The BAWLI Papers
(Boxing As We Liked It)
Edited by J Michael Kenyon

Issue Number 97
Tuesday, June 22, 1999
New York City, New York, US of A
___________________________

IN THIS ISSUE: TIMOTHY SMITH OF THE NEW YORK TIMES EXPLORES THE LEE, IBF
PROBE
_____________________________

The BAWLI Papers are periodically sent to a free-of-charge mailing list. To
subscribe, at no cost, send an e-mail message to
<bigbulls-request@lists.best.com and place the lower-case word "subscribe"
in the bodyof the message. To unsubscribe, do the same thing,except for
placing the lower-case word "unsubscribe" inthe body of the message.

Readers are welcome to submit interesting and otherwise noteworthy articles
concerning professional boxing's long and storied past. The emphasis,
generally, should be on the foremost fighters, managers, trainers and
promoters, and events that otherwise were of some moment in the sport's
history. Either transmit the articles via e-mail or mail them to the editor
at the following addresses:

J Michael Kenyon (oldfallguy@aol.com)
4739 University Way N.E., Suite 1150
Seattle, Washington 98105 (temporary)
 __________________________________

To access back issues of The BAWLI Papers, please connect with Marty
Mulcahey's splendid Boxing Wise Website: Dedicated to the Sweet Science of
Boxing.

The site contains: Information and opinions on the Sweet Science. This is a
no frills boxing site with lots of information, opinions and boxing related
articles. Everything at Boxing Wise is free.

 http://members.tripod.com/~fivedogs/

The popular Cyber Boxing Zone, located at
http://www.cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/bawli-idx.htm  also has a growing
archive of The BAWLI Papers.
_____________________________

ROBERT LEE, IBF UNDER SCRUTINY

(New York Times, Sunday, June 20, 1999)

By Timothy Smith

In 1983, Robert W. Lee Sr. quietly formed the International Boxing
Federation. If the announcement lacked both drama and publicity, Lee did not
lack for ambition: the I.B.F., he pledged, would be built from scratch with
the idea that it would objectively rank the world's top fighters and create
its own set of legitimate championship titles.

As the leader of a new boxing organization, one that claimed it wanted to
clean up a sport rife with wrongdoing, Lee was a curious candidate to play
the part of maverick reformer.

Lee, after all, had never been a serious boxer or trainer or promoter,
having spent most of his professional life as a homicide detective in Hudson
County, N.J. More odd, however, Lee, at the very moment he was creating the
I.B.F., was deputy commissioner of the New Jersey Athletic Commission, a
governmental agency charged with monitoring boxing in the state. And Federal
agents investigating corruption in boxing in the early 1980's had said they
had evidence that Lee accepted illegal payoffs in his job with the state
commission.

In the end, none of it -- a lack of experience, a possible conflict of
interest, a brush with the F.B.I. -- mattered. Lee indeed founded the I.B.F.
(originally calling it the United States Boxing Association International),
and within months staged its first championship fight. And for the last 16
years, the I.B.F., along with the World Boxing Council and the World Boxing
Association, has functioned as one of the sport's three sanctioning
organizations, and thus as one of its most powerful forces.

The I.B.F. has anointed champions, but it has also been sued by fighters who
have claimed, among other things, that its ranking system was fixed. It has
made millions of dollars, but has also been at the center of some of the
sport's great embarrassments -- most recently when the performance of a
judge it appointed in the Evander Holyfield-Lennox Lewis fight March 13 set
off a New York City criminal investigation into whether the bout was rigged.

Now, Lee and the I.B.F., and with them another layer of boxing's
credibility, seem to be in additional peril.  Federal prosecutors in Newark,
in a broad grand jury investigation that predates the Holyfield-Lewis
debacle, have been submitting evidence of possible criminal conduct by the
I.B.F, which is based in East Orange, N.J.

The grand jury is looking into whether the I.B.F. accepted payoffs in return
for ranking certain fighters. Over the last year, the organization's
financial records have been seized; promoters, managers and boxers have been
questioned about a variety of improper schemes, and the promoter Don King,
who has worked closely with the I.B.F. over the years, has said he believes
prosecutors have targeted Lee and the I.B.F. in an attempt to ultimately
indict him.

Lee has denied any wrongdoing, saying he believes he is being investigated
because prosecutors have failed in their attempts to go after the W.B.C. and
the W.B.A., which are based in Mexico and Venezuela, respectively. "I'm an
easy target because I'm in the United States," Lee said a few weeks ago.
"I'm here, and I'm accessible."

King, whose business offices in Florida were raided by Federal agents this
month, said before the raid that he expected to be indicted, but also
predicted that he would be exonerated. According to people who have
testified before the grand jury, prosecutors have focused on him because
they are interested in seeing whether he might have used his influence over
Lee to turn the I.B.F. and its titles into his own fiefdom.

"I know they're trying to get Bob Lee," King said, "but it always ends up
with me. I've been indicted all my life. But I'm not going to deal with
smokescreens and hypotheticals, and I'm not going to give up my most basic
right -- the presumption of innocence."

Boxing's sanctioning organizations have long drawn criticism. The W.B.C. and
the W.B.A. operated as fringe groups in the sport until the early 1960's,
publishing rankings of fighters and designating their own sets of champions,
but being all but ignored by the most powerful promoters and fighters. That
changed in the late 1970's when television networks, reacting to repeated
scandals in boxing, turned to the two organizations in an attempt to create
a credible mechanism for ranking fighters and staging legitimate
championship fights.

But despite having been enlisted to help the networks and the sport, the
newly powerful organizations were soon criticized for their own alleged
misdeeds -- manipulating their rankings, extracting enormous sums of money
from fighters, establishing alliances with promoters that called into
question the integrity of both fights and champions.

In fact, when the Committee on Governmental Affairs conducted the most
recent United States Senate investigation of boxing in 1992, it did not look
into the sanctioning organizations and their ranking systems, so convinced
was it of their illegitimacy.

"It was so universally accepted that they're arbitrary and subject to
manipulation that we didn't think it would serve any purpose to spend six
months looking into them," said Paul Feeney, a legislative aide to Senator
John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

As it happened, it was a scandal involving how boxers were ranked that
lifted the sanctioning organizations to positions of real influence. In
1977, during a boxing tournament televised by ABC Sports, it was revealed
that the rankings of the boxers involved, then set by The Ring magazine's
experts, were flawed, and that the records of some boxers were bogus.

Embarrassed, ABC turned to the W.B.A. and the W.B.C., which had been formed
decades before. The organizations took over the ranking of the top boxers,
deciding who would fight whom and when.

The organizations, which made occasional nods toward the interests of
fighters -- establishing safety regulations such as shortening the lengths
of championship fights -- became the beneficiary of television's effort to,
in effect, purchase credibility. Executives from ABC and other networks paid
the organizations for the right to broadcast a sanctioned fight, and
fighters gave up a piece of their purse for the privilege of having a shot
at a sanctioning organization's title.

And quickly, a dynamic of widespread coziness took hold.  The interests at
work in this dynamic were easy to see. One one hand, television executives
eager to offer the viewing public a reliable product came to depend on at
least the surface seriousness of, say, a W.B.C.-sanctioned championship, one
to be fought for by boxers whose rankings said they were deserving. On the
other hand, the promoters ingratiated themselves with the sanctioning
bodies, recognizing that title fights meant more money. And the sanctioning
bodies set fees for their championships, often taking as much as 3 percent
of each fighter's purse.

It did not take long, then, for people in boxing to conclude that in using
the sanctioning bodies to name champions, set rankings and strip fighters of
their titles if they did not box designated opponents, one scandal had
simply replaced another.

In 1983, Bob Arum, a longtime promoter, charged in a magazine article that a
W.B.A. official, Pepe Cordero, had extorted $500,000 from him in order for
Arum's fighter, Ray Mancini, to gain a championship fight. Arum repeated the
charge in a recent interview. Cordero, who was never charged or disciplined
as a result of the allegation, died years ago.

Others, though, made similar allegations. In the end, the F.B.I.'s
early-1980's study did not result in the prosecution of major fight figures,
but investigators nevertheless formed some conclusions about the sanctioning
organizations.

"They collect percentages of a fighter's purse in sanctioning fees every
time he fights," Joseph Spinelli, a former agent who led the investigation,
said. "No one knows where it goes or who it goes to. They're not accountable
to anyone."  Many promoters are quite frank about their efforts to get close
to the sanctioning organizations. It has been a ritual for years, for
example, for promoters to underwrite the costs of the organizations' annual
conventions.

"It's like everything else," said the promoter Butch Lewis, whose records on
his dealings with the I.B.F. have been subpoenaed by the F.B.I. in the
current investigation. "You go to the conventions, put on a cocktail party,
you make donations to the conventions. That's what you do to stay in
business."

Michael Marley, a former publicist for King who now manages a number of
boxers, agreed that the relationships between promoters and sanctioning
organizations could look suspect. "There were always hints being dropped,"
Marley said of rankings being put up for sale. "If you're a discerning
manager you see them. I can't give you any evidence. I don't have any
receipts. I don't think guys are bringing bags of cash and handing them out
to these organizations. But they do things like buy wedding presents for
people."

Boxing has always attracted eclectic characters -- from the heroic to the
criminal, the comic to the sad. Thus the story of Bob Lee and his rise
within boxing is not entirely difficult to fathom.  Lee, who at 67 is among
the most powerful people in the game as the head of the I.B.F., was not much
of a boxer as a youth, a broken finger cutting short his career after four
fights. He served as a detective with the Hudson County Police Department,
later lost an election for Sheriff in Union County, and then took up a
bureaucrat's job in the New Jersey consumer affairs office.

In 1978, though, Lee was assigned to assist Althea Gibson, the former tennis
great, in her job as the state's athletic commissioner. Part of his job was
helping attract boxing events to Atlantic City.

Almost from the start, questions were raised about Lee's conduct. In 1980,
the F.B.I., then conducting its initial investigation into boxing, said an
undercover agent had made an audiotape that recorded Lee's acceptance of a
bribe as payment for granting a promoter's license. Though the investigation
did not result in indictments, the agents gave information on Lee to the New
Jersey authorities.  Lee has always maintained that the bribery claim is
unfounded.

State officials did not take action against Lee on the bribery accusation,
but four years later they did force his removal from office. Lee, it turned
out, had worked for the W.B.A., and later formed the I.B.F., while he
continued to work at his state job overseeing boxing. In 1984, after an
investigation by the state Attorney General's office, Lee was forced by the
New Jersey Investigation Commission to give up his state job because of what
were termed ethical misjudgments. Among the findings was that Lee had
solicited funds for the I.B.F. from the very boxing people he was
regulating.

"I think he saw his role as more boosterism than regulator," said James
Morley, who headed the state investigation. "Most of those guys thought they
were there to find ways to get more boxing in New Jersey, not to regulate
it."

Scott Woodworth, the manager of Roberto Garcia, the I.B.F.'s junior
lightweight champion, said Lee's unusual route to becoming the head of a
sanctioning organization was a damning commentary on the sport.

"You know there's something wrong with these organizations when Bob Lee can
go from being fired as a state commissioner to being president of a
sanctioning organization," Woodward said. "But this is the business of
boxing."

At least one boxing manager, Ron Weathers, said he had told the grand jury
in Newark that part of that business involved direct payoffs to the I.B.F.
Weathers said in a recent interview that he had told prosecutors of "several
occasions" on which he had made improper payments in order to get his
fighters ranked.

"For years," Weathers said of the I.B.F. and the other sanctioning bodies,
"you could only do business with these organizations if you paid them
One fighter, William Guthrie, gave a sworn statement two years ago claiming
that the I.B.F.'s tactics could involve tools other than money. Guthrie, a
former I.B.F. lightweight champion, sued King, alleging that in using his
influence with Lee, King had told Lee not to grant Guthrie a title fight if
Guthrie decided to sign with a different promoter. Guthrie said Lee had then
in fact told him that.

"I had no doubt what they were saying was true," Guthrie said in an
interview on Friday.  Lee said he has been singled out for criticism and
punishment because he is black.

"My two predecessors, Abe Greene and Joe Maloney, who were both white, they
had done the same thing I did," Lee said. "I copied what they did. Yet they
never found them to be in ethical violations."  After the state Attorney
General's investigation, Lee continued to be haunted by his past. In 1992,
he was called before the Senate committee and was asked to answer questions
about the F.B.I.'s claim that he had taken a bribe in 1980. Lee repeatedly
invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege and declined to answer questions.

"If you look at the stuff they were talking about," Lee said recently,
"nothing ever happened."  Much, though, was happening with the I.B.F. Marvin
Hagler fought in its first championship event in 1983. Larry Holmes soon
became one of its champions. Its conventions attracted all the major
promoters. Lee's son, Robert W. Lee Jr., became a senior officer. The
organization's coffers filled with cash, as it took a greater percentage of
a fighter's purse than any other sanctioning body.

"The number of fighters who have come through here and have been world
champions, I'm happy about that," Lee said as he sat in the I.B.F.'s
offices. "If you think about it, we've put a lot of money in the pockets of
these guys."

The I.B.F. has only five full-time employees, and its finances are not
subject to any kind of independent oversight. According to people who have
testified before the grand jury in Newark, prosecutors are looking into the
question of whether improper payments to I.B.F. officials were made through
the overcharging of sanctioning fees.

Suspicions about how the I.B.F. has conducted its business have certainly
been widespread for years. Arum, the promoter who claimed he was required to
pay off a W.B.A. official for a prize fight more than a decade ago, said
that his early optimism about the I.B.F. quickly dissipated, and that he has
given testimony before the Newark grand jury.

"These were American guys who weren't going to be corrupt," Arum said he
once thought. But, he said, "I began hearing rumors as early as the end of
the 1980's that guys were paying for ratings."

The current Federal investigation of the I.B.F., according to law
enforcement officials, grew directly out of a lawsuit brought against the
organization by Michael Moorer, a former heavyweight champion. In his 1994
suit, Moorer argued that he had been wrongly denied the I.B.F.'s No. 1
ranking, and had instead been leapfrogged by two less-deserving boxers,
including François Botha, a King fighter who moved from No. 4 to No. 1.
Moorer said he had been told by Lee that he was not fighting frequently
enough to merit the top slot.

In making his case, Moorer and his lawyers obtained the testimony of
managers and television executives. The promoter Dan Duva, then president of
Main Events, said in an affidavit that the I.B.F. official in charge of
rankings, Doug Beavers, had told him that Lee ordered that Botha be
"unilaterally" moved to No. 1.

But perhaps the most provocative testimony came from Seth Abraham, president
of Time Warner-HBO Sports. He said in a sworn statement that King had
outlined for him how he would have Botha moved ahead of Moorer.  "And that
is indeed what happened," Abraham said in a recent interview. "There is no
secret Don knows how to use the organizations better than anyone I know. But
quite frankly all the promoters do what the organizations allow them to do."

The lawsuit was ultimately settled, and, according to John Davimos, Moorer's
manager, the fighter received $3 million and a promise that he could fight
for the I.B.F. title in the future. He fought for the title in 1996.

But according to lawyers involved in the suit, as well as a number of people
who have testified before the grand jury, prosecutors were intrigued enough
by the allegations in the case to start their own investigation.

A number of promoters, including Butch Lewis and Cedric Kushner, have either
testified before the grand jury or turned over many of the financial records
of their dealings with the I.B.F.  King and others have said that they
believe the Government's case has been helped by the work of Beavers, the
former I.B.F. rankings official, who they say worked as an informant for
prosecutors over the last year or more. Beavers, who has since left the
I.B.F., did not return repeated telephone calls seeking a response.

George Foreman, who once held the I.B.F.'s heavyweight title, also testified
before the grand jury. He said he was questioned extensively about knowledge
of kickbacks for rankings. Foreman said he told prosecutors he had no direct
knowledge of such payoffs, but that he believed such schemes existed. But he
blamed the promoters as well as the sanctioning organization officials.

"Have you ever heard the old expression, 'Can two walk together unless they
agree?' " Foreman said. "I believe that's the way it works."