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

by Jack Newfield

  The feds filled a whole “war room” with more than 100,000 indexed documents. They briefly considered drafting a broad indictment against King, but discarded the notion, remembering the 1985 case had been criticized as too complex. Chapman’s narrow, simple objective was a guilty verdict, not a trial that would help expose the whole corrupt system of boxing.

  Hauser wanted the government to separately bring a complex civil antitrust suit against King for monopoly. Such a strategy would have brought the case before a judge rather than a jury, with a civil standard of proof that was the “preponderance of the evidence” rather than the higher standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” It would also have placed the resources of the whole Department of Justice behind the charge and brought the WBC and WBA sanctioning bodies into the case for their rigged rankings and extortionate sanction fees.

  Hauser understood Sarah Chapman’s need for one neat, narrow, winnable case after the government’s haunting failure against King in the tax trial. But he still would have preferred “two bites at the apple,” because he was in awe of King’s survival magic, fully aware of his escapes from the first-degree murder conviction, the ABC tournament sandal, the FBI sting, the 1985 tax trial, and the skimming of millions from Mike Tyson.

  Finally, on July 14, 1994, King was indicted on nine counts of wire fraud—eight of them committed after Maffia left DKP.

  The heart of the government’s charge was that King submitted as part of his insurance claim an altered contract between himself and Chavez. This fake contract contained a typed-in rider that indicated that King had paid Chavez $350,000 in nonrefundable training expenses. But this rider was not part of the contract Chavez had actually signed.

  The indictment charged that during the summer of 1992, after the insurance claim had been paid to King, King concealed from Chavez that there had been an insurance recovery of training expenses. In essence, King was double-dipping from both Lloyd’s and Chavez.

  The actual wire frauds were faxes between King, Lloyd’s, Gagliardi Brothers Brokers, Adams Loss Adjusters, and Hanleigh Management. The final fraud was the wire transfer of $671,000 into King’s bank account, in April 1992.

  When a reporter called King’s office seeking a quotable reaction, King’s assistant, Al Braverman, who had been part of the ABC tournament fraud eighteen years earlier, took the call.

  “I think it’s a complete crock put down by a bitter accountant who got fired for fucking up,” Braverman said.

  The day the indictment was announced King was inaccessible to reporters because he was busy in Phoenix, Arizona, stealing another fighter. He was somehow convincing Michael Carbajal, the 1988 Olympic silver medalist at 108 pounds, to sign with him.

  King was promising Carbajal a series of million-dollar fights and a signing bonus to come with him and abandon Bob Arum, who had promoted all his fights and thought of Carbajal so much a member of his family that he didn’t have a written contract with him.

  A few months later, however, Carbajal would lose his first title fight under King to Humberto “Chiquita” Gonzales, the 108-pound champion of the WBC and the IBF.

  The wire-fraud indictment of King did seem a little bit of a letdown, a technical way to level a giant who has led a life of Shakespearean proportions.

  The federal government had investigated him for twenty-six months and all they indicted him for was nine incriminating faxes. To those who followed the broad sweep of King’s life, to those who saw him as a character out of a novel by Dreiser, or compared him to Citizen Kane, it seemed so undramatic after so dramatic a life.

  It felt a little disappointing for King to get caught, just like any other aging businessman, committing felonies by facsimile.

  Here was a man who killed two men, reinvented himself in prison, and rose to become friends with presidents and a flag-waving Vegas patriot.

  Here was one of the most famous, and most interesting, people in America, who had promoted some of the greatest fights in history— Ali–Foreman, Douglas–Tyson, Holmes–Norton, and the Homeric Ali– Frazier III.

  Here was a brilliant showman who outnegotiated corporate titans like Steve Ross, Donald Trump, Steve Wynn, Roone Arledge, Sonny Werblin, and Frank Biondi.

  Here was an international confidence man so clever he fleeced the treasuries of whole countries like Zaire and the Philippines.

  Here was a very rich man who had such a remorseless memory that he could betray so many friends who loved him—Lloyd Price, Connie Harper, Muhammad Ali, Don Elbaum, Michael Dokes.

  Here was a deal-maker so greedy that he diverted and skimmed millions from Tyson, Holmes, and Witherspoon—and got away with it.

  And he is indicted for cheating the world’s largest insurance syndicate, not a fighter.

  It did seem a little like getting Al Capone for taxes after he had arranged dozens of underworld executions.

  A few hours after the indictment was announced, Joe Maffia and Tom Hauser shared a beer at Hauser’s apartment. There was no gloating, just a search for emotional closure on a joint adventure.

  Maffia was a little puzzled by the limited scope of the indictment, but when he read it over, he was also pleased that he would play only a subordinate role at the coming trial.

  “After I read it, I felt relief,” Maffia said. “I realized most of the paperwork on the Chavez claim was done after I left the office.

  “Other employees handled the paperwork. They would be the main witnesses, not me. Don got the money in April 1992, six months after I left the office.

  “It was a relief to know the paperwork would speak for itself at the trial. Other employees would have to testify. No one would be able to say I did it, I signed the letters, I sent the faxes. No one could say I made them do it.”

  As Maffia sipped his beer, Hauser was answering the phone and giving interviews to reporters who were calling for reaction and comment.

  Maffia heard Hauser tell one of the reporters, “Joe is the real hero. Everybody talks about Don King, but Joe did something about Don King.”

  This was an essential distinction.

  “Boxing is the only jungle where the lions are afraid of the rats” was a line I used on the PBS documentary on King that Charles Stuart and I wrote and produced in 1991.

  Lions were afraid of Don King. Larry Holmes and Saoul Mamby, two champions, were afraid to tell the whole truth about King to the federal grand jury in 1982. Mike Tyson wouldn’t testify against King in the Lloyd’s of London investigation.

  But Joe Maffia, the accountant who spoke softly, did the right thing. He did not relish doing it, and he was not without a measure of fear.

  But as Cus D’Amato often told his pupils, “The hero and the coward both feel exactly the same emotion of fear. The only difference is that the hero learns how to control his fear. And then he does whatever he has to do.”

  Epilogue: The Shame of Boxing

  Boxing is my guilty pleasure. I love it and I hate it. I appreciate it, but I’m also the first one to shout “Stop the fight!” when it becomes an unequal beating rather than a competitive sport.

  At its infrequent best, boxing can be the art of hitting and not getting hit—a ballet with blood, geometry with guile. At its frequent worst, it is fakery, burlesque, cruelty, injustice, exploitation and death.

  It has always been a sport on the neon, outlaw margins. Fifty years ago sportswriter Jimmy Cannon called it “the red light district of sports.” It still is, though in a slicker way.

  Despite its dark side—or more likely because of its dark side—boxing has always been the sport most stimulating and attractive to serious writers, filmmakers, painters and songwriters. It is deeply embedded in the American culture. It appeals to the bloodlust in human nature.

  Boxing has been an inspiration to writers of the caliber of Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce Carol Oates, Gerald Early, A. J. Liebling, Jack London, Pete Hamill, James Elroy, Budd Schulberg, Nick Tosches, Leonard Gardner, W. C. Heinz, Gay Tale
se, Ted Hoagland and David Remnick.

  More outstanding movies have been made about boxing than any other game or racket: Body and Soul, Champion, Raging Bull, The Set-Up, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Harder They Fall, the first Rocky film, Fat City and On the Waterfront (in which Marlon Brando plays Terry Maloy, a boxer who took a dive for the mob). Two of Bob Dylan’s best songs are about fighters: “Who Killed Davey Moore?” and “The Hurricane.”

  Even now, in an era without a Jack Dempsey/Joe Louis/ Muhammad Ali-level star who is bigger than boxing, the sport is still a $500-million-a-year big business. It is still the ticket out of slum poverty, still what Joyce Carol Oates called “America’s tragic theater.”

  HBO’s annual budget for boxing is $75 million. Showtime’s budget is $25 million. The second Holyfield–Tyson fight grossed $100 million in one night, because of pay-per-view technology. The mega-fight is still key to the Las Vegas casino economy of high rollers. HBO (AOL-Time Warner), Showtime (Viacom) and ESPN (Disney) make a lot of money off boxing programming. Boxing feeds the corporate system.

  The problem is that the sport is unregulated. Except for Nevada and Pennsylvania, the state commissions are jokes, run by small-time politicians interested in free seats facing the TV cameras.

  This was the affliction back in 1967, when every boxing commission in the country wrongfully stripped Muhammad Ali of his title, and his license to box and earn a living, without any due process. The New York commission—chaired by a former Republican Congress-man—revoked Ali’s license on the same day he refused induction into the Army on religious grounds. Four years later the Supreme Court ruled, 8 to 0, that Ali did have a legitimate, sincere religious position against the Vietnam War. But every state commission— appointed by politicians—banned him without even holding a hearing where he could present his case.

  These state boxing commissions are still as unprofessional as they were in Ali’s time. This same politicized passivity is what has allowed boxing to evolve its strange economic structure that is half monopoly and half piracy.

  Boxing is like no other sport. It has no national commissioner to set standards for health and safety. In boxing there are no leagues or schedules. Every match is a separate deal. There is no rational structure. The chaos itself becomes an impediment to reform. The casual fan does not understand how the sport is run.

  In baseball, the standings reflect a quantifiable reality. In boxing, the ratings (which supposedly rank fighters according to ability, from one to ten with a number-one ranking guaranteeing a lucrative fight for the title) are at best impressionistic, and at worst totally corrupt— sold for cash. Everyone in boxing knows that the three sanctioning bodies that issue the ratings—the World Boxing Association, the World Boxing Council, and the International Boxing Federation— have no legitimacy. They force champions to pay huge sanction fees for the right to defend their titles. They strip champions of their titles if they don’t go along with the sport’s back-room politics. They manipulate the ratings and exclude merit from consideration. They assign incompetent judges to fights. They are more like bandits than regulators.

  In basketball, the score is obvious. The ball has to go through the hoop. In boxing, nothing is clear; victory and defeat are matters of interpretation by judges. A number-one rating can be auctioned. Fighters sometimes don’t get paid what they are promised in a contract. Nobody audits the money. There are conflicts of interest that would never be tolerated in predominantly white sports like tennis, golf or stock-car racing.

  In theory, a manager is supposed to negotiate the most favorable economic terms for his fighter, while the promoter is supposed to make the largest possible profit on the event. But there have been dozens of fights in which Carl King managed both fighters while the match was promoted by his father, Don King, boxing’s dominant promoter since 1974, accumulating a net worth of S200 million along the way. Bob Arum has also had similar conflicts of interest.

  If the promoter’s son represents both fighters, what chance does the boxer have of getting paid fairly? In addition, most of King’s fighters tell me they are not permitted to have their own lawyers or accountants. Mike Tyson is now suing King, claiming his co-managers were actually employees of King, whose loyalty was to him, not Tyson.

  I tolerated this institutionalized avarice and cynicism for years because of the occasional artistry of a Sugar Ray Robinson or a Muhammad Ali. Or the occasional classic match like Ray Leonard versus Tommy Hearns or Ali versus Frazier. Robinson was my perfect fighter. He had speed, grace, heart, punch, style, intelligence, fluidity, character, and will. He was the Einstein of the geometry of angles and distances. He was to boxing what Shakespeare was to playwriting.

  In 1998 I co-produced a documentary film about Robinson’s life for HBO and learned that Ray hated boxing. He killed an opponent, Jimmy Doyle, in 1948, and after that he disliked the thing he was a genius at doing. “It’s just a job, I do not enjoy it,” he once told Edward R. Murrow. I spent a lifetime looking for another Robinson, but never found his likeness. Knowing now how badly his health had deteriorated and how he felt about his gift. I wonder why I was looking so hard.

  This past June I saw boxer Beethoven Scottland get killed during a fight in New York City because of medical and regulatory negligence. I’ve seen other fighters crumble into a fatal coma, most famously Benny “Kid” Paret in 1962. But this one got to me because I felt it was especially preventable. The political hacks who rule the New York boxing commission failed to perform their job. The doctors present failed to intervene when it was obvious that a one-sided beating was going on. Brooding about this needless death, I reached the internal tipping point, where my guilt started to outweigh my pleasure. I now feel that boxing must he cleaned up, or I don’t want to watch it anymore.

  I have known a lot of fighters and liked almost all of them. They have no pension, no union, no health insurance, no voice. For every George Foreman who gets rich, there are 1,000 you never hear of who end up with slurred speech, failing memory, and an empty bank account.

  I once asked a gallant old champion from the 1950s, Boston’s Tony DeMarco, why so many ex-fighters I knew were such modest, quiet, sweet men, appreciative of any attention. “Because we’ve had all the anger punched out of us,” Tony replied.

  “Respectable Society Doesn’t Really Care”

  Boxing in the twenty-first century is not like it was portrayed in the movies of the 1950s. A gangster doesn’t strut into the dressing room, a cigar in his teeth, and whisper to the fighter, “Tonight isn’t your night, kid. You’re going down in the sixth.” The corruption now is more subtle, sophisticated, and systemic. It depends more on fixing the rankings than fixing the fights, although some rigging of results does go on, to manufacture “white hopes.”

  Lou DiBella ran boxing at HBO for eleven years and is now an “adviser” to the new middleweight champion, Bernard Hopkins. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and an advocate for reform.

  “The current system is designed for abuse,” DiBella told me. It is set up to keep the fighter in the dark. No one is looking out for the fighter’s economic interest.”

  “Respectable society doesn’t really care,” DiBella continued. “They say it’s just boxing, and boxing has always been dirty. Respectable society doesn’t care because almost all the fighters are black or Latino. Boxing is the sport of the underclass. Even the Russians are poor. If a golfer or baseball player were getting cheated and injured like this, there would be televised Congressional hearings.”

  “The law sets up an employer-employee relationship between the promoter and the fighter,” DiBella added. “Most boxers enter into legal contracts without any legal representation. The promoters are so powerful they are making the function of the manager obsolete. The two or three dominant promoters make vast profits within this system. But they are not really taking the kind of financial risk Tex Rickard and Mike Jacobs took sixty or seventy years ago. The money is guaranteed to the promoters by the televis
ion networks and the casinos. The promoter is negotiating with the money people and the fighter doesn’t know what is going on.”

  I have investigated the velvet sewer of professional boxing, applied my populist economics to this sports slum of sad endings. I see the fighter as the exploited worker, the gym as the factory assembly line, the promoters as the robber barons. I see the television networks and the gambling casinos as the bankers. I see the arena as the mine shaft, where the occupational hazard is a bleeding brain instead of black lung. I see boxing as a dangerous, unregulated craft, more about Marx’s concept of surplus value than notions of literary symbolism. There is nothing existential about a punch to the liver.

  Boxing has become like a gruesome car wreck. I can keep watching only if I am pulling a victim out to safety. I feel that I must do everything possible to make this velvet sewer better before I abandon it. That’s why this muckraking meditation will end with a proposed Bill of Rights for Boxers. The best way I can display my respect for the workers is to try to clean up their polluted and toxic environment.

  A Death in the Ring

  In June 2001, Beethoven Scottland was offered a fight with undefeated George Jones in Manhattan as a last-minute substitute. Jones was four pounds bigger and three inches taller. The fight was being promoted by Jones’s manager, Dino Duva, a conflict of interest that would be unacceptable in any other sport.

  Beethoven Scottland, whose father was a classical pianist and who was known as “Bee” to his friends in the Baltimore gym where he trained, accepted the fight on short notice because he was broke and needed the money. He had not had a fight for 329 days. Besides, the fight would be televised nationally on the ESPN2 cable network. Bee was promised $8,000 for the ten-round match, a modest purse. But Bee was an independent, who had no contract with any promoter or TV network.

  Since 1970, about fifty professional fighters have died in the ring. Most of them followed a warrior code that made them too brave for their own good. This was true of Benny Paret, Willie Classen, Stephan Johnson, Jimmy Garcia, Bobby Tomasello—and of Beethoven Scottland.