Ex-con works toward opening boxing gym with businessman's help
By Cristina Rouvalis - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
He's a 61-year-old man with a chiseled face, sculpted abs and a rap sheet more intimidating than his boxer's physique. Drug dealer. Bank robber. Pimp. Not the kind of jobs Larry Chisholm could put on his resume when he got out of prison for the eighth time.
Not the kind of man employers and landlords were seeking.
Not the kind of man Randy Castriota met in his life as a businessman and landlord.
But when Larry walked into Randy's office to inquire about an apartment rental in November 2004, Randy didn't give him the standard landlord brushoff, the look that said, "Felons need not apply."
He saw something sincere in the eyes of the recovering crack addict who reminded him of the actor Danny Glover.
He trusted him.
It was pure instinct.
And his instincts had never failed Randy in his 19 years in the scrap metal business.
"Do you have a job, Larry?" he asked.
"No," Larry answered.
"You do now," he said.
So began an unlikely friendship between the black Muslim ex-con from the Hill District and the white Catholic businessman from Peters.
"It's as though the world opened up," Larry said. "Very rarely do you find a gentleman of Randy Castriota's caliber reaching out to a guy with a history like mine."
Larry didn't want to go back to the Hill, where the once-promising boxer had turned into a career criminal. He was thrilled to rent a tiny $450 a month apartment in Dormont with a checkerboard vinyl kitchen floor that looked as though it had lost as many decades as Larry.
Larry became a maintenance man for Castriota Metals & Recycling, cleaning up and sorting metals for $6 an hour.
"What's your dream, Larry?" asked Randy, a self-described "motto-maniac" who posts slogans such as "never, ever, ever give up" in his office.
"A boxing gym," Larry answered.
Larry once had hopes of becoming the light heavyweight champion of the world, and said he was two months from a big fight in 1979 when police stopped the car his friend was driving and found heroin inside. That was the end of his boxing career.
"He was a good local fighter, a flashy fighter with an Ali kind of style," said attorney Ernest Sharif, a boxing referee and former fighter. "He might have gone places, but we will never know because he went to jail."
Larry's idea for a boxing gym came to him during his last sentence on bank robbery charges in 1995. He was 51, a dinosaur among all the young faces at Federal Correctional Institute in McKean. He saw younger versions of himself everywhere and was sickened by what was happening to African-American youth. He dreamed of opening a boxing gym, giving them self-esteem and title belts instead of prison sentences and gang colors.
Larry came up with a slogan -- "Get the guns out of their hands and put gloves on" -- and the perfect name that rolled off his tongue: The Gym of Future Champs.
Inside the prison walls, he would say it over and over, his boxing gym, his redemption.
Opposite lives
A few months into his new job, Randy, 54, hands Larry his keys and tells him to pick up his wallet that he left in his car.
Larry promptly retrieves the wallet, hands over the keys and says laughing, "Twelve years ago, I would have had your car, your credit card and your cash, and I would have been flying to Downtown Pittsburgh by now."
Larry grew up on the streets of the Hill District. A member of the Cavaliers gang, he snorted cocaine by 12 and injected heroin by age 17, instilling fear with his fists both in and out of the ring. "He was a wild buck," said Norman Williams, who grew up with him on the Hill. "I never saw him shoot or cut anybody, but he used his fists."
Larry was raised by his mother, a loving woman, he said, but a "hopeless alcoholic." The seventh-grade dropout was an angry kid, raging at a father who had left him.
Across town in Brookline, Randy went to Catholic schools and was raised by loving and strict parents, Al and Roseanne. The boy rarely got into mischief and avoided alcohol and drugs.
As a young man, Larry sold drugs on the corner of Kirkpatrick Street and Centre Avenue while Randy rode around with his father in a 1956 Ford pickup truck, picking up old mufflers and tailpipes to sell to scrap yards.
In the '60s, '70s and early '80s, Larry was a drug dealer and a pimp, enjoying the ultimate power trip to mask his insecurity. "You can't imagine what it felt like to be in a brand new El Dorado, going to a club. Whenever you pulled up, you would have 10 beautiful women all wearing minks."
Meanwhile, Randy, a 1972 graduate of Duquesne University, was chasing his entrepreneurial dreams, establishing a scrap-metal business in 1987 in Brookline. "It was very exciting, buying a building."
Larry went in and out of jail on drug charges, firearms possession and bank robbery. "He was very angry. He was very tough, street tough," said Walter Schafer of West Deer, who served time with him at Western Penitentiary.
As Larry's criminal record grew, Randy's scrap business grew from two to 25 employees and he was named Rotarian of the Year. Larry avoided work -- "work to me was like a disease" -- while Randy worked 12-hour days.
"I learned a lot from Randy," Larry said. "As an African-American, I figured they would never afford me the opportunity to do anything. I had a long record. Randy convinced me that I could be a part of the American dream."
Randy, a devout Catholic whose parents taught him to help someone in need, learned from Larry, too. He was struck by how this supposedly hardened criminal who had wasted decades in jail was so articulate and likable.
Randy started hiring and housing ex-cons, 10 over the next year, and he didn't get burned once on rent money.
"Aren't you afraid?" people would ask him.
"Everyone deserves a first chance, and a second chance and a third chance," says Randy, his blond eyebrows arching up playfully as he looks at Larry. "Besides, he looks like Danny Glover."
No longer on the ropes
Oct. 4, 2005, is Larry's 61st birthday, usually not a landmark birthday.
But it is monumental for someone who had never before spent two consecutive adult birthdays out of jail, for someone whose last birthday celebration was when he was 10 and had a small cake and a few kids over, "not a real party."
Randy is holding a real party to make up for lost time -- dinner for 10 at Bruschetta's restaurant on the South Side.
Larry, who says he has been clean for 12 years, sips water as he eats Atlantic salmon with lemon herb sauce and grilled scallops. "I don't even know what it is. I just know it tastes good. If life gets any better than this, I don't know what to do."
"You look good for 61, honey," the waitress says.
Then Larry divulges an anti-aging secret not as popular as Botox: Prison. He spent three hours a day working out while incarcerated.
His son, Ron Chisholm, walks in and says, "How you doing, Dad?" One of the joys of going straight is that Larry is getting to know his son. Ron was born when his father was in the penitentiary and was 19 by the time he got out. He's now a professional cook at another restaurant who looks like Larry but has a quieter manner.
"This kid of mine turned out good," Larry says. "He practically raised himself."
The waitress, young and pretty, dotes over Larry. Someone jokes that Larry, a charmer, is often surrounded by pretty women. "He is a chick magnet," Randy quips. "It goes with his past."
Then Larry jabs Randy for being a hard-driving boss.
"You remind me of a prison guard," Larry says.
"And what's wrong with that?" Randy shoots back.
"I am going to open up a boxing gym. And I am going to find me a big heavyweight and pounce on him," Larry says looking at Randy, a broad-shouldered man.
"I can hardly wait," Randy says. "I am a poor white guy from Brookline. The black guy is going to beat me up. I am going to be the white punching bag."
Larry lets out a hearty laugh before looking at all his friends and saying softly, "I didn't think I would make it this far."
The wedding ring
Larry is still working for Randy in early November, but he is pushing ahead on his boxing gym -- scouting out various sites, getting it incorporated as a nonprofit, looking for sponsors. He enlists volunteers for his anti-crime program, using the same salesmanship and intensity he once used to push drugs.
Larry finds an ideal building in Dormont for about $100,000 and hints that Randy might want to help buy it.
Randy donates a few hundred dollars toward some Gym of Future Champion sweatshirts but tells Larry that he can only kick in so much.
"He thinks I am the Great White Hope. Poor guy was away for 11 years. I want to make his dream happen," says Randy, who has a wife and a teenage son. "But I can't go broke."
A few weeks later on Nov. 23, Larry gets married for the fourth time, the second time to Brenda Card.
He first met her in 1971, while he was getting a haircut on Centre Avenue and happened to notice a beautiful 23-year-old woman with a tall afro walking by. He was so taken by her that he jumped right out of his barber's chair to pursue her. They married in 1975. She was a homebody, and he was hardly ever at home. Brenda visited him in jail for years, but in 1982, Larry told her to make a new life for herself.
"I never got over him," says Brenda, a newly retired Mellon Bank employee. "I was divorced on paper but not at heart. I thought I could change him, but I couldn't."
He had to change himself. The jolt came during his last prison sentence. Larry was tired of squandering his life, tired of wrecking marriage after marriage, tired of being an absent father. So he became spiritual, embracing the religion of Islam. He went to recovery meetings in jail and earned an associate degree in business.
Larry visited Brenda last year for her birthday in April and told her he was a changed man. His friends told him to forget it. She would never take him back. She played hard to get initially, wearing a fake diamond ring she bought from QVC, telling him she was dating someone else. But he won her over.
During the Nov. 23 wedding at Bruschetta's, Larry, resplendent in a tan glen plaid suit, toasts his beaming wife. He introduces one of his boxers, a strapping Chris "Nightmare" Stallworth, as the next cruiserweight champ. "I am training him. I am giving him what I had 35 years ago -- in case we get financial help from my sponsor, Mr. Castriota."
Randy's wife, Chris, says, "I think Larry is a great guy, but he has to get on his feet and do his own thing."
"I have broad shoulders," Randy says wincing, "but I don't want them to break."
Not down for the count
The next week, Randy tells Larry, "If you want something done, you have to do it yourself. You have to step up."
He worries that Larry is disappointed that he won't buy the building for the gym. Larry is sad about the loss of the building, but he is not upset at Randy. "I understand that he has to take care of his family. He reached out to me when nobody else would. I will never, ever forget that."
Larry quits his job at the recycling plant so he can get knee replacement surgery, but he and Brenda continue as Randy's tenants in a larger Dormont apartment. "He pays the rent on time," Randy says. "He keeps it very neat."
Brenda is thrilled that her husband stays at home with her now. "I always wanted him to be the way he is now."
Larry supports himself with Supplemental Security Income and his wife's pension.
His gym is his passion, all he talks about, so excited that he wakes his wife up at 4 a.m. to discuss it. But he is feeling the pressure. He keeps getting calls from kids wanting to be trained. When is the gym going to open?
He trains some of them in Beggs-Snyder Park in Dormont, teaching them how to punch and counterpunch. "Now that's the new Muhammad Ali," Larry says as he trains Mikel Richardson, 22, of Uptown. As his boxers grimace with the awkwardness of new moves, he says softly, "Now you are getting the rhythm. Hey, it takes time."
Larry trains his star boxer, Nightmare, in The Exercise Warehouse in Bloomfield, pumping him up by trash talking his opponent.
Larry thinks he is on the verge of landing him a big prize fight in Madison Square Garden in April. His share of the purse would enable him to buy the Dormont building himself. But Larry doesn't realize he needs an out-of-state boxing license. Boxing, like the rest of the world, has changed.
He is disappointed but bounces back. "Compared to the stuff I survived in the past, this is child's stuff."
Then word comes in May of a new place for the gym. The Muhammad Mosque No. 22 in Wilkinsburg donates its third floor, a neglected area strewn with wood planks and old chairs and tables. But where other people see attic clutter, Larry sees two gleaming boxing rings.
Randy gives him a Castriota Dumpster at a discount so Larry can clean out the space.
Larry's moving ahead with the gym project when a promoter calls him. There's a match 7:30 p.m. this Saturday at Heinz Field. Nightmare may get a shot in the ring. Larry hopes to be in the corner, pumping up his boxer.
In between training bouts with Nightmare, he returns to the mosque. A few volunteers say they will help him clean it out. But on a steamy summer cleanup day last week, it is just Larry tossing old chairs, tables and dressers out the third floor window. Brenda shoos pedestrians off the sidewalk as the items hurtle to the ground with a dramatic thud, wood splintering everywhere.
"This is joy," says Larry, drenched in sweat and caked in dirt. Much better than making license plates in the penitentiary.
After 30 years of broken boxing dreams, he's so close. His first fight and his gym are within sight.
Larry beams as he hurls musty furniture out the window as though he were cleansing himself of his past sins.
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