Sinatra died in May 1998, Hofstra University announced that it would hold a "Sinatra Symposium" in the fall. I began work on this project immediately, but missed the application deadline owing to frequent travel. Since then, this presentation has benefited from new internet material. My copyright applies to the text and documents or photographs marked from "Tomlin family archives". Copyrighted material of others appears under the "fair use" doctrine.

While the work is primarily based upon family archives and chats with my father, I am greatly indebted to my longtime friend, the noted boxing authority, Bert Randolph Sugar (click here), who provided material I otherwise could not have obtained. Thanks are also owed to the research staffs of the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Las Vegas-Clark County Library, and the Miami-Dade Public Library.

I was born in 1938, the second of two children of Joseph J. and Regina F. Tomin. Dad (1902-1988), was the son of a Shenandoah, PA coal mine crew chief, and Mom (1914-2005) was the daughter of a Philadelphia grocer. This work is dedicated to them both. As my father and Pop Warner grew close during the latter's time in Philadelphia, the coach became my godfather before he returned to California at the close of the 1938 football season. After serving as an advisory coach at San Jose State in 1939, he retired. Pop Warner died in 1954.

I received a BS in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1960, then spent another two years at Penn (no degree), following which I served as an army counterintelligence agent. I joined the Pop Warner staff in 1965, and became its president in 1988. After leaving the program in 1990, I did investigative work, then joined the Internal Revenue Service.

Divorced with two children, I am a baseball fan, a would-be fly fisherman, a C-SPAN viewer,  a non-fiction reader, an Art Bell listener, and a devotee of most music (especially classical) and home theater.

Frank Sinatra, A Thrown Fight, & The Rise of Pop Warner Football

1947 was not a very good year for Frank Sinatra. His troubles began in February when he was photographed in Havana, Cuba, among top American mobsters who had gathered in honor of their deported boss, Charles “Lucky” Luciano. The imbroglio required a doubling of pr efforts already underway owing to his womanizing, a dispute with his movie studio, and a physical assault against a columnist. No sooner had things quieted down when the crooner became involved in a fixed boxing match, beginning a process that would propel Pop Warner Football into national significance.

On December 28, 1947, Frank Palumbo’s Clickets of Philadelphia played Frank Sinatra’s Cyclones of New York in the first Santa Claus Bowl. While the Philadelphia Daily News falsely claimed it outbid four cities to win rights to the game, the contest was actually requested of my father by Sinatra's friend, Frank Palumbo, as both men were threatened by investigations into the Jake LaMotta-Billy Fox boxing match held at Madison Square Garden on November 14. While no charges resulted, LaMotta ultimately confessed to the fix in 1960.

After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1927, my father became a Wall Street broker. Plagued by kids throwing stones at their factory windows, friends back in Philadelphia were brainstorming solutions in early 1929 when my father suggested a sports program. By commuting on weekends, he organized the 4-team Junior Football League, with play getting underway just before the infamous stock market crash. When he, himself, was wiped out, my father moved back home, and by the fall of 1933, his league had grown to 16 teams.

In March 1934, the legendary collegiate football coach (Carlisle, Pittsburgh, Stanford) Glenn Scobey “Pop” Warner came to Philadelphia to coach Temple University's Owls. One month later, on a sleety spring night, he was the only one from among seven invited college coaches to show up at a clinic my father had arranged. At the close of the evening, the Junior Football League was renamed the Pop Warner Conference.

Thanks to the Warner name, the Conference grew to 144 teams by 1936 and the city fathers began to credit Joe Tomlin with helping to combat juvenile delinquency. Trading on his newfound celebrity, he established a board of directors drawn mainly from the Social Register in the mistaken belief that blue bloods would dig deep to bulldoze fields, buy equipment for the poor, and establish a medical fund. Instead, in spite of the Depression, the board urged the teams to collect more at games and tithe a portion back to the Conference! Its disconnect with the unwashed also took other forms, and my father's street-smart advice was some-times ignored. In 1937, when he cautioned against moving the annual banquet from Palumbo’s, the blue bloods began to rotate it among the posh hotels at which they did business over lunch.

In 1884, Antonio Palumbo opened a boarding house in South Philadelphia which his son, Frank, inherited in 1906. By 1912, so many immigrants had passed through the place that the feds suspected that it was part of a racket that supplied cheap labor for industry. Upon debarking ships, men were given cards in Italian that offered rooms at $1 per week with free pasta, and asked directions of pedestrians. The probe ended when immigration agent Adrian Bonnelly, sent down from New York, reported back that Palumbo was simply one of many Italian businessmen who “banded together to aid, comfort, and assist their brethren.”

One of Palumbo's sons, also named Frank, added "Senior" to his surname after his father died. When my father met him in 1931, Frank Palumbo, Sr., then only 21, had al-ready converted the boarding house into a restaurant and built the private CR Club next door. A few years later, he opened The Click in the city's office district to book big bands.

As he liked what my father was doing, Palumbo offered to bill only his costs if the Junior Football League ever held a banquet, which it did in 1932. Four more affairs followed when the blue bloods moved them. They also rejected Palumbo each time my father proposed him as a Conference board member. In spite of repeated snubs, he continued to treat my father royally.

H. Birchard Taylor became Conference president in 1938 – a year in which my father also founded the Connie Mack Baseball Conference, named after the “Grand Old Man of Baseball”, who owned the Athletics, or "A’s”,  now of Oakland, California. The Sandlot Sports Association (SSA) was then established as a fundraising umbrella for the football and baseball programs. Two years later, Taylor, who was president of the Navy League of the United States, was chosen by the War Department to reopen Cramp's shipyard (click here) which had been mothballed in 1927.

In 1943, with its upper age ranks decimated by the draft, Taylor closed SSA and made my father his only foreman with a secretary so that his sports programs would survive the war. After he introduced him to the airplane maker, Glenn L. Martin (click here) my father's "shipyard" duties included arranging tournaments for the All-American Amateur Baseball Association which Martin and Washington Sen-ators’ owner Clark Griffith established to supply professional baseball with talent during the war (among those who credit Joe Tomlin with helping to launch their baseball careers is Tommy Lasorda).

When Taylor fell seriously ill after SSA reopened in 1946, another board member jockeyed a crony onto the payroll creating a financial squeeze that led to a short-changing of Pop Warner in program decisions. In January 1947, my father underwent surgery followed by a long recuperation. With Taylor still absent upon his return to work in July, he visited an old friend in South Philadelphia.

After he unburdened himself, Frank Palumbo asked my father what he wanted to do, which was to leave SSA and take the Warner and Mack programs with him. He had verbal permission to use the names, but needed a job to make the jump. Palumbo made one call, and my father started to work at the Chamber of Commerce two weeks later. With his spare time limited, he enlisted the help of four ex-GIs who grew up in the prewar SSA. One, Bill Gillen, became Pop Warner’s Managing Director.

When Gillen received a letter from SSA that claimed ownership of the Pop Warner Conference, Palumbo sent my father to his attorney, Jacob Kossman, who had him get written permission to use the Warner and Mack names. When SSA countered by announ-cing that it would award a record number of trophies in 1947, Palumbo gave Gillen $1000, whose answering glitter was displayed in the windows of sporting goods dealers all over town. The Conference went on to field 100 teams as opposed to 88 in 1946, and ended the year with a publicity blitz in the Philadelphia Daily News. First, however, a review of the LaMotta-Fox boxing match from the pages of the same newspaper.

On Friday, November 14, 1947, under the heading Favor Fox Over LaMotta In Garden Fight, the tabloid described  Billy Fox a “Philadelphia Negro” who knocked out 49 of 50 opponents, and called him the favorite based upon last minute betting because of his “lightning punch” and LaMotta’s disadvantage in fighting as a light-heavyweight as he couldn’t find opponents in his middleweight class.

In Saturday’s Reported “fix” as Fox halts Jake LaMotta, the News stated that Fox’s TKO of LaMotta the night before “raised a lot of eyebrows in the boxing industry.” It was the first time LaMotta had been knocked out in a bout he listlessly fought before 18,340 fans. As the week progressed, Fox became an 11-5, then a 3-1 favorite, at which point bookies stopped taking bets. Rumors of a fix were so persistent that the chairman of the New York Athletic Commission, Eddie Eagan, visited both dressing rooms with warnings before the fight.

According to Tuesday’s News, Manhattan DA Frank Hogan and Eagan launched separate investigations, and on Wednesday, it reported that LaMotta’s physician, who had cleared him for the bout, stated that he was actually suffer-ing from a blood clot of the spleen! Also, Fox’s manager, Frank “Blinky” Palermo, who came up from Philadelphia, denied doing so to appear before Eagan’s commission or Hogan’s grand jury.

Thursday's article began: “Al Silvani, manager of Jake LaMotta and former bodyguard for Frank Sinatra, was among those expected to be questioned by the district attorney today regarding LaMotta’s fight with Billy Fox last Friday night. ...". Also on Thursday, the New York Times reported that LaMotta called reports that Silvani met with Blinky Palermo before the fight a “dirty lie”, and that Palermo refused to testify before the grand jury without benefit of counsel.

My father knew Blinky well enough to wave "hello", as did everyone who frequented Palumbo's. While it was common knowledge that he ran the city's policy racket, no one cared as nearly everyone played the numbers. It had been publicly announced in the spring that Palumbo had joined Palermo as Billy Fox’s co-manager.

On November 22, the News reported LaMotta’s suspension by the Athletic Commission for covering up an injury that hampered his fighting ability. However, by releasing both fighters’ purses on December 17, the Commission implied that he had not taken a dive.

I vaguely remembered the Santa Claus Bowl from my childhood when, in 1978, I compiled Pop Warner’s history for its upcoming Golden Anniversary. Using scrapbooks my father began to keep in 1934, I noticed that while the Daily News devoted 458 column inches to the game, Pop Warner’s press releases never mentioned it once. When I asked my father about this, he told me how the game actually came about, and I had to write a false account of the Bowl's origin for the Anniversary program book.

Palumbo called him down to the CR after LaMotta’s suspension, where he matter-of-factly stated that he needed something to make  himself look good "because of what you have been reading about”. My father understood what he meant, but felt that had there been a fix, it would have been solely of Blinky Palermo's doing. Frank then said he had an idea that would not only take care of him, but eclipse Sandlot Sports as well.  If my father could set up a Christmas holiday game, he would get the Daily News to promote it as the Santa Claus Bowl ..... then came the kicker.

Palumbo wanted one team to be named after him, and the other after Frank Sinatra! My father almost fell off his bar stool when he heard this, although he already knew the two men were close. A year or so before, he was sitting with Palumbo's brother-in-law, John Ferro, when “Skinny” D’Amato walked in. Some small talk between he and Ferro about Sinatra, who performed at Skinny's 500 Club (click here) in Atlantic City, revealed the friendship.

After calling Bill Gillen to be sure he could enlist enough help, the Santa Claus Bowl was outlined on the CR's napkins. The Venango Midgets became Frank Palumbo’s Clickets, named after his Market Street bandbox. Sponsored by Dixie Casey, a former burlesque dancer turned candy store owner, Venango had just taken Pop Warner's 12-13 year old title. When my father said he would ask Glenn Martin to recommend a suitable opponent from Baltimore, Palumbo replied that people in New York would handle it.

Game day was set for Sunday, December 28, at Southern High School field, which was convenient to Palumbo’s for a post-game banquet. Once the last detail was decided, Palumbo called in Ferro from next door and gave him the napkins to have a memo typed up. Upon his return, the trio drank to the first Santa Claus Bowl, ending the “bidding contest” won by the Philadelphia Daily News!

With just sixteen days to go, the tabloid officially announced the game on its back (sports) page on Friday, December 12. Pictured, sitting, were the News' promotion director, a Clicket, and Frank Palumbo. Behind them stood John Condon and Bill Gillen. Although the caption labeled Condon a “New York newspaperman representing Sinatra”, he actually was Madison Square Garden's pr man (and future president of its boxing division).

The News later misidentified MSG judge and timekeeper, Barney Felix, who managed the Cyclones, as a “police athletic league boxing in-structor”, but had no choice when it came to the Garden's nationally known ring announcer, Harry Balough, who handled p.a. chores at the game (the Cyclones’ physician, thought to be licensed for ringside duty, could not be confirmed by today’s Athletic Commission).

Daily coverage began on December 15 with the false claim that the News won rights to the Santa Claus Bowl in a bidding contest with New York, Las Vegas, West Palm Beach, Florida, and San Mateo, California. It also implied that Pop Warner was more than a local program when it reported that Sinatra’s team won the "New York district title”.

Although Sinatra was irrevocably committed to appear on the Lux Radio Theatre (click here) on the day after the game, on the 16th, the News stated that he was "making every effort ..." to attend the Santa Claus Bowl.

From CBS' Hollywood studios, Lux broadcast live radio adaptations of film scripts featuring original casts, and had scheduled Anchors Aweigh for Monday, December 29, with Frank and his co-stars Gene Kelly, Kathryn Grayson, and Dean Stockwell. Sinatra could not have made the Bowl, and then returned to California even had passenger jets been flying, as three days of rehearsals preceded each show. Lux was as big as it got in the Forties, and Palumbo would have known there was no way that Sinatra could have wiggled out of the gig.

The article went on to say that bids to host the 1948 Santa Claus Bowl were already coming in, and that Milton Berle, Al Jolson, Bob Hope, Mickey Rooney, and Jimmy Durante also had Pop Warner teams, "and have given lavishly of their time and money in helping to promote their clubs".

When my father visited sports editor Lanse McCurley to stop the hype, McCurley told him that he was responsible only for his bylined articles, and had been told to go along with everything that came down from New York, most likely from Condon.

It was not until  the day before the game - December 27 - that the tabloid finally published a picture of the New Yorkers.  Its lateness, and the fact that Sinatra Cyclones appeared to have been hastily stenciled onto players' jerseys, hinted that the kids were recently picked all-stars, and not members of a regular, season-long squad as the paper had claimed all along.

In 1947, the Daily News did not publish on Sun-days unless the Phillies, A's or Eagles played at home, in which case a special "scorecard" edi-tion was sold at the ball-park. It was no different at South Philly High, where a capacity crowd was expected. The Cyclones planned to leave Manhattan by bus early Sunday morning and stop at the Liberty Bell on their way to the field. However, an 8-inch snowstorm hit Philadelphia on Friday, while a record 28 inches fell in Central Park. When their charter bus was cancelled due to road conditions, the team took a train which got as far as Newark, where it derailed!

Its  2 P.M. kickoff missed, the Santa Claus Bowl was about to be called off when the Cyclones arrived in a fleet of cabs. Having seated 3000 or so from the bountiful advance sale, Gillen's crew had already issued half of them refunds from a cigar box that Palumbo had stuffed with $1 bills. Those who stayed saw his Clickets win on defense, 6-0.

After the game, the kids were treated to a banquet at which Frank pulled two names out of a bowl and sent a Cyclone and Clicket Jimmie O’Donnell to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. Jimmie's three articles about his trip appeared in the News on January 1, 2, and 3, ending its role in a project totally at odds with its established promotional pattern.

In 1978, my father voiced no regrets. Looking back, the Santa Claus Bowl was the "launch pad" of  Pop Warner Football. Based on LaMotta's 1960 confession, he was certain that Palermo acted alone. Unlike the undertaker in the Godfather, who was told that he would one day owe his Don a "service", he said he could have turned Palumbo down, but felt that he owed him one.

I began this project by taking a closer look at Mannie Sachs. In 1978, I took him to be just another pr flack as the Evening Bulletin’s game recap ended: “Coach Gary Carr … received the Sinatra award from Mannie Sacks (sic) of Columbia Records, who represented Sinatra.”

Open sources often prove invaluable in investigations, and that’s how it was with Kitty Kelley’s His Way and Will Freidwald’s Sinatra! The Song Is You. Both authors show that until his death in 1958, Mannie Sachs was among Frank Sinatra’s closest friends. As Columbia’s VP in charge of Artists and Repertoire, he found Sinatra a pr man who created the “swoon” effect which propelled him to the top, then talked him into leaving Tommy Dorsey’s band, lending him $25,000 toward settlement. Sinatra then signed with Columbia as a solo artist. An indication of just how close the two men were came in 1944 when Sachs, who was Jewish, became godfather to Frank Sinatra, Jr.

When the married singer took up with Ava Gardner, Sachs covered for him, and when the fiery couple had a tiff, he was usually the one to help make peace. One night, to make Ava think he killed himself while talking to her over the phone, Sinatra fired a pistol into his mattress. Sachs, whose Central Park apartment was down the hall, raced to Frank’s suite. Finding him intact, he figured Ava would call the police and exchanged mattresses with Sinatra to erase the incident. When the pair finally married, Sachs drove them to his brother’s home in Philadelphia, where Ava came down the stairs on his arm. Mannie Sachs, then, was clearly on the crooner's A-team, and his banquet presence meant that the Santa Claus Bowl was just as important to Frank Sinatra as it was to Frank Palumbo.

Sinatra's famous Rat Pack was not his first coterie. He called his original one "The Varsity" - a group that partied with him in New York and accompanied him to the fights at MSG. As Kelley quotes him: “I never missed a Friday night.” In addition to Sachs, the group consisted of music arranger Alex Stordahl, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen, lyricist Sammy Cahn, boxing writer Jimmy Tarantino, and Frank’s personal entourage consisting of gofer Nick Sevano, business partner Ben Barton, manager Hank Sanicola, and two boxer/bodyguards, Al Silvani and Tami Mauriello. Owing to his frequent trips east, the Varsity stayed together after Sinatra moved to California.

At the time of the fight, the crooner was appearing at the Capitol Theater in New York, and had a direct connection to the bout through Silvani, who managed LaMotta. We now know that Silvani met with Palermo before the match, and that Sinatra, who spent lavishly, was taking advances from Columbia to make ends meet. This makes it impossible to exclude him from the list of probable insiders who bet on Fox.

That list, of course, begins with Billy Fox's two managers. As progenitor of the Santa Claus Bowl, Frank Palumbo obviously cashed in a marker owed to him by the Daily News after Hogan and Eagan began their inquiries. This leaves for later the question of why the tabloid masked the role played in the game by Madison Square Garden.

The worst I can say about my father is that, according to my mother, he sometimes bought black market cigarettes at the CR during WWII. His bank account never swelled up, and my grandfather’s money explains how my sister and I attended private schools. As a result of a federal tie I once had, I learned that my father passed muster via Birch Taylor, who was close to John Sears, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia office, and that Glenn Martin also reported on him to Washington.

The Clickets played for the last time in 1948 against a Lynchburg, Virginia, opponent. There was no Sinatra or Daily News, but Frank Palumbo gave the kids nice trophies and a banquet. The Santa Claus Bowl then moved to Omaha, Nebraska, followed by Lakeland, Florida, where it was broadcast over Mutual Radio. In 1953, Pop Warner Football was introduced out west by the Pony Bowl in Las Vegas.

National recognition came when the American Football Coaches Association (college coaches) presented Joe Tomlin with its prestigious Amos Alonzo Stagg Award in 1955. He was now brokering holiday football festivals all over the map under names such as the Kids’ Army-Navy Game, Toys for Tots, and the Piggy Bank Bowl. He finally hit the jackpot in 1959 with the Disneyland Bowl, which begat Moochie of Pop Warner Football, shown on ABC-TV’s Disneyland series (click here). The film still reruns on Disney's cable channel.

John Scott succeeded Bill Gillen as Conference manager in 1950 under president John Ferro and vice-president Jack Pearson, a sporting goods dealer. This trio ran the program through 1957, allowing my father to pursue his national goal. When Pop Warner Little Scholars - a/k/a Pop Warner Football - was born in 1958, its highest individual awards were earned in the classroom, leading Jim Michener to call it "the (juvenile sports) system at its best" in his 1976 book, Sports In America.

Declining a position on Scholars' founding board, Palumbo asked that the slot be offered to Jake Kossman, the attorney to whom he sent my father in 1947. Frank was among the "Old Timers" scheduled for honors at 1979's Golden Anniversary Dinner, but as he was not feeling well that evening, his wife, Kippee, accepted. According to the “Palumbo file” at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Frank's gold Pop Warner football is among his most cherished awards!

The Philadelphia mob was formally established in 1920 under Salvatore Sabatello. A peaceful line of succession then followed, ending with the ascendancy of Angelo Bruno in 1957. All the while, a parallel clan, similar to Italy's “High Mafia”, operated in the background. Italy’s government-business cabal dealt with its cousins via cutouts, as periodic sacrifices of low-level street types kept the public blissfully ignorant. However, after two investigative magistrates were murdered in 1992, the ensuing public outcry resulted in a massive purge of Italy’s political system. As the elder Palumbo left his son the means to own more than a boarding house by his 21st year, the feds’ old case theory had credence in this "high" Italian sense.

In a 1973 Philadelphia Inquirer article, Tom Foglietta, godfather to Palumbo’s daughter, Franca, whose political rise began in City Council with Frank’s help, and who ended his career by serving as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Italy, was quoted: “His friends go down to the restaurant, and if they want to talk, or they need a favor, Frank’s there. They might ask his advice on how to go about getting elected. Frank can help them by letting the committeemen and ward leaders know that he thinks a certain candidate is a good one.”

Dispensing advice with pasta did not prevent the ambassador’s mentor from tending to other businesses (an auto dealership, real estate, and landlord to operators of several girlie joints). Also, when quoted by the United Press in 1947 about a possible title fight for Ike Williams, Palumbo demonstrated he was just as savvy about the fight game as was his partner, Blinky Palermo.

In 1971, a treasury agent who penetrated the mob called Palumbo its “political fixer”. Nine years earlier, a wiretap es-tablished that Angelo Bruno’s crews used Palumbo's for its “secure” public telephone (it wasn't), and in 1951, a Philly cop dismissed from the force for arresting bookies, told the U.S. Senate's Crime Committee that the CR Club was the meeting place of 50 numbers bankers, leading to the only time Frank Palumbo got himself into trouble with the law.

In 1950, Senator Estes Kefauver held hearings in Philadelphia, after which a grand jury probed connections between the police and the underworld. While Blinky Palermo was fined $500 for “deliberately evasive, irrelevant, impertinent, and sarcastic answers”, Palumbo briefly dodged his subpoena, and then turned himself in. After Kossman got him off without charges, a file that detailed his relationship with Palermo, disappeared. As these events unfolded, Lee Ellmaker, the owner of the Philadelphia Daily News, suddenly died.

In 1998, the owner of the Daily News was Knight-Ridder’s Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc., whose publisher informed me that there was nothing in its files to confirm or refute a claim made by the Pennsylvania Historical Commission in Philadelphia, A Guide To The Nation’s Birthplace that “[The] first proprietor of the Daily News was the late William Scott Vare … [who] entered the newspaper ... business … to advance his prospects as U.S. Senatorial candidate …”. When Vare died in 1934, the Guide concluded, “… the newspaper was finally taken over by Lee Ellmaker."

Edwin and William Vare grew up on a pig farm near Antonio Palumbo’s boarding house. Having prospered by carting city trash in their farm wagons, they became general contractors, and then entered the rough and tum-ble world of Philadelphia's Republican politics. Ed became a state senator in 1912, and Bill, a congressman. When he died, Bill's estate included 41,475 shares in the Daily News.

Of modest means, Lee Ellmaker's family moved from the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside near Lancaster to Philadelphia, where Lee was born in 1897. In 1915, at 18 years of age, he went to Harrisburg to report on the state legislature, where he met Ed Vare, and through him, became Bill’s secretary in Washington. He left Bill to join the International News Service in 1919, then returned to Philadelphia in 1924 to organize the Daily News for his Senate run.

Under its inaugural (March 31, 1925) masthead, Ellmaker was listed as the Daily News’ general manager while Vare’s name did not appear at all. Instead, to create the illusion of total detachment from the newspaper, Vare sent it a con-gratulatory message, nor was the News mentioned in his 1933 vanity-published My Forty Years In Politics. After his election to the Senate, Vare sold half of his interest in the paper to New York magazine publisher, Bernarr McFadden, who retained Ellmaker as general manager, and then sold him his shares four years later.

The Vares were snubbed by the G.O.P. elite, not because of their humble origin, but because of how they "boss-ruled" the city and fought the establishment. Through Ed’s death in 1922, they had taken on Governor Pinchot, Pittsburgh’s Mellons, and George Wharton Pepper, who Bill defeated, along with Pinchot, in the 1926 senatorial primary. How-ever, after Vare won the general election, the Senate refused to seat him on the grounds of vote fraud, election finance, and a decade old murder!

State senator James McNichol was one of  many Vare enemies among Philadelphia's Republican politicians. As the 1917 primary neared, the McNichol and Vare factions clashed throughout the city, especially in the Fifth Ward, where McNichol's councilmanic candidate, James Carey, faced Vare’s Isaac Deutsch. When an attempt was made on Carey’s life, a policeman was shot dead by Jake Mascia and John Costello, who fingered Ruggiero Falcone as being in charge of their New York crew. Upon his arrest, Falcone claimed the pair had acted on their own - that his only instructions were to harass Carey's supporters, for which he had been promised freedom from police interference.

Based on the murder and beatings of Carey supporters at a political club, arrest warrants were served upon Deutsch, police lieutenant David Bennett, and Mayor Thomas Smith, who sat on warnings of Fifth Ward trouble. Upon making bail, Smith and Bennett golfed with Ed Vare, who posted bond for six cops implicated in the club beatings, one of whom disclosed that Vare put up the money to hire Falcone! Ultimately, only the New Yorkers stood trial for the policeman's death. Note the time correlation between the fiasco caused by Vare's imported goons and the formal founding of the Philly mob (click here).

After Lee Ellmaker’s death in March 1951, a Daily News editorial read, in part: “The employees of the DAILY NEWS … never felt they were working for him, but with him, building public confidence in the … newspaper he helped to establish and over which he held command from its inception more than 25 years ago.” It concluded: “A keen student of politics, having served for years as secretary and personal representative for Congressman William S. Vare, Mr. Ellmaker was familiar with every facet of the government scene.”

How gingerly the Daily News treated the subject of its birth! If, by its own words, Lee Ellmaker helped to establish it, for whom did he do it? Next, from where, at the trough of the Great Depression, did Ellmaker get the money to buy the News from "someone"? According to Time magazine (January 11, 1932) Vare bankrolled him, and after he bought out McFadden, Ellmaker became a national publisher when he acquired Woman's World and the Pictorial Review. No matter the details, it is clear that as Vare’s "secretary", his “personal representative”, and as "general manager" of (someone's) Daily News, Lee Ellmaker took a sabbatical until Fifth Ward fallout subsided, then rejoined his patron for his Senate run! Given such “integrity”, it is fair to speculate that he knew Frank Palumbo as more than an advertiser and did his bidding in sponsoring the Santa Claus Bowl.

Before Billy Fox's purse was released, Blinky Palermo signed him to fight Gus Les-nevitch at Madison Square Garden in March 1948. Commenting on this on December 17, Lanse McCurley characterized the Garden as Blinky's playground when he wrote: “The man who is virtually running things in Madison Square Garden right now, getting everything he wants, and dictating his own terms, is none other than Blinky Palermo, the co-manager of Ike Williams along with Frank Palumbo.”

What could have so emboldened Blinky while fixed in Hogan's cross-hairs, and just after the Athletic Commission fined MSG's boxing partner - The 20th Century Sporting Club - for dealing with “unlicensed persons with criminal records”? The fine resulted from a different Hogan probe into a bribe offer reported by Rocky Graziano. While Eagan did not disclose names when announcing the puny $2500 fine, one was Frankie Carbo, called by Jimmy Breslin “a standby Mafia killer who liked to think of himself as a fight manager”. Carbo's rap sheet: 17 arrests including several murders.

In 1960, Jake LaMotta finally admitted he took a dive before Estes Kefauver’s Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee of the Senate's Judiciary Committee which targeted the monopoly enjoyed by Jim Norris' International Boxing Club (IBC). LaMotta said he turned down Palermo’s $100,000 offer, but threw the fight in exchange for a later title shot against France’s Maurice Cerdan. Two New York detectives then testified that a “terrific amount of Philadelphia money (bet on Fox) flowed into New York” and that Frankie Carbo controlled boxing by using Blinky Palermo as his “leg man”.

In Beyond The Ring, Jeff Sammons makes the case for Hogan’s integrity, but comes down hard on Eagan, who often looked the other way when ethics clashed with business. Two possibilities arise in the LaMotta case. Either Eagan deliberately gave everyone a "pass" (including CBS, which owned Sinatra’s label, and whose founder, Ike Levy, was close to Sachs), or, less likely,  he “sentenced” those guilty to community service.

With 20th Century paralyzed due to the illness of its principal, Mike Jacobs, MSG's box office was threatened just as it began to recover from a post-war string of meaningless fights. Then came the one-two punch of Graziano followed by LaMotta. As there was no substitute for the talent Carbo controlled, Eagan restored the status quo under Palermo, and in pawning Carbo off on Hogan, he paved the way for Norris to buy out Jacobs.

Updated on 29 Apr 2007

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