Iron Ambition by Mike Tyson

Author:Mike Tyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-10T15:37:02+00:00

9

If 1959 was a horrible year for Cus—Floyd losing his crown, Cus losing his manager’s license and being forced into a perp walk—1960 was starting out just as bad. Early in January his attorneys appealed the order to revoke his license. Besides arguing that Cus was now deprived of his “sole means of livelihood,” Julius November and Edwin Schweig painted a saintly picture of Cus. “Your petitioner has consistently aided young and deserving fighters by furnishing them with money, shelter, and the other necessities of life, all at his own cost and expense, and without reimbursement.”

They also argued that Cus “was harassed on all sides, was before the District Attorney’s Office of New York County on various occasions, and . . . that there was never any question of the honesty and integrity of the fight itself and . . . no evidence of any crime in connection thereof.” Finally, they blamed the press. “Many articles were written in the daily press to incite this Commission against your petitioner.”

On January 26, Justice Aron Steuer issued his determination. He wrote that since Charlie Black was a licensee of the commission, they could not ban Cus from consorting with one of their own licensees. He threw out the charge of failure to file a manager’s report, but he upheld the three most serious charges, including the determination that Cus “deliberately failed to attend at the investigation and defied the mandate of the commission to do so.” Cus was sunk.

Two weeks later, Cus was rocked when New York State attorney general Louis Lefkowitz brought an action to dissolve Floyd Patterson Enterprises, a corporation in which Floyd was two-thirds owner and Cus one-third. The attorney general went after Cus on the same charges that had brought down Norris’s empire. “Acting principally through D’Amato, Patterson Enterprises became party to a continuing conspiracy and arrangement to gain and maintain a monopolistic grip on the World’s Heavyweight Boxing Championship.” In detailing Cus’s arrangement with TelePrompTer, Lefkowitz revealed that Patterson and D’Amato were both voted a place on the TelePrompTer payroll, along with Sugar Ray Robinson. Lefkowitz cited all the attempts that Cus had made to foist his friends as managers for Floyd’s opponents and noted Charlie Black’s move to bring Fat Tony Salerno into the Johansson fight’s promotion. Certainly Black, at least, was nothing more than a conduit for the D’Amato/Patterson interests. In its decision dated October 13, 1959, rendered in connection with its inquiry into the conduct of the first Johansson fight, the NYSAC said of Black: “Charlie Black is D’Amato’s trusted adviser and go-between. Whenever there is a Patterson fight, Black appears on the scene either with a part in the promotion or in the boxer management. Black apparently has no occupation. He is friendly with Tony Salerno and has known him for 25 years; has known Trigger Mike Coppola for 25 years, and Velella for a good many years.”

These arguments were compelling enough to have a judge order the dissolution of Floyd Patterson Enterprises. All these legal battles were having an adverse effect on the rematch between Floyd and Ingo.

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