Commissions of Cronies

Last year Wally Matthews and I wrote a series of fifteen columns in the New York Post taking the NYSAC apart for patronage, incompetence, conflicts of interest and, most prominent, its repeated failure to protect the health and safety of fighters.

The counsel to the commission, Larry Mandelker, was also the counsel to the state Republican Party. He is an elections lawyer who knows little about boxing. He ran the commission during the years that poor Floyd Patterson was used as a front--made chairman in a cynical act that revealed contempt for a former heavyweight champion.

Tom Hoover was the capable deputy commissioner under Governor Mario Cuomo. He was called in by Mandelker in 1995 and told he could be the new chairman, if he agreed to switch his party registration to the GOP and promised to campaign for George Pataki's re-election. Hoover rejected the demeaning deal.

After the Scottland death, Hoover told me, "The kid should never have died. The commission didn't know what it was doing. They don't have one person who can take charge in a crisis like this one."

One of the three New York commissioners is Marc Cornstein. He got the job because his father, David, contributed more than $200,000 to Republicans Rudy Giuliani, Al D'Amato and Pataki, since 1997. James Polsinello is the $76,000-a-year special assistant to the NYSAC. He has contributed $27,000 to Pataki. Tony Russo, another GOP loyalist, was the $77,000-a-year seldom-show executive director of the NYSAC. He was quietly eased out after we exposed how he botched the weigh-in for the Arturo Gatti-Joey Gamache fight at Madison Square Garden in February 2000. Russo supervised that weigh-in and allowed Gatti to jump off the scale after the balance beam indicated that Gatti was clearly over the contracted weight.

Gamache's trainer, Jimmy Glenn, immediately protested that Gatti was "over the weight," and asked that he get back on the scale. But Russo, who was there to insure competitive fairness, told Glenn, "Shut up! Stop making a fuss!"

At fight time the next night, after rehydrating his body, Gatti weighed fifteen pounds more than Gamache; HBO weighed both boxers in their dressing rooms. Such a size disparity, over two weight classifications, is not permitted under the rules. Gatti knocked Gamache out cold in two rounds. Gamache spent two nights in the hospital and hasn't boxed since, on the advice of his doctors.

"They send us out to slaughter, and there is no one to protect us," Gamache told me. He is now suing the NYSAC for $5 million in negligence.

The Gamache episode dramatizes the direct connection between patronage and incompetence, between appointing hacks and increasing the risks to the fighters. The Gamache episode is the context for the Scottland tragedy.

Another incident underlines the link between ineptitude and jeopardy. Last year a fighter named José Maldonado, who had hepatitis C--which is contagious through blood and is potentially fatal--was allowed to box on a card in Westchester County, New York, that was promoted by Joe DeGuardia, a former prosecutor who is a favorite of the NYSAC.

Maldonado was a last-minute substitute, so his blood test was done the day before his four-round preliminary fight. The lab says it faxed his positive results for hepatitis C to both DeGuardia and the commission. But neither stopped the boxer from entering the ring. Fortunately, the sick boxer was knocked out in the first round, before he could bleed on his opponent or the referee. A month later an assistant to DeGuardia was fired for the carelessness of people in higher authority.

When Bee Scottland was killed, the athletic commission had fifty-five "inspectors and guests" populating the ringside seats. It looked like a Republican Party convention. But even fifty-five freebies and hangers-on didn't have the collective judgment to stop the fight in time.

And now death has again become a catalyst for reform, just as it was with the civil rights movement and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911. Two months after Scottland's funeral, Governor Pataki nominated Ray Kelly to replace Mel Southard as chairman of the NYSAC. It was a smart move. Kelly, the former New York City police commissioner, knows boxing, has integrity, has the capacity to listen and has been given a mandate to "clean house."

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