photo by Lisa Ross

Author's Notes re BUMMY DAVIS VS MURDER, INC.

When I began this project in 1994, I intended to research and write the story of Al Davis, the Brownsville Bum, a much-maligned prizefighter whose life had always fascinated me. However, I soon learned that the story of Al "Bummy" Davis was not just the story of a person. His life was so intricately intertwined with a time, a place, and a phenomenon in our history that to separate one from the others would be like pulling the thread that unravels the fabric. To chronicle his life was to chronicle the Brownsville, Brooklyn, of the Prohibition and Depression era and its inevitable offspring, the notorious band of killers known as Murder, Inc.

I never met Bummy, but I feel as though I've known him most of my life. In 1940, my cousin Irwin Kaye Kaplan, a tough California lightweight, moved to New York. He trained at Beecher's Gym on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville and was greatly impressed by two things: my mother's stuffed peppers and the friendship of Al Davis. At seven years old, I was greatly impressed by one thing: my cousin Irwin. I would sit at the dinner table, listening in wonder as he told my father, grandfather, and uncles about Brownsville and the fight game and how this guy Davis, who didn't know him from a hole in the wall, offered to stake him until he got settled and was earning his keep. Irwin didn't need the help, but that was beside the point. He couldn't get over the fact that Davis offered it.

By the time I was ten I was listening to Davis fights on the radio and reading about him in the newspapers - reading sometimes about a very different Al Davis from the one described by my cousin. This Al Davis was a bum, a guttersnipe, a gangster, a bully, and the dirtiest fighter to grace the prize rings of the thirties and forties. So I left him to rest in the recesses of my mind, but the intrigue never faded. Over the years I became involved in many facets of the boxing community, as a participant and then a manager and promoter. It was more like a wine-tasting experience than a professional endeavor, probably due in part to my cousin's early influence, but it was through these peripheral involvements that I met Vic Zimet and the mystique of Al Davis was reawakened.

Vic was Bummy's assistant trainer during his early career. He opened the door that permitted me to enter a world-a world in step only with itself-where I got to know the real Al Davis. He brought me together with Bummy's friends, neighbors, and ring opponents. And as I learned about Bummy, I learned about Brownsville. The two were inseparable.

As a youngster growing up in East Flatbush, I was not unfamiliar with Brownsville. I could bicycle there in fifteen minutes or take the Kings Highway bus, but my memories are of floating in on an aromatic cloud of roasted chestnuts, baked sweet potatoes, and knishes. I never thought of Brownsville as a place. It was an experience, an adventure. It wasn't very different in appearance from its neighboring communities of Crown Heights, Canarsie, East Flatbush, and Flatbush, but these were places you passed through. There was no reason to visit them. It was different with Brownsville. Brownsville lured you, suckered you, conned you. It was everyone's poor relation, and everyone's invitation from the spider to the fly.

Brownsville was a world of haggles and gaggles. From every part of the city, crowds converged on the overflowing pushcart marketplaces and the Pitkin Avenue haberdashers and the Rockaway Avenue furniture and appliance merchants, hunting for bargains and delighting in being swells on a slumming expedition. Nevertheless, people respected Brownsville. From the outside looking in, it was the land of the bizarre; everyone was a character, from the kibitzer to the comic, and every character was tough. Brownsville was tough, and tough earns respect. Sometimes respect grows and becomes fear. Brownsville earned that kind of respect too, packaged and wholesaled in the form of the Shapiro brothers and the Ambergs and finally the ultimate gangland killing machine, Murder, Incorporated.

The headquarters of Murder, Inc. was right next to a gas station on Stone and Sutter Avenues that was owned by two of my uncles. I heard many frightening inside stories about this gang from those who shook hands with or just shook at the sight of the shtarkers. Over the years the stories were told to me conversationally, and then much more purposefully when I began this project. Initially my interest in Murder, Inc. came from natural curiosity, geographic proximity, and the pervasive media coverage at the time. It was while I was traversing the world of Al Bummy Davis that curiosity graduated to intense research.

In writing ≥Bummy Davis Vs. Murder Inc.≤, I've relied on archival records, authoritative books, and contemporary newspaper accounts, as well as extensive interviews with historians, neighbors, relatives, and friends of Al Davis and his family, opponents he faced in the ring, trainers, managers, and even the guy who gassed up his car. So much becomes distorted over time-it is more than fifty-five years since Al Davis strode the sidewalks of Brownsville-that often truth and legend are difficult to separate. It's very much like a jigsaw puzzle. Faced with conflicting or unreliable information, I found myself picking and choosing the pieces that fit best into the overall picture. I also pieced together some of the lesser-known characters in Bummy's life from stories and anecdotes I heard over and over, usually from more than one person. Moe Bradie used to tell me about a guy named Mottel who lived across from the station and went to the I.J. Morris Funeral Parlor like other people went to the movies. Marvin Dick, a former fighter from Brownsville, told me about Bummy's strange "big brother" friendship with a kid called Chotchke Charlie, and so did two other sources, Al Spieler, who owned a popular Brownsville eatery, and Larry Linden, a Brownsville contemporary of Bummy's. I heard stories about "the big Polack" from several people, including Marvin Dick, who gave a hilarious rendition of Bummy's brothers coming to settle accounts for his bullying the kid, and Dave Smith, another uncle of mine, head of the sheetrock union and a former fighter. They didn't know the guy's name, so I gave him one, and he appears in these pages as Zelke.

The Al Davis portrayed throughout this book is the Al Davis that I believe he truly was: a young man who couldn't understand a world that shunned him, but who stood up to it eyeball to eyeball, jaw to jaw. It is about a guy born Albert Davidoff fighting to rid himself of the image of a guy dubbed the Brownsville Bum. Because I wasn't there to hear Bummy and my other characters, I've invented much of their dialogue, but the conversations in this book are the conversations I heard a million times in my youth, informed by careful research and interviews. I have been as faithful to everything I know about Al Davis as is humanly possible, and the same goes for the entire cast of Murder, Inc. as well as all the peddlers, shop owners, and baleboostehs of Brownsville and East New York.

My attempt to breathe life into Al Davis and all those who shared his time and place on this earth could never have been carried through without the many wonderful people who joined in to assist me. I want to take this opportunity to thank them.

Until I met Hank Kaplan, I never knew a person who lived in a library or a museum, but that's what Hank's home in Miami is. He is acknowledged to be boxing's foremost historian and archivist, but I'll always cherish him as a dear friend whose unflagging support and never-ending supply of information were invaluable. The same goes for Vic Zimet, who worked with Froike as Bummy's trainer early in his career, stood straight, tall and regal almost until the day of his death, on January 13, 2003, at the age of eighty-five. He remained active in amateur boxing until the end,after an illustrious career in which he served as first president of the Metropolitan Amateur Boxing Federation and assistant ringside manager of the 1984 Olympic Boxing Team. He was named Coach of the Year by the National Amateur Boxing Federation in 1986. He helped launch the careers of numerous headliners, including Al Davis and Bernie Friedkin. "Bummy was as polite and respectful a young man as I ever came across," Vic told me. "He always had a pleasant smile, and even though I was only three years older than he was, it was always 'Mr. Zimet.' And as far as paying attention and his ability to learn, he sopped it up like a sponge. Without Vic Zimet and Hank Kaplan this project might not have been possible.

My dear friend Mike Welch, a boxing historian, made his vast library of boxing audiotapes available to me day and night. More important to me, though, was the enjoyment and appreciation he expressed for my work. Irving Rudd, the great publicist, knew Al Davis as well as anyone and started many years ago to set the record straight. I hope I've completed the job to Irv's satisfaction. Bernie "Schoolboy" Friedkin's warmth, candor, and memories of Al Davis were truly a revelation. He can still serve as a model, if not for a good boy, for a good person. Stanley Weston, the irrepressible former publisher and editor of Ring magazine, helped me tremendously in gathering material and requested in return no more than a bar of halvah. On the bleakest of days my ray of sunshine was Gil Clancy, who started out as a schoolteacher in Brownsville and went on to become the legendary trainer of such ring greats as Emile Griffith, George Foreman, and Oscar De La Hoya. Morris Reif, another gallant Brownsville warrior of yesteryear, regaled me with his insights, memories, and personal acquaintances from that long-ago Brownsville. Beau Jack, the affable former world lightweight champion, shared wistful memories of Al Davis that were extremely helpful in further defining his personality.

Last but not least, I thank all those Brownsville denizens now scattered around the land, those who have lived the life described in the following pages, those who were kind enough to share their experiences with me, and those who only know of this period and these events through the stories they've heard from their parents and grandparents. This is your book.

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