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

by Jack Newfield

  Two investors in Bounds’s company started to panic and refused to put up other assets as a guarantee for King’s letter of credit. King agreed to give Bounds a few extra days grace period and Bounds flew from Dallas to Vegas to California in search of additional capital. There was some interest, but nobody was willing to write a check.

  Caesars announced the collapse of the fight on May 15, saying Bounds had breached his contract, apparently by failing to deliver the letter of credit to King. Bounds said he was unwilling to pull down his two other companies, AP Development (real estate) and KBK Energy (oil), in order to try to salvage the promotion.

  The whole sobering experience cost Bounds about $5 million. Holmes and King kept their nonrefundable advances, and Bounds never had anything to do with boxing again. Real estate is a gentleman’s game compared to the cruelest sport.

  The disintegration of the deal also drove an irreparable wedge between Kushner and Coetzee. All the while Bounds was trying to hold his fight together, King was working on Coetzee, telling him to dump Kushner, come with him, and make some real money with a pro who knew how to put on a promotion and sell it with showmanship.

  Just as King had turned Shavers against Elbaum, and turned Holmes against Ernie Butler, he turned Coetzee against Kushner. He has an instinct for the back stab equal to Iago or Kissinger.

  As the Holmes fight was collapsing, King flew to California, where Coetzee was training, and offered him $650,000 to fight David Bey (managed by Carl) in Sun City, and to abandon Bounds and Kushner.

  Kushner says, “Coetzee was awed by King. He was awed just having King in his home. He just dumped me and went with King. I had given Gerrie $100,000 out of my own pocket for living and training expenses. But Don convinced him that I was no good, and that he could make more money for him. Don then went to see Gerrie’s prior manager, a disbarred South African lawyer named Harold Tucker, and they made a deal. I was out of the picture and my contract abrogated.”

  In January 1985, Kushner sued King for breach of contract in Manhattan Supreme Court. Kushner claimed that King owed him $225,000 out of the $750,000 that Bounds had paid King. The lawsuit also alleged that King had engaged in “intentional and malicious acts and conspiracy” to terminate Kushner’s relationship with Coetzee and to “replace Kushner and obtain the valuable promotional and business relationship with Gerrie Coetzee.”

  In 1991, King settled the lawsuit and paid Kushner $10,000. The payment came about because Kushner was then Tony Tucker’s promoter and King was making a Tucker–Mike Tyson fight.

  Michael Dokes quickly became a forgotten person. King stopped calling him as soon as he became an ex-champ. Dokes slipped deeper into the velvet sewer of the cocaine trade, getting arrested several times for sale and possession, and going through several cycles of prison and rehabilitation.

  In 1988 Dokes was in New York for one of his comeback fights and he spoke about his ruined career.

  “I was using blow [cocaine] steady since 1982,” he said. “It was good for training in the gym. But the first time I went into a fight with cocaine in my blood was when I lost my title to Coetzee. I can’t remember the end of the fight…. Don King hurt me. One time I went to Cleveland to ask Don for some money when I was in a jam with the IRS. He said he didn’t have any money and I started to cry. I loved that man. I looked up to him like he was my daddy. I even tried to comb my hair so I could look like him. And he had this big mansion, and millions of dollars, and he wouldn’t help me out just a little. I became suicidal, close to a nervous breakdown. And I was still doing drugs all the time.”

  When asked if King knew he was a drug addict while he was heavyweight champion, Dokes almost whispered, “I believe he knew it. He never tried to stop me. He let me do whatever I wanted. I ran wild and he made money.”

  Then he added, “You can’t use any of this stuff until after I stop fighting. Carl has promised me a fight with Tyson and I need the money. I got nothing left. I spent it all on blow and lawyers. Blow is the most seductive drug ever conceived on earth.”

  After the collapse of the Coetzee–Holmes match, Don King made a quiet deal with Sol Kerzner and Sun City. He would sell his rights to Coetzee, and provide a suitable challenger from his stable, in exchange for $1 million. Sun City would be the promoter and King would not have to do anything in public to earn his money.

  The first fighter King tried to convince to make the fight—and violate the international boycott—was an amiable, undefeated heavyweight named David Bey. King liked to call Bey a “halfbreed” because his mother was white and his father was black.

  Bey was then rated the Number 3 contender, having just beaten Greg Page in impressive fashion in July in Las Vegas. Bey had beaten James “Buster” Douglas in his first pro fight, and his record was now fourteen wins and no defeats. A former army boxing champion, he called almost everyone “Sir.”

  What made Bey an even more attractive candidate to King was that Carl King was his manager of record. Carl took 50 percent of all of Bey’s purses, even though he did not negotiate in his interest, guide his career, or in any way earn his share. Moreover, Bey had a warm relationship with both Kings, despite this onerous financial arrangement.

  As Bey recalls it, King invited him to his townhouse on East Sixty-second Street in Manhattan and offered him the fight. King promised Bey a $650,000 purse, plus $100,000 for expenses, to fight Coetzee for the title at the Sun City casino in December.

  Bey read the contracts and saw that King was getting more money than he was. Don King then told him that Carl King would not be accompanying him to South Africa. Bey was also taken aback when King asked him to sign a life insurance policy in case something happened in South Africa.

  “Don wanted me to go,” Bey told me in an interview that was videotaped as part of a television documentary. He said, ‘This is a big opportunity for you, a fight for the championship of the world, and you’ll bring the title back home to America.’”

  But Bey was a little uneasy and he asked King if he could think about it for a few days.

  Bey was then dating singer Natalie Cole, and she strongly advised him not to go.

  “I didn’t know what apartheid was,” Bey says. “I didn’t know anything about it. But my lady friend said it was a bad thing to go.”

  A few days later Bey accidentally ran into Arthur Ashe and Harry Belafonte at the Sepia Awards dinner at a Manhattan hotel. He approached them and said King had made him this offer, and he didn’t know what to do because it was an opportunity to make $650,000, and he had never made more than $50,000 in any fight before this.

  Belafonte, who was deeply involved with the ANC movement in South Africa, and had been a close friend and adviser to Martin Luther King, made a direct moral-political appeal to the fighter. Belafonte remembers telling Bey: “Anything that gives legitimacy to Sun City strengthens the system of apartheid, and worsens the oppression of black people in South Africa. But nobody is better qualified to tell you what a trick bag you’re in than Arthur Ashe, who is sitting right over there. Go talk to him. Arthur played in South Africa as a tennis pro in the 1970s. Afterward Arthur discovered that his whole point of view was wrong, that he had been used and exploited by the apartheid system.”

  Bey then spoke to Ashe, who was a little less blunt and passionate but made the same point—that it would be morally wrong to take the Sun City fight, and that Bey would have to make a sacrifice that was small compared to the sacrifice others were making to bring down a system of pure evil.

  When Bey reported these conversations back to King, King told him he couldn’t trust Ashe because Ashe “owned stores in South Africa.” This, of course, was not true.

  After a few more days of thinking Bey told King he couldn’t accept the fight.

  “As soon as I told him I wouldn’t go,” Bey says, “Don told me I had made the right decision, and how proud he was of me, and he gave me a big hug, and told me how brave I was.”

  King then turned around and convin
ced Greg Page to take the fight. Page was also managed by Carl, and had lost his last two fights—to Bey and to Tim Witherspoon. But King made sure he was still rated in the top ten and set the fight with Coetzee for December 1.

  King was in control of both fighters’ careers when the match was announced, but he was careful to keep a low profile and not publicize his $1 million fee.

  But there are few secrets in the boxing subculture and soon word spread and got into the sports pages about what King had done.

  On November 8, 1984, Michael Katz published a story in the New York Times revealing that King would soon be expelled from the executive committee of Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid for violating the charter of his own organization.

  Katz quoted King as saying, “I’m not going to South Africa. All I did was sell my rights.”

  “Same thing,” rebutted activist Franklin Williams in the same article.

  Katz quoted Larry Holmes as saying, “I think King should be ashamed of himself. He’s always talking about his principles. It seems he sold ’em. If a man’s got principles, you can’t buy ’em.”

  David Bey turned out to be an unsung hero and martyr to the antiapartheid movement because Page, who went in his place, knocked out Coetzee and won the title. Bey had beaten Page in his last fight and likely would have beaten Coetzee, too. This would have meant several million dollars to Bey and an irrevocable piece of boxing immortality; being heavyweight champion is an honor you can never lose and it stays with you the rest of your life. And Bey gave it up for a principle that had to be explained to him by Ashe and Belafonte.

  Carl King (left) with his stepfather in 1978. As a manager, Carl took an unethical 50 percent of the earnings of many of his fighters, including Tim Witherspoon and David Bey. In two of Saoul Mamby’s title defenses, Carl King managed both Mamby and his opponent. When Mamby won the championship in South Korea, Carl King didn’t even go with him to the fight. But Carl took 33 percent of his purse when he got home, and Don took 20 percent. JAMES HAMILTON

  Before Ashe, Belafonte, and Randall Robinson could formally evict King from their anti-apartheid organization, King submitted his letter of resignation on November 16.

  In his letter King claimed that he had tried to convince Greg Page not to accept the fight but that Page wouldn’t listen to him. He further claimed that the only reason he finally accepted the $1 million payment from Sun City was that Coetzee had insisted on it.

  “Coetzee felt a strong moral obligation to me,” King wrote, “and only through his insistence did I receive any compensation for the assignment of my rights.”

  King wrote that he had tried to explain all this to the group’s president, Arthur Ashe, but that Ashe “wasn’t interested.” The tone of the letter was that King still felt he had done nothing wrong. Ashe told me that King’s account was “false,” and Page told me King urged him to take the fight and not to boycott Sun City.

  A year after his resignation, King made a public donation of $100,000 to Randall Robinson’s organization, TransAfrica, to get back in the good graces of the activist community, On June 22, 1990, Nelson Mandela delivered a memorable address to the United Nations, and Don King was his honored guest. King was photographed with Mandela and spoke about his devotion to the anti-apartheid cause.

  King even told reporters he was planning to promote a Mike Tyson fight in South Africa to benefit the ANC. The Sunday Star of Johannesburg quoted King as saying, “It would be tremendous to go to Johannesburg, where our brothers have been shackled and fettered without compunction or remorse, and fight under Nelson Mandela’s banner for freedom and equality.” King said the fight could raise $100 million and proposed that a “large share of the profits would be donated to the ANC.”

  Even though Harry Belafonte spoke to King about such a fight in South Africa to benefit the ANC, King never made a serious effort to organize the promotion. He put Tyson’s 1990 comeback fights into casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas.

  King often speaks the lofty words of altruism and idealism, and every year before Thanksgiving he gives out turkeys in poor neighborhoods, like an old Tammany ward boss. But he has never really used his power to benefit the larger community or the poor. Back in Zaire, when George Plimpton asked him about sharing his profits with the dispossessed, King fell into a double-talk monologue to escape the implications of the question.

  What King should have done was donate the entire $1 million he took from Sun City and give it directly to the ANC, back in 1984, when the ANC was struggling and Mandela was still in prison. That would have been one press conference where all of King’s superlatives and self-dramatization might have been justified.

  BLACK PROMOTER TAKES $1 MILLION FROM SOUTH AFRICA AND GIVES IT BACK TO LIBERATION STRUGGLE would have, at last, been a headline worthy of King’s self-image of an epic life.

  * * *

  In March 1991, I flew to Las Vegas to try to interview King, both for this book and for a PBS documentary I was working on as the writercorrespondent. The occasion was that King was promoting the first Mike Tyson–Razor Ruddock match at the Mirage. King’s office had accredited me and my PBS colleagues to attend the fight.

  I was traveling with Charles Stuart, an independent producer who had won six Emmys; his cameraman, John Baynard; and ex-champion Jose Torres, who was a close friend of mine and a consultant to the documentary.

  High on my list of questions for King was his 1984 deal with Sun City, since he was now leading a campaign to prevent black South African fighters from being ranked by the IBF and getting title fights, in a holier-than-thou boycott extremism.

  I have had a strong involvement with the issue of South African liberation ever since I was an activist in the 1960s. I had once been arrested in a sit-in at the Chase Bank in a protest over the bank’s loans to the government of South Africa. In the mid-1980s I had written several lengthy articles in support of economic sanctions against the South African regime.

  I had even written about the video released by forty rock, rap, reggae, R&B, and jazz performers in 1985 called “Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City.” The video was an effective mix of music and politics that included artists like Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, Darlene Love, Bonnie Raitt, Eddie Kendricks, David Ruffin, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Cliff, Lou Reed, Herbie Hancock, and Ruben Blades.

  The lyrics, composed by Little Steven Van Zandt, seemed directly relevant to what King had done:

  Relocation to phony homelands

  Separation of families I can’t understand

  23 million can’t vote because they’re black

  We’re stabbing our brothers and sisters in the back

  I ain’t gonna play Sun City.

  The first thing you see when you get off the plane at McCarran Airport are rows and rows of slot machines, even before you get to the baggage-claim area. The first street you see is called Paradise Road, and the next is Rainbow Drive. And then you see the neon signs for the casinos with those names that suggest fantasy and opportunity— the Stardust, the Mirage, the Golden Nugget.

  Las Vegas is Disneyland for high rollers and desperate dreamers. On the eve of a big fight, it also becomes a convention of pimps, hookers, pickpockets, the princes of the crack trade, wiseguys with gold chains, gold teeth, and gold rings.

  We were there to cover the fight, hopefully to interview King, and let John Baynard shoot the atmosphere of this grotesque watering hole of vices.

  Two days before the fight, King was standing in the main ballroom of the Mirage giving an interview to a cluster of print and TV reporters after finishing a long press conference with the fighters for the contingent of five hundred journalists.

  As I joined the group, King was beginning a personalized tirade against Bobby Lee, the president of the IBF. The real reason for King’s anger was that the IBF had recently sanctioned a title fight between Evander Holyfield and George Foreman, rejecting King’s demand that Holyfield fight Tyson or be stripped of the crown.

  The issue King was
raising was not the sanction but the IBF’s policy of ranking black fighters from South Africa and sanctioning their right to fight for a world title if the fight is located outside of South Africa. This seemed fair to me, since the point of protest shouldn’t be to deprive black South African fighters of equal opportunity.

  “Bobby Lee has no dignity,” King was almost shouting. “The IBF is a bunch of ingrates and mercenaries. Bobby Lee is no longer fit to be the president of an organization. He’s dealing with South Africa clandestinely and surreptitiously. He’s putting fights on in Europe. How can a black man condone working with apartheid? He’s a traitor, an Uncle Tom.”

  Since that’s exactly what King himself had done, I couldn’t resist the opening.

  “What about the million dollars you took from Sun City, Don?” I asked.

  Don King was not pleased to be reminded of his hypocrisy in the midst of his own oratory against Lee, with dozens of boxing writers and black fighters standing around.

  Don King began attacking me.

  “You ain’t nothin’ but a scumbag,” he screamed. “You are dirt. You are nothing. You are a scumbag!”

  For about two minutes Don King stood about three inches from me screaming insults, as a larger and larger crowd gathered, drawn by the roar of his rant. Two thoughts raced through my mind: Is my cameraman getting this? This guy has killed two people!

  As King cursed me, I could hear Joe Frazier ask, “Who is that guy? What’s he got on Don?”

  Every thirty or forty seconds I interrupted just to say, “Don, you haven’t answered my question; why did you take the one million from South Africa?”

  Each time I squeezed in my question, he raised his volume with more insults.

  “You are Goebbels! You’re prejudiced!”

  I knew King was trying to intimidate me, so I just stood my ground and kept repeating my question. I could now see that John Baynard was smiling and getting all this down on video.