Smokin' Joe

by Mark Kram, Jr.

  Marvis would work his way back up in the two and a half years that followed, only to find himself staring across the ring at a young and unbeaten Mike Tyson in Glens Falls, New York, in July 1986. Although Tyson had plowed through twenty-four opponents, twenty-two by knockout, Joe remained unimpressed, telling reporters: “He ain’t nothin’ to write home to Momma about.” All week leading up to the bout, Joe kept it up, yapping the way Ali used to yap, almost as if it were him and not his son who had the date with Tyson. As Joe launched Marvis from his corner at the bell, Tyson charged from his as if he had been set free from a cage. Unable to take advantage of his six-inch advantage in reach, Marvis froze in place as Tyson drove him to a neutral corner. There, Marvis bent down and Tyson strafed him with right uppercuts that toppled him to the floor. From beyond the ropes, Joe implored, “Get up, son. Be a man, son!” Referee Joe Cortez began counting but got as far as three before calling a halt to the bout. Marvis said later, “Maybe God’s telling me something.” After three more inconsequential bouts, he retired at age twenty-seven, with some money but not enough to last. He would become an ordained minister in 1994.

  No one can say for certain how far Marvis would have gone if his father had not intervened and rushed him along. While Marvis had some boxing ability, he would never be the “cold-blooded killer” in the ring that Tyson was or Joe himself had been. Even Joe knew that, occasionally scolding Marvis on his stool between rounds: “Do I have to get in there and fight for you?” Sympathetically, Sharon Hatch would always wonder if Marvis had it in him to even attempt to eclipse the deeds of the man he so idolized. “Joe was his hero,” said Hatch. “Marvis could not see himself passing him or even equaling him in the ring. Joe was the champ. And Marvis was fine with being something less than that.” Newark Star-Ledger columnist Jerry Izenberg observed, “Joe was trying to live through his son. I mean, how many men do that?” To Larry Hazzard, the New Jersey Athletic Control Board commissioner, even bringing up the subject of what could have been is an act of “Monday morning quarterbacking.” That said, he added: “Maybe he did rush him. Going after the money is fine, but I think he could have slowed it down and still have gotten the money at some point.” Years later, Marvis himself would only say, “Awww, I loved Pop.”

  * * *

  Nothing had prepared Joe for the success he found. When Florence gave birth to their oldest child in 1960, they were so young and so poor that Joe looked down at Marvis in his crib and wondered to himself, “How’m I gonna feed this little bugger?” He would later say, “Man, I was worried about paying the rent, paying the light bill, putting food on the table.” Daughter Jacquelyn followed a year later, and there were the two children he had with Rosetta: Renae (1960) and Hector (1962). Three other daughters with Florence came along later: Weatta (1963), Jo-Netta (1968), and Natasha (1970)—and suddenly, it was as if he were a youth again and the cousins were piling on his back as he lugged them across the backyard. But by then “the love” was flowing into his lap like a jackpot of coins and showed no sign of letting up, wealth larger than he or Florence could have ever imagined. Cheerfully, Joe spread it around in a big way, indulging not just himself, in cars and clothes, but those dearest to his heart and whoever else came to him along the way with a sad story. Close friend and business associate Darren Prince told me: “He lived not just in the day but for the day.”

  Upon boarding the Dog in 1959 in search of a better deal in the North, it would have been only understandable that he thought he was leaving the South Carolina Lowcountry in a cloud of exhaust. But the culture of poverty he had grown up with there would remain with him as if it had stowed away in the bag he had packed with his Sunday church clothes. It gave him his drive to excel in the ring and his love for song, yet it left him with the inability to embrace life beyond the horizon of today. Long-range planning yielded to the urgency of now, the only reality that he could be sure of in a world that promised no tomorrow. Even as his mother Dolly carried him in her womb, he had come chillingly close to expiring there when Arthur Smith shot into the car she and Rubin were in and narrowly missed killing her. Routinely, black lives in the Deep South were shortened by hunger, disease, and bigotry. While he would come into vast sums of unexpected money, his childhood in the Lowcountry became the lens through which he viewed his evolving circumstances.

  Even as he found himself in sophisticated circles in the years to come, befriended and indeed adored by all manner of celebrities worldwide, he remained that same country boy. “He was happy eating a can of beans,” said Richard Slone, who once trained under Joe and later became an artist. Though Joe had street smarts, he had come from a place where, instead of placing his few valuables under lock and key at a bank, his daddy buried them in the hog pen out back. By his own admission, Joe was “not good with numbers” and was uneasy dealing with the challenges that big money entailed. Cloverlay had helped him to a point, but when it dissolved and he was out on his own, he adopted a more or less haphazard approach to his finances, handing over control to whoever came along and won his trust. Whenever he was queried on the subject of his investments and such, he would say, “My job is to fight. I have other people who take care of the money.” Content to have a few thousand stuffed in his sock, money he used for gambling and to dole out as necessary, he was never one to sit down with a financial planner, go over his portfolio, and develop an investment strategy. Only one question concerned him: Is there enough on hand to pay the bills? Former business manager Burt Watson remembered that he and Marvis would hold a weekly meeting with Joe to go over what he owed. “Marvis would say, ‘Coach, we gotta get Pop, sit him down and catch him up with this love,” Watson said. “Joe liked to hear that there was two to three hundred thousand dollars in the account. When it got down to thirty or forty thousand, he would say, ‘That all we got? It’s time to go to work.’” To augment his pension dispersal, he did commercials, personal appearances, and whatever else he could do to cash in on his brand. When their meeting was over, Watson would remember that Joe would ask for a check for a thousand dollars, cash it at the bank, pocket six hundred dollars, and slip the other four hundred in his sock.

  Chaos engulfed Joe in the 1980s and ’90s. In 1983, eleven days after Holmes whipped Marvis in Las Vegas, the Internal Revenue Service had Frazier up on the witness stand in U.S. Tax Court in Philadelphia to explain $220,000 in deductible expenses on his plantation in South Carolina. While Frazier had been quoted in the press saying he had purchased the property as a place for his mother to live, his former attorney Bruce Wright claimed it was a working farm and used it as a tax shelter to help offset the approximately two million dollars in taxes Joe paid from 1971 to 1976. Although there was an earnest effort to develop it as a farm, the high level of clay in the soil and the fact that the land was 40 percent swamp impeded that effort. Nephew Rodney Frazier would say years later, “And it had alligators galore! I remember when we once dredged the pond, we opened up one of their dens and they came crawling out. You have never seen so many alligators. We had to hide the dogs.” Additionally, seventy-five head of beef cattle Joe purchased in 1974 died from intestinal parasites. Altogether, the plantation yielded only nine thousand dollars in gross receipts during the five-year period in question. The plantation would become just one of the tax issues that ensnared Joe, who sold the property for a loss in January 1988.

  With all but one of their children sixteen or older, Joe filed for divorce from Florence in May 1985. It was not unexpected, given how strained the relationship had been for years. Florence had told him, “You call yourself a Christian, all this running around you’re doing? You better get it together. God is watching you, Billy.” Though Joe had been a generous provider to her and their children, he had cultivated an existence apart from them that would begin in secrecy and end in painful disclosures. In the period from 1980 to 1984, he had three children outside of his marriage: sons Joseph Mahoney and Joseph Jordan Frazier (Joe Jr.)—with Joan Mahoney and Sharon Hatch, respectively—
and son Brandon Cottom, by Janice Cottom, a year before he asked for a divorce. Seven years later, in 1991, he had a final child—Derek Dennis Frazier, by Sheri Gibson—bringing his total offspring to eleven. The divorce proceedings between Joe and Florence would drag on for an extraordinary twelve years, which spoke to the complexity of the estate and the hard feelings that had emerged from what daughter Weatta called “years of pain and disrespect.”

  Unable to re-create himself in the ring, it seemed almost as if Joe had opted instead to do so through his heirs. In the same way Tudor sovereigns practiced procreation in deference to the royal lineage, he was only too pleased that he had sons. “Only sons could carry on his name,” said Weatta, who paused and added, “He was weird that way.” But he had come out of a world in which sons were prized as breadwinners by men and women who favored big families. Joe himself had grown up in a house with nine siblings—six of them boys—and that did not count the seventeen others whom he claimed in his autobiography that his father Rubin had sired. Had Joe not said years before that he was the son of his daddy? And that to change him, you would have to go back and change Rubin? Rodney said that in the eyes of his uncle, “having children determined what kind of a man you were.” He remembered a conversation he had with Joe at the gym one day.

  Oddly, it began with Joe calling out to him and asking: “Rod, are you gay?”

  “Why would you ask that?” Rodney replied.

  Joe eyed him and said, “Marvis has children. Mark has children. Hector has children. Why not you?”

  “Because of you and my father,” said Rodney.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” said Joe.

  “My father had nineteen children by twelve or thirteen different women,” said Rodney, who would later marry and have a daughter. “You had eleven kids by six different women. Every dime you get goes out the door to somebody.”

  Joe told him he was crazy.

  “Paying for all those children?” Rodney said. “And not being with them every day to help them through the struggles of life? You call that being a man? I consider that being a fool.”

  “You callin’ me a fool?” Joe snapped.

  “No, Uncle Billy,” he said. “Not a fool, just that you could have done things differently.”

  Weatta also chastised her father. Over his protestations, she told him in the 1990s: “Look, you have to stop having these babies and not marrying their mothers. You know what Renae and Hector have gone through? What kind of life they’ve had? Or Joseph Mahoney? Joe Jr.? Brandon? And now Derek?”

  Sailing down the highway behind the wheel of one of his cars, Joe would roar the lyrics of a Johnnie Taylor song he was fond of that had personal significance: “The downfall of too many men is the upkeep of too many women.” By the early 1990s, he had found himself steeped in the encumbrances of not just one woman but six, not just five children but eleven—and that did not include the attention he showered on Denise, who lingered in the background and adopted a strategy of letting him have his space with the hope that he would come around to her. While Joe endeavored to give more of himself to his children than just the envelopes he or his aides dropped to their mothers each month—he showed up when he was called upon for school plays, teacher meetings, and such—he found himself immersed in the unpredictable moods of women who not long before had found his charm so irresistible.

  “Celebrity, power, and money are aphrodisiacs to women,” said Sharon Hatch. “When you met Joe, you would think: I would love to be around him. Because he was so upbeat—he had that smile—and he would have you laughing.” That said, Hatch understood that he would never be a “one-woman man.”

  “More was coming at him than he could have ever imagined,” she said. “Look at it this way: You cannot take a child who gets one piece of candy a year, let him loose in a candy factory, and not expect him to eat all he can.”

  Even as “the love” slipped through his now gnarled hands, Joe did have a long-term investment into which Bruce Wright had guided him in 1973. With $843,000 from his boxing proceeds, Frazier purchased 140 acres in Bucks County that would later be developed into a housing development of 476 town houses called 100 Acre Woods. Frazier and Wright formed One Hundred Acres Ltd. According to Werner Fricker—whose Fricker Corp. purchased the acreage in 1978 and later developed it—Frazier had sold his interest in the land to A. M. Greenfield Trust, whereupon it passed into a series of other trusts. Under the terms of the sales agreement, Frazier was to be paid his share of the proceeds in installments over a twenty-year period. Until Wright died, at age sixty-nine, in April 1991, all went smoothly: Joe received his payments in an orderly fashion. But when Wright died, the 1991 payment never showed up. In an interview with Philadelphia Daily News reporter Leon Taylor, Jacquelyn Frazier-Lyde—an attorney who took up the case on behalf of her father and would later become a judge—said that “the chain of title was broken somewhere along the line as if, as far as that land was concerned, my father never existed.” Frazier-Lyde added that she believed that annual payments her father had been receiving were not part of the land deal but that Wright was “just paying him from the proceeds he earned when he was fighting.”

  Lawsuits were filed and refiled. In November 1998, Frazier-Lyde sent a letter to the homeowners at the Northampton Township development that read, in part: “Please be advised that the premises on which you reside are subject to a claim of ownership by our client, Joseph Frazier.” The letter claimed that Frazier “demands payment for this land” and stated that “all transfers of title, subsequent to his purchase of this land, are based on fraudulent transfers without consideration/payment to him for his land.” For someone who had been so beloved in the community, Joe suddenly found himself in the crosshairs of public scorn. Common Pleas Judge Edward G. Biester ruled in favor of the homeowners in 1999. Frazier would later say that his “fight” was not against the people but “against the corporate scamboogahs.” To stir up support, he was joined by activist Dick Gregory in a three-day march from his gym to Bucks County in September 2003. Former Fricker Corp. attorney Edward J. Hayes told Philadelphia Daily News reporter Ramona Smith that the claim of ownership by Frazier was “asinine,” stating that while Frazier and Wright did agree to sell the property for $1.8 million, a later deal between Wright and Greit Realty Trust Co. superseded that previous deal. Joe claimed he never signed off on that later deal and that his signature had to have been forged. A friend of both would say, “Even if it had been unintentional—and knowing Bruce I think that it was, that there was some slipup on his part in recording the mortgage—Joe got screwed.”

  Larry Holmes had joined Frazier on his quixotic march to Bucks County. He told reporters that Joe was a friend and that he would do whatever he could to help him. Though Holmes would say he was not clear on “the whole story,” he told me years later that he did know this: “If you give somebody control of your shit, you’ll lose your shit.”

  * * *

  Strapped behind the wheel of the Corvette that Joe had given him, Hector pressed hard on the gas as he barreled down the Atlantic City Expressway. In the passenger seat was Kevin Dublin, whom Hector had befriended when he spotted him in a street fight and told him, “You should stop by the gym sometime.” Weaving in and out of traffic, Hector came upon a Mercury that would not let him pass. When Hector sped up, the other car sped up. Hector gunned it and got around the car, only to have it zip ahead of him. Dublin would say that it became “a game of chicken” at 110 mph, with both cars speeding up, then falling back, until the other driver veered in and Hector slammed on the brake. The Corvette soared eight feet in the air, flipped over on its T-top, and slid down an embankment onto the grassy median. Incredibly, neither Hector nor Dublin was injured. Even more incredibly, they were still able to drive the car on to Atlantic City, where Rodney had a bout that evening against James Broad at Trump Casino Hotel.

  Joe looked at Hector and Dublin in disbelief when they walked into the dressing room. From head to t
oe, they were covered in grime. “What the fuck?” Joe said. “Where was you at? You come in looking like that?”

  Dublin said they had an accident.

  “What you do? Run into a pile of dirt?”

  Rodney turned to Dublin and asked, “What happened?”

  “Hector flipped the Corvette,” said Dublin. “Almost killed us.”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Rodney said. “You keep fucking with Hector, you’ll end up dead.”

  Even more than Marvis or any of his other sons, Joe saw himself in Hector. Before Joe found his way to Philadelphia and into boxing at the Twenty-Third PAL, he had been on the loose in New York. Hector stole cars and sold off the parts, just as Joe had. Rodney would remember how Hector had told him that when he was in New York, he used to steal the catalytic converters from cars and sell them to junkyards. He could earn upwards of five hundred dollars per night doing that. “One night he got caught in the act,” said Rodney. “The owner of the car came down, shoved a gun in his face, and told him to either tighten up every bolt he had loosened or he would blow his head off. He did it and the guy let him go.” Only eighteen when he joined his father in Philadelphia, Hector even then possessed what Rodney referred to as “a jailhouse mentality.” Rodney would say, “There is no other way to say it: Hector aspired to be a gangster.”

  Joe could not help but feel he had let Hector down. There had been an inequity between the advantages that had been afforded the five children he had with Florence and the two he had with Rosetta: the former had grown up in a big house with a swimming pool in a posh suburb of Philadelphia; the latter were raised in public housing in New York. Stitched into the robe Joe had worn for the Fight of the Century were the names of his children with Florence—and only their names. Renae and Hector looked upon them with some derision as “The Fabulous Five.” As the two went through school, it had been awkward for them when someone asked them who their father was. When they would reply “Joe Frazier,” no one believed them until they heard the backstory. They would say: Say again, your father is who? Joe Frazier, the heavyweight champion of the world? Then why are you so poor? Given the hard feelings Rosetta had toward him, Joe remained on the periphery of their lives until word got back to him of the trouble Hector was having. Marvis drove to New York and picked him up. “I think he had either gotten out of jail or was on his way to jail,” said Rodney. “Uncle Billy said he owed him a life that was better than the one he was living.”