Lombardo was a thirty-five-year-old Cleveland millionaire who owned the Lombardo Brothers Construction Company, a dog track in Daytona Beach, five auto raceways in Ohio, and a Thoroughbred racetrack near New Orleans. Others said he owned porno locations in Cleveland, but this was never proven. He told reporters, “I’m in the pari-mutuel industry. I expect to make a profit on the fight. That’s the only reason I’m putting up $1.3 million.”
From the beginning, it was an open secret in boxing circles that the mob put up the money to finance the fight. Members of the Ali camp, the Cleveland police, and most boxing writers believed that was the case. Even Bobby Cassidy, who fought in the semifinal, heard that mob money was behind the promotion.
In 1988, Bob Arum told me, “Mob money for the Wepner fight was the key to King’s emergence in boxing.”
In 1989, Teddy Brenner told me that not only did organized crime underwrite the Wepner fight, but King owed them money for years and was nearly killed over the debt in the early 1980s. “King went to a friend of mine,” Brenner told me, “and begged him to cancel a contract put out on his life by the Cleveland mob. There was a hit man coming after King in New York because he hadn’t paid back the debt for the Wepner fight.”
Finally, both Bob Arum and Don Elbaum went on the record with the story and both allowed themselves to be quoted in Tom Hauser’s authorized biography of Ali, published in 1991. King never sued Hauser, Arum, or Elbaum. He didn’t even write a letter to the publisher.
This is how Arum described the deal: “King wanted to stay in the heavyweight picture. If possible, he wanted to control Ali. So he went to some mob guys in Cleveland, and got financing from the mob. That enabled him to offer more for the fight than anyone else could afford….
“I know for a fact, because some FBI people told me, that the interest he owed on the loan from the mob kept building and building, and King wasn’t able to pay it off until after Holmes–Cooney in 1982. That’s how long it took him to get clear again.”
Some of Arum’s knowledge may have come from Brenner, who was working for Arum at the time Hauser interviewed Arum.
Hauser quoted Elbaum, who knows Cleveland, as saying: “King financed the Wepner fight with mob money. I’ve heard that since he put the fight together, and while I can’t prove it, I believe it to be true. I heard he borrowed a million and a half from the mob in Cleveland, and then he had trouble paying it back.
“In fact, I heard that part of how he paid it off was by giving them his numbers business. And by ‘them,’ I mean the people he borrowed the money from. He had the numbers business going after he got out of prison. There’s no question about that. I know that.”
In 1982, when FBI agent Joe Spinelli tried to interview Lombardo about the financing of the Wepner fight, Lombardo declined to be interviewed. There is no evidence actually linking Lombardo to organized crime, and it is possible that he was simply an innocent dupe of Don King’s.
Bahar Muhammad, who was part of Ali’s camp in 1975, also told me that he knew at the time the Cleveland mob was lending King the money to promote the Wepner fight. Bahar told me in 1990, “Don kept his influence up with Ali by paying guys around Ali. I saw it myself. I used to see Don come up to Deer Lake and give guys cash to spy for him and tell Ali positive things about King, to let King become his promoter and not other guys. There was always factions around Ali, and King was smart enough to buy people’s loyalty with cash. I think this was another reason why he got the Wepner fight.”
On February 9, with Ali and Wepner at his side in New York, King officially announced the fight for Cleveland on March 24.
King said Ali would get $1.5 million, plus $200,000 in training expenses. Wepner would get $100,000.
Later King would add a semifinal in the Garden between Ken Norton and Jerry Quarry to boost the closed-circuit sales, and this would cost his investors $400,000 more. With travel, “finder’s fees,” and publicity expenses, the fight would cost more than $2.5 million to put on.
But to King it was more than worth it. He was not risking his own money. It looked to the world like he was in control of Ali’s destiny. He seemed to have the inside track for Ali’s coming mega-matches with Frazier and Foreman. And King had outfoxed Madison Square Garden and gotten even with John Daly for the London snub.
At the opening press conference King started to market Wepner as a white hope, calling himself “an equal opportunity promoter who wants to give the white race a chance, a chance to reclaim the heavyweight crown.”
Ali, however, began to call Wepner “a white with no hope.”
For the fight King hired his former boss, Hank Schwartz, to handle all the closed-circuit rights with exhibitors. As Schwartz had predicted in Caracas, he was now riding in the back of the bus and King in the front of the bus.
As in the record business and horse racing, almost everyone in boxing seems like a character. That’s why writers and filmmakers are drawn to it. Almost everyone in boxing is a colorful storyteller with a touch of lunacy or larceny. Chuck Wepner was one of those characters. So was his manager, Al Braverman, and his trainer, Paddy Flood. One of Flood’s former fighters once told me, “I loved Paddy. I just didn’t trust him.”
Don King was shrewd enough to try to market his mismatch by letting Wepner be Wepner. He didn’t try to sanitize him for the media. Wepner was himself—a boisterous, funny, crude, average fighter with a dream. He was an Everyman with whom the public could identify: a hard-drinking, limited journeyman with a big heart, being given the chance we all dream about—get even in one night, land a lucky punch, hit the lottery number, and change your low-rent life forever.
Wepner made such an impression as the underdog, blue-collar, fearless tavern gladiator that Sylvester Stallone, who watched the fight in a theater, used him as the inspiration for Rocky Balboa in the series of five Rocky movies that grossed millions.
When a reporter asked Wepner what his best punch was, he replied, “My three best punches are the rabbit punch, the choke hold, and a head butt.”
Wepner lived in the bar, disco, and fringe mob culture of white ethnic Bayonne, New Jersey. He usually trained by drinking at Johnny Di’s Lounge and playing pool until the other guy let him win.
The fighter told Vic Ziegel, who wrote dozens of raffish columns about him, “I’m good for a quart of vodka on a given night. I just get a little silly.”
Of his daily routine, he told Ziegel, “We don’t think nothing of jumping on a plane and going down to Puerto Rico for a weekend, calling our wives from Puerto Rico and saying, ‘Hey, guess where we are?’ We aren’t henpecked. We like to party.”
Wepner told one local television reporter—female—who had done a story on his wife, “We raffled your body off at the bar. Three guys won. They’ll see you after the fight.”
Wepner’s manager was Al Braverman, a former boxer, a twice-convicted former bookmaker in New York City, who got into managing local club fights like Rinzy Nocero and Bill Bossio.
In June 1970, Wepner fought Sonny Liston at the Jersey City Armory, in what turned out to be Liston’s last fight before his death, a bout I covered for the Village Voice.
Liston was then over forty, but he could still hit, and he gave Wepner, who acted like moving his head was a crime, a brutal beating. Wepner’s nose was broken, his mouth and both his eyes badly cut. His trunks looked like a butcher’s apron, and the canvas looked like a work in progress by an artist who used only red paint. The referee mercifully stopped the butchery in the tenth round. Afterward, Wepner needed seventy stitches in his face.
In the winner’s dressing room a younger reporter asked, “Mr. Liston, is Chuck the bravest man you ever saw?”
“Shit, no,” Liston growled.
“Well, who is the bravest?” the reporter persisted.
“Wepner’s manager,” Liston answered, breaking up the room full of reporters who all knew Braverman.
Despite a lot of free publicity, the fight wasn’t selling many tickets at the Cl
eveland Coliseum, or at 135 theater TV locations around the country. It just wasn’t a fight with any doubt about the outcome. It was a curiosity, more like the pilot for a sitcom than a competitive sporting event.
Ali trained minimally for the fight, weighing in at 223 1/2, compared to 216 at Zaire. The day before the fight he just hung out with comedian Redd Foxx, singer Billy Eckstine, and James Brown, who would sing the national anthem.
“Wepner’s chances are slim and none,” Ali was saying to a few reporters.
“And Slim left on the eight o’clock train,” Eckstine cracked.
Redd Foxx started to tell Ali one of his very dirty jokes, and Ali broke in, saying, “Louder, let the reporters hear it, too.”
“Not at these prices,” Foxx replied, and everyone broke up laughing.
When Ali was asked if he considered Wepner as “representing White America,” Ali rolled his eyes like an actor and said, “White America would never pick hiiiiim.”
Ali then playfully mused to the writers that he might handicap himself by giving away the first five rounds, or by trying not to hit Wepner near his eyes. He seemed to be looking for a way to make the contest equal, like a father who gets down on his knees so his sixyear-old son can reach his chin.
The day before the fight, Braverman, a low-rent Barnum in his own right, told a few reporters that he had a secret, magic elixir that would prevent any cuts to Wepner’s eyes and face.
“I got the last batch of this miracle gook,” Braverman said with gruff sincerity. “I got the secret formula from Doc Kearns, who got the recipe from an old Indian in the desert. It has Indian herbs in it and some kind of smelly stuff. I rub it in an hour before the fight and Chuck won’t bleed.” (Doc Kearns was the manager of Jack Dempsey, a con man the equal of King, who ripped off Shelby, Montana, in the same way King ripped off Zaire.)
To boost the lagging ticket sales, King announced the day before the fight that he would donate half the profits to charity—secure in the private knowledge there would be no profits.
On the day of the fight, Carl Lombardo was quoted in the New York Daily News as saying, “The live gate is doing very well, and the closed circuit should be a pleasant surprise.”
When the fighters entered the ring, Wepner’s chances were so remote, there was no betting line. But Wepner’s heart made it an interesting night. He had no fear of Ali, no stage fright. He kept swinging and missing, and coming forward. Wepner also fought barroom style as usual, starting to foul Ali in the first round with his hard rabbit punches, and attempting other illegal tactics, including low blows, all through the fight.
Ali loafed, downed, talked, mimicked, and hit Wepner whenever he felt like it.
In the ninth round Wepner stepped on Ali’s foot, jabbed him in the chest, and Ali went down. The referee, Tony Perez, ruled it as an official knockdown, but as I look at replays, and at the film over many years, it seems more like a trip, or a slip.
But it fed into the coming Rocky myth that anything can happen, and gave the fight the drama of the old loser with no hope knocking down the great Ali. It created the illusion of a potential miracle. Everyman, down on his luck, a lottery ticket in his glove, was getting cheered by the crowd.
In the ring Ali was actually winning almost every round, and Wepner was bleeding as usual, despite Braverman’s magic gook. Ali was also getting deeply angry from the constant fouling and the embarrassment of being ruled an official victim of a knockdown.
The dramatic tension of the fight was becoming: Can the old guy with guts go the distance? Will Wepner be able to get free drinks for the rest of life by boasting the great Ali couldn’t stop him? Can a bum gain glory and dignity by refusing to give up?
In the last round Ali went for the kill in a way he had never done before with an inferior fighter. Ali had gone easy on Jerry Quarry. He didn’t want to hurt Blue Lewis or Buster Mathis. He played with Joe Bugner and Rudi Lubbers. He took pity on Mac Foster and let him last fifteen in Tokyo.
But now he wanted to deny Wepner the honor of going the distance. The drama built as Wepner struggled to hang on and the fight dwindled down to the last sixty seconds.
Wepner was valiant, but Ali was too quick and too emotional. Left, right, left, right. Then one last tremendous right to the jaw. Exhausted, his legs spaghetti, Wepner sagged down along the ropes. The moment looked like a live replica of Bellows’s famous boxing painting, Stag at Sharkey’s, a beaten fighter draped on the ropes.
Wepner pulled himself back up at the count of nine, but referee Tony Perez stopped the fight. There were nineteen seconds left. Everyman would not go the distance this night. The ending made a farce look like tragedy.
Paddy Flood stormed into the ring, screaming curses at Perez. He threw all the blood and dirty water on his sponge all over Perez, and then he cradled the badly hurt Wepner in his arms.
Later Perez said he thought Ali was one punch away from killing Wepner. Ali said, “Usually I back off, but I tried to annihilate him. I had no mercy.”
Wepner got back from the hospital at 6:00 A.M., after they put twenty-three stitches in his eyebrows and repaired his broken nose.
“I told the doctor not to worry about my nose,” Wepner told Braverman in their hotel suite. “This is the fifth time. It’s Silly Putty now.”
Paddy Flood told a reporter, “We love that bum,” gesturing toward Wepner as he lay on the bed, stitched, swollen, and spent.
The next morning Larry Merchant’s column in the New York Post was called “A Great Bum.” It was a song to Wepner’s courage.
In June 1991 I was with Ali at a ceremony honoring him at Gracie Mansion, the residence of New York’s mayor, then David Dinkins. There was a crowd of about two hundred, and out of the corner of his eye, Ali noticed Chuck Wepner. Wepner had just gotten out of prison after serving seventeen months for selling cocaine.
Very slowly, afflicted by his Parkinson’s, Ali inched his way over to Wepner and tried to trip him by stepping on his right foot, and the two old foes hugged each other. Ali’s memory was fine.
“You stepped on my toe,” Ali said. “You must have ate a lot of carrots when you was little, because you had a helluva rabbit punch.”
The Ali–Wepner fight lost money, just as everyone predicted. The live crowd at the 22,000-seat Coliseum was announced at 14,900, but much of this was papered.
The day after the fight Hank Schwartz told reporters he estimated that 50 percent of the closed-circuit television seats had been sold, putting the promotion near the break-even mark. Three weeks later Schwartz admitted the percentage of seats sold was closer to 3 percent. He conceded the losses would be about $1 million. Vic Ziegel, in the New York Post, estimated Carl Lombardo’s personal loss at “close to a million dollars.” Two years later, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Lombardo lost $750,000 on his investment.
Hank Schwartz told Ziegel: “We got ourselves emotionally involved in the fight. We won’t let it happen again. I’m a businessman, while Don operates in an entirely different framework…. He’s capable of carrying you along like a swift current, and we have to put the paddle in the water to stem the flow a little bit.”
On October 1, 1975, King and Bob Arum co-promoted the Thriller in Manila, the last act in the Ali–Frazier trilogy, won by Ali, in a war that ruined both men, both of whom would have been wise to retire that night, in the ring, at the apex of their glory.
The uneasy alliance between the two rivals had been brokered over a lunch at the Friars Club in Manhattan, arranged by public relations legend Harold Conrad, whom King admired because he had once worked for a Florida casino owned by Meyer Lansky. They agreed King would be the main promoter of the fight, but Arum would handle the closed-circuit because King had a bitter falling-out with Hank Schwartz. Arum was also supposed to get a percentage of the gross, plus a guaranteed fee of $300,000.
But weeks before the fight Arum was already accusing King of skimming, finagling with a letter of credit, and scheming to underreport the gross r
eceipts to cheat Arum on the percentage.
Arum says, “By the end I let King buy out my interest, I was so disgusted. I was terrified Don was doing things that would get us all arrested. Ferdinand Marcos [the one-man ruler of the Philippines] was putting up all the money for the fight, and I was in his country, and Don was fooling around with his money. That’s why I pulled back at the end. Don wanted me to sign some documents and I just refused. I was scared.”
By the close of 1975 King had badly overplayed his hand. He tried to drive a wedge between Ali and Herbert Muhammad and take over Ali’s career. King was not satisfied being Ali’s preferred promoter. He wanted to be his only promoter, total control, monopoly, the way Mike Jacobs had been with Joe Louis.
This direct move for control ruptured King’s relationship with Ali and Herbert. It was a violation of trust, friendship, and Muslim etiquette.
King had a great thing going. He had co-promoted the third Ali– Frazier fight after listening to the first one in prison. He was becoming rich and powerful. But the street hustler demon inside of him couldn’t he contained.
Bahar Muhammad recalls, “Don tried a hostile takeover of Muhammad Ali and it failed. He was relying on the flunkies he was paying off. He underestimated the bond between Ali and Herbert, the religious piece. That’s why, to this day, orthodox Muslims don’t like Don King. He tried to cheat the messenger’s son.”
Herbert Muhammad candidly told the whole story to Tom Hauser for his authorized biography of Ali:
I know he [King] paid people in the camp. I know he tried to talk to Ali behind my back.
Ali was hearing from certain people, “Herbert is taking one-third and he’s not even here. Maybe we should get rid of Herbert.”
But I never confronted Don about it, because I had confidence in my closeness to Ali. I knew Don would never be able to come between us. And Don resented that. To this day he doesn’t like me. He hates my guts, really.
Herbert also told Hauser:
I was never able to travel all the time with Ali because my religious obligations came first. And in 1975, when my father passed, I felt an obligation to keep the community strong, and help my brother, Wallace D. Muhammad. So then especially, I wasn’t in camp every day.
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 10
