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A FURTHER LOOK AT RICHARD LONGINO – THE OTHER ‘ASSASSIN’?

April 2004 – Rich Tate

Note: This article first appeared in a print edition of Peach State Pandemonium.

Back in January 2003 I was scouring through the WAWLI Papers, a huge collection of wrestling themed items published by J Michael Kenyon. The WAWLI collection can be found now at Wrestling Classics, and features various articles, columns and other miscellaneous findings.

One particular item caught my eye. It was an article published in the January 25, 2000, edition of the Palm Beach Post. The most incredible thing that stood out was a claim by the subject of the article – Richard Longino – that he had wrestled between 1961 and 1965 as an Assassin. Bear in mind this was definitely news if it were true. After all, Tom Renesto and Jody Hamilton were the original tag team. After Renesto retired from the ring, Hamilton used only three partners he deemed worthy of using the name – Randy Colley, Roger Smith and Ray Fernandez.

Over the years there were also other Assassins, including people such as Don Bass, Kurt Von Hess, Mr. Saito, Guy Mitchell and Nick Patrick (incidentally Hamilton’s son), among others. There have also been numerous mutations of tag teams featuring the name, such as the New York Assassins, the Cuban Assassins, and the Super Assassins.

However, never once has it been determined that Longino ever wore a mask as an Assassin. So I decided to bring the claim to a few message boards, in hopes of hearing from anyone who might be able to confirm or deny the claim. The subject raised quite a few eyebrows, including those of some historians and wrestlers. Everyone vehemently declared this must be yet another person making outrageous claims – you know the type – those who suffer from the “I was a great professional wrestler in my youth, but I wore a mask so you wouldn’t recognize me. I was the world heavyweight champion at one time” syndrome.

I did not yet know Jody Hamilton personally, but a friend who knew him made contact and asked if he knew about Longino. The logic was that if he really had been used as a part of the team during the time frame he claims, Hamilton would probably know since those were the first four years of the team’s existence, and the name had not yet become one that would typically be copy-catted in other territories so soon. Jody adamantly denied not only the claim by Longino, but went on to say he had never even heard of a wrestler named Longino.

I could kick myself for not thinking about doing a further investigation of the claim back then, and I have no idea why I chose to, if the thought even did briefly occur to me. In November 2002, when we launched Georgia Wrestling History, we had already posted many results on our site dating back into the 1920’s (although we go back a bit further now), as well as documenting all the ring names we find in those results. One such name that I didn’t recall at the time I found the article featuring Longino’s claim was Ricky Longino, who was in fact a wrestler in Georgia. We have results currently on the site from 1958 and 1960 where we show him working matches for Fred Ward and a promoter who we have yet to identify.

Attempts to reach Longino at the Darcy Hill center were futile, though I did reach the writer, Michael Browning, who informed me that he had died days after the article appeared. “I struggled with the same problems you are struggling with. Early wrestling was such a harum-scarum thing, with multiple substitutions, identities and disguises, that it was impossible to verify anything. Longino's sister talked to me and said he was one of the Assassins, but who knows, he may just have substituted a couple of weekends from his full-time job. Poor old guy, he really was pretty beat up. But he did seem to know an awful lot about the nuts and bolts of wrestling,” said Browning. “I would be interested in finding out what Longino DID do, if wasn't the Assassin. He obviously knew a lot about wrestling, he could not have faked all that inside nuts and bolts info. But old people in the twilight of their years have a tendency to brag and exaggerate. I would not be surprised to learn that he misrepresented himself. I think you are wise to be skeptical.”

Below is a re-print of the article on Longino (in italics). The article was titled “Wrestling with Anonymity.” At the conclusion of the re-print, I will look at certain points and see whether or not we are left to believe his story.

He was never unmasked, though the furious fans howled for it, Saturday after Saturday. The hateful red cowl with the black eye, nose and mouth-slits remained in place. Chief Little Eagle tried to lift the mask like a scalp. Haystacks Calhoun would fall on him like a mountain, perhaps hoping the mask would just spurt off his head like a squeezed watermelon seed. In vain: At the last minute, fate would always intervene, in the shape of a whammed folding chair or a thunderous body slam, or an illegal tag, resulting in a two-against-one melee. No one takes the mask off the Assassin. He always escaped, to wrestle again another day. Now it can be told! Richard Longino greets you with a firm handshake from his motorized wheelchair at the Darcy Hall nursing home.

"I was the Assassin. I was the bad guy," he says in a rich Georgia drawl, his diamond-studded Rolex watch glittering on his thick wrist. On the other wrist, he wears a light purple patient ID bracelet. He has been at the white-columned, Colonial-style rest home on Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard since August. Time, four divorces and horrific injuries suffered in a traffic accident have taken a heavy toll on his body. Although he has suffered several strokes, his memory is still clear. Ironically, his very anonymity in those years creates difficulties. Longino can’t prove he was the Assassin. The whole purpose of playing the Assassin was to remain anonymous, mysterious. Now that he wants to take the mask off, it won’t come away easily.

He used to have a scrapbook, some posters from those days. "But they got away from me after my last divorce," Longino says. Only his encyclopedic memory and his insider’s knowledge of pro wrestling, the tricks of the trade, bear out his claim to have been one of the great bad men of early wrestling. He also has his sister, Marty Snyder, a staunch supporter and eyewitness to some of his bouts back in the early 1960s. "I had to quit going. I couldn’t take the way the fans were abusing him, hating him, because he was such a sweet man," Snyder said. "But it was all part of the game. I loved the Assassin. I got into fights with the fans over him, defending him. He was my brother."

Longino was half of the cape-clad wrestling team you loved to hate in the early 1960s, the brawny, brawling, braggadocios Assassins. He and his partner – it might have been Tom Renesto, it might have been Joe Hamilton; half the time he didn’t know who his partner was going to be that night – he and his partner would swagger into the ring in their polyester knit masks and silky red cloaks, radiating pure evil, and proceed to drive the spectators out of their minds with rage.

"One old woman fan, she must have been about 70, I swear got so mad at me she cut my back open with a beer-can opener. This was in the days before pop-tops. She cut me so bad it took 16 stitches to sew me up again." But the mask remained firmly in place, and the Assassin’s true identity remained a secret for more than 35 years.

Well, almost a secret. His fellow wrestlers knew. His neighbors in the Atlanta suburb of East Point knew. Some of his fellow baggage-handlers at the Atlanta airport knew. His four wives, including Las Vegas stripper Coco Bar, knew. His two children know. And today, the staff of Darcy Hall Nursing Center all know who the battered, scarred, pale, broad-shouldered man in the wheelchair used to be.

Nowadays, wrestling has become a multimillion-dollar industry, with bouts resembling rock concerts three nights a week, fantastic plots and subplots, clouds of dry ice and colored lights, men flying around on cables, women scampering into the ring wearing next to nothing, Arnold Schwarzenegger mixing it up next to Stone Cold Steve Austin – a tremendous spectacle, in which all that glitters is not sweat. The Assassin isn’t impressed. "It’s all hoopla nowadays. They hardly wrestle at all anymore, they’re so busy yelling and flying through the air and throwing trash cans and hitting each other with chairs."

Longino, born in March 1936, dates back to a time when wrestling was just making its way onto TV. The most he ever made in a year was $53,000, and it was never more than a part-time job for him, being one of the Assassins. The rest of the week he worked at the Atlanta airport, loading and unloading baggage off planes. He had the build for both jobs. "My biceps were 22 inches around. I had a 54-inch chest, a 32-inch waist, 30-inch thighs. I was 6 feet tall and weighed 250 pounds. Women used to come up to me and ask if they could feel my arms."

Longino reels off names that stir faint memories of Sunday afternoons in the early ‘60s: Dusty Rhodes, the American Dream; Gorgeous George; Verne Gagne; Wahoo McDaniel; Chief Little Eagle; Dick the Bruiser; Classy Freddie Blassie; Haystacks Calhoun, who entered the ring wearing bib overalls; Fritz Von Erich; Farmer Freddie, who would perch his pet rooster on the post; Nick Bockwinkel of a tag team called The Medics; Lou Thesz; Rowdy Roddy Piper, who wore a kilt like a Scotsman; and the little red-headed announcer, Ed Capral.

One of the most interesting wrestlers Longino ran up against was Lenny Montana, who became famous for playing Luca Brasi, the huge, grim gangster who is strangled to death in a New York bar in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie, "The Godfather." "That was Lenny’s one great trick, he could bug his eyes out if you had him in a headlock. He looks great, getting strangled in that movie," Longino said.

When Longino watches wrestling nowadays – and he doesn’t watch often; he prefers to read – he sees the sport from an insider’s perspective. It may have gotten flashier, but the old war – between good and evil, between the god-like heroes with their sweat-sleeked pecs, and the dastardly Assassins with their scowls and snarls – goes on. Though the carnage is exaggerated, Longino insists the matches were never fixed. "The winner got paid more than the loser, so that was a big incentive to do your best. You never went into that ring knowing who would win," he declared.

Wrestlers would put a tiny shard of razor blade under their fingernail, held in place with plaster of Paris. When the going got rough, Longino says, you would nick your forehead with the razor blade and get blood on your face. "Fans loved to see blood. You can tell an old wrestler by how many little cuts he’s got on his forehead from the razor blade," Longino says. Cauliflower ears came from tight headlocks, the sweat being physically back-pumped into the ear, between the skin and cartilage. But the blows were always cushioned.

"You never hit with a closed fist, just an open first. You can’t hurt anybody with an open first," Longino says. "When you do a full body slam, you don’t land on your torso, you land on your knees and elbows to avoid hurting your opponent. Whenever you hit, you stomp your foot on the canvas to make a big noise. Those chairs they’re always hitting each other with? They’re all made of very light aluminum, and they always pick them up by the legs and hit the other guy with the back portion of the chair. If you look at it afterward, you’ll see it’s bent, it’s so light.

To make sure no one learned his identity, he would be brought to the arena in Atlanta in a different car for each bout, dressed in normal civilian clothes. Once inside, he would put on his costume and meet his fellow Assassin, sometimes for the first time. "You never knew from night to night who you were going to be fighting alongside of," Longino said.

Anonymity again: Scott Teal, a Tennessee-based historian of the early days of wrestling, who publishes two online magazines on the subject, drew a blank when Longino’s name was mentioned to him. "It doesn’t ring a bell. The Assassins were played by a number of wrestlers over the years. The most famous was Tom Renesto. I do a lot of interviews with guys who did nothing but lose to the ‘name’ wrestlers. In the wrestling business, they were known as ‘carpenters,’ who used their abilities to make the ‘name’ guys look great. In fact, if it weren’t for the carpenters, guys like that bozo Hulk Hogan wouldn’t be anywhere today," Teal said. "That said, Mr. Longino could well have been a ‘star’ in his day, albeit in a lesser light than the top names. However, he was no less important to the business and those wrestlers he helped look like ‘stars’."

Longino says he played one of the Assassins in approximately 15 matches, over a period of years from 1961-65, before moving to Texas. There, he sold luxury cars for a few years, then became a truck driver. An accident on Aug. 22, 1984, near Kirbyville, Texas, did what all his opponents in the ring could never do: nearly assassinate the Assassin. "My front right wheel came off, and the rig flipped three times with me inside it. My neck was broken in three places, my back was broken. My spinal fluid was dripping out of my nose. I had a subdural hematoma, and they had to stick a needle up my nose and drain out the blood next to my brain. I’ve never been the same since," Longino says.

He was married four times, divorced four times and has two children, both in Texas: Russell, 31, and Mamie Antoinette, 32. His mother – even the Assassin had a mother – and his sister, Marty, live nearby, and he looks forward to their visits. He remembers his days in the ring with fondness. "It was the highlight of my life. People in my neighborhood loved me. Kids asked me for my autograph. I loved wrestling. Those were wonderful times," Longino said. He shakes hands powerfully and says goodbye. Battered, scarred, conquered only by time, the Assassin pilots his electric wheelchair away, down halls of memory.

First off, the paragraph where he mentions names from the early 1960’s that he worked with, Longino mentioned names who weren’t even in the business yet, like Dusty Rhodes, Roddy Piper and Wahoo McDaniel. He also mentions a name I have never heard of associated with any of the major Georgia promotions, Farmer Freddie. He also says Nick Bockwinkel was a member of the Medics, which is nowhere near correct. However, the remainder of the names he references in that paragraph and throughout the rest of the article were indeed in Georgia during the 1961-65 time frame.

He also claims the winner of a match made more than the loser. If wrestling matches were not pre-determined and were true competitive contests, this might be the case, but we all know different. Of course, if you’re reading this, I apologize if I let the cat out of the bag. By the way, Santa Claus isn’t real either, nor is the Easter Bunny. I’m sorry I had to be the one to break it to you.

Also, Longino makes a reference to his highest annual salary in the wrestling business being at $53,000, yet he was also working a day job at an airport, which I would assume would have been the Atlanta Municipal Airport, now known as Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Comparing $53,000 in 1961 (although he didn’t reference the year he made that amount) to what that would translate to today, I doubt you or I would work a second job if we were making almost $300,000 in the wrestling business. As a matter of fact, I would have my own airplane and wouldn’t even need to visit the airport, much less work for them.

Still, some assumed he wasn’t ever in the business, but we do have the man wrestling as we mentioned earlier in the article. He may have never been an Assassin, and made claims toward his death that were apparently untrue, but he was a wrestler.

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