On January 9, 1971, Geraldine Liston watched an overflow crowd at the Palm Mortuary pass by her husband’s steel casket. The crowd comprised the business of Las Vegas: showgirls, card dealers, casino execs, mob associates. Geraldine, her brown eyes hooded but sharp, studied their faces.

 

Some were there for the show. Stan Armstrong, a documentary filmmaker, would later recall walking a mile from his house at the age of 14 because he knew the funeral of Charles “Sonny” Liston would be a piece of history. Others were there simply to be seen. Ed Sullivan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Doris Day sat in the front row while the Ink Spots did a special rendition of the 1966 hit “Sunny.”

 

The last time Geraldine saw her husband alive, she was rushing to the airport to take their adopted son, Daniel, on a family visit to St. Louis. Even closing on 50, Sonny still looked like he was meant for only one thing. He was built like a mushroom cloud, with coal eyes that had dead reckoning in them and monstrous hands that punched with the force of a government crash test.

 

When she returned home from her trip, Geraldine expected to find her husband planning his next fight or maybe playing craps with his best friend, Joe Louis. Instead, she followed the smell of rotting flesh to her bedroom, where she found his corpse slumped backward over their bed. So much methane had escaped up his legs that his penis was fully engorged and his testicles were the size of pool balls.

 

There was an era when Sonny terrified God-fearing whites by carrying the mantle of the angriest black man in America. But that time was long gone. Since the Beatles had put him on the cover of Sgt. Pepper and the Monkees had put him in a movie, he’d receded into a kind of genteel notoriety. Around Vegas, the restaurants comped him, the hookers waved as he passed by, and cops offered his rides homes when he was drunk. He returned the favor by handing our preprinted business cards with his signature to tourists.

 

During his time in the spotlight, Sonny made it perfectly clear that he was willing to cheat on Geraldine whenever he had the chance. When a waitress presented them with a child that Sonny had fathered a few years before, Geraldine adopted the boy as her own, hoping he might finally give her the family she had always wanted. Sonny never became an ideal father, but his fragile fidelity always did lead him back home to her. And for that Geraldine remained his biggest defender. “He acts like he loves me, whether he does or not,” she said. “He takes care of his home and that’s all you can ask of a man.”

 

On the night she found him, Geraldine let the police who were called to investigate do their work without helping too much. They walked past the stuffed bear in the living room that had Sonny’s title belt wrapped around it, and into the den, where he kept his prized photos: the framed portrait with his arm around Lyndon Johnson; the one of him laughing it up with Sammy Davis Jr.; the sepia-toned keepsake of him mugging with Joe Louis when he took the crown from Floyd Patterson in 1962. The police rubbernecked, taking photos of themselves in front of the photos.

 

For all of its sophistication, Las Vegas was an unforgiving place in the 1960s, and it took a mean and unapologetic police force to hold it together. At the Greyhound station, plainclothes officers kept their eyes on the two-bit con men who rode in from wherever their last bit of luck ran out. As one deputy would say, “We had a blue binder book that had pictures of all known career criminals. The sheriff used to tell us, ‘If you kick their ass enough or throw them in jail enough, they’ll leave town.’ So whenever we saw somebody in that book, we found a way to kick their ass.”

 

The town was deeply segregated, too. “If you were black and walking down the strip just looking at the buildings and taking pictures, the sheriff’s department would take you to jail,” recalls Wilbur Jackson, one of the first African-American cops in the city when he was hired in 1958. “On the booking sheet, they’d write NOS.” It stood for Nigger on the Strip.

 

In response, the residents of the Westside built their own shadow Strip along Jackson Street and filled it with rollicking jazz and bebop joints. But by 1970, Jackson Street had become a tapped-out vein running through redlined heart of a ghetto.

 

Riots and civic neglect transformed the area into a badland where few without business dared to go. Sonny, of course, feared no one, and consequently made the Westside’s best-known lounge, the Town Tavern, his home away from home.

 

On Christmas Dat 1970, Sonny walked into the tavern with a white showgirl on each arm and ran into Clyde “Rabbit” Watkins, a former pool hustler who worked as a bellman at Caesars Palace. Watkins had met Sonny when he moved to town in 1966 and quickly became part of his entourage, jumping into Sonny’s pink Cadillac when he wanted company and keeping an eye out when strangers started to get on the big man’s nerves.

 

Watkins tipped the brim of his hat and wished his friend a Merry Christmas.

 

“What are you doing later?” he asked.

 

“Coming to your house to eat,” Sonny answered, laying his huge hands on Watkin’s back.

 

To Watkins and all those who saw Sonny that day, the champ was still a force of nature. 8 Christmases before, he had posed for the cover of Esquire in a red Santa Claus cap, looking every bit like an overgrown prison elf ready to Shiv a reindeer. And as far as Watkins was concerned, little had changed. Sonny remained a menacing slab of manhood. Immutable, Impervious, Impossible. As a writer for Sports Illustrated once observed, “If [a] ship were to go down, I would look at Sonny Liston to tell me what to do.” So Watkins was shocked then he was working the night shift at Caesars and heard the police were reporting Sonny was dead. As Watkins would recall it, he grabbed Joe Louis and Sonny’s former manager, Ash Resnick, both of whom were on the casino floor, and ran red lights until they reached 2058 Ottawa Drive.

 

Geraldine was not happy to see Watkins. She wasn’t blind to what her husband did, but she was old-fashioned enough to think that whatever it was should stay on the other side of town. Nor would she have been thrilled to see Resnick. He’d guided Sonny through his first fight against Muhammad Ali and it turned out to be the costliest loss of his career. Resnick was a player, and as far as Geraldine was concerned, Resnick had played them out of retirement.

 

But what could she say about Louis? Joe had always been generous to Sonny and was probably his best friend in Las Vegas. The problem was that he’d also just been treated in a psychiatric hospital for a heroin addiction that made him delusional. They were a triangle without a steady side.

 

According to Watkins, the trio entered just in time to watch two medical examiners struggling to load Sonny into a body bag. He was just six-foot-one but he was thick, and the rigor mortis made him hard to lift. The coroners got him as far as the stairs when one of them slipped and sent the corpse sliding. It landed on the living room floor with a thud.

 

The Three Amigos stood over the body, slightly stunned. And as the house filled with cops, the last thing they needed to do was answer questions, especially after the sheriff’s sergeant found a balloon of heroin on the kitchen table, below a wall phone. So they left.

 

The discovery of heroin led to a flurry of queries for Geraldine. What did she know about the drugs? Why had she waited three hours after walking through the door to report his death? What exactly did she find when she first got home? Was there any evidence of a struggle?

 

She waved off the questions, making it clear that she had nothing more to add that night. “Due to Mrs. Liston’s apparent shock over the death of her husband,” one officer wrote, “[we] were unable to interview her for further information.”

 

She would keep whatever suspicions she had to herself until her death.

 

As Sonny’s funeral wore on, Geraldine was consumed not only by who showed up but by who didn’t. Her husband kept a large swath of his life a secret, and the people he kept in the shadows weren’t about to show their faces now.

 

That included a well-known trumpeter who ran a drug gang and had hired Sonny to do collections for him with a .38 strapped to his ankle. The bandleader had a long track record with the cops and knew that they liked him for some part of Sonny’s death, even if they didn’t know what part yet.

 

And there was the beautician who dealt drugs out of the hair salon he ran across the tracks. He and Sonny did business together before they had a falling-out. Word on the street was that the beautician was looking for a piece of Sonny’s calp.

 

Even stranger was a milky alliance between a hero cop and an alcoholic grifter who became enmeshed in the darkest secret of Sonny’s career: the circumstances of his first-round surrender to Muhammad Ali in 1965.

 

The Nation of Islam, meanwhile, lurked in the shadows, as worrisome an influence as it had been during that fight when rumours surfaced that its founder threatened to assassinate Sonny if he didn’t take a dive. Ali was preparing to fight Joe Frazier for the biggest paycheck in the history of the sport, and Sonny was making noises that Ali owed him a piece of that purse as payment for taking a dive in ’65, although that seemed to be news to Ali. The Nation’s leaders had as much reason as anyone to make sure Sonny kept his mouth shut.

 

These were powerful people with means and connections, and they had all worried that Sonny was spiraling out of control. In her own way, Geraldine pleaded with him to slow down, enjoy life, and focus on raising their adopted son, who was all of 7. But whether it was because he was facing a midlife crisis or he simply thought no one could hurt him, Sonny couldn’t take his foot off the gas. He’d always had a girl or 4 on the side, but he was risking more than usual this time around. He’d fallen in love with a buxom cocktail waitress who’d turned him on to heroin.

 

In what might have been the biggest threat of all, the feds were beginning to look into the source of the drugs he was buying and selling. An undercover agent had already met with him about doing a drug deal and there was every indication that Sonny was going to fall for the trap. There was no telling what he would do if he had to start wearing a wire on his friends. But it was hard to imagine anyone in Las Vegas who had a larger or more varied group of people who already wished him ill.

 

That’s why those close to Sonny were sceptical when the coroner of Clark County issued a report that attributed his death to natural causes – specifically fluid on the lungs. It wasn’t an uncommon way for a man of roughly fifty to die, especially since the underlying cause was ruled to be a lack of blood flow to the heart, a common affliction for people with hardened arteries. But Sonny was no ordinary man. As recently as his last fight, in June of 1970, his body looked 15 years younger than his face, still massive and muscular. Among the fights he had won, 9 of 54 had ended in the first round with victories and 25 others failed to go halfway.

 

“I knew the mortician who took care of Sonny,” Rabbit Watkins would say in his Las Vegas home, not far from the Town Tavern, when I tracked him down more than 40 years later. “He told me, from what he seen, that wasn’t no natural causes.”

 

The death of Sonny Liston remains one of the most enduring mysteries in Las Vegas. There never was a homicide investigation because his death was never classified as a homicide. As a result, leads surfaced that haven’t been followed, suspects died with their secrets, and stories haven’t been told.

 

At the funeral, Geraldine flung herself at her husband’s casket and yelled, “I can’t even see his face. Oh Jesus.” Then she rose and shouted a question that would hover over the case for the next 5 decades. “Can you tell me what happened to you, Sonny?”