Part 1, Fighters Getting Ripped Off Outside The Ring
Could Manny Pacquaio wind up someday, broke, busted and just plain disgusted? Is it possible for Floyd Mayweather to wind up not helping the homeless in Las Vegas but joining their pitiful ranks?
Certainly, no one hopes for that but, yes, it could happen. Unfortunately, boxing history is littered with great fighters who got knocked out financially.
I think Muhammad Ali used to have the best answer when he heard people bemoaning the sad financial status of boxing icons such as tax-plagued Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, who lived high on the hog and also made bad investments.
Recently, Thomas “Hitman” Hearns has had the IRS at his door and Mayweather caught up on millions of dollars in back taxes owed last year. Louis, the great “Brown Bomber,” seemed to have a perpetual income tax debt along with always mounting penalties.
All those millions, people would say, how did they fritter it away, how did they wind up without the proverbial pot to you know what in?
“Big businessman go broke, sometimes they jump out windows and kill themselves,” Ali would say. “Governments run out of money and so do whole corporations. So why are you shocked when a little bitty, uneducated fighter becomes broke?”
That quote is inexact but that was the gist of Ali’s response and it struck me then and now as completely valid.
Fraudster of massive proportions Donald Lukens even ripped off his girlfriend, shown above, along with numerous pro athletes including Terrible Terry Norris and Ferocious Fernando Vargas (Chicago Tribune Photo)
It’s especially meaningful now in a rough recessionary period when nations are flirting with bankruptcy.
I also thought it about after hearing the dreadful news that Ferocious Fernando Vargas has allegedly been cheated out of a half million dollars or more by a “financial adviser” named Joe Pecora.
Pecora is in jail in Camarillo, California, and facing fraud and embezzlement charges involving the popular boxer who grew up in nearby Oxnard.
If Pecora ripped off Vargas, he is not the first swindler who has cleaned out the boxer’s once bulging pockets.
There was a shyster lawyer named Robert Troy Caron, a high class hustler/swindler named Donald Lukens and a cultlike group called DFJ italia which was led by a super shamster named Luigi DiFonzo who also stole money from Vargas and from Terrible Terry Norris and others in boxing.
It’s as though Vargas became an unwitting magnet for such unsavory bunco artists.
Among others defrauded through the Lukens/Caron run Global Sports & Entertainment entity were NFL players Shannon Sharpe and Simeon Rice and NBA players Kurt Thomas, Byron Russell and Keith Van Horn. It’s been reported that Lukens scram ran into the area of $45 million.
Various fraudsters, including Lukens, attorney Robert Troy Caron and now allegedly his business manager, Joe Pecora, have stolen funds from former world champion Ferocious Fernando Vargas (Boxinginlasvegas.com Photo/Mary Ann Owen)
DiFonzo’s slick crew, whose pitch was that only “the royalty of European monarchies” were normally allowed to invest with them and who promised 24 percent quickie returns or more, also clipped sizable amounts from supermodel Kim Alexis and football star Eric Dickerson.
But more on those bad guys to follow.
If Vargas has to return to the ring out of economic desperation now, it will be sad.
Let’s hope that Pacquiao, Mayweather and other ring stars of today are not so blindly trusting of such con artists.
But, like Ali said, if it can happen to rich, educated guys, it certainly should not be surprising when boxers with little formal education are robbed of their hard-earned wealth.
Referees tell boxers to “protect themselves at all times” in the ring.
But who protects them outside the ring?
