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

by Jack Newfield

  The only boxing person who would go to jail as a direct result of the probe would be King’s assistant, Constance Harper, who was convicted by the same jury that acquitted King of tax evasion. The investigation did develop information that led to the conviction of the mobster Michael Franzese, and it did accumulate a lot of evidence of King’s associations with organized crime. It also turned the Reverend Al Sharpton into an FBI informer for a while. But on the humid summer day it started, Jose Torres was making the introductions to his old manager, vouching for the dedication of the two agents to the demanding and somewhat paranoid D’Amato.

  As history would have it, July 1980 was also the first month that D’Amato began working with a fourteen-year-old kid named Mike Tyson, although the agents did not glimpse the prodigy on this visit.

  D’Amato, then seventy-two, suggested James Cagney in his looks and intensity. He sat at a picnic table in his yard and gave the agents a three-hour lecture on the history of larceny in the cruelest game. They barely had a chance to ask any questions. D’Amato just kept rolling along. He seemed like he had been waiting for these two visitors for forty years.

  D’Amato had been active in boxing since the 1930s and he was like a professor of history. He described how the gangster Owney Madden controlled Primo Carnera when he was heavyweight champion, and how the novel The Harder They Fall is based on Carnera.

  He described how the feared killer Frankie Carbo ruled boxing in the 1950s, controlling virtually every welterweight and lightweight champion, and most of the top contenders.

  He stressed the commercial side of boxing, calling multifight option contracts “legalized extortion.” He lectured on the hidden ownership of fighters, the manipulation of rankings, and the sport’s own lack of regulation.

  If anything, D’Amato seemed more hostile to Arum than to King. When Spinelli asked him which one was worse, D’Amato replied, “How could God have made the same mistake twice?”

  At the end of the country seminar, Pritchard asked who else they should go see at the start of their education. D’Amato suggested Flash Gordon, and provided the address of his phoneless apartment in Queens. He also recommended Alex Wallau at ABC.

  Nothing D’Amato said came close to usable legal evidence. But the day had been well spent as an orientation and history lesson.

  On the drive back to Manhattan, Spinelli, who had the streak of the social worker beneath his law enforcement mask, felt he was embarking on a socially redeeming adventure, not merely another routine FBI investigation.

  Joe Spinelli had been a boxing junkie ever since his grandfather took him by subway, when he was just six years old, to see Rocky Marciano fight Archie Moore at Yankee Stadium in 1955. That brisk September night, with its roaring crowd, electric atmosphere, and bright lights, became one of those childhood memories that remain vivid forever.

  His grandfather had come from the same small town in Italy as Marciano’s family, and the grandfather had a reverential feeling about Marciano that he was able to communicate to his young grandson.

  Also, Spinelli’s father had been a successful amateur boxer, fighting in “smokers” across the Bronx for a few dollars. His father had given Spinelli a populist view of boxing, from the perspective of the fighter as working stiff, who took the blows but usually ended up with less money than the promoters who counted the house.

  So from the outset Spinelli felt his job was to clean up boxing for the protection of the fighters. He brought an uncommon passion for systemic reform to his mission, not merely a relentless lock-up-thebad-guys cop mentality. Although Spinelli had this, too.

  After a few months, the FBI investigation began to focus on King, mostly because he was the dominant promoter in boxing and the ABC tournament had left behind a paper trail and some bitter, talkative boxing folk.

  Also, on September 10, 1980, the Cleveland office of the FBI sent Spinelli an airtel memo citing some of King’s long-term relationships with Ohio mobsters. The airtel said:

  Organized crime figures in Cleveland who King would most likely remain in contact with are black numbers operators Virgil Ogletree and Richard Drake. Source information from July of 1978 indicates that King returned to Cleveland at that time to bring back into line several subordinate numbers operators in the Cleveland area…. In the early 1970s King kicked back part of his numbers profits to Alex Birns, aka Shondor (killed in the bombing of his vehicle in 1975) and LCN member Anthony Panzarella.

  Panzarella was a career hoodlum, first jailed for robbery in 1929, who dabbled in numbers, gambling, and Teamster Union rackets and pled guilty to tax evasion in 1968, a case based on his unreported income from the numbers. He provided King with protection in exchange for his kickbacks, and when he died of natural causes in 1989, some old-time Cleveland mobsters were offended that King did not attend the funeral and pay his respects.

  Joe Spinelli investigated boxing—and King—for four years as an FBI agent.

  Spinelli’s first breakthrough came on January 21, 1981, when Richie Giachetti turned over five tape recordings he had secretly made on his own initiative of his telephone conversations with King, and one with Larry Holmes. Giachetti had made the tapes to have a weapon to use against King in case the two old friends became enemies. Giachetti was starting to feel that King was cheating him out of money and he wanted some leverage with King. The tapes Giachetti made were dated November 18, 1978, December 12, 1978, two on January 14, 1979, and June 1, 1980. One was undated.

  Giachetti had first told Spinelli about them six months earlier, claiming they contained proof of crimes. He asked Spinelli to serve a subpoena on him for the tapes, so he could say he had no choice in turning them over. Giachetti, who was experienced in dealing with law enforcement, said he wanted immunity for himself before he testified before any grand jury.

  In these preliminary conversations Giachetti also told Spinelli and Assistant U.S. Attorney Dominic Amorosa that he had copies of “double contracts” signed by Larry Holmes that would prove how King was taking 25 percent of Holmes’s earnings as an illegal undercover manager.

  Giachetti kept promising Spinelli and Amorosa he would provide the tapes as soon as he was paid from Holmes’s fight with Ali in October 1980. Giachetti was expecting $500,000 under his contract that gave him 12 1/2 percent of Holmes’s purses, but King paid him only $350,000, keeping the rest for himself. This accounting eased Giachetti’s guilt about becoming a “rat” and breaking the code of silence he had lived by ever since he was a runner in King’s numbers empire in the 1960s.

  But when Spinelli finally heard the tapes he had negotiated over for six months, he was a little disappointed. They contained no direct proof of any indictable offense. But there was a colloquial admission by King of his ties to the mob.

  On one of the tapes King recounted a sit-down with a mobster sent by a rival promoter. King told Giachetti: “They put the mob on me! What he [the rival promoter] had hoped was that I would start mouthing off and yelling at this guy, but I was too smart. I knew if I did that, I would end up in the fucking lake. So I told this guy who I was with, and he said, ‘Oh, OK, I understand.’”

  On June 3, 1981, Spinelli got the convicted California bank swindler and Don King wannabe Harold Smith to do some undercover work for him, in hopes of getting a lighter sentence for his Wells Fargo Bank embezzlement. He arranged for Smith to call Giachetti and consensually record the conversation.

  “What’s happening, Richie?” Smith began.

  “That fucking King,” said Giachetti, “he sent a hit man to Las Vegas to tell me to lay off him…. You know that I got tapes of King that I made.”

  Later in this same call Giachetti claimed that King “pays off” Jose Sulaiman and journalists.

  Smith’s taped conversation seemed to confirm information Spinelli had received three weeks earlier, from two separate FBI informants, that King was, in fact, trying to arrange for Giachetti’s murder.

  On May 15 an FBI informant told Spinelli that he had found o
ut from King that King was planning to go to Philadelphia four days later to meet with Frankie “Flowers” D’Alfonso “to discuss the killing of Giachetti.” D’Alfonso was one of King’s mob friends, and King had steered him the lucrative closed-circuit rights to the Holmes–Ali match for Philly and Atlantic City, and would later get him the rights to the Holmes–Cooney fight. D’Alfonso himself would be executed in a mob hit in 1985.

  A second FBI informant, based in Baltimore, told Spinelli that King’s meeting had to be canceled at the last minute because D’Alfonso suspected he was under surveillance at the time (which was true), and he didn’t want to be seen with King.

  King found out about Giachetti taping him from Holmes, who heard the tapes when they were played for him during a grand jury appearance in the Southern District. Holmes and King fired Giachetti the next day.

  Giachetti is a genuinely tough man who boasts he never lost a street fight. But he was in fear for his life after the hit man visited him in Vegas on May 27, 1981, and told him King had put out a contract on him.

  Giachetti was so scared that he told the whole story to Mike Marley, who splashed it all over the back page of the New York Post on August 8, 1981. “I am fearful for my life,” Giachetti confessed to the Post’s boxing writer. “I’m scared to go to the bars I used to, my old hangouts…. I think they would try to make it look like a mugging. A bombing, an outright killing would be too obvious.”

  Marley quoted Giachetti as saying, “The mob guys have come to see me…. My family is very scared and my two kids are upset. I make sure I don’t go out alone. I sneak in and out of Vegas and New York now.”

  The Post’s story continued: “Giachetti said he was paid a visit by a New York man who is deeply involved in organized crime. ‘This guy said King told him I put a contract out on King,’ Giachetti recalled. King tried a reverse tactic.”*

  Somebody a lot tougher than even Giachetti was also afraid of King—Larry Holmes, the heavyweight champion.

  Early in 1981 Spinelli went to Holmes’s house in Easton to give him a grand jury subpoena and try to talk him into cooperating with the investigation. Spinelli used his empathy with fighters and knowledge of the sport to make human contact, and soon Holmes was relaxed, and they sat around the pool talking boxing for an hour. Spinelli told him how impressive he was in that fifteenth round with Norton.

  * Giachetti eventually reconciled with King, who assigned him to train Mike Tyson in 1991. Marley quit the Post, where he wrote favorably about King, and went to work for King in 1992.

  Holmes started out in a jovial mood, at one point calling his lawyer, Charles Spaziani, and laughing, “I got the FBI here and they have subpoenaed my ass. And they have a subpoena for you, too, so you better go hide.”

  The mood of the conversation turned when Spinelli got to his message.

  “You know there are plenty of deserving fighters who never got to own a nice house like this because they got ripped off by promoters,” Spinelli told Holmes. “You know the fighters, and you know the promoters, and you know exactly how they do it. That’s why we want you to testify. We’re hoping, Larry, that you would appear before the grand jury as a friendly witness, someone who really knows the story and come forward willingly.”

  “Look, Mr. Spinelli,” Holmes responded, “I’m just a fighter trying to turn a couple of bucks in the few years I have.”

  “No, you’re not, Larry. You’re more than that. You’re the heavyweight champion of the world. And that gives you a certain credibility and responsibility that goes along with it.”

  After quoting that report by Spinelli in his unpublished manuscript, Holmes wrote: “I knew he was right, and I really did want the sport cleaned up. But I didn’t volunteer a thing…. Joe Spinelli began to come across to me as a pretty decent guy. Spinelli made it a point not to single out Don King when he talked about going after promoters.”

  Those were Holmes’s thoughts in reflected tranquillity. But what he said to Spinelli that day in his house was something very different: “King’s got a lot of bad friends. I’ve got to make a living. I have a family. I’m scared for my family. I’ve got to be careful. He can hurt me.”

  Spinelli remembers, “Larry looked as frightened as any man I’ve ever seen.”

  The lions were still afraid of the rats.

  Another exceptional fighter who broke Spinelli’s heart was Saoul Mamby, who was gifted, intelligent, screwed by King, but wouldn’t testify.

  Mamby was the best fighter nobody ever heard of in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Bronx-born black Jew became a vagabond because no one was willing to fight him during the seasons of his prime. He displayed his subtle skills in Curaçao, Quebec, Venezuela, Kingston, and Santo Domingo. Even when he was champion he never got a chance to perform before his hometown fans in New York.

  Mamby boxed the way Sarah Vaughan wove a melody, the way Tony Gwynn hit a curve ball. He was a smooth, economical craftsman. He didn’t have a big punch, but he was harder to hit than the number.

  A cooperating witness had taped a conversation in which Mamby described how King skimmed his purses and had forced him to retain his stepson Carl as his manager. He told the story of how, when he finally won a world title at age thirty-three, in Seoul, South Korea, Carl King didn’t even go with him, but took part of his earnings when he got home.

  In an interview with Spinelli that was not under oath, Mamby told him that Don King took 20 percent of all his earnings. But on July 20, 1981, when he was under oath before the grand jury, Mamby denied what he told Spinelli and what he had said on tape. He would say nothing derogatory about King.

  The next day the cooperating witness taped Mamby admitting he had not told the grand jury the truth. Spinelli probably could have gotten a perjury indictment of Mamby, but he didn’t even try.

  “I saw Mamby and Holmes more as victims than targets,” Spinelli said years later.

  In December 1992, I interviewed Mamby. He was then almost forty-five years old, broke, in debt to the IRS, and still fighting. Very few boxing lives have happy endings.

  “I defended my title five times with Don King as the promoter, and every time I was paid less money than the signed contract guaranteed me,” Mamby said.

  “In three of my defenses I found out after the fight Don or Carl also managed my opponent. I defended my title against a tough guy, Esteban De Jesus, in Minnesota. Afterward I found out his manager was Connie Harper, Don’s secretary.

  “I defended my title in Indonesia against Thomas Americo. My purse was supposed to be $350,000, but Don took $50,000 off the top for expenses. Don promised me I was getting paid $250,000, but after I won the fight I got a check for $135,000.

  “Then I went to Nigeria to fight Obisia Nwankpa, who I later was told was managed by Carl. I was supposed to get paid $300,000, but I actually got paid less than half of what I was entitled to. Don double-billed me for travel expenses. He billed me for the plane tickets and hotel rooms for his employees. After all those deductions, I got a check for $118,000.

  “After that I left Don and signed to fight Aaron Pryor for Harold Smith. Smith did give me a generous signing bonus, and this fight was supposed to finally be my big payday. But the fight never came off. Pryor got shot by his girlfriend and then Smith got indicted for the bank fraud.

  “I still like Harold. At least he just robbed banks, not fighters.

  “So then I had to crawl back to Don, and he matched me with Leroy Haley in Vegas, and I lost my title in a split decision. Right after they announced the judges’ scoring, right in the ring, I saw Carl King hug Haley. That’s when I realized he was Haley’s manager, too.

  “But Carl and I are still friends. I don’t blame him for anything that happened. He just did what his daddy told him. I don’t think he ever kept any of my money. I think he gave it all to his daddy.”

  When I asked Mamby why he hadn’t told the grand jury the truth back in 1981, he said, “I couldn’t do it. I was still fighting. I needed to keep work
ing. So I didn’t tell the grand jury anything. Afterward, Don asked me what questions they asked me, and I told him.”

  In the fall of 1982, Spinelli began getting FBI informant and surveillance reports of King having dinners in public places with some of the leading gangsters of New York.

  On September 14, King dined with John Gotti, then a fast-rising capo in the Gambino family, with interests in boxing. The dinner took place in Patrissy’s Restaurant in Little Italy.

  On September 29, King had dinner at Abe’s Steakhouse with Genovese capo Matty “The Horse” Ianiello “and two other members of Ianiello’s crew.”

  On December 6 King dined with both Gotti and Ianiello at Abe’s Steakhouse. An informant’s report on this meeting said, “Gotti and fight promoter Don King were engaged in a heated discussion and it appears to the source that King was in serious trouble with Gotti.”

  Gotti later told a friend that he had slapped King during this meeting because King “was not paying his debts to us on time.”

  The informant’s report added: “Source advised that Ianiello was heard to say that ‘that guy’s got to be taught a lesson and John will take care of it.’”

  On November 8, 1991, King was quoted in an Associated Press wire service story assaying, “Categorically, I never met John Gotti.”

  But on July 8, 1992, King walked into Room 192 in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington to be questioned in an executive session by a Senate subcommittee looking into boxing. Dan Rinzel, chief counsel to the committee’s Republican minority, asked King under oath if he had ever met John Gotti. King replied, “I respectfully decline to answer the question on the basis of the protection offered under the Constitution.”

  Rinzel then read King his categorical denial to the AP reporter while not under oath.

  “Where are you telling the truth?” Rinzel asked.

  King invoked the Fifth Amendment again.