In this insightful sports history, former boxing publicist Sussman (Rocky Graziano: Fists, Fame, and Fortune) exposes professional boxing’s world of gangsters and crooked referees and judges. At age 13 in the 1970s, Sussman realized that many professional fights were fixed; he recalls his father saying, “Gambling is a sucker’s game; betting on a fixed fight is never a gamble.” Sussman goes through a rogues’ gallery of master fixers and their control of the fight game: Abe Attell (mob boss Arnold Rothstein’s enforcer whose presence at fights “indicated something was not on the level”), Owney Madden (rumored to have fixed many of Primo Carnera’s fights), and Frank Carbo (a gunman for Murder Inc. who became a major boxing promoter). Sussman explains that with no union or pension, washed-up boxers fell prey to fast-talking, bullying con men who tainted the careers of the likes of Rocky Graziano and Sonny Liston (it was rumored that Liston’s 1964 loss to Muhammad Ali was a mafia fix). The prose harkens to old-school sportswriters like Red Smith and Jim Murray, with crisp descriptions of colorful characters and acts of criminality (Carbo “had the hard, cold eyes of a killer... the man who would invade, conquer, and corrupt the world of boxing”). Sussman’s bold, probing excursion into boxing has the knockout power of a good punch.”

Publishers Weekly

Mr. Sussman profiles the shady promoters and managers who controlled boxing from the sport’s early days in America. The book charts the gangsters’ involvement in boxing beginning with Arnold Rothstein, the New York gambler who was suspected of fixing the 1919 World Series. . . . an interesting and insightful book that chronicles the dramatic and colorful stories of mobsters and boxers.

Washington Times

If you loved Goodfellas, Casino, and The Godfather, you will love Boxing and the Mob. . . . the first book to cover a century of fixed fights, paid-off referees, greedy managers, and misused boxers. Organized crime and the world of boxing are intertwined with absorbing detail in this notorious piece of American history.

Boxing News 24

[Sussman presents] convincing evidence of the insidious connection between fighters and criminals that took off in the 1930s, and that is still with us today in subtle, sophisticated “more circumspect” ways related to gambling. The book also fairly reassesses those said to have taken falls — eye opening and sometimes sympathetic accounts that show that it was not the boxers themselves who took bribes so much as their promoters, managers, referees, trainers and high-powered judicial and political allies. In rare instances the fighters never made nearly as much as their various handlers.

Sag Harbor Express

[Sussman] exhibits a true love for his subject, alternating lively accounts of ring action with Runyonesque sketches of the mobsters and hit men who fixed top fights for decades.

COMMENTARY

Sussman is what in boxing would be called a “banger,” less dependent on finesse than straight-ahead slugging, a technique that works well enough for pounding through a gamey half-century of brutality, fake news, and the romance we attach to outlaws. . . . Mr. Sussman has dug up an all-star roster of low-life scum for our reading pleasure.

East Hampton Star