Despite his involvement in the mob-controlled rackets, King managed to mostly avoid legal problems during his youth. But on December 2, 1954, King shot and killed Hillary Brown after Brown and two associates tried to rob one of King’s gambling houses in Cleveland. The judge in the case decided that King had acted in self-defense and declared the act a justifiable homicide. King was released and continued running numbers.
Over the next 12 years, King continued to grow his empire and took over ownership of several businesses in Cleveland, including the Corner Tavern, a music joint that has since been enshrined into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. The law eventually caught up to him again. On April 20, 1966, King stomped a former employee named Sam Garrett to death over a $600 debt. In a trial overrun with witness tampering and bizarre judicial motions, King was eventually convicted on a reduced first-degree manslaughter charge. “When they sentenced me,” King told me, “they said it was a probationary shock. Like I would go in and come out quickly and they hoped that the experience of the penitentiary would shock me into going straight. Turns out they kept me in there for four years.”
King says he divides his life into two categories—Before the Penitentiary and After the Penitentiary. There is no doubt that his time in prison expanded King’s ambitions. He read voraciously, and by the time he got out he had built up the lexicon of quotations and malapropisms that would turn him into one of the great talkers of his time.
Within a year of his release, Don King was putting together his first fight. With the help of Lloyd “Mr. Personality” Price, a close musician friend of King’s from the Corner Tavern, King convinced Muhammad Ali to come to Cleveland to put on a boxing exhibition to help save a black hospital from going under. As part of the night’s festivities, King put on a concert featuring Marvin Gaye, Lou Rawls, and Wilson Pickett. The Don King template for big-time promotions was set—a superstar boxer, some vague social mission, and a whole lot of great music. He also found his cash cow in Ali, and although Ali’s camp never fully trusted Don King, the champ was impressed by the new promoter’s grand visions. In 1973, King attended the George Foreman–Joe Frazier title bout in Kingston, Jamaica. King, as his own legend goes, rode to the fight in Frazier’s limousine, and after Frazier got knocked out in the second round, King jumped into the ring, hugged Foreman, and left Jamaica with the new champ. By 1974, King’s ambition and hustle produced the Rumble in the Jungle, arguably the greatest sporting event of the 20th century. Everything else—the notoriety, the Thrilla in Manila, the hundreds of millions of dollars, the multiple investigations by Interpol and the FBI and CIA, the dozens of lawsuits, Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson, Julio Cesar Chavez, Tito Trinidad—came as a direct result of King pulling off the impossible in Zaire. An ex-con numbers runner, three years removed from the penitentiary, somehow brokered deals with Mobutu Sese Seko, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, James Brown, the country of Liberia, Barclays Bank of London, and several other operations that could have killed a fight that was perpetually in danger of being canceled or moved back to the United States.
But none of that—the killings, the jail time, the extraordinary hustle—matters much when it comes to Don King’s legacy. In the eyes of the public, Don King is a monster because he stole from his fighters. After Muhammad Ali’s brutal loss to Larry Holmes on October 2, 1980, King shortchanged Ali about $1.2 million of an $8 million guaranteed payout. While Ali was laid up in Los Angeles, his career finally dead and buried, King coerced Jeremiah Shabazz, one of Ali’s trusted associates, to bring the champ a suitcase filled with $50,000 and a contract that not only released the right to pursue any further punitive damages, but also gave King the option to promote any of Ali’s future fights. Ali, wearied and confused, signed the contract and took the briefcase. King repeated this process with nearly every fighter he worked with in the ’70s and throughout the ’80s. In doing so, he violated Mike Tyson, Larry Holmes, Evander Holyfield, and a long list of other fighters who came up, like King, from impoverished backgrounds to claim glory found “Only in America!”
King speaks of himself as a transformative figure, someone who through sheer intellect, hard work, and determination overcame racism, both overt and institutional, and brought millions of dollars and international adulation to the young black men he promoted. All of this is undeniably true. But Don King’s PR problem is that we don’t see him as a civil rights pioneer. We see him as a gangster—and as a gangster, he must adhere to the strict ethics of a gangster movie. He stole, without a hint of mercy or contrition, from his own people.