Category: Nation & World

LOS ANGELES — Inside a North Hollywood police precinct late on March 9, 1977, before the cops began questioning her about her father, Carol Steindler noticed a young woman sitting outside an office. The word HOMICIDE was stripped across the room’s pebbled-glass door, but Steindler didn’t think anything of it, didn’t see the straight line linking those three things: the word and the woman and her father. How could she see it? She didn’t know yet that he was dead.

What she did know was that Howie Steindler, 72, the owner of the Main Street Gym and a respected boxing manager, had not come home that night. Her mother, Ann, had telephoned her in a panic. Your daddy still isn’t here. Howie often stopped at his favorite bar, the Redwood, after a long day of work, but something this time made Ann “insanely upset,” Carol said recently, “more upset than usual.” Ann was so unsettled that she also called boxing promoter Don Fraser, Howie’s best friend. Fraser in turn called the police, who told him to get himself and at least one member of the Steindler family to the precinct.

The nature and timing of Howie’s disappearance were strange. Over the previous month, Ann, who tended toward the eccentric, had become convinced that something terrible was going to happen to her husband, telling Carol and others, My Howie’s gonna die. My Howie’s gonna die. Carol had stopped by her parents’ condominium in Encino, Calif., one day in February to find Howie, who had always handled the couple’s finances, teaching Ann how to write checks. “Are you sick?” Carol asked him, fearing that her father might be suffering from a fatal disease. No, he replied. It was just time for Ann to learn.

Those puzzling incidents were piling up while Steindler was approaching what promised to be the apex of his career in boxing. Looming over LA’s skid row neighborhood, the Main Street Gym was an institution, and Steindler was a popular member of the sport’s community, 5-foot-6 and slim but tough, hot-tempered yet softhearted, with few apparent enemies if any at all. He was so well regarded, in fact, that when the cast and crew of a low-budget movie — about an underdog Philadelphia fighter who gets an improbable shot at the heavyweight title — decided to use the gym as a location to shoot several scenes, one of the film’s stars had sought him out.

For two weeks in 1975, Burgess Meredith had shadowed Steindler, observing how he spoke to fighters and ran the gym, soliciting insights and advice from him, so he could better portray Mickey Goldmill, the wise and grouchy trainer who prepares Rocky Balboa to go the distance against Apollo Creed in Rocky. The Academy Awards would be held on March 28, 1977, and among the film’s 10 nominations was Meredith’s, for best actor in a supporting role. If he won, the chances were good that Meredith, in front of millions of viewers on ABC, would thank Steindler in his acceptance speech.

That moment of worldwide recognition for Steindler would never materialize, and not merely because Jason Robards, for playing Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men, won the best supporting actor Oscar that year and Meredith did not. Instead, Howie Steindler’s name would be left, for those who remember it, cloaked in sadness and mystery. Fraser picked up Carol and drove to the police station. The two of them sat together, waiting for an answer about his whereabouts, as the clock ticked toward midnight.

A troubled heart of gold

Sylvester Stallone was anonymous in Hollywood, with just $106 to his name, before writing the script for Rocky and insisting, at the risk of scuttling the entire project, that he play the titular character. Rocky’s true star, the biggest name in the movie at the time, was Meredith.

He had earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor the previous year for his performance as a salesman/ex-vaudevillian in The Day of the Locust, and his lengthy career as a stage and screen actor, coupled with his deserved reputation as a ladies’ man, had made him a frequent source of copy in newspaper entertainment sections and gossip pages. (“Showgirl is 4th Wife of Burgess Meredith” was the headline of a brief United Press International story in January 1951.)

He was one of 41 actors who either auditioned or was considered for the role of Mickey; Lee J. Cobb, Art Carney, and George Burns were among the others. When producer Bob Chartoff approached him about the part, though, Meredith was skeptical.

“Chartoff came to Dad’s house,” Meredith’s son Jonathan said. “‘Look, we’re making a film about a boxer with Sylvester Stallone, and we’d like you to be in it. We think it’s really going to be a great film, so what we’d like to do is give you a piece of the production and then pay you less.’ And Dad says, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’d rather have the money because no one’s gonna watch a film about a boxer.’ And then, of course, it became a hit.”

Meredith accepted the role for a salary of $20,000, and the Main Street Gym was an obvious choice for Stallone, Chartoff, coproducer Irwin Winkler, and director John Avildsen as an essential location for Rocky, its grimy interior and creaky floors lending Stallone’s training scenes with Meredith an atmosphere fit for any Philly neighborhood.

The gym, on the second floor of an old concrete theater, hovered above a parking garage at the intersection of Third and Main Streets. Its entrance adorned with a sign that read “World Rated Boxers Train Here Daily,” it shared the building with a luggage store. Jim Murray, the renowned Los Angeles Times sports columnist, described the gym’s setting as “losers’ turf, the crossroads of hopelessness and despair, the home base of a lot of guys who have quit in their corners of life.”

It was the perfect place for the hardest men on earth to harden themselves. Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali (when his name was Cassius Clay), Jack Dempsey, Floyd Patterson, Joe Louis, George Foreman: All of them and more trained there. Steindler himself managed Danny Lopez to the World Boxing Council featherweight championship in November 1976 — the same month that Rocky premiered. Lopez’s title fight was held in Ghana, and Steindler, sick at the time, couldn’t accompany him on the trip.

Still, he was so proud of his contribution to Lopez’s championship that he invited several friends and reporters to the Redwood one night, then had them listen to a recording of the radio broadcast of the bout. He’d sip a bottle of brandy immediately after Lopez’s fights to calm his nerves, and having taken over the gym in 1960, he kept a ledger, on a yellow notepad, of all the money he had loaned to fighters — two dollars here, three dollars there, 10 dollars sometimes — and never collected.

“Even with the gruff exterior,” Carol said recently, “he had a heart of gold.”

Jimmy Gambina, who played Mike, Mickey’s assistant, and whose father, Ralph, was an accomplished manager, spent weeks teaching, or trying to teach, Stallone proper boxing technique for the film. “I got him in condition to be a tough guy,” Gambina said, “not a good boxer, just a banger, a Joe Frazier type who weighed less.” Steindler served a different function, simply by being himself. He was Meredith’s model.

The first time he met Steindler, at the gym, Meredith was dressed in what he called his “broken-down outfit” to play Mickey: ratty sweatshirt, pilled cardigan, cotton balls stuffed in his cheeks, makeup cauliflowering his ears, 17 fake stitches zigzagging near his eyes. He asked Steindler if he could use the phone. The costume fooled Steindler, who told him, You think I’m running a hotel here? There’s a phone down on the street. I got other things to do.

“He thought I was one of the bums, and he gave it to me,” Meredith once told the Los Angeles Times. “Later, when I went out, one of the rather slow-minded pugs around there must’ve got to his ear and said, ‘That’s one of the stars of this thing.’”

Meredith wasn’t much of a boxing fan. Loving the sport required a “love of the brutal,” he once said, that he didn’t possess. But Steindler “gave me the mind of the man,” meaning Mickey. “I’d stay around that office and listen to him crack. He’s quite a fella.”

Rudy Tellez, who apprenticed under Steindler before becoming a longtime trainer and manager himself, said that Meredith and Steindler would sit down for long conversations, and Meredith would watch Steindler’s facial expressions intently: “That’s where he picked up all that dialogue and persona.”

There’s no public record of Steindler ever saying, Women weaken legs or You’re gonna eat lightning, and you’re gonna crap thunder, as Mickey did. But it wouldn’t have been out of character if he had. “He used to call me ‘schmuck’ or ‘putz’ or all other kinds of crazy Jewish names,” Tellez said. “He meant it with love, though.” He kept a wad of cash, as much as $400, on him at all times because he didn’t trust banks. He wore a special 14-karat-gold diamond ring and drove a gold ’76 Cadillac. His office was barely big enough to store a couple of brooms, and he decorated it with photos of chimpanzees with people’s names under them. He refused to list the gym’s phone number because he didn’t want to be bothered with “too many annoying calls.”

Homeless men, their bottles of wine and beer wrapped in paper bags, sometimes slipped inside the foyer and staggered up the staircase, following the aromas of fresh sweat, dried blood, and liniment. On those occasions, Steindler might grab the billy club that hung on one of the walls.

“I run this place, y’see,” he told an LA writer in February 1976; by then, his health deteriorating, he was carrying an oxygen tank with him. “I pay the rent, and this is the most famous gym in the world. Y’might hear remarks that this is a dingy neighborhood, but no gym in the world has a tenth the traffic or a hundredth of the number of fighters.

“Sure, we got troubles sometimes, but it’s nothing. Everybody’s being hit by the same trouble. We got characters floating around — the screwballs find their way up here — but I run a strict place. This is one establishment that stays the way it was established.”

Some of those characters were more dangerous, and some of the potential troubles more serious, than Steindler implied. Crime boss Mickey Cohen, who as a teen had trained at Main Street and fancied himself a budding featherweight contender, was a presence in the LA boxing scene until his death, from complications from stomach cancer surgery, in July 1976. Fraser tried to keep Cohen and the rest of his kind at a distance, according to his daughter Denise.

“Dad would say, ‘Don’t ever have the mob do anything for you because you’ll owe them for the rest of your life,’” she said. But boxing has always been seamy, stained with corruption. There’s no cleaning it. There never has been. All you do is live with it, if you can.

“Ex-gangsters, Mafia, I met a few,” Tellez said. “They’d come up and see Howie.”

A critical error

The day of Steindler’s death began in its ordinary way: the click of a key into a lock, the clomping of feet up steps. Tellez had been worried about Steindler for a while, had heard him arguing on the phone frequently. The previous afternoon, in fact, Steindler had called a state senator to talk about problems he was having with the state athletic commission. He had another loud, anxious phone conversation that morning; with whom, Tellez didn’t know. When Steindler hung up the phone, Tellez asked him, Are you OK?

Yeah, schmuck, he mumbled. I’m all right.

Tellez wouldn’t let Steindler lock up the gym alone. They left together that night. He never saw his mentor again.

At the precinct, Carol thought perhaps her father had gotten into an argument or fight with another motorist, a road-rage-style incident, or maybe he had been arrested on DUI charges. The word murder didn’t cross her mind until the police separated her and Fraser and brought her into an office to question her.

“When I got in the room there,” she said, “you would have thought I killed my father. They treated you like that. ‘What time do you get home? What time did your husband get home? Where were you?’ And yet, they haven’t told me anything about my father. Finally, I said to the guy, ‘You’d better’ — and I used some not-so-nice words — ‘tell me what’s going on or I’m not telling you another thing.’”

So they told her: A highway patrol officer had come across Howie’s Cadillac on the shoulder of Ventura Freeway, five miles from the Steindlers’ house. His body was in the backseat, his feet dangling out an open door. He had sustained a horrible beating. Three of his ribs and a vertebra were broken. He had bruises on his head, chest, and right leg and a puncture wound to his right temple. Fraser identified the body to spare Carol the sight. The official cause of death was “suffocation by apparent smothering”; the police speculated that the killers had pushed Steindler’s face into the car-seat cushion.

His wallet, his keys, his identification papers, and his gold diamond ring were missing. There was a dent on the back of Steindler’s car and a hole slicing through the bumper, indications that someone had rear-ended him.

A witness had told police that two men had attacked Steindler as he stood near his Cadillac a block from his home, punching him before shoving him in the back of the car and driving away. At first, the observer had thought the victim was female, because Steindler was so small and slight. The witness drove past the scene once, then again, then left when one of the assailants started to approach her, but she described the men’s car as being older and gray.

The young woman. Carol now understood why the young woman had been sitting near the HOMICIDE door. She was the witness. And she had made one critical mistake: Instead of noticing the license plate of the old, gray car, she remembered the license plate of Steindler’s: HOWIE-5.

‘You never know’

From that beginning, a lack of evidence — and competing theories of the crime — made the case difficult to solve. Marv Engquist, the detective who led the investigation, believed that Steindler had been a random victim, that the killers had collided with his Cadillac to draw him into a confrontation and rob him. The MO fit other unsolved murders in the same vicinity and time frame, and Steindler’s feistiness, his refusal to back down from anyone, could have escalated a robbery into something more deadly.

Carol has long been skeptical of that theory. “The police, the homicide detectives, all thought it was a bump-and-run,” she said, “and I kept saying, ‘No, it’s something else. My father and mother were acting really strange for two weeks.’ I don’t think it’s just a bump-and-run. I think they knew something.”

Gambina and Tellez still believe that the mob was responsible for Steindler’s murder. They raised and discussed that possibility in hushed tones and with measured words. “The fight game,” Gambina said. “You never know what’s going to happen with people.”

Carol took over the Main Street Gym and ran it until 1984, when it was razed to build a parking lot. She and her sister, Bobbi Beatty, would from time to time speak to a newspaper or TV reporter, usually on the anniversary of their father’s death, to reawaken interest in and awareness of the case. But the odds that it will be solved are less than slim. Detectives compiled suspects but never made an arrest. Carol, who lives in Thousand Oaks, Calif., is 86. Bobbi died of cancer in 2004. Those who were involved or might know what happened — even the killers themselves — have either died or aged into inertia.

“Unfortunately,” William Beatty, Bobbi’s widower, said in a phone interview, “it’s like you’re trying to find out if there are any witnesses to the Civil War.”

After 48 years, with so many questions still lingering unanswered and unanswerable, one detail remains especially haunting. Nine months after her husband’s car and body were discovered, Ann Steindler received a strange package in the mail: Howie’s wallet, Howie’s keys, Howie’s credit cards. No cash, no return address, no fingerprints.

What has changed and what hasn’t

Three hundred parking spots, give or take, cover the piece of land where the Main Street Gym once stood. In some ways, little has changed about the neighborhood. Weeds and tufts of grass burst up from the concrete. Walls and telephone poles are psychedelic with graffiti.

On a recent morning, a man in a red plaid shirt stretched out on a ledge near a palm bush and slept. A few feet away, another man, dressed in ratty black, crouched down, put his hands on the sides of his head, and began screaming. A pair of white sneakers dangled from a wire stretched above, giving the lot a Philadelphian flavor. Around the corner, a dog had dropped something in the middle of the sidewalk that its owner, if the animal even had an owner, hadn’t bothered to scoop up.

There was no historical marker commemorating the gym. No artwork invoking Rocky, Stallone, or Meredith. No acknowledgment of one of the most inspirational films ever made … or the dark story connected to it.

Then, as if by magic, there was something. There was someone. True Rice strolled through the lot, heading back to his apartment after grocery shopping. Twenty-nine and a native of West Baltimore, he moved to Los Angeles in 2020 to try to make it in modeling and music.

“Came out here with 60 dollars in my pocket,” he said, “looking for a change.”

The striking aspect about him wasn’t what he did but what he wore: a white, hooded sweatshirt that he had bought the day before. Plastered across the back were the words “ROCKY: His whole life was a million-to-one shot” and a depiction of Stallone atop the Art Museum steps.

Did Rice have any idea about the history of where was walking and what that history represented? The lot … the gym … the men … the movie … the murder … the stories and the scenes, exhilarating and evil.

He said what anyone would have expected him to say. He said what even those few who remember Howie Steindler and his death would have to admit. He stood in the middle of a grim city block with no memory, and he said he didn’t know.