The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America

by Jack Newfield

  In 1989 there was a big meeting in King’s office to try to settle the lawsuit. Don and Carl and several of their cohorts were there. So was Witherspoon, his brother Steve (whom King had paid to set up the meeting), and Moran, who was the only white person in the room, which was often his circumstance.

  King offered Witherspoon $30,000 to settle a vague offer of a few fights.

  “This won’t even pay our legal bills,” Moran responded.

  King leaped up, slapped Moran’s hand, hard, and shouted, “Shut up! You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re ignorant. You don’t know anything about boxing.”

  Witherspoon’s brother said, “Yeah, Tom, shut up.”

  But then Witherspoon said to King, “You shut up! You don’t even know who you’re talking to. You don’t know anything about my people. And you will never know anything about my people until we see you in court.”

  For the next two years Witherspoon kept winning small fights on cable TV shows promoted by Bob Arum, but no heavyweight controlled by King would fight him, which meant no substantial income.

  Meanwhile, the lawsuit progressed through depositions. Mickey Duff provided a supportive deposition on the way Witherspoon was paid for the Bruno fight. DKP had to turn over all its financial records on all of Witherspoon’s fights, documenting that Carl King was taking an improper 50 percent of his earnings. A federal judge, Thomas Grisea, then ruled that Witherspoon’s lawyers could get access to the tax returns and financial records of Monarch, which showed how much it was a subsidiary of DKP. The lawyers also got cartons of internal memos from DKP, which showed Carl functioning as an employee, working at his stepfather’s direction.

  King had to know Witherspoon had a very strong case. By the autumn of 1990 Witherspoon started to get threats and ominous messages. Witherspoon called me up in October and said his former trainer, Slim Robinson, had visited his house and reported that Blinky Palermo, the old Philadelphia mobster and fight fixer, wanted to see him about dropping his lawsuit against the Kings.

  A few days earlier, Robinson, and an ex-fighter named Lightning Bob Smith, had asked Witherspoon to accompany them to Atlantic City to meet with King directly about ending the lawsuit. Smith had once been Tim’s best friend, but he had lately developed a drug problem.

  Witherspoon told his two old friends, “Tell Don I’ll see him in court.”

  Former two-time heavyweight champion Tim Witherspoon. King paid him $1 million to settle a lawsuit for fraud and confict of interest. Witherspoon says, “Don’s specialty is black-on-black crime. I’m black and he robbed me.” ARLENE SCHULMAN

  Jimmy Binns, the WBA counsel, based in Philadelphia, supports Witherspoon’s account. Binns told me: “King’s lawyer, Charles Lomax, told me that King was using Blinky as an emissary to Tim. King himself told me he knew Blinky was still part of the Scarfo gang. King told me he knew Scarfo was about to get out of prison. Don had ties to Palermo. I told both Don and Lomax that it was inappropriate for them to be dealing with Palermo.”

  In May 1991 Witherspoon still did not have a working phone in his apartment. His close friends who wanted to reach him knew to call a woman neighbor who took care of his three children.

  In mid-May this woman got a call from a man identifying himself as “Kareen Sadat.” He told her, “You tell Tim that if he doesn’t settle his lawsuit by Friday, he won’t be breathing by Sunday.”

  Witherspoon was so frightened by this call that he immediately went out and “I got a gun to protect myself.” He also moved out of his apartment and asked a cousin, who was also armed, to stay with him. Moran thinks Witherspoon “may have overreacted, but that was Tim’s mental state. His conflict with King was an obsession. It had taken over his whole life.”

  But by October 1992, King began to feel more pressure to settle the lawsuit. Judge Grisea was now demanding a firm trial date be set, since the suit was almost six years old. Grisea also ordered that King be deposed for a second time, and now Witherspoon’s lawyers had even more ammunition, more documents on the financing of the Bruno fight to ask him about, and a copy of a contract that Witherspoon had signed under duress awarding Carl King 50 percent of his earnings.

  Even more threatening to King was a new federal investigation into his business practices being conducted by the FBI and the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. King was paranoid that questions he was asked under oath in the Witherspoon civil deposition would be used against him in the federal criminal investigation. He felt he had to get out of his deposition at almost any cost.

  King knew that the new federal investigation had been triggered by the information provided by his former chief financial officer, Joe Maffia, and he was worried that Maffia would become a witness for Witherspoon in the civil suit. So over a two-week period in October, King’s lawyers and Witherspoon’s new attorney, Richard Emery, engaged in intense negotiations to try to finally settle the lawsuit. King’s cash offer kept going up in each bargaining session. He seemed almost desperate to avoid a trial and his sworn deposition.

  In one of the final sessions, both King and Witherspoon were in the room at the same time, and King launched one of his vicious rants against the fighter.

  “Timmy, you are a good-for-nothing, low-life nobody,” King said. “You are dope addict trash.” But Witherspoon, in a jovial mood, now could laugh at King.

  Finally, after negotiating nonstop through a weekend, King agreed to pay Witherspoon what he wanted. Although the agreement was sealed, it is known that King agreed to pay Witherspoon more than $1 million in three installments over a twelve-month period—and King did make all the payments on time.

  The final part of the negotiation consisted of King insisting that the language of the press release disclosing the settlement contain nothing adverse about him. Witherspoon didn’t care what kind of face King put on the deal in a press release, while King seemed more concerned about saving face than saving money.

  In the end, the settlement was the biggest payday of Tim Witherspoon’s boxing career.

  Unfortunately, after a year of big spending, all Witherspoon had to show for the more than $1 million was a new house and a car. The rest he gave to Tom Moran, or handed out to friends with problems, or spent on partying, or was conned out of by leeches. Some of the money seems to have been extorted from him by a faction of Muslims.

  At the end of the year, Witherspoon was back in the situation of not having a phone in his new house, after riding around with a cellular phone for the year he was flush.

  Tim Witherspoon is now thirty-seven and still fighting. But in October 1994 he disappointed his friends, and broke Tom Moran’s heart, by signing a contract with Mark Stewart, now an ex-con, the same early manager who had led Tim into Don King’s web without fully explaining what was happening.

  “You’ll always be my friend, but I’m finished with trying to help your boxing career,” Moran told him.

  Witherspoon will never be thought of as one of the great fighters of the contemporary era like Ali, Leonard, Duran, Whitaker, Hearns, Chavez, Hagler, Sanchez, or Mike Tyson in the comet of his prime.

  He was not a heroic figure larger than his sport like Curt Flood, Jackie Robinson, or Ali. He didn’t have their mental strength, or the sense of commitment to a destiny greater than himself.

  In some ways Witherspoon is more of a tragic hero. His personal flaws subverted his effectiveness—his escapism from responsibility, his streak of self-destructiveness that led him to dabble with drugs and resign with Mark Stewart.

  But in the end, in his own wobbly way, Witherspoon stood up to King, and the whole boxing system, more courageously than any other fighter. He stuck to his lawsuit for almost six years so that young fighters in the future can have some measure of independence, some measure of dignity and honest accounting, some freedom of choice in a manager.

  Witherspoon was too flawed to become the Spartacus of the gym, to lead the slave revolt. But he gave it his best shot so that other fighters
would not be as exploited and demoralized as he was.

  Tim Witherspoon has earned the last word in this chapter, as emblematic of King’s lost generation. This is how he summed up his thoughts about Don King in February 1991—four years into his lawsuit, almost two years before it was finally settled.

  “Don’s specialty is black-on-black crime. I’m black and he robbed me, so I know this is true,” he said.

  “Don’s problem is that he would rather put a dishonest quarter into his pocket than an honest dollar. You know, that’s just the way he is. It’s a feeling he gets. He gets that big old knot in his pocket. And he’s rubbing it. He loves money. And they say money is the root of all evil. And that’s what he is, an evil man.

  “Don King just destroyed everything that I tried to be. And there’s nothing else I can say about it.”

  12. The Hostile Takeover of Mike Tyson

  It was about 6:00 A.M. on Thursday, March 24, 1988. The phone was ringing in the bedroom of Jose Torres in his middle-income apartment in Independence Plaza in lower Manhattan. Torres was in a deep sleep and he picked up the phone on the third or fourth ring.

  “It’s Don,” the familiar fire-engine voice said. “What time are they going to LA? What airline? What airport? What flight number?”

  Jim Jacobs, Mike Tyson’s co-manager, had died the day before, and Don King was crashing the funeral party.

  Even in his semi-alert state Torres realized what King was up to. He was trying to insinuate himself into the heavyweight champion’s life at this moment of grief, even before Jim Jacobs’s body was placed under the earth.

  But Torres didn’t like conflict, even though he was a former champion. And he was still friendly on the surface with King, so he gave King all the details of the flight that would carry Tyson and Jacobs’s widow and closest friends to Los Angeles for a funeral ceremony the next morning.

  Jimmy Jacobs’s death was traumatic for Tyson. His whole life had been a quest for a father figure—and an identity—after never knowing his biological father as he grew up wild on the streets of Bed-Stuy and Brownsville.

  Cus D’Amato, who had rescued him from a juvenile prison at thirteen, had been his first father substitute, slowing earning Tyson’s trust, and then love, and finally becoming Tyson’s legal guardian. But D’Amato, who had trained Torres, died in November 1985, when Tyson was just eighteen and a pro for just eight months.

  Jacobs had replaced D’Amato, developing a warm personal bond with the moody Tyson, helping him out of a few jams with the law, guiding him to one version of the heavyweight title when he was twenty, fulfilling D’Amato’s prophecy that Tyson would become the youngest heavyweight champion in history.

  Jose Torres had become Tyson’s surrogate big brother: both spiritual children of Cus; both champions shaped by Cus’s system of head-moving technique and psychology of will; both children of poverty and proud men of color.

  Tyson now had lost his second father substitute in three years, and was feeling abandoned and betrayed again by a harsh world.

  The night before King’s cunning wake-up call, Torres and a bereft Tyson had walked through the darkened Manhattan streets near Jacobs’s apartment on East Fortieth Street. The heavyweight champion of the world sank his head in Torres’s chest and shoulders and cried like a baby.

  “People think I’m tough, but that’s bullshit,” Tyson said when he regained his composure. “I’m a fucking coward. You know something? I feel like taking my own life. But I don’t have the fucking guts to do it, you know what I mean? When Cus died, I felt the same way.”

  Torres, grieving himself and moved by Tyson’s intimacy, replied: “My friend, you had a commitment when Cus died that was fulfilled. You have a commitment now, and I see no obstacle to preventing its execution. You must keep winning until you want the championship no more. You and only you must make that decision. Both Cus and Jimmy will be happier wherever they are.”

  “I could trust Cus and Jimmy,” Tyson said after a silence. “You know, trust and love are two different things. I love Robin, but I don’t trust her.”

  Robin was his wife of five weeks, actress Robin Givens. His remark was a window into the solitude and confusion of a millionaire young champion, not yet twenty-two years old and feeling overwhelmed by the experience of public fame and private loneliness.

  The next morning, as Don King called his travel agent to get him on the flight, Tyson was reading the obituary for his manager in the New York Times, written by Phil Berger. The obit said that Jacobs “had suffered from lymphocytic leukemia for nine years.”

  This came as a shock to Tyson. He never knew his manager was sick with a terminal disease. He had been told the day before that Jacobs had died of pneumonia. Suddenly he was even less sure of whom he could trust in this world. He didn’t trust his bride. And now none of his closest boxing friends had told him the truth about his own manager’s medical condition. His surviving co-manager, Bill Gayton, who handled the business side, and whom Tyson didn’t know well at all, had told everyone, including the Associated Press, that Jacobs had died of pneumonia. The leukemia had been kept secret and covered up with well-intentioned lies for years.

  King showed up at the American Airlines terminal at JFK Airport in time, and joined the funeral party on the cross-country flight. On the plane were Tyson; Jacobs’s widow, Lorraine; Bill and Doris Gayton; Steve Lott, the assistant trainer and Jacobs’s protégé; Kevin Rooney, Tyson’s trainer; Jacobs’s doctor, Gene Brody; and his friends Matty Decatur and Sal Rappa.

  Tyson sat alone during the entire flight, seeming in a trance of sorrow and loss. Neither Cayton nor anyone else made any effort to comfort Tyson, or try to talk to him about the pain he was so visibly feeling.

  King also kept to himself, not really being part of this group of mourners, and not having been a friend of Jacobs. They had negotiated a few deals but never socialized. Jacobs had, in fact, echoed Cus D’Amato’s warnings to Tyson to beware of Don King’s practices, even before he turned pro. D’Amato had even told Bobby Stewart, the staff member of Tryon Reformatory who first noticed Tyson, that one reason he wanted to legally become his guardian at sixteen was to prevent “promoters like Don King and Bob Arum” from stealing him away.

  Mike Tyson at eighteen, before he met Don King. Tyson’s first boxing family (from left): Cus D’Amato, Tyson, Jose Torres, and Floyd Patterson. BIG FIGHTS

  King had coveted Tyson for years. You didn’t have to be a gym rat, or attend every amateur tournament, to know about Tyson. CBS network had profiled Tyson before the 1984 Olympics. His defeat in the Olympic trials was on national television. Boxing people had been talking about Tyson since 1982, when he was sixteen.

  King’s relationship to young boxing talent is a little like Alan Freed’s and Morris Levy’s relationships to young music talent in the 1950s. Like them, King is a hip exploiter. He knew enough to know whom to rip off. Freed and Levy stole songwriting credits and performing royalties. King stole fighters. Like Freed and Levy, King was a predator who was not patronizing. He was smart enough to take over the best. Like Freed and Levy, he was a knowing flesh peddler.

  King sensed Tyson was emotionally open to a strong father figure like himself, that Tyson was someone who would be impressed by King telling him he had killed two men in his lifetime, because when Tyson was a teenage mugger, he looked up to people like King on the streets of Brooklyn.

  King began to make his moves as soon as the plane landed in Los Angeles. He saw that Tyson was standing at the curb, outside the American Airlines terminal, with no limo or car there to pick him up and take him to the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

  “These people don’t know how to deal with this kid,” King said to Torres, loud enough for Tyson to hear. “There should be a couple of limos waiting for the champ, before you people got here,” King commented. “I’ll tell you something, Muhammad Ali never had to wait this long at an airport. Never!”

  Although an uninvited mourner, King was already planting seed
s of doubt in Tyson’s mind about whether Cayton had the proper respect and competence to now guide Tyson’s future, with Jacobs gone.

  King had arranged in advance for a limo to pick him up, and he gave a ride to Tyson and Torres, to show how a champion should always travel in the style of royalty. King was already demonstrating to Tyson how he could take care of him, solve his little problems, like a father.

  While Don King started to make his first moves for Mike Tyson’s body, Robin Givens and her mother, Ruth Roper, started making their first moves for Mike Tyson’s money. One hour after Jim Jacobs was pronounced dead on March 23, Givens and Roper showed up, without an appointment, at the offices of Merrill Lynch vice president James Brady, in the Pan Am building at 200 Park Avenue.

  They told Brady to shift $1.9 million from Tyson’s stock account in order to make a down payment on buying a $4.2 million mansion in New Jersey. Brady, although taken aback by the coldness of the move, followed instructions and transferred the money to a joint account Givens and Tyson had at Citibank.

  The next day, as Tyson was arriving in Los Angeles, Givens and Roper showed up again unannounced at Merrill Lynch. They handed Brady—a personal friend of Jacobs—a letter from Tyson giving his new wife power of attorney for the house purchase. Roper had gotten Tyson to sign the letter just before he left for the funeral.

  Givens now told Brady to transfer the $1.9 million from their joint account at Citibank to an account solely in her name at the European-American Bank. But European-American would not accept the transfer because it came from an account in two names to a proposed new account only in the name of Robin Givens.