George Kimball America at LargeWhew! This past Monday morning in Las Vegas, a federal jury returned guilty verdicts against South Carolina boxing promoter Bobby Mitchell and journeyman heavyweight Thomas "Top Dawg" Williams. The pair was convicted on one count each of conspiracy to commit sports bribery, sports bribery, and attempted sports bribery. Each faces a five-year prison term and could be fined as much as $250,000.

To my immense relief, the jurors managed to reach this conclusion without any help from me.

The last thing any newspaperman wants is to become the story, which is why it was so unsettling to receive a phone call last month from Kevin Tate, the Federal Deputy Public Defender who was Williams' court-appointed defence attorney on the case.

The government's star witness was Robert (The Middleman) Mittelman, a boxing bottom-feeder who had helped engineer the outcomes of several fights and then, in the face of overwhelming evidence, flipped and ratted out his co-conspirators. Mittelman pleaded guilty to similar charges last spring, but his sentencing has been deferred several times, presumably pending the extent of his cooperation with the prosecution of Mitchell and Williams.

I had had a long conversation with Mittelman in Athens during last summer's Olympics, in the course of which he had made several statements Tate thought might be useful to his client, to wit: when I had asked the convicted fight-fixer how he'd managed to retain his passport, he had replied, "Let's just say I'm on very friendly terms with the federal government right now."

Mittelman had also speculated, somewhat cheerfully, on the sentence he might receive: "Right now I'm supposed to be sentenced in October. I may not do any time at all, and at worst I'm probably looking at a year."

Since Mittelman's first-hand testimony figured to be the most damning evidence against Williams, Tate hoped to discredit the fixer's credibility by demonstrating that the government might have influenced his account by promising him leniency. And, presumably, he hoped I might aid him in that demonstration.

Over the course of several days in August, accounts of my encounter with Mittelman had appeared in dispatches I filed from Athens for the Boston Herald, for The Irish Times and for the website TheSweetScience.com. Tate began by asking whether the quotes attributed to Mittelman were accurate (they were), and then asked whether I would be willing to attest to their veracity on the witness stand. The government, he explained, would fly me to Las Vegas and see to my accommodation.

In other words, the United States Department of Justice, having already spent tens of thousands of dollars prosecuting the case, now wanted to spend (at least) another thousand attempting to discredit it by bankrolling my testimony to assist the indigent Williams' court-appointed attorney's defence strategy.

I've never been particularly comfortable with the notion of journalists being compelled to testify under subpoena, but in this instance there did not appear to be any compelling First Amendment issue. I wasn't being asked to give up a source, but merely to confirm that what I had written was accurate. After consulting with my legal adviser, I agreed I would appear provided my testimony would be limited solely to confirming the veracity of what I had written.

Although Mittelman, at the trial, admitted to having arranged 11 fixed fights with the defendants, including Williams' March 2000 loss to Brian Nielsen in Denmark, the fight at the heart of the prosecution's case was Williams' knockout loss to Richie "The Bull" Melito at the Paris Las Vegas on the undercard of the Evander Holyfield-John Ruiz WBA heavyweight title fight on August 12th, 2000.

I'd covered the card at the Paris Las Vegas that night, but would have made a damned unreliable witness when it came to Melito v Williams. I didn't see it, and practically nobody else did, either. Originally scheduled for five o'clock in the afternoon, it was mysteriously moved up an hour amid whispers that something odoriferous was afoot. Melito's first-round knockout of Williams took place at 4.0 that afternoon, an hour before the doors were opened to the public.

Kevin Tate apparently thought better of compelling my testimony, and while the trial proceeded without me, my stories did come up in his cross-examination of Mittelman. To his credit, the fight-fixer did not attempt to deny anything he'd said to me in Greece.

Mittelman conceded, as he had admitted in last summer's guilty plea, that he had been paid $1,000 to arrange the loss, and that Williams had received $10,000 for agreeing to lie down for Melito.

If Tate had hoped to discredit Mittelman's testimony, he apparently failed. Mitchell and Top Dawg were convicted. Seven other boxers were paraded through the courtroom, and each admitted to having thrown fights against Melito in exchange for financial consideration.

"By returning guilty verdicts against both men, the jurors in Las Vegas have spoken that criminal conduct of this kind violates an important public trust in the integrity of sports," said prosecutor Daniel G Bogden after the trial.

Mitchell and Williams have been released on bail pending their sentencing next February. Mittelman also remains on the street. His latest sentencing date is December 6th. It will be instructive to see how much time the respective parties receive for essentially the same offence.

In the meantime, I keep thinking about one other thing Robert Mittelman said to me that night in Athens.

"Look, I made a mistake," he said. "But I'm not a career criminal."