HELL RAISER
as if he knew something about it. Maroney wrote out a statement while under arrest, declaring he’d seen Siki go berserk in a restaurant. Maroney denied being involved in the murder, though he implicated others. Yet none of the people he named were ever charged. Maroney was released. The mystery lingered. Peter Benson, who authored a lengthy biography of Siki in 2008, proposed that a group of Manhattan gamblers and mobsters had targeted Siki after he had reneged on deals to throw fights. After all, he’d claimed to have double-crossed Carpentier’s backers in 1922 and apparently thought nothing of continuing the unadvised practice. The main fight in question involved Jimmy Francis, whom Siki had allegedly agreed to carry. Instead, Siki knocked Francis out in two rounds on July 23, 1925. Days later, Siki was found unconscious and bleeding on West 41st Street. Siki, who had been stabbed in the neck, was unclear about what had happened. And when police brought in a suspect, a 25-year-old thug named John Hanrahan who had been snooping around the crime scene, Siki declined to press charges. Benson suggested this incident was the mob’s first attempt on Siki’s life and that whoever was behind it told his flunkies to wait and try again. Much of Benson’s mobster lore sprung from a comment by noted French journalist Gaston Bénac, who claimed Siki had scammed gamblers on four occasions and had upset a “second-rate gangster.” Bénac purportedly overheard this from Bob Levy, Siki’s manager at the time of his death. Building on Bénac’s comment, Benson packed his gangland theory with anecdotal evidence, namely that Hell’s Kitchen was overloaded with gangsters, and that other boxing figures had died in those years under mysterious circumstances. The final ingredient was the veil of secrecy that blanketed Hell’s Kitchen. “You could bet if Siki was killed by the mob,” Benson wrote, “the
killer wouldn’t come to trial.” Still, there’s no real evidence, not in Benson’s book or elsewhere, that Siki’s murder was part of an underworld conspiracy. With Siki, whose history was full of missing chapters, the tendency is to fill the gaps with colorful guesswork. Other theories have included owners of local speakeasies, tired of Siki’s loutish behavior and unpaid debts, hiring someone to kill him. The police, with whom Siki often clashed, were also suspected. At the least, many believed the cops knew exactly who killed him but let the matter lay because Siki was Black and a troublemaker. Before any of these theories evolved, the consensus was that Siki owed money to someone and, in his naivete, had broken a rule of the street: He’d stiffed somebody on a loan and flouted it. Not even a former boxing champion could be forgiven for such a misstep in Hell’s Kitchen. The scuttlebutt was that Siki had created a disturbance in a place called The Coffee Pot and left without paying his tab. From the earliest reports, Siki was said to owe $20 to some unnamed figure, a sum that was repeated constantly. Siki’s widow verified that her husband had owed “a Greek named Jimmie” $20 (about $370.00 in today’s money), and that he had been killed because of an argument over some bootleg booze. She also said that someone had stolen Siki’s overcoat the night before. Did someone steal Siki’s coat as collateral for the money he owed? The last time Lillian saw Siki, he said he was returning to the place where the coat had been stolen. Perhaps the reports of him causing a disturbance had to do with the coat and his attempt to settle things. Bob Levy’s brother Harry told the Montreal Gazette in 1948 that Siki’s murder was indeed related to his owing money at a speakeasy, claiming “two tough kids” followed Siki home and shot him.
Additionally, a Hell’s Kitchen woman purportedly heard the shots that killed Siki and looked out her window. She claimed to have seen two men leaving the scene and jumping into a taxicab. Apparently, two cracks from a handgun weren’t enough to alert anyone else on the block at 4 a.m., but that was life on West 41st Street in 1925. By the 1930s, when city corruption was under siege and Mayor Jimmy Walker resigned in disgrace, the Siki case was forgotten. It’s rather unbelievable that not one hoodlum or shady cop ever told what they knew, though there could be reasons for this. A secret is easier kept if it involves only one or two people. Therefore, a vast underground conspiracy is unlikely. One man with a gun on a dark street was all it took. And if the assassin never shared his secret, it was because he felt no guilt over it. Siki’s old turf is now known for upscale restaurants and luxury condominiums with views of the Hudson River. It is a mix of young professionals and students, as well as tourists on the hunt for a sushi burrito. But at one time you might’ve seen Siki strutting along the sidewalk, wearing a cape and a top hat, inviting passersby to join him in a song or a dance, to enjoy life as he did: with gusto and pulling no punches. Though Siki provided a neon-lit cautionary episode, it is not a story that anyone learns from. Athletes still fall under the spell of fame and money and end up in bad ways. Siki, more tragic than most, gets bundled into the stack of boxing oddities and weird tales. Perhaps the strangest part of Siki’s legacy is that he spawned, throughout the 1930s and ’40s, more than 100 fighters calling themselves “Battling Siki.” They appeared on undercards in backwaters across the country, usually for one or two fights before disappearing. It seemed America was full of Battling Sikis, though on that dismal December morning a century ago, as he lay dying in the street, the real Siki must’ve felt terribly alone.
Usyk is one of three male fighters to hold every sanctioning organization title.
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