Boxing Odds and Ends: Tom-and-Jerry Fights, Kid Twist and More

At major online betting shops, the odds on Saturday’s Pacquiao-Barrios fight have been holding fairly steady with Barrios the favorite in the 7/2 range.

History informs us that those odds will likely recede tomorrow (Friday) as money comes in on the underdog, the sentimental pick, and then u-turn back up beginning late Saturday afternoon as the hour of destiny draws near.

Anyone that had been in Pacquaio’s dressing room after his last bout, a 12-rounder with Yordenis Ugas, would have trouble wagering on the Filipino icon.

Combat sports journalist Alan Dawson was there. Writing for “Uncrowned,” Dawson writes that Pacquiao’s bruised face was so swollen and that he could barely open his eyes.

That was four years ago.

Tom and Jerry

HE Turki Alalshikh coined a new phrase when he wrote that he didn’t want to see any more Tom-and-Jerry matches on the events that he was involved in.

Alalshikh was referring to the first weekend of May when shows on back-to-back nights produced three of the six dullest fights in boxing history as measured by the fewest punches thrown per CompuBox.

The first two (Devin Haney vs Jose Carlos Ramirez and Ryan Garcia vs Rolly Romero) played out in Times Square. For a boxing fan, it didn’t seem that things could get any worse, but they did the very next night in Saudi Arabia where Canelo Alvarez and William Scull combined to throw the fewest punches ever recorded by CompuBox in a 12-round match. Scull was credited with landing more punches than Canelo but none of his punches carried bad intentions and, as we wrote, the shifty Cuban fought as if he were competing on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Both shows were pay-per-view. A fight fan who bundled the two events for a discount rather than purchasing each separately was out $90.

Alalshikh clarified what he meant by a Tom-and-Jerry fight by describing it as a fight “where one fighter is running around the ring and the other is chasing him.” The allusion was to the animated children’s cartoon series of the same name where Jerry is a mischievous mouse who delights in frustrating Tom, a housecat, who chases him to no avail.

“Tom-and-Jerrying” originally meant a rowdy night on the town. In “Life in London,” a novel by Pierce Egan, first published in 1820, Jerry Hawthorne, a rube from the countryside, is introduced to high and low places in London by his friend Corinthian Tom. Their nocturnal escapades as they rambled about the city were transfigured from the printed page into a long-running and enormously successful play.

Students of boxing history know Pierce Egan for another reason. In “Boxiana,” a sweeping history of prizefighting in Regency England, Egan coined the term The Sweet Science (“the sweet science of bruising”), a euphemism for boxing.

Jeffrey Epstein and Kid Twist

On Aug. 10, 2019, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, was found dead in his cell at a federal detention facility in New York City. His death was ruled a suicide by hanging.

The first name that raced through my mind when I heard about Epstein’s death was Kid Twist. The similarities are eerie.

On Nov. 12, 1941, Kid Twist, born Abraham Reles, either fell or was pushed to his death from his sixth-floor room at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island while under heavy police guard.

A heavy-set man, 35 years of age when he drew his last breath, Kid Twist was a key cog in Murder Incorporated, the name given to a loose consortium of gangsters whose hub was a barbershop in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. According to Brooklyn DA William O’Dwyer, the combination was responsible for 86 gangland slayings across a 10-year span. Among the victims were the three Shapiro brothers – Meyer, Willie, and Irving — the latter of whom was a journeyman lightweight boxer.

Kid Twist

Twist/Reles, who admitted to killing Irving Shapiro, among others, had turned State’s evidence. His testimony had sent three members of Murder Inc. to the electric chair, but he wasn’t done. In a few months, he and an associate, Al Tannenbaum, were due in Los Angeles to testify in the trials of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Frankie Carbo who were accused of murdering Siegel’s boyhood pal Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg whose body was discovered by Greenberg’s wife in the driveway of their home.

Kid Twist had told the authorities that he had been a witness to the murder, that he and Tannenbaum, on a trip to Los Angeles, had followed Siegel and Carbo to the murder scene in a separate car and that it was actually Carbo who did the killing, pumping five bullets into Big Greenie.

The official version of Kid Twist’s death was that he had tried to escape by making a rope from bedsheets and wire hangers and the contraption broke as he was scaling down the Half Moon hotel, sending him crashing to his death. Ostensibly there were guards stationed right outside his door, so he couldn’t have simply walked away.

Many thought the official version was hogwash. They chose to believe that the mob had gotten to him, that he was murdered to keep him from testifying against his fellow racketeers who, in turn, might be induced to identify some of the politicians on their payroll.

Bugsy Siegel went to trial and was acquitted, leaving him free to invent Las Vegas. Frankie Carbo’s trial ended in a hung jury. And, yes, this is the same Frankie Carbo who a few years later would be called the underworld czar of boxing, a man who would twice go to prison for his nefarious dealings with fight managers and promoters, spending the last 15 years of his life, save for the last few months, in a federal penitentiary.

Regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious death, recent polls indicate that the conspiracy theory has taken a stronger hold, that the majority are now inclined to believe that Epstein was murdered to keep him from “ratting out” some of the powerful people with whom he was cozy.

We won’t venture an opinion; it’s not a proper subject for this website. But wherever Jeffrey Epstein is today, it’s a fair guess that Abe Reles, aka Kid Twist, is somewhere nearby.

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