And he took it five more times in response to questions about meetings with other major mobsters, including Gambino family godfather Paul Castellano, whom, the committee had been told by capo Michael Franzese, King had met with.
King also took the Fifth about his meeting with Franzese, and that meeting was recorded by the FBI.
All these meetings with ranking gangsters were titillating and vaguely sinister, but they were not against the law. They whetted Spinelli’s appetite, but did not help him make a case.
It should be repeated here that Don King did not invent the link between organized crime and boxing. Indeed, King has always denied that any such link exists, at least as far as he is concerned. However, the alliance between boxing and the mob flourished before King was born.
In the 1930s, the mob owned heavyweight champion Primo Carnera. In the 1950s, Sonny Liston was co-owned by Frankie Carbo, who was convicted for one killing and acquitted of three others, and by St. Louis mob boss John Vitale.
Mob Godfather John Gotti (seen in 1972 mug shot) met with King in 1982. King swore to reporters that he’d never met Gotti. But when the U.S. Senate asked King under oath if he’d met Gotti, King took the Fifth Amendment.
Carbo, and his accomplice Blinky Palermo, dominated boxing during the 1950s by using millionaire businessman James Norris as their front man. Norris had a television monopoly and was a willing dupe for the gangsters. This cartel controlled many champions, including Johnny Bratton, Johnny Saxton, Virgil Akins, and Jimmy Carter.
They sometimes fixed fights—including the LaMotta–Billy Fox bout in 1947—to stage betting coups. Sometimes they bribed the judges when the fighters wouldn’t accommodate them.
Carbo had to act as an undercover manager because of his manslaughter conviction, but Palermo was the licensed manager of Saxton and the great 135-pound champion Ike Williams.
In 1960 Williams testified before Estes Kefauver’s Senate committee and explained that he received no money at all from Palermo for two title defenses, against Beau Jack and Jesse Flores, but that he still had to pay taxes on the $65,000 of unpaid purses. Williams also testified that Palermo offered him bribe money to throw his fights with Kid Gavilan, Jimmy Carter, and Freddie Dawson.
In his old age, Williams was virtually penniless. When he died in Los Angeles in September 1994, he was living on Social Security payments of $600 a month.
Jimmy Carter, the talented, mob-controlled fighter who beat Williams for the lightweight title, passed away the same week that Williams did. Carter died in his hometown of Aiken, South Carolina, and his family was so destitute that charity was needed to pay for his funeral expenses.
Carbo and Palermo were both eventually convicted in the same case for trying to extort control over welterweight champion Don Jordan through threats of violence against his legitimate manager.
In terms of pure gangsterism and Mafia monopoly, the Carbo– Norris era was much worse than anything to come under Don King.
In mid-1981 the prosecutor Spinelli was working with, Dominic Amorosa, left the government to go into private practice. His replacement, Roanne Mann, and the U.S. attorney, John Martin, decided together to withdraw Amorosa’s offer of immunity to Richie Giachetti. This decision meant Giachetti’s six homemade tapes were no longer of any value to the investigation, and Giachetti took the Fifth before the grand jury. Spinelli bitterly opposed this judgment, but he was overruled.
Then Holmes and Mamby also balked before the grand jury. Spinelli started getting threatening calls at work. A workaholic, Spinelli began to drive himself even more, traveling and working twelve-hour days. He became so stressed out and overworked that he developed a case of Bell’s palsy, which paralyzed one side of his face. He had to spend two weeks in bed.
While recuperating in bed, Spinelli got an idea. He realized the only way to really make a case against someone as smart, as intimidating, as insulated as Don King was through a costly undercover operation—a sting.
Spinelli had gone undercover himself a few times, and he had been probing Congressman John Murphy on the fringes of ABSCAM—the massive sting that captured on videotape seven members of the Congress taking bribes. Actually going into the marketplace of boxing would he the only way to secure proof beyond a reasonable doubt against King, he reasoned.
Through a series of memos and meetings, Spinelli convinced the FBI to allocate a substantial sum of money to fund an elaborate sting operation that was much broader than just targeting King. A Group I undercover operation was approved on March 23, 1982, and became fully operational by October.
A phony company called TKO Promotions was set up in an office near Madison Square Garden. A luxury apartment was rented near Lincoln Center. A Rolls-Royce was leased.
And one of the best undercover agents in the country, Victor Quintana, was recruited out of the Los Angeles office. Quintana was Dominican, bilingual, a black belt in karate, a graduate of the FBI’s acting school. He had been an agent for fifteen years and before that, a police officer for seven years in Compton, California.
A scenario was created: Victor was an ex-South American drug trafficker looking to launder and legitimize $3 million of drug money through doing some boxing co-promotions. The plan was to try to get a license in New jersey, sign up some fighters, and eventually promote some fights with the license.
Spinelli dreamed about managing a world champion and taking down a network or casino executive, someone in the corporate world who let all the boxing corruption go on because it was “just boxing.”
Don King, meanwhile, was thinking his usual five moves ahead. He knew Spinelli was his adversary, so he decided he would try to get to know Spinelli, perhaps charm him a little.
On December 5, 1981, King was in Freeport, in the Bahamas, trying to get an injunction to prevent the Ali–Trevor Berbick fight. King was saying he had a valid contract with Berbick and he wanted $100,000 from the promoter, James Cornelius, if the fight was going on as planned. King wanted his promotional rights for Berbick to be paid for.
That night Cornelius and four large men, all Muslims, came into King’s room at the Bahamas Princess Hotel and administered a professional beating to King. They broke his nose and knocked out some teeth. As soon as he got back to New York, King called up Joe Spinelli and announced he wanted to file a complaint with Spinelli himself about the assault.
As case agent on the boxing probe, Spinelli, along with agent Jim Kossler, went to King’s office on East Sixty-ninth Street and conducted a formal interview, with King as crime victim, not suspect. They could see King’s still-swollen eye, stitches in his mouth, a large welt on his temple.
King soon had Spinelli laughing out loud. He put on a performance. King began by looking at his adversary and saying: “This is like Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables! I wake up every morning, I look at the ceiling and I know Joe Spinelli is listening! I walk down the street and look over my shoulder, and I know Joe Spinelli is following! I know the motherfucker knows more about me than me!”
As he said that, King stood up and pointed his finger at the FBI agent, who couldn’t hold back a smile at the funky flattery.
“Four of them was beating me up,” King explained. “But as they were working me over, I got two of them, named Omar and Luke, on the side. I slipped them two hundred dollars each and asked them to take it easy on me, not to kick me so hard. Right away Omar told Cornelius, ‘I think we done enough,’ and I knew my money was working for me already.”
King described how right after the beating stopped, Cornelius ordered him to leave the island immediately or he would be killed. A bloody King went directly to the airport and flew to Ft. Lauderdale. There his fighter Michael Dokes drove him to the emergency room at the Broward County Medical Center.
After completing the narrative of his complaint, King attempted to charm his foe.
“I ain’t such a bad guy, Joe,” King said. “There’s worse in boxing than me. I just play by the rules that exist. I’m just a twenty-fourh
our-a-day guy. Nobody can outwork me. That’s why I’m on top. Nobody can outwork me and I play by the rules. The problem is, you don’t like the rules.”
Spinelli admitted to himself that King was making a fair point, that the rules had to be changed, that Cus D’Amato was exactly accurate when he called option contracts “legalized extortion,” that King himself was more the symptom than the disease.
King then got Spinelli laughing when he declared, “At least when you’re dealing with the gumbahs [Italians] you know where you stand. These Muslim guys are irrational, my little Italian brother.”
A second way King was thinking ahead was that he began a public campaign to get an official pardon in Ohio for his first-degree manslaughter conviction. This way, if he were to be convicted in the current investigation, he would not have a predicate felony on his record to assure him a severe sentence. A pardon would also help him get licenses in Atlantic City and Las Vegas and make him appear less unsavory in corporate boardrooms. A pardon would also be a display of his political power to fighters and other witnesses who might be wavering on whether to testify against him.
Clarance Rogers was the attorney handling King’s petition for a pardon, and Rogers was law partners with the powerful George Forbes, president of the Cleveland City Council. And Forbes was close to Governor James Rhodes, even though Rhodes was a Republican and Forbes a Democrat.
Among those whom King got to write letters on his behalf to Governor Rhodes were Cleveland’s Republican mayor, George Voinovich; Indians’ president Gabe Paul; Browns’ owner Art Modell; Coretta Scott King; the Reverend Jesse Jackson; and even Cleveland police officer William Hanton.
But retired police detective Carl DeLau, who supervised King’s arrest, wrote to the parole board urging that no pardon be granted.
Lame-duck Ohio Governor James Rhodes, who had received several campaign donations from King and had given King his direct-line phone number, granted King his pardon during his last week in office, on January 4, 1983. The pardon restored all of King’s citizenship rights and prevented his conviction from being held against him in any future legal proceeding.
The next day an exuberant King staged a combination “pardon party” and press conference, with big trays of shrimps and ribs for the press and his friends. King called Governor Rhodes “a great American who cares,” proclaimed, “Only in America,” and observed, “No one in the history of sports has accomplished what I have.”
King had also shrewdly hedged his bets. The previous September he had made a $10,000 contribution to the incoming Democratic governor, Richard Celeste—just in case Rhodes did not come through. King personally handed Celeste the check, according to the Plain Dealer.
The only negative word to be found in the Cleveland papers about the pardon came from Sam Garrett’s two stepchildren, who had known their father only for a few years.
“I don’t see how those people could have backed him. What if it was someone in their family who was killed?” said Lauree Howell, who was twelve when her stepfather was stomped to death by King. She said King had never apologized to the family.
Ellen Harper, Garrett’s other stepdaughter, was interviewed holding the flag that had been draped over Sam Garrett’s casket. She said the pardon made it feel like her stepfather had never lived.
“It hurts because it’s not fair,” she said. “Sam cared about us.”
Shortly after the pardon, Don King hired the son of Governor Rhodes as a “consultant.”
By November 1982, the sting operation—code-named Crown Royal—was progressing to the point where Quintana, dressed in his gold chains and designer jeans, was hanging out with Columbo family capo Michael Franzese. They had first met at a fight in Atlantic City, and although the yuppie-ish Franzese was more interested in movies, gasoline, and offshore money, he also had an 8 percent piece of middleweight Davey Moore. Quintana wanted a meeting with King.
In one conversation taped by Quintana’s hidden wire, Franzese explained: “Don King is not with my family. He’s with some cousins. I’ve got to call the cousins to get their approval before I can introduce you.”
This was standard mob protocol. And since Franzese was a mob prince, the son of the legendary street capo John “Sonny” Franzese, he was acutely aware of all the underworld etiquette.
To prove his bona fides, Quintana had Franzese call a bank in Illinois where the FBI had set up a paper account. Franzese was told Quintana held $15 million in his account. That’s when Franzese called Corky Vastola.
On November 3, 1982, Quintana and Franzese were invited to the back room of Gargiulio’s Restaurant in Coney Island, to meet with Vastola and Jimmy Rotundo, two heavy New Jersey mobsters in the DeCavalcante crime family.
Vastola asked Quintana, “How much money you got? You got to do business with Don King, you gotta have the money. You don’t want to see the man, and the man is out of your league.”
“Three million dollars. Cash. Right now,” Quintana said.
A few days later Vastola told Franzese the Cleveland family approved his meeting with King.
A few days after that, as Quintana gently pushed Franzese to arrange the meeting with King, Franzese started to warn the undercover fed about the feds.
“We have to be very careful with King,” Franzese said. “A lot of people in Cleveland are telling me that the heat he’s under from the feds is enormous. Don’t get too close to him, Victor. You should keep that in mind in dealing with King. You don’t want to get jammed up with the feds.”
As Spinelli waited for the face-to-face meeting with King to be set up, he thought about all of King’s Mafia affiliations. In Cleveland, in New Jersey, in Philadelphia, with each of the five families in New York City. And he formed a working hypothesis—one of the reasons King skimmed fighters’ earnings so ruthlessly was that he had to kick back a portion of his own profits to organized crime—the mob had become his hidden partner. That seemed to be the significance of his confrontational meeting with John Gotti.
On January 12, 1983, Michael Franzese and the Reverend Al Sharpton finally got a wired Quintana in to see King for a short meeting. King agreed to do a co-promotion with Quintana and the FBI’s undercover company.
Before King sat down with Quintana and Sharpton, he first held a private pre-meeting with Franzese. In this meeting Franzese told King that his family was “very interested” in seeing this deal go forward, and that if it proceeded successfully, Franzese himself would invest a substantial amount of cash in the promotions. King assured Franzese he should not be concerned about losing any money on any “family situation.”
Franzese also assured King that he had checked through Vastola, and “the Cleveland family” had sanctioned this deal going forward.*
After this was all clarified, only then did King invite the others in for the larger meeting. King told Quintana, “You must be serious about doing a co-promotion, or you wouldn’t be coming here with Michael.”
Spinelli now had a promise of co-promotion, and the proof on tape that King would knowingly do business with a well-known mobster like Franzese. But his excitement would be short-lived. Right after this meeting, the FBI chiefs in Washington decided they could not approve the bureau’s undercover participation in promoting a real professional boxing match.
In November 1982, Duk Koo Kim of South Korea had died as a result of brain injuries he suffered in a nationally televised fight with Ray Mancini. Spinelli’s supervisor informed him, “The bureau can’t do it. They’re worried about the liability. What would happen if some fighter got killed and it came out later that the FBI was behind the promotion?”
Don King was lucky again.
“I was really disheartened by that decision,” Spinelli says now, “but the Bureau was right in making their decision…. We were right where we wanted to be, doing a co-promotion with King. We were at the top of the mountain. And when we got that decision from Washington we were suddenly kicked down to the bottom of the mountain. I tried to argue we
could get around the liability problem with insurance and other precautions, but the risks were just too big.”
The covert phase of Crown Royal had reached a dead end. There would be no ABSCAM-like partnership with Don King. The FBI would never get its chance to be on the inside with hidden cameras, as fighters were paid, bank accounts opened, Jose Sulaiman talked to, blank contracts filled in, the judges chosen, the rankings determined. Spinelli would never find out why King was so close to so many capos and dons.
A few months later Quintana taped a conversation with Danny Pagano, a soldier in the Genovese family. When Quintana mentioned that he had gotten a meeting through Michael Franzese of the Columbo family, Pagano asked incredulously, “What did you go to Michael for? King’s with us.”
* Michael Franzese’s account of the pre-meeting with King is based on his August 12, 1992, testimony before the U.S. Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee public hearing on mob penetration of boxing.
A colorful subplot and historical footnote to the Crown Royal sting was the ensnarement of the Reverend Al Sharpton, the Falstaffian preacher-without-a-pulpit who seems like a character right out of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In 1982, long before he became notorious for the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, Sharpton was trying to juggle his incompatible roles as street hustler, mob front, social activist, and media manipulator.
Victor Quintana was introduced to Sharpton, then just twenty-nine, by Michael Franzese in December 1982, as the best intermediary to set up a meeting with Don King. Sharpton—funny, a compulsive talker, gossip, and name-dropper—soon became the star of a series of FBI recordings.
Sharpton kept mentioning how close he was to Danny Pagano, whose father, Joey, was a top-level hoodlum and the rumored hit man who killed Joey Gallo at Umberto’s Clam House.
Sharpton kept telling the wired Quintana of his exploits in the record industry with King, and passed along ribald gossip about singers Dionne Warwick and Shirley Bassey. He also made references to his odd alliance with South Carolina Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, possibly the most anti-black member of the Senate.
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 19