Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion by Gianmarc Manzione

cute for his own good. He tried to cheat the kind of guys who cheated for a living—the shylocks and backers who flocked to Gun Post as surely as the action bowlers did. Goldfinger had a reputation for lodging lead in his bowling ball to give it more “side weight.” He did this through a process called “plugging.” It involved drilling a hole in the bowling ball, embedding lead or pouring mercury into the hole, and then topping it off with a liquid that hardened overnight like glue, trapping the lead or mercury inside. According to the crooks and shysters whose income depended on the extent of their mastery over the various measures of deception, side weight turned the ball sosharply toward the headpin that it obliterated the pocket with an authority no ordinary bowling ball could possibly achieve. He made a lot of money this way. Steve Harris, who ran his own pro shop at 4840 Broadway on the corner of Broadway and Academy in upper Manhattan, would buy mercury from the drugstore and use it to “plug” bowling balls. He did the same with lead sinkers he would get from bait and tackle shops, but he insisted it was impossible to control bowling balls after manipulating them. The density of lead or mercury gave the bowling ball more hitting power—the kind of advantage Goldfinger sought. One bowler, Al Sergeant, unknowingly became a beneficiary of this practice. He bowled with a white towel draped over his shoulder and a cigar pinned between two fingers in his left hand while he threw the ball with his right. Sergeant’s ability as a spare shooter earned him recognition as the “king of the clean game”; he averaged about a 189 throwing his ball straight up the 15th board, rarely missing the pocket and never missing a spare. He threw the ball with so little angle and power, however, that he rarely carried pocket hits for strikes; he left a lot of 8-10 splits, 5-7 splits, 5-10 splits, and 10 pins. One night, a guy named Eddie Fenton, who owned a pro shop on Broadway and Dungan Place in Inwood, removed Sergeant’s ball from his locker, took it to his shop, and plugged it with lead. Sergeant, known to be as honest a man as he was accurate a bowler, never would have participated in the practice himself. But the ball he removed from his locker the next day made him a new bowler. Those 8-10 splits he left before now were just 10 pins he converted for spares; those pocket 10 pins he left now were strikes. If Sergeant had any idea what was going on, he never let on.
    Goldfinger hoped to enjoy some of the magic Fenton had bestowed upon Al Sergeant. He had just won four consecutive matches with a loaded ball when a group of gangsters bettingon his opponent noticed the same peculiarity in the movement of his bowling ball. Unfortunately for Goldfinger, the gangsters were not interested in giving him a snappy nickname for the move; they were interested in making him pay for it.
    “He’s throwin’ a loaded ball,” one of the gangsters growled as he pulled his cigar out of his face.
    One of the gangster’s goons took Goldfinger’s ball back to the pro shop to check it out. He weighed the ball and found that it had half an ounce of extra side weight. So they grabbed Goldfinger, laid him on the ground, held his bowling ball high over their heads, and smashed it down on his bowling hand. The blow blasted the bones in Goldfinger’s hand into so many little pieces they could have been used as mulch. Everybody in the action bowling scene got the message: it may help to load your bowling ball, but having your hand pounded to a pulp by gangsters did not sound like fun. His next trip back to Florida would be the last time he headed back home after a night of action up north; he never bowled again.
    But mercury plugs and lead sinkers from the local bait and tackle shop ranked among the crudest deceits employed by the more refined practitioners of hustling. Like Avenue M Bowl, Gun Post provided the stage on which many of action