Read Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion for Free Online Page A

they encountered in bowling alleys. One of Nagai’s buddies, who stood barely five feet tall andweighed about 150 pounds, once was held up by a few muggers who were twice his size. He told them he had $8, and that he would give each of them $2 and keep the last $2 for bus money to get home. The muggers did not particularly care for diplomacy, however, and demanded all the dough. Seconds later, the biggest of the three was out cold on the ground and the other two were running as fast as they could. Nagai was like that, too, having trained in martial arts himself.
    Just as Harris and Schlegel made it to Nagai’s car in the parking lot, they found themselves confronted by the whole gang they thought they had bought off inside—only now they were armed to the teeth with chains, knives, pipes and various other implements of persuasion. In the few minutes it took to reach the car, it dawned on the gang that if a knife flash got them $30, a real fight would get them even more. Fortunately the only weapons Nagai usually needed were his own bare hands, and he managed to nearly single-handedly take on the entire gang, with Harris and Schlegel heading for Nagai’s Cadillac.
    “When you lose, that should be a lesson to you,” Nagai admonished with a scowl as he performed a brutal karate chop on the fender of another parked car.
    Then Nagai told Schlegel and the boys it was time to get the hell out of there. He knew as well as they did that scaring the hoods was a great way of attracting more of them. Nagai twisted the keys in the ignition of his Caddy and, as he peeled off into the street, lifted a long iron bar from under his seat and twirled it around in his hand. From their vantage point, the gangsters must have sworn he was wielding a gun. If the objective was not to scare the poor bastards, then at that point they could consider the night a total failure, because fear attracted more teens looking for a fight like moths to a porch light. Nagai screamed up Route 1 at about 80 miles an hour with a car full of ‘hoodson his tail. They pursued the Caddy for nearly forty miles and, only then, finally conceded that the money they put on the wrong man that night was money they never would see again. Neither Harris nor Schlegel ever considered taking weapons of their own into bowling alleys after that, because the incident was such an aberration in their experience.
    It was also the last Nagai and the boys would ever see of Federal Lanes. It was not, however, the last time a coterie of young gamblers went out looking for action and instead found themselves on the wrong end of a gangster’s weapon. As 1962 drew to a close, one bowling alley in Brooklyn, New York was emerging as a place where the trouble was at least as plentiful as the treasure. Those who walked the precarious line between the two had stories to tell for the rest of their lives.

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    THE GUNS OF AVENUE M
    B y 1963, the Brooklyn action bowling scene swirled with rumors about gangsters who packed heat, shylocks who had ways of making sure you did not forget the debt you owed, and con artists who swindled the wrong crowd. Rumor and reality rarely make good bedfellows, of course; most action bowlers who went fishing in Brooklyn made it back home no worse for wear. Others, however, headed home with tales to tell and never dared set foot in the Brooklyn action again. But the promise of a big score overruled any fear the gamblers felt as they headed to Brooklyn for a night of action. Most of the time, they found that action at a place called Avenue M Bowl.
    An imposing but otherwise unremarkable edifice, Avenue M Bowl was a two-story bowling alley with lockers and a lounge upstairs. The building stretched from McDonald Avenue to East 2nd Street on Avenue M in Brooklyn, justbeside the elevated subway. The owner, Howie Noble, had a face so gnarled with pockmarks that most knew him by his nickname, “Fish Face,” an appropriate moniker given his famous tuna sandwiches served at