In one taped meeting Sharpton described how he had gotten his friend James Brown to do a radio commercial boosting Thurmond’s re-election, and how he had called in that favor to ask Thurmond to use his influence with the Republican Justice Department to block any indictment of King.
Sharpton might have been puffing about the meeting he says he set up between King and Thurmond, but the tapes do establish that he used Thurmond’s office when he was in Washington, and that he spoke with Thurmond’s assistant, Ted Kinghorn.
Sharpton also blabbed away in a meeting taped on March 4, 1983, with Quintana and Bob Ramn, who did video work for King. Sharpton delivered an informed lecture on King’s mob connections, saying their origins go back to King’s bond with the “Jewish Mafia of Cleveland,” founded by Moe Dalitz. Sharpton even boasted— falsely—that he had checked with Pat and Don Maggadino of the Buffalo crime family to verify that King had “no problems with the Cleveland people.”
Columbo family capo Michael Franzese arranged the meeting in which King agreed to do a co-promotion with an FBI undercover agent posing as a drug dealer seeking to launder cash.
On this tape Ramn said that King kept most of his money “offshore and in Swiss bank accounts.”
During one of the meetings with Quintana taped by the FBI on CCTV, the talk veered away from getting a meeting with King, and to setting up a potential drug deal. Once again Sharpton couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“Let me see what I can do, I know some people,” said the minister who did anti-drug crusades in the projects.
Quintana, keeping with his script, stressed he was only talked about pot and cocaine, not heroin. Sharpton said he would mention the prospect to Danny Pagano.
“He’s a Genovese guy, you know,” Sharpton said, showing off his knowledge of crime family factions.
But when Quintana met with Pagano, Pagano told him, “I don’t deal in drugs.”
Spinelli watched the video of Sharpton volunteering to further a drug deal at least thirty times, trying to read his character, measure his potential to be flipped, to become his informant against King. Spinelli needed a breakthrough on Crown Royal. His six-month funding cycle was about to expire, and the probe was at an impasse.
In the portly, anxious-to-please image of Sharpton, Spinelli thought he saw a weak man, a bluffer, a blowhard—not a tough or sinister criminal. Spinelli thought he and Quintana could flip Sharpton themselves.
At 5:00 P.M. on June 30, 1983, Sharpton arrived at Crown Royal’s $2,400-per-month luxury apartment, in a doorman building near Lincoln Center. Sharpton was making small talk with Quintana when Spinelli and another agent, Ken Mikionis, burst out of the bedroom, startling the minister.
Without saying a word they inserted a cassette into the VCR and started playing the video of the meeting where Sharpton offered to call Danny Pagano about the fictional drug transaction. Sharpton is as smart and as quick as Don King. After less than a minute he asked, “What do I have to do?”
Spinelli never got to deliver his your-life-is-at-the-crossroads speech he had been rehearsing in his mind all day. “I’ll do whatever I have to do to stay out of jail,” Sharpton repeated.
“Fine,” Spinelli said, “but you better be straight with me. This is no game. This is very serious. You’ll only get a chance to cross me once, and that will be it.”
The next day Sharpton taped his first conversation with Don King for the FBI. King asked Sharpton to orchestrate attacks in the black media on Larry Holmes because Holmes had left him and signed to fight Marvis Frazier. King asked Sharpton to plant stories in the black media, including Jet and Ebony, depicting Holmes as an “Uncle Tom” for leaving him for “a white promoter.”
“Put a fire under Larry’s ass,” was King’s instruction.
Holmes’s fight with Marvis Frazier (Joe’s son) was being co-promoted by Robert Andreoli, who was white, and Murad Muhammad, who was black and a traditional Islamic Muslim.
On July 6 Sharpton recorded another conversation with King, who was in a cautious mood. King told him not to come to his office during daylight hours. King also asked Sharpton to call him the following week in Vegas, but to use the code name of “Roy Williams.” Sharpton asked if King would help him out financially for helping to smear Holmes, and King, using some sort of code, said he would assist him “with the mail.”
On July 8 Sharpton taped a conversation with Holmes, and Holmes admitted he had not told the truth to the grand jury out of loyalty to King.
Al Sharpton never taped a conversation of prosecutorial value with King. He generated background intelligence, embarrassing tidbits, character insights a novelist could use, and documentation of King’s talent for three-dimensional deception. But no conversation where lawbreaking came up.
The whole thing was probably a double con. Spinelli had conned Sharpton into thinking his videotaped conversation was sufficient evidence to indict him for a drug conspiracy, which was not the case. And Sharpton never really tried to incriminate King.
After a few months Sharpton was passed along to FBI agents on other squads. He did help John Pritchard, the chief of the Genovese squad, gather information that led to the conviction of the mob’s main man in the record industry, Morris Levy. He supplied the probable cause for a wiretap order on Danny Pagano. He contributed to the case against Michael Franzese involving a gasoline and tax swindle.
Years later, Pritchard, by then the Number 2 man in the New York transit police, said, “The Rev was a great bullshitter. I have to say he probably conned the FBI in terms of the boxing investigation.”
In 1988 Sharpton talked his way out of his exposure as an FBI informer by admitting parts of the story and denying others. He also won an acquittal on charges of tax evasion, went on to run in the Democratic primary for Senate in 1992 and 1994 and become the subject of favorable profiles in the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine.
During the 1994 campaign, Sharpton told me, “I’m running to get a more moderate and mainstream image. I’m now into coalition more than confrontation. I’m changing.”
“Then why don’t you change your hairdo?” I asked.
“You don’t understand,” the witty hustler said. “I was raised up by James Brown and Don King. By their standards my hair is normal!”
The covert phase of the FBI’s boxing probe was over by August 1983. All the financial information Spinelli developed was turned over to the IRS, and the investigation into King evolved into a traditional tax-fraud case assigned to IRS agent Mark Schwartz. He worked with Roanne Mann, the assistant U.S. attorney.
Looking back on his boxing probe eleven years later, in 1994, Spinelli’s assessment was: “Dom Amorosa leaving for private practice when he did hurt us. Not giving Giachetti his immunity agreement was a killer. If we had Giachetti as a witness, we could have had the tapes and the contracts and proven King was taking twenty-five percent of Larry’s money. And stopping the covert co-promotion with King ended all our chances to make a substantive case.”*
On December 13, 1984, the new U.S. attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, called a press conference to announce a twenty-three-count indictment for tax fraud and conspiracy against King and Constance Harper, the vice president of DKP but really King’s personal assistant.
The indictment charged King with diverting and skimming $422,000 between 1978 and 1981 from DKP and not paying federal taxes on the money. In his press conference Giuliani said, “The scheme involved obtaining cash from casino cages on several occasions—on one occasion as high as seventy thousand—and not reporting it as income.”
Giuliani said some of the money was used to pay King’s personal gambling debt at Caesars Palace casino.
Connie Harper was charged with not paying taxes on $150,000 other income and helping to conceal King’s skimming from DKP’s accountants.
Don King, the master survivalist, prepared for another war in his epic life. He toned down his public act, wrapped himself in the flag more than ever, and made “Only in Ame
rica” his trademark phrase. He retained Vince Fuller of Williams & Connally, then in his prime, to be his lawyer. And he hired—and paid—Andrew Lawler to be Connie Harper’s lawyer.
* In early 1984, Spinelli was transferred to the New Haven office of the FBI. In January 1986, Governor Mario Cuomo appointed Spinelli the first inspector general for New York State. In November 1991, he published an article in Sports Illustrated detailing all the evidence of King’s relationships with mobsters.
King and Fuller quickly settled on a defense strategy—blame the subordinates, just as King had blamed Flood, Braverman, and Ort for the tournament scandal. King would not dispute the essential facts of the indictment; he would just depict himself as the innocent victim of his accountants, bookkeepers, and assistants, whom he relied upon in good faith. He would claim his intent was pure.
Because innocent intent was King’s defense, the judge’s procedural ruling became the turning point of the trial. Roanne Mann, the trial prosecutor, had evidence that King had committed tax evasion once before, in 1973, and wanted to present this evidence to the jury as “a past similar act.” This would have undermined King’s defense of no knowledge and no intent to mislead the government.
Roanne Mann had King’s 1979 federal grand jury testimony from Cleveland, plus other documents that indicated that King had not paid any federal taxes on his 1973 profits from the numbers racket. This evidence showed that King had maintained three bank accounts under fictitious names at the Quincy Savings & Loan in Cleveland, including a joint account with Virgil Ogletree, his partner in the numbers.
King had opened accounts under the fake names of “Henry George” and “Charles Brown,” and the joint account with Ogletree for K & G Enterprises under the fake names of “Kenneth Donaldson” and “James Woods.”
King had been given immunity by the grand jury and had admitted that he was getting from Ogletree “25 percent of the will, or thereabouts,” which had to be well over $100,000.
Roanne Mann had the signature cards from the bank, and the handwriting samples from King, showing King making deposits into these three accounts. She also had his 1973 tax return that showed no taxes were paid on this money, while King claimed a total income for 1973 of $20,300. She also had King’s own grand jury testimony admitting the unreported cash came from the numbers business. (At that time King was telling reporters he was out of the numbers racket and only doing boxing promotions.)
This degree of sophisticated tax evasion would have undercut King’s trial defense of victimization by devious subordinates.
In a pretrial hearing, Roanne Mann told Judge Thomas Grisea: “According to his own testimony, he [King] would make deposits into the account, his associates or partners would make withdrawals, King would receive a percentage of the money. And we believe that that is consistent with part of the scheme in this case, in which a joint account was opened by the two defendants, and they channeled monies that had been skimmed from the corporation through that account.
“They are going to claim that the reason it wasn’t reported was due to the incompetence of King’s accountants and bookkeepers. And certainly the fact that he engaged in a prior tax evasion—and in addition used a similar scheme to channel monies—I think is highly probative of knowledge and intent.”
At first Judge Grisea ruled that the government could present all this evidence to the jury, as a past similar act. But after the trial began, Judge Grisea changed his mind and ruled all the evidence from the 1973 tax evasion was inadmissible.
This was crushing to the prosecution and another astonishing example of Don King’s good luck.
Roanne Mann had already told the jury in her opening statement that she would prove that King had committed tax evasion in the past, and now she was disarmed of the proof of her promised past example, in midtrial.
This procedural ruling allowed King’s lawyer to lay the responsibility off on everyone else, including his co-defendant and dear friend, Connie Harper.
Harper had been King’s faithful employee for fifteen years.* She came from a prominent Cleveland family. She was so close to King that King had put fighters like Esteban De Jesus in her name, to hide his own ownership. But this loyal servant became the fall woman at the trial.
* Connie Harper was probably more than a close associate—she was one of King’s mistresses for years, according to most of King’s employees. These coworkers believe that Harper—unmarried, plump, and short—was in love with King, and whatever she did was motivated by blind romantic loyalty. Harper’s pre-sentencing rep would later describe her as an addictive personality, prone to obsessive shopping, eating, and sleeping. The report would conclude that Harper might have been “swept away by the excitement and glamour of Don King’s world.”
Fuller blamed the employees in King’s Manhattan office, even though the critical documents dealing with King’s cash advances from Caesars casino were kept in King’s home in Ohio, not his Manhattan office.
Don King never took the stand in his own defense.
On November 19, after seven hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted King of all charges and convicted Harper of tax evasion. She served four months in prison and now has a job on the Cleveland Board of Elections, a job King has told friends he secured for her.
Reflecting back on the trial, Roanne Mann, now a lawyer in private practice, told me, “I underestimated the power King’s personality had over a jury. He was a star, a celebrity. He was a folk hero to some of the jurors. Most of the women on the jury asked him for his autograph. They were fascinated by him.”
She added, “Go reread the trial transcript. You will see how Andy Lawler’s summation for Harper really helped King get off. It was a brilliant summation, but it wasn’t for his own client.”
Don King let a woman who loved him do the time for him.
Eight months after he was acquitted, Don King flew most of the jurors over to London, lodged them at a luxury hotel, and gave them free ringside tickets to the Tim Witherspoon–Frank Bruno heavyweight title fight.
Don King billed the promotion for the expenses.
10. Only in South Africa
By 1983 the anti-apartheid revolution, both inside and outside South Africa, was gathering momentum. Nelson Mandela was starting his twenty-first year in prison. Protests—violent and nonviolent—against the system of legalized segregation and denial of black voting rights were becoming more frequent. The whole civilized world was starting to mount boycotts of an outlaw nation based on minority rule and white supremacy. Nations were starting to impose economic sanctions and devise disinvestment strategies to weaken apartheid.
As part of this international upsurge, consciousness was starting to rise among athletes and musical performers in America that they had a contribution to make in the isolating of South Africa.
South Africa was banned from the 1964 Olympic games, invited to the 1968 games in Mexico City, and quickly disinvited when forty-one black African nations threatened their own boycott. In 1970, South Africa became the first nation expelled from the Olympic games.
In 1979, Bob Arum promoted a fight in Johannesburg between black American heavyweight John Tate and white South African Gerrie Coetzee. Although the audience was not officially segregated— except by the economics of the prohibitive ticket pricing—the fight was condemned almost universally, including by Don King, as morally abhorrent.
Arum’s partner in the promotion was Sol Kerzner, a white South African who owned the country’s largest chain of hotels. When Tate won by a knockout, there was dancing in the streets of the black township of Soweto.
In 1980 Arum came back to promote a fight between Coetzee and another black American heavyweight, Mike Weaver. This match was held in the phony homeland of Bophuthatswana, which was recognized by no other nation on earth as an independent country. Its specific site was the opulent Sun City hotel and casino, owned by Kerzner.
Once again Arum was appropriately lashed by King, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and
a group called ACCESS, standing for American Coordinating Committee for Equality in Sport and Society. ACCESS organized a letter-writing campaign to CBS-TV, which bought the rights to televise the bout, and King started calling Arum “the Apostle of Apartheid” at every opportunity.
King became such a crusader for boycotting anything involving South Africa that he even put out a press release denouncing an insignificant fight held in Miami Beach between a white South African heavyweight named Kallie Knoetze and Bill Sharkey of New York City. King’s press release said: “The plight of black people, socially and economically, troubles me, and I wholeheartedly support the position taken by Jesse Jackson, who feels this country has an obligation to break cultural and economic ties with the repressive regime of South Africa, and feels a moral obligation to resist promulgation of their policies through sports figures…. It would be an unpardonable sin for Knoetze to have the opportunity to become a world champion. The heavyweight championship of the world is a coveted sports prize, a revered and symbolic title. It should not be used as a great propaganda tool to promote racial hatred.”
By 1983, a movement was also developing among black American performers and civil rights activists to convince American stars not to perform at Sun City.
The South African resort was offering staggering sums of money to American performers to appear in the casino’s six thousand-seat arena. Among those who did accept Sun City’s money were Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, the Beach Boys, the Osmonds, Linda Ronstadt, Cher, Paul Anka, Dolly Parton, Glen Campbell, Olivia Newton-John, and Ann-Margret.
Kerzner, who sounded more like a bouncer from Brooklyn than a South African entrepreneur, even convinced black performers like the O’Jays and Millie Jackson to accept invitations to play Sun City.
Millie Jackson unwittingly gave the international boycott movement a shot of adrenaline by her comments while in South Africa. A reporter asked her if she was going to perform in Soweto. “Soweto? Where is that place? I never heard of it,” Jackson replied. When told she was breaking a boycott, Jackson said, “I’m not going to mix my career with politics. All I want is the money.” After her remarks were publicized in the United States, black performers like Gladys Knight and Ben Vereen canceled their appearances at Sun City.
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 20