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    The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights
    The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights
    The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights

    Written by Shaun Assael

    Narrated by R.C. Bray

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    On January 5, 1971, Sonny Liston was found dead in his home-of an apparent heroin overdose. But no one close to Liston believed that his death was accidental. Digging deep into a life that Liston tried hard to hide, Shaun Assael treats the boxer's death as a cold case. The result is a riveting whodunit that evokes a glorious and grimy era of Las Vegas.

    Elvis Presley was playing two shows a night at the International. Howard Hughes was running his empire from the penthouse suite of the Desert Inn. And middle America was flocking to the Strip, transforming it from an exclusive playground for the mob to a mecca for corporate dollars. But the city was also rotting from within. Heroin was pouring over the border from Mexico, and the segregated Westside was on the cusp of a race war.

    Driving through town with the top of his pink Cadillac down, Liston was the one celebrity who was unafraid to bridge the two sides of Las Vegas. Cashing in on his fading notoriety in the casinos, he was dealing drugs, working for a crime syndicate, and trying to break into Hollywood-all with a boxer's faith that he could duck any threat, slip any punch. Heroin addiction was the only knockout blow he didn't see coming.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateOct 18, 2016
    ISBN9781681681337
    The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights
    Author

    Shaun Assael

    Shaun Assael is an investigative journalist, who has been with ESPN The Magazine since its launch in 1996. He is a member of ESPN's investigations unit and a regular contributor to the prime-time show E:60. He is also the author of four books: Wide Open: Days and Nights on the NASCAR Tour; Sex, Lies, and Headlocks, which was a New York Timesbestseller; and Steroid Nation, and The Murder of Sonny Liston.

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    Reviews for The Murder of Sonny Liston

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      The Serial podcast about Adnan Syed's murder conviction sparked a profusion of so-called "true crime" podcasts, many focusing on unsolved murders or assessing whether particular deaths were the result of foul play. While several of those are worth listening to, The Murder of Sonny Liston displays the advantage of the written word.The question of whether boxer Sonny Liston's heroin overdose was actually a murder has been a subject of speculation for decades. While author Shaun Assael's The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights can't settle that question, the book portrays a Las Vegas on the verge of its heydays. There's the wealthy casino investors, such as Howard Hughes, and the mob influence in the city. There's the office run by Clark County Sheriff Ralph Lamb, one of the most powerful men in Vegas, if not Nevada. There's the seedy underside of the Las Vegas Police Department in a jurisdictional muddle of the city's explosive growth. There's the de facto segregation of the community. And while Liston spent much of his time in African-American West Las Vegas, the man considered by many to be the angriest black man in America lived in an exclusive area of the city in a home once owned by Debby Reynolds.Given the poverty in which he grew up, the fact he came into boxing while serving time in the Missouri State Prison and his later addiction to heroin, gentrification wasn't something that fit Liston. The home and opportunities his celebrity brought didn't cast out the variety of shady characters who were regular elements of and influences on his professional and personal life. Assael clearly portrays these elements of the story. Unfortunately, while there are several candidates who may well have wanted Liston dead, that theme often seems to get lost in the emphasis on Vegas itself. Although Liston's story makes the book a satisfactory read for those interested in him, the book is as much a history of 1960s Las Vegas as a thorough analysis of whether Liston was murdered. In fact, the latter focuses in large part on a police informant's claims some 12 years after Liston's death. At least the detail Assael provides elevates his exploration above the cursory views taken in most genre-related podcasts.(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie)
    • 4/5
      Admittedly I knew next to nothing about Sonny Liston before I read this book. I'm not much of a sports guru, although I do love boxing movies. All I knew about Sonny Liston was that he was the fallen boxer in the famous photo with Muhammad Ali towering over him. That's it. While this book doesn't go into too much detail about Sonny's early life or early career, it does mention some key facts and picks up the story towards the end of Sonny's life and career. This book doesn't paint a pretty picture of anyone but it is a fascinating look at corruption, the mob, heroin, and Las Vegas. The author meticulously puts together all the possible events, people, and circumstances that point to the famous boxer being murdered, even though there was never a homicide investigation. The plot thickens when you realize that virtually no one was straight, not even his wife. While there is no concrete conclusion at the end, readers will draw their own conclusions and in the process learn a great deal about boxing, fight fixing, draft dodgers, heroin, dirty cops, and Las Vegas. Thoroughly engaging, I wish there had been more pictures, but hey, what is a little outside research on my own.