King may be big fish in feds' net

Even though they work opposite sides of the street, Greg Fritz could scarcely contain his admiration for his FBI counterpart. "That PR guy from the Miami office did one hell of a job," said Don King's publicist. "I wish I could pick up the phone and draw a crowd like that!"

Fritz wasn't present when a raiding party of federal agents 50 to 60 strong showed up at the Florida corporate offices of Don King Productions last Friday morning. The posse arrived armed with a search warrant and dozens of empty boxes, which they proceeded to fill up with documents they then carted away.

It wasn't exactly a clandestine raid, either.

The feds came accompanied by a media swarm which nearly matched their own numbers. Television crews representing three South Florida stations, several newspapers, and the Associated Press had apparently been tipped off beforehand and were on hand to record the proceedings from outside the building.

Fritz wasn't even in Deerfield Beach, where King's offices are located, on the morning of the raid. He was on his way to Boston, where he has spent the past week laying the groundwork for a nationally televised boxing card King will promote in suburban Wilmington on Saturday night.

But of course the reporters who had been summoned to cover the raid didn't know that.

"When I got to Boston I had 15 messages on my answering machine," reported Fritz. "The first one was from you. (I had phoned him from the Atlanta airport on an unrelated matter; my phone call was logged in just about the time the FBI hit the building). The others were from the newspaper and television people who were standing outside the building.

"Most of them basically said the same thing: `All right, Fritz, we know you're in there. Please come outside and give us a statement'. "King himself was clearly caught off-guard by the raid. "This is all nonsense," said the World's Greatest Promoter when he learned of the invasion. "They can look at all the documents they want. Had they asked for (the documents), I would have given them to them. I have nothing to hide."

Although the feds declined to specify the nature of their search, the AP reported that the boxes with which they left with contained information relating to the International Boxing Federation, Don King Productions and Monarch Productions, a company run by King's son, Carl. Fritz also reported that the FBI seized and carted off every computer in the building - "which is kind of ridiculous, since we don't even use e-mail."

A federal grand jury in Newark (New Jersey) had been quietly investigating the IBF for several months - even before the disputed draw in March between Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis. The outrageous nature of the outcome, along with the fact that it was the IBF which appointed controversial judge Eugenia Williams, tended to put the probe in the spotlight. Three weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times quoted boxing promoters and managers as saying the sport's sanctioning bodies sometimes sell the rankings that lead to more lucrative bouts. The Times reported that witnesses have testified before the federal grand jury in New Jersey that some payments to the IBF were made in cash, but that others were less obvious, such as those contained in overpayments of standard fees.

If the nature of the grand jury proceedings was common knowledge, last week's tactics have cast the matter in an entirely new light, leading to speculation that the focus of the investigation may have shifted from IBF president Bob Lee to King himself.

Consider this: while a grand jury is nominally an investigative body with the power of indictment, it basically operates at the whim of whichever prosecutor happens to be leading the jurors around by their collective noses. And as badly as the feds may have wanted Lee, King (who three times in the past decade has eluded attempts to convict him on income tax and insurance fraud charges) would make a far more appetising catch.

Here's what we do know: according to the IBF's own attorney, the New Jersey grand jury issued a subpoena for all IBF records since 1982 dealing with rankings and contracts for fights, as well as checks, invoices, expense forms and telephone records. Now since Lee and the IBF were the target of the investigation and they issued them a mere subpoena, the fact that the FBI took King's records at gunpoint indicates at least two things. One is that the feds had reason to suppose that the promoter might attempt to alter, destroy, or remove the materials if provided with advance warning. The other is that King may now be the big fish the government is after.

The corollary to this theory is that Bob Lee may have gone from target to chief witness for the prosecution. In other words, Lee may have rolled on King.

Interestingly, at the moment the FBI arrived at his doorstep, King was in HBO's New York offices, negotiating for a possible Lewis-Holyfield rematch in November. Although the purses, contracts, site, and television deal had been essentially worked out, a major stumbling block had arisen in recent weeks in the form of HBO's insistence that King agree to step down as lead promoter if he were subsequently indicted.

Now that precisely that appears on the verge of actually occurring, King must be wondering what sort of advance notice the HBO people might have been given. The promoter, who has confirmed that he now believes himself to be the target of the federal investigation, told the New York Times this week that he thinks HBO is responsible for the government's renewed interest in him.

"That's ridiculous," said HBO senior vice-president Lou DiBella. "We're back in business with the guy. Why would we want all this embarrassment?"

King is expected in Boston tomorrow for Saturday night's show, which will feature Frankie Liles' WBA super-middleweight title defence against Byron Mitchell, along with the WBC's number one rated heavyweight, John Ruiz, in action against Dominican Fernely Feliz, but so far the promoter has been uncharacteristically silent about last week's visit from the posse.

Until the grand jury finishes we can only speculate. But if Don King is indicted and Bob Lee isn't, it won't be hard to figure out what happened.