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

by Jack Newfield

  Bee took a bad beating all night, refusing to quit, until he collapsed into a coma with a bleeding brain in the tenth round. Scottland’s record was 20–7, and he was not a big puncher; he just had a big heart and a big dream that boxing would lift him, his wife, his three children, and his mother out of poverty.

  After watching the tape three times, I am convinced that the doctors or the referee should have stopped the fight. Three doctors from the New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) were present at ringside—Gerald Varlotta, Barry Jordan, and Rufus Sadler. None of them had the instinct to jump into the ring after the seventh round and shine a penlight into Scottland’s eyes. The failure of the pupils to constrict in response to the light would have been a sign of injury to the brain.

  Dr. Sadler told a reporter that night that Scottland’s injuries were “probably not life-threatening.”

  In stark contrast, I have seen Dr. Margaret Goodman of the Nevada commission personally intervene to stop fights at precisely the right time. I have seen her correctly diagnose a detached retina and a brain injury in the seconds between rounds, using her penlight. She is a professional without being panicky.

  The fight was broadcast live on ESPN2. Max Kellerman, the announcer, pleaded for the fight to be stopped while it was going on. My views are merely hindsight, but the whole country could hear the rising fear and revulsion in Kellerman’s voice.

  In an interview six days after the fight, Kellerman told me, “I saw it coming. The kid was absorbing too much punishment to the head. I saw Bobby Tomasello die after an ESPN2 fight that I was broadcasting. The kid got a draw and then went into a coma. I have always preferred referees and doctors to err on the side of humanity and caution.”

  The tape reveals Kellerman saying as early as the fourth round that Scottland was taking “a brutal beating.” During the fifth round Scottland absorbed twenty-five consecutive punches to his head when he was trapped in a corner.

  “That’s it!” Kellerman shouted. “This is how guys get seriously hurt.”

  During the seventh round, as the one-sided brutality continued, Kellerman told the television audience, “I don’t like the way he is getting hit…. Those are the cumulative punches that lead to things that you don’t want to hear about after the fight.”

  After that round, Kellerman said, “if you’re in Scottland’s corner you have to ask yourself, ‘Is it worth it, for the damage he is sustaining? Is it worth it for the kid’s life to stay in these final rounds?’ I would say no.”

  None of the three commission physicians at ringside examined Scottland in his corner after the savage seventh round. The TV broadcaster could see that the fight should be stopped, but not the trained physicians. Their penlights remained in their bags.

  When Scottland finally collapsed from his bleeding brain, with forty-five seconds remaining in the fight, Kellerman told the television audience, “I feel nauseated. I feel sick. Why does this ever have to happen?”

  In Dylan’s song following the ring death of Davey Moore in 1963, he has the manager, the referee and the crowd all defensively rejecting responsibility for the calamity. Part of the songs intelligence comes from the multiplicity of logical suspects. In any tragedy like this, it is simplistic to blame any single suspect. In the case of Scottland, the referee and his cornerman all might have saved him. But the main culprit, in the opinion of most observers, including this one, was the boxing commission. They hired and assigned the doctors. Their top officials were present. They could have intervened.

  Commissions of Cronies

  Last year Wally Matthews and I wrote a series of fifteen columns in the New York Post taking the NYSAC apart for patronage, incompetence, conflicts of interest and, most prominent, its repeated failure to protect the health and safety of fighters.

  The counsel to the commission, Larry Mandelker, was also the counsel to the state Republican Party. He is an elections lawyer who knows little about boxing. He ran the commission during the years that poor Floyd Patterson was used as a front—made chairman in a cynical act that revealed contempt for a former heavyweight champion.

  Tom Hoover was the capable deputy commissioner under Governor Mario Cuomo. He was called in by Mandelker in 1995 and told he could be the new chairman, if he agreed to switch his party registration to the GOP and promised to campaign for George Pataki’s reelection. Hoover rejected the demeaning deal.

  Alter the Scottland death, Hoover told me, “The kid should never have died. The commission didn’t know what it was doing. They don’t have one person who can take charge in a crisis like this one.”

  One of the three New York commissioners is Marc Cornstein. He got the job because his father, David, contributed more than $200,000 to Republicans Rudy Giuliani, Al D’Amato, and Pataki, since 1997. James Polsinello is the $76,000-a-year special assistant to the NYSAC. He has contributed $27,000 to Pataki. Tony Russo, another GOP loyalist, was the $77,000-a-year seldom-show executive director of the NYSAC. He was quietly eased out after we exposed how he botched the weigh-in for the Arturo Gatti–Joey Gamache fight at Madison Square Garden in February 2000. Russo supervised that weigh-in and allowed Gatti to jump off the scale after the balance beam indicated that Gatti was clearly over the contracted weight.

  Gamache’s trainer, Jimmy Glenn, immediately protested that Gatti was “over the weight,” and asked that he get back on the scale. But Russo, who was there to insure competitive fairness, told Glenn, “Shut up! Stop making a fuss!”

  At fight time the next night, after rehydrating his body, Gatti weighed fifteen pounds more than Gamache; HBO weighed both boxers in their dressing rooms. Such a size disparity, over two weight classifications, is not permitted under the rules. Gatti knocked Gamache out cold in two rounds. Gamache spent two nights in the hospital and hasn’t boxed since, on the advice of his doctors.

  “They send us out to slaughter, and there is no one to protect us,” Gamache told me. He is now suing the NYSAC for $5 million in negligence.

  The Gamache episode dramatizes the direct connection between patronage and incompetence, between appointing hacks and increasing the risks to the fighters. The Gamache episode is the context for the Scottland tragedy.

  Another incident underlines the link between ineptitude and jeopardy. Last year a fighter named José Maldonado, who had hepatitis C—which is contagious through blood and is potentially fatal— was allowed to box on a card in Westchester County New York, that was promoted by Joe DeGuardia, a former prosecutor who is a favorite of the NYSAC.

  Maldonado was a last-minute substitute, so his blood lest was done the day before his four-round preliminary fight. The lab says it faxed his positive results for hepatitis C to both DeGuardia and the commission. But neither stopped the boxer from entering the ring. Fortunately, the sick boxer was knocked out in the first round. before he could bleed on his opponent or the referee. A month later an assistant to DeGuardia was fired for the carelessness of people in higher authority.

  When Bee Scottland was killed, the athletic commission had fifty-five “inspectors and guests” populating the ringside seats. It looked like a Republican Party convention. But even fifty-five freebies and hangers-on didn’t have the collective judgment to stop the fight in time.

  And now death has again become a catalyst for reform, just as it was with the civil rights movement and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911. Two months after Scottland’s funeral, Governor Pataki nominated Ray Kelly to replace Mel Southard as chairman of the NYSAC. It was a smart move. Kelly, the former New York City police commissioner, knows boxing, has integrity, has the capacity to listen and has been given a mandate to “clean house,”

  Favors for Sale—On Tape

  On May 19, 1997, FBI agent Theresa Reilly approached Doug Beavers, International Boxing Federation ratings committee chairman, in front of his home in Virginia. Beavers had responsibility for issuing the ratings that determine the economic future of fighters.

  Reilly identified herself and dropped a phra
se from an incriminating phone conversation Beavers had six months earlier with a boxing promoter, who taped the conversation.

  “I’m investigating corruption in boxing,” Reilly told Beavers.

  “What took you so long?” Beavers responded, meaning, What took the FBI so long to realize he was corrupt?

  Beavers, who was the bagman for former IBF president Robert Lee, quickly agreed to become an informant for Assistant US Attorney José Sierra, who was based in Newark. Once a month, starting in 1985, Lee—an ex-cop—came to Virginia to meet Beavers in hotel rooms, collect his share of the bribes and make up the ratings based on who paid. Fighters who were qualified on merit were kept out of the rankings if their promoter or agent didn’t pay. Fighters who left Don King were dropped from the ratings, while fighters who signed with King went up.

  When heavyweight Michael Moorer filed a civil RICO suit against the IBF, he was excluded from the ratings as punishment, even though he was one of the best in the world and a former IBF champion. It was Moorer’s lawsuit that had triggered the US Attorney’s probe, and it was the IBF rating of King’s fighter Frans Botha above Moorer that had triggered the lawsuit.

  After Beavers became a cooperating witness, he helped the prosecutors make about 200 hours of undercover video and audio tapes. In November 1999, Lee, his son, Bob Lee Jr., and 85-year-old IBF official Bill Brennan were indicted on thirty-two counts of racketeering, fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, and tax evasion, in the US district court in northern New Jersey. In grand jury testimony leading up to the indictment, promoter Bob Arum (a former federal prosecutor himself in the 1960s) admitted paying $100,000 to get the IBF’s sanction for a George Foreman match. New Jersey promoter Dino Duva admitted paying a $25,000 bribe. Promoter Cedric Kushner admitted paying $100,000 in bribes. The indictment accused Lee of taking a total of $338,000 in payoffs to manipulate the rankings. Don King was named as an “unindicted co-conspirator.” The prosecutors hoped to turn Lee into a witness against King, but that never happened.

  The fifteen hours of undercover videos that I viewed reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil.” The conversations between Lee and Beavers are tedious—except for Lee’s requirement that Beavers provide him with prostitutes from Norfolk whenever he came down for a visit, especially a “long-legged one” that Lee was partial to, after divvying up the payoffs.

  In an interview this summer, Beavers told me. “I don’t regret becoming a government witness. A big reason I did it was that Lee didn’t know anything about boxing or care about the fighters. It was just a business to him.”

  On the tapes Lee used a simple code. Don King was always referred to as “Fuzzy” or “Fuzzy Wuzzy.” Cedric Kushner was always “The Fat Man.” The bribe money was called “turkey” or “stuffing” or “ginseng.”

  One King boxer, who hadn’t won a match in three years, was placed in the ratings by Lee, even though Beavers had never seen him fight. When Beavers asked Lee about this idle tiger’s credentials. Lee explained: “One of Fuzzy’s guys.”

  All through 1998 Lee insisted to Beavers that Henry Akinwande— under contract to King—be kept high up in the heavyweight rankings, even though he hadn’t boxed in more than a year because he had a case of hepatitis C. In our interview Beavers told me, “King was also the reason we kept rating Frans Botha a top heavyweight. He did not deserve it.”

  Watching these payoff tapes makes your heart go out to all the honest fighters without any corrupt connections. They keep getting excluded from the fraudulent listings. They train hard, fight fair, and then get cheated out of economic opportunities because they have no bribe-payer in their corner. Boxing corruption is not a victimless crime. A number-one ranking has an economic value because it eventually guarantees a title fight as the “mandatory challenger.”

  In the most graphic of the undercover videos, recorded on December 18, 1998, in a Portsmouth, Virginia, hotel room, Beavers arrived with the payoff money taped to his leg in a plastic bag.

  “Christmas cheer,” Beavers said as he handed the cash to Lee.

  “How much is this?” asked Lee.

  “This is $5,000,” Beavers answered.

  On the tape you can see Lee sliding the money into the pocket of his suit.

  Despite this overwhelming evidence of bribery, the jury convicted Lee only of money laundering and tax fraud. But that was enough for the judge to sentence Lee to twenty-two months—without parole— this past February 14.

  Doug Beavers is now operating a gym in Portsmouth. He told me, “it only takes one person to corrupt the whole sport, because then everyone else starts paying bribes, just to keep the playing field level.”

  Cedric Kushner now says, “I understood. I paid. I was extorted. That’s how it works.”

  Fixed Fights and White Hopes

  There are still some fixed fights. In August a federal grand jury in Las Vegas indicted “matchmaker” Bobby Mitchell and boxer Thomas Williams for sports bribery and conspiracy. The basic allegation is that Williams took a dive against Richie Melito Jr. in the preliminary match to the Holyfield–Ruiz title fight in August 2000.

  A statement released by the grand jury said, “Beginning around March 1995, Mitchell and others [associated with the boxing business] conspired to fix boxing matches for the purpose of promoting the professional career of Richard Melito Jr.”

  In the 1950s, fights were fixed to set up betting coups for the mob. These days fights are fixed to build up the records and reputations of white heavyweights who can’t win on their own. Melito is a slow white heavyweight from Queens with a china chin. His father, who manages his son’s career, is a former NYPD detective.

  All the dominant fighters since the 1960s have been black or Lat-ino—Ali, Duran, Roy Jones Jr., Leonard, Hagler, Pryor, Bernard Hopkins, Alexis Arguello, Thomas Hearns, Chavez, Trinidad, Mosley, De La Hoya, Whitaker, Holmes, Holyfield. This has created a pathetic yearning for a white boxing star among white fans. This tribal inferiority complex is what helped make the Rocky movies a box-office bonanza. There is a huge market for this sort of therapeutic racial-revenge fantasy. It was behind the scam that Mitchell and Williams are accused of running. Mitchell, and others around Melito not yet named, believed that if they could inflate Melito’s record with arranged wins, he could be maneuvered into a big-money fight as the latest white hope.

  Bobby Mitchell’s job is to locate and deliver breathing bodies certain to fall down early. Boxing’s bottom-feeders crave predictability. Nobody who saw the way Melito’s chin reacted to a real punch wanted their investment jeopardized by an opponent trying to win. Mitchell was the “manager” (really the booking agent) for twelve of Melito’s opponents who were knocked out. Last year Mitchell gave Wally Matthews and me an astonishingly honest interview about his job as the casting agent for Melito’s opponents.

  “Promoters hire me to fill out one side of their cards,” Mitchell explained. “They hire me to protect their investments. They’re not calling me because I’m going to get their guys beat…. When I’m making matches for Melito, the first thing I’m looking for is a weak chin. Then I’m looking for someone who is not training.”

  Melito’s record is 27–1, with twenty-five knockouts, but his only legitimate fight may have been the one he lost to Bert Cooper in New York in 1997. And Cooper won the fight—a first-round KO—probably because a member of the New York commission went into his dressing room beforehand and warned him that there were rumors he was taking a dive, and if he didn’t give an honest effort he would not get paid. Bert needed the money.

  A year ago a boxer named John Carlo told me and Matthews he “wasn’t trying” when he lost to Melito. A second boxer, Shelby Gross, told us that Mitchell offered him $10,000 to lose to Melito, but that he rejected the proposition. The indictment charges Mitchell with paying Williams to lose, but make no reference to the original source of the money.

  In 1995, Peter McNeeley, another manufactured white hope, was demolished in n
inety seconds by Mike Tyson. But this mismatch, promoted by Don King, grossed $96 million on pay per view, as Tyson’s first fight after serving a prison term for rape. McNeeley went into the fight with a record on paper of 36–1. But it was a fake résumé. His fights had been fixed in the matchmaking to make him look good.

  McNeeley’s handpicked opponents had a combined record of 301 defeats in 422 fights. They had already been knocked out a total of 132 times before they were judged unqualified enough to face McNeeley. They were a bunch of drug-rehab refugees, fighters who had been retired, out-of-shape bouncers and tomato cans who worked day jobs.

  McNeeley’s manager was Vinnie Vecchione, who selected all these opponents. Vecchione has also produced a dozen of Melito’s opponents, or most of those not recruited by Mitchell. Sylvester Stallone could sue Mitchell and Vecchione for copyright infringement.

  Don King has been a lousy promoter for good black fighters, but he has been an outstanding one for lousy white fighters. King gave the Bayonne Bleeder, Chuck Wepner, a chance to lose to Ali in 1975. His undue influence kept white South African heavyweight Frans Botha much higher in the ratings than he deserved. He gave Gerry Cooney a chance to get knocked out by Larry Holmes in 1982-and he paid Cooney more than he paid the undefeated black champion. He dressed up McNeeley like a Thanksgiving turkey until he fed him to Tyson.

  King was a brilliant, bombastic Barnum in using racial conflict to huckster these black-and-white fights. That was the same agenda behind the Melito buildup. It was just too brazen and transparent to fool the Feds.

  Where Have You Gone, Sugar Ray Robinson?

  I have been around gyms and pugilists since the early 1960s. I have seen the greatest fighters end up living in rooming houses, picking up cans to get the deposits. I have seen champions who are now indigent, depressed, deranged, emotionally troubled, in need of professional help.