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

by Jack Newfield

  King listened to the first Ali–Frazier fight, in March 1971, on radio in prison. He co-promoted the last of the Ali–Frazier trilogy, on October 1, 1975. This would not have been possible without Judge Corrigan’s ex parte kindness.

  Detectives DeLau and Tonne both believe the Judge was probably fixed. There is no question King did everything in his power to prevent a fair trial. DeLau told me in 1991, “We heard from good sources there was an exchange of funds; there was quite a transaction of money.”

  The key witness against King, Rosa Wrines, was terrorized into disappearing. Other witnesses vanished, were bought off, or changed their testimony. Two attempts were made to bribe Detective Tonne and get him to perjure himself by saying King was acting in self-defense. Judge Corrigan’s ruling came in this context of external manipulation by King’s friends, by lawyers, bondsmen, and thugs.

  Over the years King has given his version of Sam Garrett’s death in hundreds of interviews. In the retelling King makes himself the victim, not the executioner.

  This is what he told Playboy in 1988: “When I finally came up for trial, however, the judge reduced the charge against me to manslaughter.” “Why?” “Because it had been an accident—there wasn’t willful intent on my part. Witnesses to the fight had all seen that I’d been attacked without provocation. The primary reason, though, was when the guy attacked me, I had a .357 Magnum on the seat of my car and I didn’t use it—and I could have gotten to it. I was getting into my car when he hit me from the back, and the gun was lying right there. But I left it sitting there on the seat.”

  It is easy for King to get away with fictionalizing his own past. Garrett is dead. All the clips from the trial seem to be missing from the library of both the Plain Dealer and the defunct Cleveland Press. The prosecutor, Ralph Sperli, is dead. DeLau is retired and nobody outside of Cleveland knows who Tonne is. Even if conscientious journalists wanted to get the other side, there was no place to go.

  One evening late in the 1980s, Bob Tonne was watching television in his home in Brooklyn Heights, Ohio. He happened to switch to a channel that was showing King being interviewed by Sarah Purcell. And in his signature verbal style of rap opera filibuster King once again was giving his account of how Sam Garrett died. King was blaming the Cleveland police for framing him, for targeting him because he was the czar of the numbers racket. He was saying it was just a fight in the ghetto that happened to end in tragedy.

  Bob Tonne was enraged. He was watching history—and his own life—being falsified on national television. He still believed the death of Sam Garrett was “a vicious, cold-blooded killing.” He still vividly remembered the disparity in size, the gun in King’s hand, the last sadistic kick to Garrett’s head, and Garrett’s final words, “Don, I’ll pay you the money.”

  Bob Tonne was so disturbed that for the first time in his life he wrote a letter to a television program, to set the record straight. He never received an answer. Don King kept getting the last word.

  2. “Make me big”

  When Don King emerged from Ohio’s Marion Correctional Institution on September 30, 1971, three men befriended him and helped him begin his remarkable transformation from convict to millionaire celebrity.

  One was the roguish, likable boxing matchmaker and promoter Don Elbaum, who had a network of small club operations in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and an eye for true talent.

  The second was the legendary 1950s rock ‘n’ roll songwriter-performer Lloyd Price, who had known King since 1959, loved him unconditionally, and visited him on his first day out of prison.

  The third was the Fighter of the Age, Muhammad Ali, with a twinkle in his eye and a fondness for all living things. His generosity gave King the keys to the kingdom of pugilism.

  All three would play a critical role in launching King’s career in boxing, opening doors, giving him credibility, introducing him to others with their imprimaturs, taking the stigma off “ex-con.” And over the course of the next decade, King would gradually betray all three benefactors, one by one.

  King pulled off his first slick deal even before he got out of prison, when he knew he was coming up for parole in the spring of 1971.

  King managed to acquire a forty-acre farm in rural Ashtabula County, on Chub Road, for $1,000—a property with a market value of at least thirty times that in 1971.

  The land was purchased on March 26, 1971, from a Cleveland city councilman named Charles Carr, who was also a lawyer with ties to Cleveland’s numbers rackets. Carr had bought the same tract of land for $19,800 in 1967. So this sharp lawyer was taking an $18,800 loss to do this favor for a man still in prison for killing a constituent of Carr’s. But this favor set King’s family up for life.

  The deed to the land was placed in the name of John Carl Renwick, King’s fourteen-year-old stepson, later to become known as Carl King.

  On May 17, 1973, the Cleveland Press published a lengthy muckraking story about the transaction, describing the teenaged John Carl Renwick as a “mystery figure unknown to local neighbors and local businessmen.”

  The story, by reporter Tony Tucci, read:

  Councilman Carr declined to shed any light on the identity of the man to whom he sold the farm. “I was just the trustee for the property,” Carr said. “The man is my client. I can’t discuss it. I can’t be of any aid to you in this respect.” [Carr died in 1987.]

  John Carl Renwick’s father was John Caldwell Renwick, a figure in the numbers racket, who died in 1961. He was an associate of Don King’s and so was his wife, Henrietta, who lived at the farm and later married King.

  The forty-acre farm, obtained almost for free, would expand over the years into the 188-acre luxury compound that would become King’s trophy and sanctuary, with a $5 million thirty-room mansion, swimming pool, gym, cattle, and giant American flag.

  Putting this jailhouse insider-trading aside, there is no question that King used his four years in prison to his advantage. As he repeatedly says, “I didn’t serve time. I made time serve me. “

  King did read his way through the prison library, absorbing ideas from history’s heavyweight thinkers, including Frederick Douglass, Adam Smith, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Sartre, Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, Tolstoy, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Marx, and Hitler.

  In a 1988 Playboy interview, King recalled:

  On my first day in prison, a guy gave me a book, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and I lay there on my bed in a four-man cell, and I just went deep into this book. Reading about Rome gave me the appetite to read whatever I could get my hands on. I then got a job in the kitchen making coffee for all the different shifts, and when I finished, I’d sit in a little room in the kitchen and read, and when I got off, I’d go to the library. I tried to escape by reading other people’s ideas and putting my ideas with theirs, and developing a sense of discipline.

  Often when King quoted the great writers he read in prison he mangled their names, calling them “Kneeis-itch” (Nietzsche) and “Jean-Paul Shar-tay” and “Dis-aray-leee.” Boxing writers would laugh about his malaprop pronunciations, or his verbose misquotations from Shakespeare. But King fully grasped the concepts, and how to integrate them into his agenda.

  King used prison as a graduate school to supplement his diploma from the street. Prison helped him appreciate ideas and language. His values were not rehabilitated. But he came out of prison seeing a bigger horizon, with a richer imagination, with a more complex self-image.

  The day after King was paroled from prison, Lloyd Price flew to Cleveland and came to see King at the house in Ashtabula County. It was an intense, emotional reunion for two black men of the same generation who had already been friends for almost fifteen years.

  Price had been a smart businessman, one of the few creators of rock ‘n’ roll who owned the writing and performing royalty rights to his own material. He had discovered Little Richard, had a hit single at eighteen with “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” seen Elvis Presley and John Lennon reco
rd his songs.

  Price had also seen his music-business partner Harold Logan murdered, perhaps by the mob. He had been a rebel himself within the music industry, fighting racism and organized crime to do things his way, which meant independence and quality.

  Price also knew boxing at a sophisticated level. Growing up in New Orleans, he had listened to Joe Louis’s fights on the radio. He knew Sugar Ray Robinson. He had met Muhammad Ali when Cassius Clay was a seventeen-year-old kid in Louisville, waiting outside a club to meet his idol, Lloyd Price, and hear Price sing his favorite song, “Stagger Lee.”

  Ali lived in Lloyd’s Manhattan apartment when he was training for his first big fight, with Doug Jones at Madison Square Garden in 1963. And it was Price who took Ali to the hospital with neck pains after that difficult victory.

  Price totally trusted King, thinking he was immune to the larceny in his friend’s character. Price had ego and financial security, and his only motive was to help his friend get back on his feet.

  He had first met King in 1959, when his band played King’s tavern, and he returned every year, sometimes to play benefits, like when King had a fire, or when the black community was raising money for a charity or cause.

  King liked jazz, and in those days Price’s band included top jazzmen like trombonist Slide Hampton and trumpet player Kenny Dorham. When the band was really cooking, with a jazz and R&B fusion, King would leap up on the bandstand and conduct the music like he was Louis Armstrong, or Louie Jordan. King introduced Price to all the ghetto players, and Price can still name some of the numbers operators and Superfly pimps he hung with in King’s circle of after-midnight friends.

  The day after King got out of prison, he and Price had a long intimate conversation as they drove the sixty miles from the farmhouse to Cleveland. King was just forty, and the two men talked about what King might do with the rest of his life, with Price’s assistance. The two old friends speculated about possible careers in music promotion, film production, show business, and boxing.

  King knew how close Price and Muhammad Ali were because Price had already introduced King to Ali. The occasion had been the fifth birthday party for King’s daughter, Debby. Price was there at King’s house and he telephoned Ali, and put the champ on the phone to sing “Happy Birthday” to King’s child.

  So some of the conversation that day was about how King might use his contacts with Ali to break into boxing. Price remembers King saying, whenever they contemplated some joint venture, “Make me big, Lloyd.”

  At the close of the day, Don King, with his normal haircut and weighing a slim 180 pounds after his regime of prison food, hugged Lloyd Price, the big star and loyal friend.

  “We’re friends forever,” King said. “Nothing will ever come between us. I love ya, partner.”

  By June 1972, Don King had an idea. He had read in the papers that a hospital with black doctors, that served mostly black patients, was in danger of going into bankruptcy. He decided to promote a benefit boxing show with Muhammad Ali to save Forest City Hospital.

  King phoned Lloyd Price and asked him to convince Ali, who had lost to Joe Frazier the previous March, to box a few rounds for charity on a card King would promote. All the money would go toward saving the hospital from the bankers, creditors, and regulators.

  Price, the loyal, more famous friend, reached Ali and his manager, Herbert Muhammad, and pitched the idea, how it would be good for Cleveland, good for Ali, good for Don King, and good for poor, sick black people who needed decent care.

  Ali knew King, but at that point in his life, offers and deals were coming to Ali every day, and someone like Price was necessary to certify this one and get Ali and Herbert to focus on it in a concrete way.

  Once King got Ali on the phone, his unstoppable flow of words did the trick. Ali agreed to come to Cleveland and box ten exhibition rounds on August 28. The event would be the beginning of King’s second career—boxing promoter.

  Only King had never promoted a boxing match in his life. He didn’t know how to get a ring, a license, referees, fighters, insurance, gloves. He knew boxing only as a fan, only as an amateur who got knocked out in a kid’s tournament.

  To guide him through his maiden promotion, King called Don Elbaum, the most knowledgeable local character who combined managing, promoting, booking fighters, and discovering young prospects before anybody else. Elbaum looked like Harvey Keitel and told stories like Damon Runyon.

  Elbaum recalls that the first time he heard Don King’s commanding voice he was in a motel room in Buffalo on a Friday evening. He was negotiating a deal for a match when the phone rang. It was Clarance Rogers, a prominent Cleveland attorney.

  “I’m with a friend of mine named Don King,” Rogers said. “I would like to put him on the line with you, he’d like to speak to you.”

  The next thing Elbaum heard was an earsplitting roar: “DON ELBAUM!”

  He had to jerk the receiver away from his ear.

  “Let me tell you something,” the voice shouted. “There’s a black hospital that’s in a lot of trouble here, and you and I are going to be the heroes who save it.

  “You are boxing in Cleveland, and I want you now. You have got to put it together for me. I got Ali, but now I need you.”

  King went on like a runaway horse for five minutes, nonstop. Finally Elbaum interrupted him to say, “Nice to meet you. And yes, I’ll do whatever it is you’re asking.”

  “I’m here in Rogers’s office. How soon can you get here?” King asked.

  “I just arrived in Buffalo a half hour ago,” Elbaum explained. “I’m here closing a deal for a show.”

  King: “No! no! no! no! no! We gotta get with you tonight.”

  Elbaum: “I just can’t do that. I have meetings here. I’ll see you in Cleveland on Monday.”

  King: “No way. I will wait here in Clarance’s office tonight until you get here. We got no time. By the way, what do you charge?”

  Elbaum: “Five thousand, plus expenses.”

  King: “You got it. Now start driving. I need your expertise immediately.”

  So Elbaum checked out of the motel and drove three hours to Cleveland, arriving just before midnight to meet King for the first time and begin the Lord’s work of rescuing what King kept calling “a black hospital.”

  “I was simply mesmerized,” Elbaum now says of his first experience with King. “I thought he was the greatest promoter I ever saw. He just overwhelms you. He could talk you into anything. I believed in the guy immediately. I felt I could trust him and he would never screw me.”

  And Elbaum was no virgin in the boxing jungle. He had promoted club fights in Erie, Scranton, Akron, Cleveland, and other blue-collar towns. He had boxed a little himself as a pro. Boxing writers lived off his supply of anecdotes. He had promoted Sugar Ray Robinson’s last fight. A few months earlier somebody blew up his car with a bomb. He had seen just about everything in the unregulated realm of the ring.

  Elbaum remembers the first night they met, when King told him how he had graduated from Ohio State with a 3.9 grade average. When Elbaum found out a little later how far that was from the truth, he was just amused by the audacity.*

  King and Elbaum set up shop in two adjacent suites in the downtown Sheraton hotel, opposite the old Cleveland Arena. From the start Elbaum saw evidence that King was still involved in the numbers game—envelopes, suitcases, guys with guns—but it didn’t matter to him, and nothing explicit was said.

  After a few days of watching King con reporters, preachers, politicians, and businessmen, Elbaum was telling him: “Don, you can take over all of boxing! You’ve got the personality! Do you realize all the black fighters are going to come running to you? Boxing needs a black promoter like you. We’ve got to go to New York right after this charity show.”

  While trying to sell blocks of tickets to the Forest City benefit, Elbaum watched King put on one of his vintage Reverend Ike style performances of evangelical huckstering.

  A churchgoing
elderly black couple of great dignity came to the suite at the Sheraton, and King was trying to sell their church a bunch of tickets out of civic duty and racial solidarity. Both Elbaum and boxing trainer Joey Fariello were in the suite, and both remember King’s oration in call-and-response preacher cadences.

  * King has told many different stories about his education, including a version that he attended Kent State University. But his official record from John Adams High School indicates he was a problem student his senior year. An entry dated March 31, 1949, says: “Donald King’s mother came. Don will be 18 next year and will not be accepted back September because of truancy, tardiness and general bad behavior.” King’s school record shows that he did get an 85 in economics and a 75 in speech, but he flunked gym and band while in Audubon Junior High School.

  “We’re blacks and we have nothing,” King began, pacing and gesturing. “We don’t have expensive suits, or big houses, or luxury vacations. We’re poor. All we got is the word. Our only invention that belongs to us is a word. And that word is motherfucker!

  “Nobody can take that away from us. That’s our word. That’s a black word. We should be proud of that word. It’s our heritage.”

  Elbaum thought he was seeing embarrassment in the body language of the elderly couple. But he didn’t know how to stop the bizarre sermon.

  “Every black man and black woman,” King continues, “should walk down Euclid Avenue with their head held high saying the word motherfucker. Because that’s ours. They can’t take it away from us. The whites can’t steal that word from us. It’s a beautiful word because it is owned by us black folk. We should be standing on the top of buildings, shouting our word—motherfucker!”