Boxing Conspiracy Theories

Duran ducked a rematch.

 

I've also never heard that about Jim Jacobs. If he was in the closet,he must have been so far in it that he was sampling Turkish Delight with a tall,evil woman dressed in white in the snow. Not that anyone's sexual orientation matters one iota.

 

Link brother?

 

The most persistent one I keep seeing across every boxing forum i scour is Donald Curry being gay - so random.

 

He started making excuses like "I will never again hurt a beautiful animal like the Horse"

 

The only thing close to this was Patterson saying that Cus put a cot outside of his room and slept with a gun as protection from supposed Mob influences ... but same bed? No.

 

https://penza.press/68262-valuev-ni...hikom-ubijstva-promoutera-olega-shalaeva.html

It's in Russian, so You'll have to use some online translator.
Not sure how reputable the source is - I also mixed one things up, should've checked on it before posting. His promoter, Oleg Shalaev, survived the murder attempt and then identified the shooter.
It was in 2003, so right before Valuev moved his career to Germany - so Shalaev probably wasn't involved in Valuev's career after that one way or the other.

 

The tell-all interview The Ring conducted with Bob Arum many years back where Arum admitted that if you wanted a title shot you had to drop a bag of cash to the WBA's bagman Pepe Cordero in Puerto Rico.

 

How the heck were they supposed to have embezzled $21M from a bank and framed Smith for it? And why would they … without that embezzled money, he has no promotion. So they would have had to have put it in his hands in the first place.

There’s a book co-written by the prosecutor that explains the scheme. Smith worked at Wells Fargo and had an inside guy after he left to promote full-time. They figured out a flaw in the internal accounting system where they could just create a paperwork check-kiting scheme that allowed them to cover bad (non-existent) money by creating a transfer from another account (that didn’t have the money) and then, before the monthly (or maybe it was weekly) audit, simply create another one that covered that … which wouldn’t show up til the following week/month by which time they had done it again. At one point the inside guy was sick and had to go into the branch when he had been out for several days to put in the transfer before it got caught.

Unless Don and Bob had inside access to create internal transactions in a major bank, there’s no way.

Now it’s entirely possible that they (especially Bob, he used to be a federal prosector, right?) would have tipped off the Justice Department and/or FBI that something fishy was going on here because this guy had unlimited funds from a source no one could ascertain (he’d say vaguely that he inherited a bunch of money) and a shady background (his real name was Ross Fields but he went by Harold Smith, changing his name after he got arrested or convicted for fraud/con man stuff under his real name) that had no trace of him before he kind of popped on the scene. There were questions in the press about ‘who is this guy and where did he get his money’ before the legal problems came so it’s not a stretch that Bob and/or Don planted those seeds — ‘hey, ask him this, ask him that, look into this’ and also did so with the feds.

A lot of people inside boxing thought he was laundering huge sums of money for drug dealers/cartel through his boxing operation as that’s the only place anyone could think of where there would be that big a stash to basically throw away overpaying fighters and such. But Smith/Fields got fights on TV and had sold a ‘Supercard’ to HBO — a lineup that included Cooney-Norton, Saad Muhammad-Mustafa Muhammad, Hearns-Benitez, Wilfredo Gomez, Aaron Pryor and more: https://www.boxingforum24.com/threads/the-greatest-fight-card-that-never-happened.680878/

Unfortunately for us, the feds caught up with him like a month or two before that one came off.

 

A sanctioning fee is common practice and nothing shady. The organization that sponsors the belt at stake gets some $$$ for overseeing it.

Bob’s talking about ‘hey, I need this guy to be ranked and this fight to be allowed to go on for the championship, here’s a bag full of money under the table to make sure that happens.’

 

I believe you may be thinking of the sanctioning fee for the fight itself. Arum explained that in order to get a WBA title shot in the first place, monies had to be produced under the table.

 

Pat, you literally beat me to the punch by seconds.

 

An example would be Ernesto Espana continually coming up for WBA title shots whether he earned them or not … the word was his manager or promoter was kicking money back to a high person in the organization to keep him at the top of the list.

One that may or may not have happened, but an example of how it would work:

Arturo Frias, a good but not great club fighter, wins the WBA lightweight title from … you guessed it, Ernesto Espana.

So maybe Bob drops a bag of money with his WBA guy and says, ‘Look, Ray Mancini is a cash cow and a guy who can potentially turn SRL type PPV events, but first I have to get a title on him — he lost to Arguello but he will beat Frias. Take this little gift from me and put Ray at the top of the line to allow me to make that Frias’ first defense.’

The WBA orders the fight (or OK’s it and tells Frias’ camp that it’s in their best interest to go forward with this … which no problem, it’s a bigger payday for Art anyway) and probably tells Bob — you have your fight, but our guy Espana gets the next shot no matter which guy wins it. So Ray stops Art in a one-round war and, lo and behold, makes his first defense against … you guessed it, Espana.

Every one of those title fights would also involve an administrative sanctioning fee, but the money in the bag is a lot more and goes straight into someone’s offshore account.