Bennie Georgino dies at 95; manager, promoter from L.A.’s golden age of boxing

Bennie Georgino, a hall of fame boxing manager, promoter and bail bondsman who was said to personify the folk culture of Los Angeles’ golden era of boxing, has died.

Georgino, a son of Neapolitan immigrants was a boxer and later an oddsmaker. He took over managing Danny “Little Red” Lopez, a former featherweight champion, after Lopez’s manager, Howie Steindler, was found mysteriously beaten and suffocated in 1977. Georgino also managed former super-bantamweight world champion Jaime Garza.

He died Feb. 2, in Sun City, Calif., said his daughter, Susan Georgino. He was 95.

Steindler, owner of a divey but celebrated downtown L.A. boxing haunt, was said to be the inspiration for the Burgess Meredith character in the “Rocky” movies. But in a case of life imitating art, it was his successor, Georgino, whom Times columnist John Hall described as “probably the exact face you would come up with if asked to draw a composite portrait of a movie fight manager.”

Writing about Georgino a few years later, Times columnist Jim Murray concurred: “Not exactly a throwback, but Central Casting would have found him perfectly acceptable” as a fight manager type.

He was round, and bald. “All the Georginos had no hair,” his daughter said. And he took to the role of manager as if born to it. He traveled widely and accompanied his boxers in the ring, urging them on. “This is the fight of your life! Keep pushing!” he told a flagging Lopez in 1980.

Murray once asked Georgino why his bantamweight fighter Alberto Davila had lost several matches and was delighted when Georgino delivered, straight-faced, the exact line he had anticipated: “I wuz robbed.”

Bennie Dominic Georgino was born April 13, 1920, in Tyler, Pa., one of eight children — seven boys and a girl — born to Cosmo and Asunta Georgino, Italian immigrants who later moved to California.

Cosmo Georgino had been a coal miner. But Bennie Georgino recalled in a 1983 Los Angeles Times article that, out West, his father found work as a landscape gardener. “He worked 10 to 20 hours a day keeping those mansions for them movie stars. My brothers and me, we didn’t want no part of,” Georgino recalled.

The boys grew up in the North Broadway area and joined forces to open bars and restaurants, including a pizza place in Alhambra, the Sunset Bar on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park and the Seven G’s” bar on West 9th Street and South Union Avenue, so named for the seven brothers. Georgino once claimed that Marlon Brando hung out there to soak up the atmosphere for “On the Waterfront.”

It was, by his own account, a rough scene. “My brother, Carmen, he used to stiffen a guy a night who got out of line,” Georgino told The Times.

All the brothers were fascinated with boxing, and some of them, including Bennie, tried their hand at it.

He frequented the Main Street Gym downtown. Opened in 1933, the gym was a center of local boxing culture. Called by a Times writer “the rattiest in Los Angeles (some say in the world),” the gym moved across the street to 318 1\2 Main St. after its original location burned down.

It had a billy club hanging on the wall and nostalgic old-timers with pinkie rings training young new fighters. At one time or another, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Jack Dempsey, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman were all said to have trained there.

Eventually, Georgino opened Georgino Bail Bonds on Vignes Street and become a well-known local oddsmaker who continued to be a regular at Main Street Gym. When Steindler was killed, a broken-hearted Lopez pleaded with Georgino to fill his shoes, Georgino said. Eventually, he became a boxing promoter and women’s boxing manager in Washington state.

“Just his whole life has been boxing,” his daughter said.

“He was a good guy with a buck who treated his fighters well — he was honest,” said Don Fraser, head of the California Boxing Hall of Fame, of which Georgino is a member.

At the old Olympic Auditorium, Georgino would occasionally work fighters’ corners with another manager, Jackie McCoy, prompting ring announcer Jimmy Lennon to proclaim their position as the “Jack Benny” corner, Fraser said.

He was married to Gloria Georgino, the mother of his two children. They divorced and he married Ruth Georgino, who, along with his daughter, survives him. His son, Don, with whom he ran Five Star Promotions, died in 2005. He is also survived by brothers Pat and Johnny Georgino of Los Angeles and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

jill.leovy@latimes.com

Times staff writer Lance Pugmire contributed to this report.