Fixed Fights in Boxing: Dives, Mob Control and Judging Scandals

Jake LaMotta was one of the hardest men ever to lace up a pair of gloves. So when Billy Fox knocked him out in the fourth round at Madison Square Garden on 14 November 1947, anyone watching could see something was wrong. LaMotta later wrote that after a couple of jabs he wondered whether Fox was "going to fall down". LaMotta had gone in there to lose, and for a while it looked as if he'd end up holding the other man on his feet.

The New York State Athletic Commission smelled a fix. It withheld the purses and suspended LaMotta. Proof was another matter. Later, in testimony and in his own book, LaMotta admitted he had thrown the fight to win favour with the Mafia, and that admission was his alone. The pay-off came on 16 June 1949 in Detroit, when he beat Marcel Cerdan for the world middleweight title. The dive and a $20,000 payment to the Mob had bought him that shot.

Nearly all of boxing's dark history is packed into that one night. A fighter who can decide a result on his own. Men in the shadows running his career. And a commission that could see the problem perfectly well but needed a confession to prove it. This is the boxing chapter of our match fixing in sport series, and all the way through it we keep a firm line between what was proven and what was only ever whispered at ringside.

The dive

The oldest fix there is: a boxer agrees to lose. In the 1940s and 1950s that was often less about a bet than about staying in favour with the people who handed out title shots. It's the same one-on-one weakness that runs through match fixing in tennis and match fixing in snooker. There are no team-mates to notice, and nobody else has to be in on it.

The men who owned the fighters

From the 1940s to 1961, organised crime owned boxers' contracts "under the table". Own the contract and you pick the opponents, you decide who gets a title shot, and you can lean on results whenever it suits you. The courts did catch the men at the top in the end, but for extortion and unlicensed management, not for any individual fight.

The judges and the gloves

The modern scandals are mostly about who sits at ringside: judges swayed by a home crowd or steered by officials, as at Seoul in 1988 and Rio in 2016. Then there's tampering, like the loaded gloves at the Garden in 1983. Some of these are worse than any betting fix. Most of them aren't betting fixes at all.

Where the line sits

Bribing a sanctioning body for a ranking is corruption, not fight fixing, and the difference matters. The International Boxing Federation's founder, Robert W. Lee, was indicted in 1999 over bribes for rankings, convicted in August 2000 of money laundering and tax evasion, and sentenced in 2001 to 22 months in prison and a $25,000 fine.

Start with the obvious. One person can throw the result. A footballer needs team-mates to go along with a fix. A boxer only needs to drop his hands.

Then look at who settles the close ones. Three judges score a professional fight from ringside, and Rio 2016 used five. That's a tiny number of people to lean on, and because scoring is subjective, a bad decision is hard to tell from a bought one. Every fight fan has heard a scorecard read out and wondered.

There's no league, either. Boxing is a patchwork of sanctioning bodies, the WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO among them, plus state and national commissions, with no single integrity unit over the lot. When Ontario's gambling regulator examined the WBA in April 2024, it found the body's Code of Ethics "does not explicitly prohibit betting by insiders". It's worth reading that line twice. And careers have always sat in other people's hands, from the managers of the 1950s to the officials who picked Olympic judges.

Eight decades, and just about every kind of scandal the sport has produced. Count how few of them ended with anyone convicted of fixing a fight.

"By [the fourth round], if there was anybody in the Garden who didn't know what was happening, he must have been dead drunk."
— Jake LaMotta, in his memoir

That candour is why LaMotta's is the one proven dive everybody knows, and why his story became Raging Bull. Fox, whose career Frank "Blinky" Palermo controlled under the table, was never the one who confessed.

Carbo, Palermo and the Combination

Frankie Carbo was a Lucchese-family mobster and former Murder, Inc. gunman, known as the "Czar of Boxing". Raging Bull's fixer, Tommy Como, is based on him. With Palermo and others he ran a group called the Combination, which held hidden stakes in fighters. By 1959 the pair reportedly owned a majority interest in Sonny Liston's contract. Keep that in mind for later.

The law got Carbo in stages. In the late 1950s he was convicted of managing boxers without a licence and served two years on Rikers Island. In 1961 Carbo and Palermo were convicted of conspiracy and extortion over welterweight champion Don Jordan. Carbo was sentenced to 25 years and died in Miami Beach on 9 November 1976. Palermo was jailed too. Neither man was convicted of fixing a specific fight, which tells you how hard that charge is to make stick even against the most notorious operators the sport ever had.

The 1960 Senate hearings

In 1960 the US Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly hauled the sport's underworld into public view. Carbo took the Fifth Amendment 25 times. Evidence showed that Carmen Basilio's managers on record had paid sums including $39,334.41 to Carbo's front man, Gabriel Genovese, while Basilio fought for titles. That figure, right down to the cents, tells you how businesslike the whole arrangement was. Ike Williams told the hearings he had been offered bribes "as big as $100,000" to throw fights.

That era hung over nights like Kid Gavilan's defeat to the Palermo-owned Johnny Saxton in Philadelphia in 1954. Saxton won a 15-round decision, yet 20 of 22 ringside reporters had Gavilan winning, and bookmakers reportedly refused bets. It remains suspicion, not a finding, and that's how it should be told.

"It wasn't that hard a punch... I got mixed up because the referee never gave me a count."
— Sonny Liston, as quoted by Dave Anderson in 1967

Lewiston, Maine, 25 May 1965. In the first round of their rematch, Muhammad Ali dropped Sonny Liston with a short right. Liston rolled over, got to a knee and went down again. Referee Jersey Joe Walcott lost the count because Ali wouldn't go to a neutral corner, then took the call from timekeeper Francis McDonough, and the fight was stopped at 2:12 of the first round.

Then came the chaos. The crowd chanted "Fix!", and George Chuvalo climbed through the ropes shouting it too. Even Ali seemed unsure: "Did I hit him?" Liston's history of Mob-owned contracts and the switch of venue to Maine did the rest.

The people who looked hardest saw a real punch. Larry Merchant wrote 50 years later that he saw it land, calling the fix theory "the apparently unkillable myth". Rocky Marciano changed his mind after watching the film, and José Torres called it "a perfect punch". Our view: it's boxing's great legend, and that's exactly where it belongs.

The worst scandal in modern boxing involved no bet at all. On 16 June 1983 at Madison Square Garden, unbeaten Billy Collins Jr, the betting favourite, took a terrible beating from Luis Resto and lost a unanimous decision. Collins's father noticed that Resto's gloves felt thin and demanded they be impounded.

He was right. The New York State Athletic Commission found that trainer Panama Lewis had removed padding from the gloves. The result became a no contest. Lewis's New York licence was permanently revoked and Resto was suspended indefinitely; he never fought again. In 1986 both were convicted of assault, conspiracy and criminal possession of a deadly weapon (the weapon being the hand wraps), and both served two and a half years in prison.

Collins paid the real price. His eyes were swollen shut, he suffered a torn iris and permanently blurred vision, and he never boxed again. He died in a car crash on 6 March 1984, aged 22. In the 2007 documentary Assault in the Ring, Resto apologised to his widow, Andrea Collins-Nile, and admitted his wraps had been soaked in plaster of Paris.

The family never saw any compensation, though the commission did change its rules. And the checks still earn their keep. In 2009 Antonio Margarito was found with illegal hand wraps containing gypsum before his fight with Shane Mosley, and was banned for a year.

The light-middleweight final at the Seoul Olympics should have been Roy Jones Jr's coronation. He hadn't lost a round on the way there, and against South Korea's Park Si-hun he landed 86 punches to Park's 32 on the computer count. Park won 3-2. Decades on, those numbers still make you wince.

Journalists later said in sworn statements that one judge told them Jones had won easily, but that he had voted for Park to placate the home crowd. Jones still collected the Val Barker trophy as the tournament's outstanding boxer. Scant consolation for losing a gold medal.

The judges were suspended or banned. But the IOC's investigation, which ended in 1997, found that although South Korean organisers had wined and dined the judges, there was no evidence of corruption in the boxing events in Seoul. The result stands, and nobody has accused Park of anything. He retired without turning professional, and in May 2023 he handed Jones his gold medal as "a gesture of justice". It's one of the few genuinely decent moments in this whole story.

What came out of Seoul was reform: computerised scoring and alcohol screening for judges and referees. In 2005 the IOC froze US$9 million of funding until judging was reformed.

Rio used a new 10-point must system, with five judges per bout and three of them chosen at random by computer. The uproar came anyway. Kazakhstan's Vasily Levit lost the heavyweight final to Russia's Evgeny Tishchenko amid jeers, and Ireland's Michael Conlan made his anger plain on social media after losing his bantamweight quarter-final to Russia's Vladimir Nikitin. The results stood.

The real verdict arrived five years later, from Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, commissioned by AIBA, the sport's world governing body, under Umar Kremlev. His report, published on 30 September 2021, found that medal bouts at Rio were manipulated by "complicit and compliant" referees and judges. AIBA officials had picked referees and judges to make sure bouts could be manipulated, at qualifying and at the Games, and the body meant to assign them fairly had become "a mere rubber stamp".

• Around 11 bouts. McLaren counted "in the vicinity of 11, perhaps less" manipulated, problem or suspicious bouts, medal fights among them.
• Winners chosen in advance. Officials were told in the morning who should win, inside a "culture of fear, intimidation and obedience".
• A bribe that was never paid. A witness described talks over up to $250,000 for a Mongolian boxer to beat a French opponent in a semi-final. No money changed hands, and the Mongolian lost on identical scores from all five judges.
• No verdict on Conlan. The report did not rule on whether Conlan v Nikitin was fixed, did not accuse the boxers, and could not identify who ran the scheme.

The fallout reshaped the sport. None of the Rio officials were in post for Tokyo, and the IOC ran the boxing at Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 itself. It had suspended AIBA in June 2019 over governance and finance, and in June 2023 it withdrew recognition from the renamed International Boxing Association, the first federation ever expelled. World Boxing received provisional IOC recognition in February 2025.

In the professional game, the commission is the first line of defence. New York's withheld the purses and suspended LaMotta in 1947, and in 1983 it revoked Panama Lewis's licence for good. The criminal courts handle the rest: Carbo and Palermo in 1961, Resto and Lewis in 1986.

Olympic boxing needed something bigger. Suspensions after Seoul, a funding freeze in 2005 and AIBA's suspension in 2019 didn't cure the judging. The McLaren inquiry, and the IOC taking the tournament off the federation, did the heavy lifting.

The newest weapon is the betting market itself. Boxing is only a small slice of the problem: the International Betting Integrity Association recorded one suspicious boxing alert out of 40 in the first quarter of 2023, against 15 for football. Our guide to how betting integrity units catch fixers explains how those alerts get raised.

Ontario's WBA ban

On 18-19 April 2024 the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario pulled the plug. It ordered every registered operator to stop taking bets on World Boxing Association events while it reviewed a December 2023 title fight in Florida between Yoenis Tellez and Livan Navarro, after two independent integrity monitors and an Ontario-registered operator detected "suspicious betting patterns". Its complaint was with the WBA, which it said had shown no evidence of efforts to enforce its own code over the incident. Betting would return once operators could show the WBA supervised its events effectively.

The proven cases share a pattern: control concentrated in a few hands. One fighter, one manager, a handful of judges, a rulebook with gaps. A big card under a strong commission is a different world from a thin undercard with nobody watching.

The red flags are worth knowing. Heavy, one-sided money on a fight going the distance, or on a specific round or method, on a small-promotion card. Prices moving the wrong way with no news to explain it. And remember Ali and Liston: a crowd shouting "Fix!" is not evidence.

Know how your bet gets settled, too. Midnite's boxing rules, for example, settle "To Win Fight" bets on the official result announced in the ring, and void all bets if the scheduled number of rounds changes. Most books settle on the result announced in the ring, so a result later overturned or declared a no contest may not change bets already settled. Read the boxing rules of whichever book you use, and our boxing betting guide shows how method of victory and round markets work.

Our view is simple: stick to UK-licensed bookmakers and major cards with a strong commission behind them. The rules are clear, the monitoring is serious, and you're far less likely to end up on the wrong side of someone else's inside knowledge.

Boxing's 20th-century fixes were about who owned the fighters. Its 21st-century scandals are about who sits at ringside and what the sanctioning bodies are willing to police. We think Ontario's move in April 2024 shows where the pressure now comes from: regulators and the betting market, not the governing bodies.

• Proven beats rumoured. LaMotta's dive is a confession. Ali-Liston and Gavilan-Saxton are suspicion, and boxing history is full of the second kind.
• The Mob fixed careers, not just fights. Carbo and Palermo were jailed for extortion, and the damage was done through contracts.
• Bad judging isn't always bought. The IOC found no evidence of corruption in Seoul, however wrong Park's win looked.
• Cheating isn't always about betting. Resto's gloves ended a young man's career with no wager in sight.
• Fight-length markets carry the risk. Rounds, method and "goes the distance" are where an insider would have the edge.
• Licensed books and big cards protect you. Clear settlement rules and proper monitoring beat a fatter price on an obscure undercard every time.

Related guides

• Match Fixing in Sport: How It's Done, Famous Cases and Every Sport Hit
• Match Fixing in Baseball: The Black Sox, Pete Rose and Prop-Bet Probes
• Match Fixing in Basketball: Point Shaving from CCNY to the NBA
• Snooker Match Fixing: The Scandals That Shook the Baize
• Match Fixing in Greyhound Racing: Doping, Ringers and Who Got Caught

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