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

those who knew it was him. The mask could conceal Mattie’s face, but not his voice. He made everyone strip to their bare asses. Then he took their clothes and their money and ran.
    But Mattie never did his due diligence about who he came after, and by the end of 1963, he crossed the kind of guy you did not run from: a member of the Gallo gang. Mattie, strung out on drugs and booze, thought it would be a good idea to make fun of Gallo while the gangster had a drink at a local bar. What a big mouth on this guy, Gallo thought. Gallo was the kind of guy who knew how to take care of people with big mouths. One night two Cadillacs pulled up to the bowling alley. Four guys in suits got out and went looking for Mattie. They found him, of course, in the lounge upstairs. They asked him to step outside. It was the kind of question that Mattie always eagerly answered in the affirmative to ensure everyone understood he feared no one. It was the last question he would answer in his life. The four gangsters took Mattie out into the street and each fired one bullet into his mouth. This is what we do with guys who have big mouths , their action seemed to say.
    The cops heard that message as loudly as anyone and circled the premises for weeks. Not surprisingly, the proximity to police officers made underage gamblers uneasy, and soon the gambling den that originated with Fish Face and his bait, Mac and Stoop, returned to the days of hushed nights andslow business. As would be the case with many bowling alleys that became hotbeds of action bowling, the Mattie incident ensured that the action at Avenue M Bowl died just as it seemed to have reached its zenith. The circus that was action bowling needed a new home. It would be no time at all before it found one.

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    T he circus moved to a place where even the street names had guns in them. Gun Post Lanes was on East Gun Hill Road in the Bronx. A huge expanse of French windows flanked the front doors, making it impossible to conceal the debauchery within. This architectural quirk would soon become the source of yet another upheaval in the action bowling scene. Gun Post was a two-story bowling alley with forty-eight lanes and a manager everybody called “Skee,” a guy who possessed the same acumen for promotion that made Fish Face a genius. Skee had come up with a game he called “Boomerang” in which bowlers would toss some money into a pot, throw one frame on each of twelve lanes, and the top two or three bowlers would divide the cash. Then they would return to the first pair of lanes and do it again. As entries went up, so did the money. Soon, the big boys started coming around. Saturday nights at Gun Post saw action on every pair of lanes,upstairs and down, beginning at 1 A.M. and persisting through dawn. The carpets gave off a reek of gangsters’ cigars as gamblers penciled their debts into the score table from one end of the alley to the other, every lane crowded with a shouting rush of gamblers looking to get their bets in.
    The craps games that had flourished around the lockers at Avenue M now found their home in the men’s restroom at Gun Post. Gamblers who came to the party a bit late and found the men’s room filled to capacity with craps players took the action to the ladies’ room instead. So acute was their addiction to gambling, in fact, that one bowler known as “Psycho Dave” once arrived directly from a wedding and bowled in his tux. Another bowler in his early twenties, Mike Ginsberg, was surprised when his parents appeared just after dawn, imploring him to leave because they had a family road trip to get on with. Ginsberg refused. So his father muttered something about the bums he kept for company, then went back out to the car, dumped Ginsberg’s clothes into the street, and left him behind.
    The whole cast of characters the cops scared away from Avenue M made Gun Post their new haunt. Iggy Russo with his lead-filled bowling pins and his clown act. The