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

by Jack Newfield

  Gradually Maffia began to notice quite a few unusual transactions.

  King always carried what he called “flash cash,” a roll of $5,000 or $10,000 he kept in his pocket. King kept bank accounts in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Panama, and safe-deposit boxes in Puerto Rico and at the Lincoln Savings Bank in Manhattan, near his office.

  He was always dealing in cash. Maffia says it was not unusual for him to cut checks of $100,000 or $200,000 made out to cash.

  “Don would make out checks to cash all the time,” Maffia says, “and he would write ‘Project Zoro’ on the stub. When I would ask him what ‘Project Zoro’ was, he would get angry and not tell me.

  “When I would tell him I needed to know because of the 1099 accounting and reporting requirements, he started calling me a ‘1099 motherfucker.’”

  King often asked Maffia to cut checks to a wide variety of people whose function it was to generate political support for King in the black community.

  Sylvester Leaks* would get “expenses” and “consultant fees” when he wrote favorable articles about King in the Amsterdam News. The Reverend Al Sharpton got expenses reimbursed for as long as he kept defending King’s practices. The Reverend Franklin Richardson of Mt. Vernon collected $10,000 in 1989. The Reverend T. J. Jemison, president of the National Baptist Ministers Association, got at least $25,000. Yamil Chade, a manager and friend of Jose Sulaiman, was given $10,000. The wife of Benjamin Hooks received $12,500.

  All these payments were taken out of Mike Tyson’s accounts.

  * Leaks wrote two puff pieces for the Amsterdam News in December 1994 about King’s visit to Ecuador. That same month Leaks was removed for mismanagement as president of Community School Board 7 in Brooklyn.

  Don King, dressed in white fur, posed outside Dewey Wong’s restaurant in February 1986. BOXING ILLUSTRATED

  In 1989, Maffia accidentally sent Reverend Richardson a 1099 form for his payment. King got angry and told his chief financial officer, “You are the most 1099 motherfucker I have ever known.”

  Once King directed Maffia to write a check for $325,000, and to write on the stub “to open offices in Latin America.”

  “Is it a lease?” Maffia asked. “Are we buying a building?”

  King wouldn’t say.

  On another occasion Maffia was instructed to give Yamil Chade four checks made out to a Panamanian company, and to record the purpose as “public relations offices in Latin America.” The next day the money came back by wire transfers.

  Maffia wasn’t sure what was going on.

  On another occasion King asked Maffia to falsify some records that had been subpoenaed as part of Tim Witherspoon’s civil lawsuit.

  “Don wanted me to add some fake expenses that would make it look like he made a smaller profit than he actually did on the Witherspoon–Bruno fight. But I never did it,” Maffia said.

  The job was exciting, and King kept paying him bonuses, so Maffia was able to rationalize for a while what was going on right under his nose. He certainly found some of the people coming into the office for money highly suspicious, and he was troubled by some of the transactions, but he felt all he could do was keep the books as honestly as he could and make sure King paid his taxes.

  A saint might have quit right away, but there are no saints in the boxing business.

  “The first two years I really liked Don,” Maffia says. “We were friends. He asked about my children. If I worked eighteen hours a day, he worked twenty-four. He had his faults, but on balance, I have to say I liked him.”

  Maffia dates the beginning of his disenchantment to the way King took advantage of Mike Tyson, when Tyson became the crown jewel of King’s empire in October 1988.

  “He began to have me bill part of everything to Tyson,” Maffia recalled. “Mike started absorbing all of Don’s overhead without really knowing it.

  “Don showed the spread sheets [detailed worksheet accountings] really fast to Mike, and he had Mike, and me, and Rory Holloway sign them to cover himself. But nobody really analyzed them for Mike, and Mike couldn’t understand them. Don had me keep the originals in a fireproof safe and told me never to let them out of the building, never to let Mike be able to show them to anyone outside the building.

  “I suppose, at some level, Mike knew and didn’t care. But no one really explained anything to him, where his money was going. Don gave Mike what he wanted—cars, cash, women. And Mike let Don control his money, which was in the multimillions. Don kept telling me to write checks reimbursing DKP from Mike’s accounts.”

  King developed a shorthand code with Maffia.

  “OTP” was King’s code for “off the top.” Whenever King said “OTP,” it meant he wanted Maffia to deduct some expenses off the top of a Tyson promotion, before Tyson’s specific percentage was allocated.

  “This began to bother me emotionally,” Maffia says. “My own bonus was billed to Mike. The salary for Don’s bodyguards was billed to Mike. Don billed his own maid services in his Las Vegas and Los Angeles condos to Mike. Mike was paying one thousand a week, plus bonuses, to Don’s daughter, Debby, to be the president of the Mike Tyson fan club. And I could see that thousands of fan letters to Mike were sitting unopened in cartons in the basement of King’s office. The fan club had the license to market Mike Tyson jackets and T-shirts. It should have been a profit-making venture. But Don was just using it to pay his family with Mike’s money.”

  By the spring of 1991, Maffia’s relationship with King had become irrevocably poisoned. One factor was that Maffia and King were both involved with the same woman. (Maffia would not discuss the tensions and emotions caused by this triangle except to acknowledge its existence.)

  Second, King became uncomfortable with all the questions Maffia kept asking. He became paranoid about the possibility that Maffia was an FBI informant.

  Maffia asked him so many insistent questions about disbursements to people who did no visible work, and about all the checks generating cash, that King came to doubt Maffia’s motives and loyalty.

  Maffia was not an informant. He kept asking King about the large checks made out to cash only because he had to file an “8300 form” with the bank each time it was done.

  In April 1991, King blew up and accused Maffia of stealing money from him. The occasion was a meeting where King was to pay his first-quarter taxes (about $1.8 million) and pay off the mortgage on the townhouse where his office was located. A vice president of Peat Marwick was present, and so was lawyer Charles Lomax and Maffia’s assistant, George Taira.

  King, as usual, was in a rush because he was flying to Europe that night with Tyson. When Maffia said there was a cash-flow problem, and there wasn’t enough money in the active accounts to both pay the taxes and pay off the mortgage, King shouted at Maffia, “You must be stealin’.”

  It took a while for Maffia to explain how most of the pay-per-view revenue from the Tyson–Ruddock fight in March hadn’t come in yet, and how the foreign sales revenue hadn’t come in yet, and that King was confused about which accounts this money would go into.

  After King calmed down, he didn’t apologize to Maffia but said, “You should have explained it better.”

  But the accusation of theft hurt and made Maffia realize his days at DKP were now numbered.

  It will always be a mystery why someone as street-smart as King would make an enemy out of his chief financial officer, by first accusing him of being an FBI informant and then accusing him of being an embezzler.

  King, meanwhile, had a cash-flow problem, mostly because he had no interest in promoting regular, local non-championship fights on the USA or ESPN cable networks, the way Bob Arum did, which generated a small, steady revenue stream for Arum. More and more King was interested only in extravaganza fights, or the pay-per-view shows where he could promote four title fights in one night.

  The steady flow of mid-level fights required an attention to detail, patience, and discipline that King didn’t have, possibly because they didn’t gi
ve him a large stage and national publicity.

  In August, King demanded that Maffia sign a confidentiality agreement, promising not to divulge any secrets he learned while in King’s employment. Maffia showed it to an attorney, who told him the document was valid only for the future, not for the past five years.

  So Maffia signed it reluctantly and was forced to resign from King’s company, effective September 28, 1991.

  Maffia says that as of 1990, King’s net worth was about $25 million, depending on how the value of the tape library and video rights to his fights were appraised.

  This estimate does not include the $15 million in profit King made from the two Tyson–Ruddock pay-per-view bouts in 1991. It also excludes accounts in his wife Henrietta’s name, maintained in Ohio. And Maffia didn’t know how much cash King kept in his safe-deposit boxes, or in his homes, which were well guarded with high-technology surveillance cameras.

  Since King had produced $350,000 in cash on an hour’s notice— bills shrink-wrapped in Vegas five years earlier—to pay his federal taxes, it is likely that he keeps significant cash reserves.

  “Cash is king with Don,” Maffia says. “He thinks you are only as good as the amount of money in your pocket. He never outgrew that mentality from the numbers business. Don always needed that cash in his pocket to bolster his ego, even though he knew his net worth with the bank was twenty-five million.”

  Joe Maffia was angry, hurt, and he knew things. But alone in the world he was no danger to Don King. He had no strategy of revenge.

  Maffia did not run to the FBI or prosecutors with his knowledge. He did not go to the boxing writers he knew. The most he did was get in touch with a literary agent named Knox Burger to explore the possibility of a book, but that never went very far.

  In March 1992 Maffia was working as an accountant for David Rosenzweig’s company and dabbling on the fringes of boxing when he received a subpoena from the United States Senate, the permanent subcommittee on investigations, chaired by Republican William Roth of Delaware. This invitation would prove to be the catalyst that put into motion a chain of events that would lead to Don King’s indictment more than two years later.

  Joe Maffia and Don King at a luncheon in 1987. Maffia was King’s chief financial officer who released the affadavits describing how King siphoned millions of dollars out of Mike Tyson’s accounts to pay for his own overhead and enrich his own family members. His information led to King’s indictment in 1994.

  Senator Roth had begun an investigation into boxing after a Delaware constituent—a fighter named David Tiberi—lost a bad decision to James Toney in a nationally televised fight. Roth’s staff began to poke around the toxic dump of boxing and easily began to find the material for public hearings and remedial legislation.

  When Maffia received the subpoena, he retained Tom Hauser for $1,000 to advise and represent him in his contacts with the Senate committee. Hauser would end up representing him for two years pro bono.

  Tom Hauser disliked Don King as intensely as anyone interviewed for this book. Hauser once said to me, “I like fighters and I hate injustice. I like fighters like Ali, Witherspoon, and Mamby. I don’t like what Don King did to them. They are decent people. We are on earth for a short time and we have to do good.”

  Tom Hauser was Ali’s avenger. Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times was one of sixteen books Hauser has published. He also wrote The Execution of Charles Horman, which was nominated for the National Book Award and served as the basis for the Academy Award-winning film Missing that starred Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.

  Hauser was also a fine lawyer, having clerked for a federal judge and been a Wall Street litigator for the firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore until he began to write in 1977.

  When Joe Maffia called him in March 1992, Hauser was a “legal consultant” to Bill Cayton on his civil lawsuit with Tyson, and knew as much about Don King’s dealings as anyone involved in the cruelest sport.

  He had written about King in his 1985 boxing book, The Black Lights, and in his biography of Ali he had described how King had cheated Ali out of $1 million after the Holmes bout and described the tragic damage that fight inflicted on Ali’s health, and why that match should never have been sanctioned or promoted.

  When Maffia called him, Hauser asked Maffia one question. “Will you tell the whole truth?” When Maffia said yes, Hauser agreed to represent him in a meeting with the Senate committee staff.

  Two years later Hauser would tell me, “I didn’t know how much Joe knew. But, yes, the thought did cross my mind during our first conversation that Joe could bring Don down.”

  A few weeks later, the Senate committee lawyers, Daniel Rinzel and W. Leighton Lord, came to New York and interviewed Maffia for several hours.

  One of them asked, “Is Don King tied to organized crime?”

  “You don’t understand,” Hauser said. “Don King is organized crime.”

  In preparing Joe Maffia for this interview and listening to him during the session, Hauser realized just how penetrating and detailed Maffia’s knowledge was. He had the accountant’s memory for numbers.

  The Senate committee never did much with Maffia’s information, and King took the Fifth Amendment when he testified in executive session a few months later. But the committee served the purpose of bringing Hauser and Maffia together.

  In April 1992 Tom Hauser conceived what he calls “the strategy of the subpoena.”

  His client Bill Cayton was bogged down in breach-of-contract litigation with Tyson. Hauser and Cayton wanted King to pay a price for this draining process. Hauser knew that Maffia had been forced to sign the confidentiality agreement with King just before he left.

  So he figured out a way around the confidentiality letter. He got Cayton’s main lawyer, David Branson, to send Maffia a notice of deposition in the civil case against Tyson. Branson then sent Maffia a subpoena to compel his testimony. That was the device around the confidentiality agreement. The subpoena waived and superseded any promise of confidentiality.

  Hauser then orchestrated an exchange of letters between Maffia and Branson, in which Maffia said he was busy and would prefer to answer specific questions in the form of an affidavit rather than sit through a time-consuming deposition. By mid-April Branson had submitted a series of written questions that Hauser was eager to answer and Maffia was willing to answer.

  Writing and signing the affidavit—and then going public—was a crossing of the Rubicon for Maffia. When asked about it more than two years later, he said, “It never occurred to me not to respond to the subpoena as honestly as I could. I didn’t want to go out of my way to hurt Don. But I didn’t want to go out of my way not to hurt him, either. I just did what I thought was right. But I wasn’t as emotionally committed to exposing Don as Tom was.”

  For three nights Hauser and Maffia worked till after midnight over the word processor in Hauser’s apartment. The affidavit went through many drafts, with some elements added and others deleted. Maffia thought he was mainly helping Cayton win his lawsuit and that at most, there would be a small story about what he had done back in the sports section of the newspaper.

  When it was finished—nine pages packed with financial details about how King fleeced Tyson out of millions of dollars—Hauser leaked it to Mike Katz of the Daily News, who had been writing columns critical of King for years. He read the affidavit and immediately knew he had a groundbreaking scoop. On Saturday, May 2, Katz reached King in West Palm Beach, Florida, to get his response to the sworn statement accusing him of the financial rape of Tyson, who was then in prison for sexual rape.

  “You are a racist motherfucker,” King screamed at Katz over the phone. “You used to be a good guy, but you’ve been out to get me for years.”

  In response to another question, King shouted, “You’re just out to get me and Tyson. You’re just like the cops who brutalized Rodney King. I’m another Rodney King…. Why don’t you write about Desiree Washington [Tyson’s rape victim]? She’s black
on the outside and white on the inside. Her father molested her. Put that in the paper.”

  “What about your daughter Debby getting fifty-two thousand a year as president of Mike’s fan club?” Katz asked.

  “Print what you want,” King yelled. “It’s all bullshit.”

  Then King abruptly changed his tune. He began to sweet-talk Katz, who was immune to flattery or gratuity.

  “We can work together on this,” King said. “You and I should be partners. You’d be stronger as an ally than as an enemy. You can be pernicious.”

  Katz thought King meant to say tenacious, but didn’t interrupt.

  “Writers are under control, you know,” King said.

  Katz thought that may have been an implied offer to pay him money not to write the story, but he ignored it.

  “Let’s have dinner,” King continued, in his seduction mode. “I’ll give you an exclusive, all the papers exposing Cayton as a thief.”

  The conversation lasted about fifteen minutes. Each time Katz tried to ask a specific question about a fact alleged in the affidavit, King cut him off with a filibuster, or just shouted over his words.

  The next day, Sunday, May 3, Katz’s story ran on page 3 of the Daily News under the five-column headline: WAS TYSON SUCKERED? EX-AIDE: KING SIPHONED OFF MILLIONS.

  “It was ten times bigger than I anticipated,” Maffia said later. “I never thought it would be a big story in the front of the paper.”

  Katz’s story reported that Maffia’s affidavit described how “King charged Tyson for the promoter’s personal security, travel bills, and renovations to King’s house in Las Vegas and his E. 69th Street brownstone…. Debby King, the promoter’s daughter, got $52,000 a year as president of the Mike Tyson fan club. Debby King’s husband, Greg Lee, received about $15,000 per fight, for several fights, as a ‘consultant.’ Carl and Eric King, the promoter’s sons, were paid about $50,000 a fight.”