It?s difficult to think of ?The Brockton Blockbuster? without bringing to mind Britain?s answer to Jayne Mansfield, the delectable Diana Dors?
?You can keep your Marxist ways, For it?s only just a phase, For it?s money, money, money makes the world go ?round.??Monty Python
It was said of the laconic Gary Cooper that when it came to lovely ladies he said ?Yup? a helluva lot more often than ?Nope.? The same is true of undefeated heavyweight champ Rocky Marciano (49-0, 43 KOs). Indeed, it?s difficult to think of ?The Brockton Blockbuster? without bringing to mind Britain?s answer to Jayne Mansfield, the delectable Diana Dors (36D-24-35), a naughty postcard of a woman who called herself ?the only sex symbol Britain has produced since Lady Godiva.?
It?s not that Rocky and Diana had an affair?it?s that they both cached fortunes that have yet to be found.
According to Marciano biographer Russell Sullivan, the champ ?stashed money in curtain rods. He stuffed it in light fixtures. He hid it in old-fashioned toilets. He placed it everywhere except banks.?
?Trying to find it would be an exercise in futility,? said Rocky?s younger brother, Peter.
Which didn?t stop the family from trying. Writes Sullivan:
?In the years after his death they spent a lot of time searching for Marciano?s hidden fortune, which certainly amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars and may have even been millions (no one knows for sure). Speculation raged over where the cash might reside. Some felt it was somewhere in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where Marciano would often secretly visit. Others believed that it resided in safe-deposit boxes, Swiss bank accounts, or family beach houses. Still others felt it was buried in a bomb shelter that one of Marciano?s friends, Bernie Castro, had built on his Florida estate. In the end, no one was sure where Marciano had hidden his money. No one ever found it, and in all likelihood no one ever will.?
Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times observed that ?Rocky chased a buck the way he chased Ezzard Charles.? And he hid it like Diana Dors.
Shortly before her death from ovarian cancer at age 52 in 1984, Diana gave one of her sons, Mark Dawson, a coded message. Once deciphered, the whereabouts of a ?2 million fortune would be revealed. She told Mark that her husband, Alan Lake, had the key that would break the code. But, emotionally devastated, Alan committed suicide a few months after his wife?s death.
Mark was stumped for more than two decades by his mother?s encrypted message, but then took the seemingly insoluble problem to Inforenz, a company that specializes in information forensics.
?Mark came to us with a tatty scrap of paper with a sequence of letters written in a traditional coded five-character column format,? said Andy Clark, director of Inforenz. ?We routinely crack codes and passwords to reveal accidentally or deliberately concealed data for large corporations and businesses, so this very personal quest intrigued us.?
Vince Gallo, the company?s chief cryptographer, was convinced that Diana had used the Vigenere code, a ?classic encryption technique? developed in the 16th century and which remained ?uncracked? until the 19th. He was spot on.
So Mark and his siblings are rolling in it, right? Wrong.
Despite the successful decoding of the message, the location of the millions remains as mysterious as the identity of Jack the Ripper.
There must have been a second piece of paper?a second part to the code, the ?key? to which Diana referred. Unless and until it?s found, neither will the money.
Mae West with Gorilla Jones, Mamie Van Doren with Art Aragon, Lupe Velez with?well, pretty much everyone, including Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey. And Diana Dors?in addition to Swedish junior middleweight Bo Hogberg, who gleefully participated in her notorious orgies, there?s her connection?if more monetary than amorous?with Rocky Marciano, one of the greatest heavyweight champs of all time.
As Gussie (Louise Beavers) observed in the 1948 comedy classic, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, ?If you ain?t eatin? Wham, you ain?t eatin? ham.? And if it ain?t about the lovelies?it ain?t about boxing.
