I had hoped to spend a little longer in Washington, even after George W. Bush finally defeated Al Gore in the contested presidential election of 2000. Technically, I was a political appointee. I understood that. President Clinton had named me undersecretary of the Treasury for enforcement and, later, commissioner of Customs. President Bush had every right to put his own people in those jobs. Still, I didn’t consider the idea of staying all that far-fetched. I never thought of myself as a creature of politics. I certainly never did my job that way. I didn’t even belong to a political party. I was a registered Independent, a professional law enforcement executive doing a professional’s job, able to work comfortably with Republicans and Democrats. Plus, I had Al Lerner supporting me.
Al was a former Marine Corps pilot who had flown missions for the CIA. In the years since, he’d become the billionaire owner of the Cleveland Browns and chairman of MBNA, a giant credit card issuer based in Wilmington, Delaware. He was known for writing large checks to causes he believed in. After a $25 million gift from Al, Columbia University, his alma mater, had just named its new student center Alfred Lerner Hall. I sat with Al at the opening celebration. He was also, I’d been told, the largest single donor to the 2001 Bush inauguration. His main contact, as well as I could figure, was Donald Evans, a close oil-business friend of the incoming president and soon-to-be commerce secretary.
I knew Al from the Marine Corps reserves and from several law enforcement groups he was active in. We had lunch in Washington before the 2000 election. “I’d like to stay for at least a few months,” I said. “I have some things I want to finish.” I told him I’d also heard that if I completed five years of federal service, I might be eligible for a government pension. “That would be nice,” I said.
“No problem,” Al told me. “I’ll take care of it.”
His assurance was good enough for me. While most of the other top Clinton administration appointees were interviewing for jobs and saying good-bye to their civil service staffs, I stayed put, running Customs, confident I’d be around awhile.
Al and I spoke a couple of times in late December and early January. Everything appeared to be on track.
On Thursday, January 18, two nights before the Bush inaugural ceremony, I went to a party hosted by Robert Cummins, who owns an elevator company in the Bronx and has some high-placed friends in Washington. I had just had a fascinating conversation that night with another guest, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, about the Bush v. Gore case, in which he was intimately involved. Then my cell phone rang. It was Al Lerner.
“Ray,” he said, “I can’t do it.”
He didn’t say why, and there didn’t seem to be much room for discussion. Just, “Ray, I can’t do it”—and my reply, “Thanks for trying, Al.”
I never did get a full explanation of what had happened or why Al Lerner couldn’t deliver. I learned later that I had a staunch opponent in the Air Transport Association of America. That group was a powerful voice in the airline industry, representing the chief executives of U.S. and foreign-flag corporations and cargo carriers. People there supposedly considered me too much of a “law enforcement type” and insufficiently boosterish toward foreign trade, a lucrative sector of the air-cargo industry. I don’t think it was meant as a compliment.
Whatever the full explanation, the appointees of George W. Bush would soon be moving their framed diplomas and cardboard boxes in, and I didn’t have a job—with the new administration or with Al. He’d already hired Secret Service director Lewis Merletti as chief of security for the Cleveland football team. When Louis Freeh left the post of FBI director later that year, he too would go to work for Al—at the credit card company. Washington could certainly be perplexing to me, even after I’d been there for more than four years.
I watched the inaugural parade with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senator from New York, who happened to live in the same Washington apartment building I did, the Residences at Market Square. For the first time in a long time, I had to go looking for a job. I started networking in the private sector, something I hadn’t had to do much of over the years. I spoke with a couple of people in the business world about job possibilities. I also discussed potential jobs with a New York billionaire named Michael Bloomberg. He had a successful financial-media company—you may have heard of it—Bloomberg L.P. Some months earlier, he and his political adviser, Kevin Sheekey, had come down to Washington to have lunch with me, saying they’d heard I might be moving back to New York to run for mayor. That was, to put it mildly, wildly premature, but we did have an interesting lunch, talking politics, terrorism, and international trade, three topics that seemed to captivate Bloomberg.
While I was looking for someplace to land, Andrew Maloney, who had been the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, reached out to me on behalf of his son, Patrick, a compliance attorney at the investment bank Bear Stearns. They were looking for someone to run their security.
Ultimately, that’s what happened. I got hired by Bear Stearns as global head of security. Alan “Ace” Greenberg, the firm’s legendary leader, was good to me. I was able to spend some personal time with him, getting my feet wet on Wall Street, learning how to protect a fast-moving financial firm and its highly sensitive data. The salary was nice, too. Bear Stearns paid investment-bank wages that made government employment look almost like volunteer work.
So I moved back to New York full-time and settled into my new life in the corporate world.
* * *
I’ve followed boxing my whole life. As a little kid, I sat in front of the television on Columbus Avenue, watching matches with my father. Later I went with my friends to the old St. Nicholas Arena, an ice rink turned boxing venue on West Sixty-Sixth Street. St. Nick’s, as everyone in the neighborhood called it, was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor. It began hosting boxing matches in 1906, five years before prizefighting was first legalized in New York. That ring had hosted some legendary fighters over the years, including Jack Johnson, Jess Willard, Kid Chocolate, Rocky Graziano, and many other early boxing greats. Future heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson fought his first professional match there in 1952.
On June 26, 2001, just as I was settling in at Bear Stearns, a boxing match was held on the USS Intrepid, a decommissioned Essex-class aircraft carrier that was built during World War II for the U.S. Navy. The Intrepid survived five kamikaze attacks and one torpedo strike before seeing service in Vietnam and in anti-Soviet Cold War operations. In 1982, thanks to the efforts of philanthropist Zachary Fisher and others, the ship was docked permanently on the Hudson River off midtown Manhattan as the centerpiece of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, one of the real treasures of New York.
I wasn’t on the Intrepid that June night, as a twenty-six-year-old fighter named Beethavean Scottland and his opponent, George Khalid Jones, entered the ring, but I would soon come to learn every detail about these men and the match.
Jones, a sturdy left-hander with a powerful right hook, proceeded to pummel Scottland through nine and a half punishing rounds. Scottland went down after a left-right combination with thirty-seven seconds left in the tenth and did not get up again. As the fight was called, Beethavean Scottland lay on the canvas, breathing but unresponsive. Once medical personnel were able to get a full-size stretcher onto the ship, after some difficulty, he was taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital Center, where he lingered in a coma. Two operations did not relieve the pressure that had built around his brain. On July 2, six days after the fight, doctors at Bellevue pronounced him dead, citing a subdural hematoma, a rupture of the veins between the skull and the brain.
Scottland, who had a 20-6-2 record including nine knockouts, hadn’t fought in eleven months. He’d been itching to get back in the ring. A scheduled match one week earlier had fallen through when his middleweight opponent backed out, blaming a pulled hamstring. Scottland had agreed to fight Jones only two days before the match, filling in for David Telesco, who pulled out after breaking his nose during training.
Scottland usually fought in the super-middleweight division, which had a weight limit of 168 pounds. To fight Jones, who had a record of 15-0 with eleven knockouts, Scottland moved up to the light-heavyweight division, which had a limit of 175 pounds.
The death in the ring was a big story in the New York papers and all across the boxing world. Fighters were often beaten on the canvas, but they were not supposed to get killed. The papers said Scottland was the fourth fighter since 1979 to die from injuries received in the ring in New York State. The previous one was in 1989, when John Gross died from a subdural hematoma at an upstate fight. Like Scottland, he’d been hit many times in the head.
The questions came like gloves against a speed bag. Why didn’t the referee stop the fight earlier? Why wasn’t a paramedic crew standing by? Was an aircraft carrier off midtown Manhattan really an appropriate venue for professional prizefights? Where was the New York State Athletic Commission, the agency that was supposed to regulate boxing? Who was looking out for the safety of the fighters and the credibility of the sport?
The roar grew loud enough that Governor George Pataki felt compelled to find a Mr. Clean to come in and, hopefully, rescue boxing from itself. That Mr. Clean was going to be me.
In September 2001, less than three months after Beethavean Scottland was killed on the Intrepid, Governor Pataki appointed me chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission. This was a part-time position. Jimmy Cayne, the Bear Stearns CEO, gave me his blessing so I wouldn’t have to leave the firm. The state salary was $110,000 a year, though I decided I would take the assignment without pay.
When I said I would do the job, I intended to do the job. I wouldn’t be a do-nothing political hack, looking the other way while the sport was corrupted, undermined, or ignored—regardless of what I was being paid. I got busy restoring a sense of professionalism to the battered sport of boxing. I was committed to turning things around, but I knew I needed help. My friend Bill Gallo, the beloved sports columnist and cartoonist at the Daily News, served as my special adviser. To oversee the staff and run the day-to-day business, I brought in Charles DiRienzo as the commission’s executive director. Charlie was affable, meticulous—just perfect for the job. I had worked with him in the 88th Precinct and he had helped reorganize the 106th Precinct after the stun gun scandal. He’d retired as an inspector and was running the fraud division of the New York State Insurance Department. So he already knew something about state government and happened to have a deep knowledge of boxing. With Charlie’s help I was eager to dive into the tough issues immediately, starting with an in-depth state police investigation of Beethavean Scottland’s death. I wanted to know everything that had happened that night and exactly what had led up to it. I asked the governor’s office to assign some state police investigators.
That seemed like a reasonable request—and an obvious place to begin. The Athletic Commission was a state agency. We were part of the New York Department of State. I was appointed by the governor. Our employees were on the state payroll. We were supposed to oversee and regulate boxing. Yet we had no investigators of our own. How could we hope to reform this undeniably troubled sport unless we had a clear idea of what the troubles were—and what the possible solutions might be? Wasn’t that Oversight 101?
Unfortunately, our request for state police investigators was denied by the governor’s office. The state police, we were told, would not be asked to probe boxing.
That was too bad. We knew a lot of corruption and double-dealing had historically been tolerated in boxing. And there were many questions just begging to be asked: What qualifications should be required for trainers, ringside physicians, and boxing referees? What medical checkups should fighters receive before and after they went into the ring? Why was there no standard way of taping boxers’ hands? It sounded so simple and so necessary. But apparently there was not much interest in addressing these questions head-on.
I knew what our job was—to make a dangerous sport as safe and honest as it could possibly be.
We began changing the commission’s policies and rules one at a time, finding our own creative ways to reform the boxing industry. The more time I spent around the sport, the clearer I came to see: the best people involved in boxing were the boxers themselves. Almost everyone else, it seemed, was somehow taking advantage of them. I saw the commission as the boxers’ friend.
We set up an 800 number so fighters and gym workers could report injuries that happened during training. We attempted to mandate MRIs. We began a program to tape hands consistently. We required doctors to go into the ring between rounds and examine the fighter after a knockdown. A doctor was standing there. Why not use him?
We couldn’t hope to change the sport all by ourselves. But clearly, a new day was dawning in the boxing world.
* * *
If anyone had doubts about the need for improvement, they were laid to rest at the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan on November 23, 2001. “Fighting for America—A Night of Thanksgiving,” the nine-bout card was billed. The promoters promised that all box office receipts would be donated to the Twin Towers Fund. Five hundred free tickets were given to firefighters, police officers, and other first responders.
The main event matched two super middleweights, Brooklyn’s Richard Grant and James Butler, known as the Harlem Hammer. Butler, who’d been favored to win, ended up losing by the judges’ decision.
Minutes later, Butler walked over to Grant as if to congratulate him. But instead of shaking hands, Butler coldcocked Grant in the jaw with a bare right fist, sending the winner to the mat with blood spurting from his mouth.
I was at ringside that night. I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen.
“I want this guy arrested,” I said to Joe Esposito, NYPD chief of department, who happened to be there. As Joe walked toward the locker room with a couple of uniformed officers, Grant was still lying on the canvas, his dyed-blond hair matted beneath his head, blood still flowing out of his mouth.
Someone yelled to the balcony, “Aren’t there any medics up there? Why isn’t a medic down here?” A moment later, a doctor stepped into the ring.
The police officers placed the sucker puncher under arrest. We pressed charges and he was taken off to central booking. He was arraigned the next morning on second-degree assault, a charge that carries up to seven years in state prison.
Grant was taken to the hospital, where he was treated for a split tongue. His jaw was knocked temporarily out of its socket. He had loose teeth and was experiencing headaches. He received twenty-six stitches before being released shortly before dawn.
At the next meeting of the Athletic Commission, the free-swinging Harlem Hammer was stripped of his $10,000 loser’s purse and given a temporary suspension from boxing.
I thought the message was a good one—and long overdue. There were some things that wouldn’t be tolerated anymore, even in boxing. The Athletic Commission was behaving like an Athletic Commission at last.