On the Road with Puppet the Psycho Dwarf
An intrepid AAJ Writer goes behind the scenes with the little men who are willing to bleed for your enjoyment
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Born in Newark, Ohio, in 1968 to a middle-class family of normal-sized people, Puppet picked up performing when he became too small for sports. “I did a variety show in high school,” he says. “The other kids really liked me in it, which was a rush. It felt good, and from then on, I’ve been performing.”
After attending Columbia College in Chicago, Richardson received a scholarship to the now-defunct National Shakespeare Conservatory in upstate New York, and Puppet insists that he still uses his Conservatory training. “They made me focus on the art,” he says, “and it gave me the confidence to perform.”
After graduation, he traveled to Hollywood, where like many acting dwarfs, he found it impossible to get meaningful work. His most substantial role was that of the Yankee’s batboy in a 1992 biopic of Babe Ruth, The Babe. Mostly, Puppet says, “I was being the little guy. They would tell me stand here, stand there. I got bored of it.” He tried some stunt work for children’s roles, but found his physique—he weighed 150 pounds then, 40 more than he does now—limited those roles as well.
Puppet returned to Chicago and tried to find a niche for a little person with a determined work ethic and an outsized personality. He formed a sidekick duo with a guy named Turd the Bartender on the shock jock Mancow’s morning program. He created a band, named Puppet, made up of all dwarfs, in which he was the rapper. He produced independent films, all flops. He wrote a sitcom pilot. None of it was working.
In 1997, Puppet was approached by a promoter about wrestling. He was initially skeptical. “I had seen some midget wrestling,” he says, “And I didn’t like the way we were portrayed. Biting referees in the ass and stuff like that. It was all jokes; it was all funny.” He gave it a chance, however, and was impressed by the reception that the little wrestlers received. “When they brought out the midgets,” he says, “everybody stopped what they were doing. There was applause right away.”
To Puppet, midget wrestling appeared to be a wide-open field, with serious money-making potential. He enrolled in Windy City Professional Wrestling Academy (WCPWA), a Chicago training school in an industrial zone on the southern outskirts of Chicago. “Everybody liked him, because he was funny,” says Sam DeCero, president of WCPWA, “and he had his celebrity status for his work with Turd.”
But unlike most of DeCero’s protégés, Puppet was never interested in joining a wrestling federation. He wanted to be the boss. He recruited four other dwarfs—two of them, Kato and Teo, are still with him—and planned the first show at Slugger’s. “It was the middle of January,” says Puppet, “and the temperature was twenty degrees below zero. But the line to get into Slugger’s stretched around the block. That’s when I knew, I got a fucking hit here.”
Today, Puppet’s troupe now averages 150 shows a year. Although Puppet refused to discuss finances, bar owners quoted that they had been charged flat appearance fees ranging from $2,000 to $10,000, depending on the size of the show. The Half-Pint Brawlers have appeared in bars, car shows, and corporate conventions, from Florida to Alaska, and, he says, they are in talks with several networks about a reality show.
“I’m lucky,” says Puppet. “I found a niche, and I use it.”
***
At the La Quinta near the airport in Indianapolis, we meet two more wrestlers and reshuffle the ever-filling car. Promoted as a space-saving measure, I sit in the passenger seat beside Puppet, and crammed in the back now are Cameo, Teo, Kato, and a wrestler I hadn't met before, the four-foot-ten-inch Madd Mexx.
I had read about Madd Mexx on the Half-Pint Brawlers website, where it refers to him as “The Immigration Sensation,” and declares, “He doesn’t speak but a word of English, but he’s one vato loco.” As I shake his hand, I introduce myself slowly.
“Alright, brother,” he says with a strong Midwestern accent. “Good to meet ya.” Turns out, Madd Mexx, born and raised in Kansas as Mikeal Santoro, Jr., speaks about five words of Spanish, and until he was 34-years old, didn’t know he was a dwarf.
Unlike the other Half-Pint Brawlers, Mexx, 41, a second-generation Mexican-American, got his start practicing the pure Greco-Roman form of wrestling. When he failed to qualify for them '92 Barcelona Olympics, Mexx conceded that his career was over—he was too tall for midget wrestling, too small for groups like the WWE. In 2002, Mexx realized he has one more option, while watching a television documentary at home. "The narrator said something about there being 250 types of dwarfism, and you're technically one if you're four-foot-ten or under," he remembers. "My brother was there with me. We just look at each other, and he says, 'Get the tape measure!'"
As Puppet tools the car through suburban Indianapolis, Kato tells a story about how he ended up with an upcoming court date in Minneapolis. “After a show there, I went to the bathroom,” he says, “and I saw puke all over a urinal, and this drunk guy just leaning against the wall. I say, ‘You alright, man?’ and he says, ‘Shut the fuck up, you fuckin’ midget!’ I just started laughing at him.”
“When I’m walking out of the bathroom, he comes out after me, and pushes me out of the way. I pull him down—I’m holding a beer bottle—and smash him in the mouth with it. He ends up losing three teeth,” he summarizes, “and I got to go to court in Minneapolis.”
“You just need to get a statement from the bar,” says Puppet, matter-of-factly, “saying that the guy put hands on you first.”
Kato’s unconvinced. “I just don’t want the judge to see on my rap sheet that this isn’t the first time something like this has happened and say, ‘I gotta teach this little guy a lesson.’”
“Stop picking on people bigger than you!” Mexx suggests.
Lil’ Kato, real name Chris Dube, was raised in Oakland, California, by adopted parents. An athlete through high school, he found a sport where size didn’t matter. He became a professional foosball player, often stepping on a pedestal to reach the table. He still competes, and in 1994, split the $30,000 prize for winning the doubles championship of the Foosball U.S. Open. The sport never paid enough for him to live on, and he took various menial jobs to support himself.
The first midget wrestling match he attended was Lord Littlebrook versus Cowboy Lang at the Oakland Coliseum, and backstage, he got a chance to meet the famous English showman. “I said, ‘Wow, that is one cool little dude. I had never seen a midget that was proportioned, like me,” he says, referring to their pituitary dwarfism, which results in “normal” proportion of limbs and torso. Two years later, looking for a career, he contacted Littlebrook, who offered to train him for free in his house in Missouri for 10 percent of his draw. People who saw them together commented on their nearly identical appearance.
When his adopted mother died in 2000, Kato, then a fifteen-year professional wrestling veteran, felt it was time to confirm what he had always suspected. “I contacted the California adoption agency,” he says, “filled out a lot of paperwork, got a lot of things notarized. When I opened the letter, [Littlebrook] was on the couch with me. I told him the news, we opened some beers, and celebrated.” Littlebrook, Kato says, was indeed his biological father.
