The Pugilist

 

Almost two years after Hurricane Ivan, all that means is that his pile of beachfront rubble is larger than his neighbors’ piles.

 

“I’d never been through a hurricane,” says Levin, as he stares out at the wreckage. “Ivan was my first.” He is resigned, not angry. Enough things — good and bad — have happened to Levin during his life that the loss of a grand beachfront home is a small bump in the road.

 

The three biggest things to hit Pensacola: Jesus, Hurricane Ivan and Fred Levin. There are 435 churches in the area (roughly one per 130 residents of the city). For Levin, who grew up in one of the approximately 350 Jewish families in the area, this means, as he recounts with a chuckle, that “every minister in town is always trying to save me.” As for Ivan, the impact is very real and very current.

 

The scene on Pensacola Beach is apocalyptic. Homes are missing roofs, windows, large chunks of siding or they’re just plain gone. Addresses painted on leftover pieces of wood identify the piles that were once homes. Pristine white sand has blown across the roads, many of which are impassable. And everywhere is the sight of Tyvek home wrap. Pensacola has finally begun to rebuild. Levin drives past all of this to the site of Portofino, a large high-rise condo development owned by his younger brother, Allen. “This is my brother’s latest development,” he says, quietly. A few minutes before, Levin received a call from his son, Martin, who, along with Allen, Levin’s University of Florida roommate Fred Vigodsky, and former Buffalo Bills head coach Kay Stephenson, make up his inner circle of friends. Martin is a former president of Levin, Papantonio, Thomas, Mitchell, Echsner & Proctor. He left the firm in 2001 to attend Harvard Divinity School.

 

Martin Levin and Kay Stephenson now run SmartCop, one of Fred’s ventures that designs software for public safety work. Joining Fred and Kay on SmartCop’s board of directors are Jack Kemp, Bill Bennett, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Dallas Mavericks CEO Terdema Ussery. Martin’s call wasn’t about SmartCop, however.

 

Allen Levin has lung cancer. Martin had called to give an update on Allen’s status, who at the time was in Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City awaiting surgery. He has since refused surgery and is back home in Pensacola.

 

There were six Levin brothers born to Abe and Rose Levin, who arrived in Pensacola in 1928. Fred Levin’s contemporaries still speak fondly of Abe, who owned a pawnshop downtown and eventually took over concessions for the dog track and the beach. “My father was the superstar of the Jewish community,” says Levin. “At services, he was the one holding the Torah. He was my hero.”

 

By his own admission, Levin skated through his early years. He was a classroom cutup and a mediocre student. He thought he would “come back and work in my father’s pawnshop.” Instead, he enrolled in the University of Florida Law School, which “anyone” could get into.

 

Two events pierced the easygoing armor of Levin’s post-graduate life. The first was the death of his younger brother, Martin, at 17, from leukemia, just before he began law school. “After Martin died,” says Levin, the wound still fresh, “I don’t think I ever saw my mother smile. Everything had gone so well. That was the first bad thing to happen to us.”

 

Levin’s second great shock came in 1958, when he trooped off to law school. On his first day, he found 330 white students and one black one: George Starke Jr., the first African American to enter an integrated public school in Florida. When he arrived at UF Law he was accompanied by two U.S. marshals. The white students did their best to make his life a living hell.

 

Every time Starke entered a classroom or opened his mouth to speak, other students mockingly shuffled their feet. “They shuffled him, 330 people,” says Levin. “And the teachers were no help, either.”