Once Upon a Time….A Fighter from Sweden, Bob Arum, and the Diabolical Roy Cohn

Sixty years have elapsed since Ingemar Johansson made his U.S. debut with a shocking demolition of defending heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson. Now another fighter from Sweden, Otto Wallin, enters a U.S. ring on the big stage with hopes of emulating his late countryman. And inevitability, the promoters of Wallin’s fight on Saturday with Tyson Fury are invoking Johansson’s name as a cautionary tale, a retort to the cynics who say the Swede has zero chance of upending the lineal heavyweight champion. Hardly anyone gave Ingemar a chance. If he could do it, then why not Otto?

Johansson knocked Patterson down seven times in the third round before the referee thought it prudent to stop the fight. It was a total massacre. There were two fast rematches and Patterson won both inside the distance, but it is the first meeting, staged at Yankee Stadium, that everyone remembers because the outcome was so unexpected.

The promoter of the first Patterson-Johansson fight was Bill Rosensohn. Formerly an executive with the TelePrompter Corp, a pioneer in the cable television industry, Rosensohn, 38, was a greenhorn in the boxing business and undercapitalized, making him easy prey for those that wanted to horn in on his operation. Some of the infiltrators were alleged Mafia figures which led the New York State Athletic Commission to rescind Rosensohn’s license before he could put the pieces together for Patterson-Johansson II.

The dissolution of Rosensohn Enterprises left quite a mess. Roy Cohn (pictured) seized the moment, putting together a 10-man syndicate to get the rematch back on track and control the heavyweight champion, whoever that may be. The syndicate got it done, but not without extensive in-fighting, recriminations and ultimately lawsuits, foreseeable whenever venal people are brought together in a complicated money grab.

Let’s stop for a moment to make certain there’s no confusion. Bob Arum and Roy Cohn were adversaries, never collaborators. In answer to a question posed by this reporter on Wednesday, Arum called Cohn despicable. The late Mr. Cohn, a homophobic homosexual and an anti-Semitic Jew, has been called a lot worse.

For the uninitiated, Roy Cohn, the son of a New York State Supreme Court Justice, first attracted notice as the 23-year-old lead prosecutor of the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, a married couple accused of selling atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. Cohn’s bulldog cross-examination of Ethel’s brother elicited the most damning piece of evidence that sent Julius and Ethel off to the electric chair.

Cohn’s work attracted the interest of anti-communist crusader Joseph McCarthy, the U.S. Senator from Wisconsin. Cohn served as McCarthy’s legal counsel and sat alongside McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 which were undertaken with the goal of purging communists and homosexuals from the federal workforce. When Cohn returned to his law practice, he handled such diverse clients as John Gotti, Rupert Murdoch, the Catholic Diocese of New York, and a young Donald Trump. A man with enormous pull in political circles during several administrations and a publicity hound, Cohn lived large. His primary residence was a six-story, 33-room Manhattan townhouse.

One man that Cohn couldn’t browbeat was Bobby Kennedy, who was appointed Attorney General by his brother, President John F. Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy loathed Roy Cohn. And as had been true when the government went after Al Capone, it was determined that the best way to bring down Cohn was to dig into his financial affairs and punish him for his machinations as a tax cheat.

Enter Bob Arum, the young Harvard Law School graduate who would become head of the tax division in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. For 10 days, Arum took Cohn’s deposition. At issue was the dispensation of the proceeds of the first Patterson-Liston fight in Chicago which the government had seized pending an investigation.

At this juncture of his life, Bob Arum had never seen a prizefight. His contentious conversations with Roy Cohn obviously piqued his interest. “I learned a lot about boxing in those 10 days,” Arum told me. Years later, after Arum became a major force in boxing, he bumped into Cohn at a swanky restaurant. “Where’s my commission?” growled Cohn. He was jesting, of course, but the gist was that he ought to have been paid for his tutorial.

History records that Bob Arum’s maiden promotion was the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Chuvalo at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto on March 29, 1966. Arum credits the great NFL running back Jim Brown for making that promotion possible by introducing Arum to Ali’s Svengali, Elijah Muhammad. But, if one were writing Arum’s life story beginning with his involvement in boxing, one could begin by citing Ingemar Johansson who indirectly set the wheels in motion by virtue of his tie-in with Roy Cohn.

Six decades have elapsed since Ingemar Johansson came over from Sweden and made a big splash and 44 years have gone by since the late Mark Kram, in Sports Illustrated, wrote that Bob Arum, of all the major players in boxing, was the most resilient.

How prescient of Kram! Arum, now 87 years old with no sign of slowing down, will be ringside on Saturday at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas as the latest heavyweight from Sweden (a very short list) attempts to shipwreck the grand promotion at the end of the tunnel, the rematch between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder.

As for Roy Cohn, who never served a day in prison, he was eventually disbarred for what was termed “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation.”  He died of AIDS in 1986 at age 59 owing $7 million in back taxes.

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