Abe Attell

Abraham Washington Attell
(The Little Hebrew)

• Born February 22, 1883 in San Francisco, CA USA
• Died February 7, 1970 in New Paltz, NY USA

Biographical Information

Abe Attell was a champion featherweight boxer who became infamous in baseball circles for his role as an intermediary in the Black Sox Scandal that tainted the 1919 World Series.

Attell gained national celebrity for holding the featherweight title for an unprecedented six years, from 1906 to 1912, with 22 successful title defences, after having first gained the title in 1902 but losing it in the interim. He became a close friend of mobster Arnold Rothstein and sometimes served as his bodyguard. He was accused a number of times of using illegal tactics during fights, such as putting chloroform on his gloves. After his fighting career ended, he became a successful trainer, operated a shoe store in New York City for a time, and then went into vaudeville.

On September 23, 1920, he was indicted by a grand jury in Chicago, IL for his role in the Black Sox Scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of accepting money to lose the 1919 World Series to the underdog Cincinnati Reds. He was indicted alongside former players Hal Chase and Bill Burns on charges of being the intermediaries between the gamblers, allegedly acting on behalf of Rothstein, who put up the money, and the players. He had allegedly been approached by Billy Maharg, another former boxer, and Burns to speak to Rothstein and get him to back the ambitious plan to fix the series, and then helped to make the whole thing happened.

Like the players, Attell was acquitted at trial (his claim was that some other person named Abe Attell was the guilty party), but that still got him a lifetime ban from the game from Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who considered that enough damaging evidence of a plot had been made public during the trial that the actual verdict was irrelevant. While the affair badly tainted his reputation, he was still inducted into various boxing Hall of Fames in the following decades.

Further Reading

• Mark Allen Baker: The Fighting Times of Abe Attell, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2018. ISBN 978-1-4766-6432-3
• Jamie Rebner: "Fight City Legends: The Little Hebrew", The Fight City, February 22, 2022. [1]