I've managed Leon Spinks, former heavyweight champ. I've managed Tyrone
Booze, former cruiserweight champ,
junior middleweight champ Buster Drayton, featherweight champ Freddie Norwood and
for the briefest of periods a guy named Jose Rivera who was the welterweight champ.
You fix fights
to make betting money.
You fix fights to get a fighter a championship. You fix fights
to maneuver a fighter up the ranks toward a championship fight.
You fix fights to win
in order
again to position someone strategically.
You fix fights to lose in
order to get paid and in order to make - you know - betting coups.
The way you fix fights
varies greatly.
You fix fights by buying judges.
That's... you know... that's one easy way to do it. You fix fights by having the referee working for you, so that
if there's any way that the ref can stop a fight in your guy's favor, he does.
You fix fights by colluding with the fighters, generally the loser. It's al... it's almost always the loser.
Winners almost never know that the fight is fixed.
One of the things that you're cognizant of when you are fixing fights is
that you're doing something illegal.
Something that theoretically can wind you up - you know -
wind you in jail and get people angry at you. So you never really say anything?
You know, nothing that's culpable.
So there's a code and
if you're in boxing for a while, you know the code everybody knows the code.
You will go into a gym
where there's either a trainer or manager and you're looking for somebody
your guy can beat. This is how these guys make their money, and it's interesting that people who lose in boxing
- generally speaking - if they're professional losers can make more money than winners.
Winning costs money,
losing makes money.
That's not true obviously at an elite level, but it almost every other level, it's the case.
So what you do is you say I've got a guy and
he is looking for work.
"Looking for work" is the first?
Okay, so it means that
He needs to win - you know - and you want to keep him busy.
The response to that is "I've got somebody" and generally the second phrase is "but he hasn't been in the gym too much."
Okay, so the subtext there is: He's not in good shape and
so you're honing in on where this thing is gonna go and you say that's okay, you know
I'd like a guy to get in a few rounds
That means it's gonna be a knockout
At which point he goes: "well, you know okay..."
I can do that, but really my guy isn't in shape to go more than three or four?
That's okay, so you've just fixed the fight.
Nobody's done anything illegal. Nobody's done anything where they've come out and stated anything explicitly.
But that's a done deal, and you get... you get what you pay for.
Can you say how many fights you've fixed?
Hundreds. How many I'm not sure, but hundreds.
I see it all the time now, I mean, I don't make our living in boxing anymore.
But I see fixes all the time, sure. It will always exist, it always has.
Alright fans, here we go with our main event of the evening
with over 90 countries in six continents tuning in. It's Showtime!
Vegas I think tends toward the sensational.
Irish hurricane Peter McNeeley!
Keep laughing, keep laughing.
Real funny huh?
If you go... if anyone of you
doesn't respect me
or what I'm doing or what I've been doing for the last three months
since I been asked... and going against a guy like this,
you'd have a big dump in your pants.
I'm hurricane Peter McNeeley from Medfield, Mass, (Massachusetts). On Saturday night, watch me kick Tyson's ass.
But if you haven't made your pay for view
arrangements yet, make them soon because remember what happens when I wrap you in my cocoon.“
McNeeley’s manager was a guy named Vin Vecchione.
Vecchione had no money,
so I... for a while was bankrolling what they were doing. I was bringing McNeeley sometimes and Vecchione to New York.
For various... you know and I was making fights for Peter,
so I mean I knew them very well, and I was very involved in what was going on.
So I bring Vecchione to Al Bravermans office, who was Don Kings Director of Boxing. And we worked out a deal.
for McNeeley to be Tyson’s first opponent which is a completely win-win situation for everybody.“
I'm just happy to be here, everybody's made their statements.
Mr McNeeley had a cute statement,
I'm just ready to fight. Thank you everyone for your support. Thank you.
And I get a phone call
from a guy whose voice I recognised but not somebody I really know.
And he said, look, somebody
thought I should give you a call, to let you
know that a bet got made,
That the fight wouldn't
Yeah, I'm trying to remember how he described...
I think he told me, the fight won't go... it's... it's not gonna go 90 seconds.
It was you know it was a million dollar bet and the fights not gonna go 90 seconds. Somebody thought,
you might be interested in that.
89 seconds at which point Vin Vecchione steps
between the ropes to prop the ending to the fight
Vecchione who really had this thing figured out, understood that
it was crucial that
there be no finding of impropriety
because Tyson was the machine
on which boxing ran.
By far the biggest earner in the world and...
You know when he fights in Vegas
they generate a billion dollars in added revenue. I mean not from boxing per se but you know from all of the ancillary revenue.
So it has to be okay?
And Vecchione knows that.
So he gets his payday, whatever it is, and I don't know what it is. I never did know what it was,
and I get a phone call from from him
and I'm still in Puerto Rico because... you got to come to the house
I got to see you, and I said I can't do it. I'm I'm still out of the country and he says:
Send somebody you trust.
And... when that somebody got there
He was given an envelope, and that envelope
put my son through college.
I got hit. You know I got knocked down
The man's quick, he hits hard.
felt like the first knockdown was a good quick punch;
on my part it was a little bit of a flash
knockdown but I was OK.
The second knockdown, as the film will show, I was shaky and I slipped and I fell on the rope,
and I twisted part of my knee, and-hey,
you see the film, look at the film, my knee buckled without even getting hit-look at the film.
Imagine that you're up against a very well-placed
high profile
machine that is capitalized
to a degree that you can't even begin to imagine a billion-dollar multibillion-dollar industry.
So this guy was nothing, except for his brain and his nerve.
And I'm thinking okay,
I know now he's got 90 seconds to make his move and
there has to be a plausible reason to do it. You can't just
walk into the ring, so you've got to watch this thing and you have to figure out
When can I do this?
Anybody who's got the kind of nerve
from that background dealing with what is on the other side,
you know, the establishment side,
to wait until one second
to step in.
If you don't admire that I don't know that yeah you see things that I don't because to me
that is the greatest single underdog score that...
that I've ever seen in all of my years in boxing. You know the single
most savvy maneuver that I've ever seen.
If you're in the boxing business, if you're doing it worldwide
you're going to run into gangsters, it's always been a sport that's had a lot of criminal activity, the Russian mob and the Mafia.
Both fractions figured out that I really didn't know my way around the game a lot
understood a lot about boxing and so I wound up making some fights for
mob guys of both both stripes...
and fixing some fights for some people but
there were problems, that... that showed up some things didn't go our way. Some bad things happened.
Well obviously, they didn't send somebody I mean, they didn't send somebody to kill me because, here I am.
I got a phone call from somebody I knew,
who said that I'd better take care of things I'd better iron out this problem
If I don't hear from you in two weeks, we'll have to
resolve this in a different way.
I really hope that we can resolve this the right way.
I mean if I have to take it just for the ... we can discuss the... it is entirely up to you.
So I brokered a deal that allowed me to get out.
