By BY DAN RODRICKS
SUN STAFF |
NOV 06, 2001 AT 3:00 AM
EDGEFIELD, S.C. - This is where the long, hard fall of Reggie Gross ends - in a two-man cell deep inside a maximum security prison on the piney outskirts of Strom Thurmond's rural hometown. He hasn't had a visitor in seven years. He hasn't seen his daughters in 12. Parole is a distant cloud. "As it all shakes out," predicted one of the men who prosecuted Gross, "he'll die in prison."
Once upon a time, Reggie Gross was a promising heavyweight fighter from Baltimore - the last one to make headlines before the emergence of Hasim "The Rock" Rahman on the international boxing scene.
For a few good years in the 1980s, with the legendary trainer Mack Lewis in his corner, Gross built an impressive record, first as a light heavyweight, then as a heavyweight. He traveled to Europe and to South America for fights. He fought, among others, teen-age sensation and then-future champion Mike Tyson at Madison Square Garden. Reggie Gross was once Lewis' pride and joy.
And maybe his greatest disappointment.
And not because Tyson finished him off at 2:36 of the first round.
But because Gross lived a double life: He was an enforcer for one of Baltimore's most violent drug gangs. Federal prosecutors accused him of serving as paid assassin for a heroin dealer who waged bloody war to control drug commerce in and around a West Baltimore housing project that no longer exists. In an indictment aimed at busting that drug gang, a federal grand jury pinned three brutal street killings on Gross, all occurring in September 1986, just three months after his main event with Tyson.
Gross pleaded guilty to the charges in 1989, got two consecutive life sentences and went to prison. Under guidelines that existed at the time of his crimes, his sentence is viewed as 60 years by the U.S. Parole Commission. He'll be eligible for parole after serving a third of that, about 2009. But it will be difficult for an admitted hit man to win parole at first eligibility unless he owns up to his crimes - Gross denies committing the murders - and lives a clean life in prison.
"I haven't had any fights, no violence," Gross said in an interview, his first since being incarcerated. "I don't bother nobody. I keep to myself. I mind my own business, and nobody bothers me. They know I can fight. Ain't no use in me going around bragging or none of that stuff. I don't do that. A lot of people say, 'Man, why you in prison? You don't belong in prison, man.' They say that because of my personality. I don't bother anybody."
Friendly manner
Now in his 13th consecutive year behind bars, the 40-year-old Gross still has a bright smile and a huge handshake, the same friendly manner that made it so difficult for people to believe he could be a cold-blooded killer. His arms still seem like long, thick branches of trees jutting from a mighty trunk. In his first years as a prisoner, when he was housed at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Gross ballooned to more than 300 pounds. But these days, at the 1,600-bed Edgefield prison, he appears to have his weight under control. He's careful about what he eats, even within the limits of Edgefield's daily offerings, and he excercises to keep in shape.
But there's no boxing. It's not allowed.
Gross writes frequent letters to Lewis, now 82 and enjoying the reflected glory of Rahman, the world heavyweight champion who, like Gross, got his start at Lewis' old gym, at Broadway and Eager.
Rahman, who in April knocked out Lennox Lewis in South Africa for the World Boxing Council and International Boxing Federation crowns, will defend his titles in a rematch Nov. 17. Rahman stands to make tens of millions of dollars from the fight in Las Vegas.
This has not gone unnoticed at the low-rise, gray-block institution here, where Gross earns $200 a month in the prison factory, sewing button-hole plackets on uniform shirts for the Army and Air Force.
He uses a good amount of his wages for telephone calls to "Mr. Mack" at his East Baltimore rowhouse. Lewis, the last man to visit Gross in prison, remains his only contact from the glory days.
"I hear from him all the time," Mack Lewis said. "I really feel sorry for him. But, you do what you can. I can't correct everybody."
Troubled youth
For a time, boxing and Mack Lewis were among the few positive influences in Reggie Gross' life. Raised by a single mother - his father, Russell Allston, was stabbed to death during a West Baltimore street fight when Gross was 3 days old in 1961 - the big, friendly kid with the ready smile was never far from trouble. Some of the neighborhoods in which Gross' mother rented homes were populated with heroin and cocaine addicts. When he was 13, he was arrested in connection with a purse snatching, and police found a toy gun in his possession.
He spent several years in a group home for juvenile offenders. While there, he met another teen-ager - "Sugar Ray Leonard's sister's boyfriend," Gross said, unable to remember his name - who knew some boxing fundamentals and training exercises. Gross learned to block punches and to shadow box. He jogged every day.
By 1979, he was out of jail, working in a construction job and bragging about being the next Muhammad Ali. Co-workers and friends challenged the boastful kid to prove himself and to sign on with Lewis, trainer of hundreds of boxers over several decades.
Lewis, whose eyes popped at Gross' 6-foot-3 body and his instincts, took him into his gym, trained him to fight, molded a muscular young man into a light heavyweight boxer. He liked him, worried about him, scolded him, admonished him to stay away from bad guys. And from women.
For a while, Gross followed at least part of that admonition. (The first of his four children, a son, was born that year.)
"In one month with Mr. Mack, I was ready to fight," said Gross, who had a 19-3 record as an amateur. "In 11 months I turned pro. Eleven months! I was 19. I wore Pro Keds for my first fight, against a guy from Virginia."
Fighting as a light heavyweight, Gross at one point had a 14-0 record. Things were going good.
But, even with the promise of a boxing career and the mentoring of a legendary trainer, he could not elude the long reach of Baltimore's illegal drug trade.
In recalling this part of his life, Gross mentions a slightly older and savvier man he knew as "Wimpy."
Wimpy - Gross said he never knew his full name - drove a Datsun 280Z. In March 1983, he drove it, with Gross in the passenger seat, to Atlantic City, N.J., for a light heavyweight championship fight between Michael Spinks and Dwight Braxton.
"On the way up in the car, he showed me $80,000 in the glove compartment," Gross said, still awed by the vision of so much cash. "Eighty thousand dollars! I was green, man. I was living with my grandparents. I didn't know nothin'. He whipped the cocaine out. It was raw, good stuff. One sniff and it made you want more. I knew I couldn't do it."
But, apparently, Gross did use the cocaine.
"I had did it," he said during the interview. "But I stopped."
He was still going to Mack Lewis' gym, still training to fight and still serious about a ring career.
In spring 1984, Gross' son, 5-year-old Philip, died from burns he received in a fire at his grandmother's rowhouse.
After that, Gross lost his heart for boxing, in the opinion of many people who were watching him closely.
But he kept going and trained as a heavyweight, hoping for a shot at Tyson the next year. He showed some promise by knocking out a fighter named Jimmy Clark in Philadelphia. When Tyson's managers agreed to a date - the day after Christmas 1985 - Gross trained with greater conviction. He ran up and down the back hills of Druid Hill Park with future world junior middleweight champion Vincent Pettway, also a Mack Lewis protege, and another boxer named Warren Boardley.
"I was in shape," Gross said. "I'd never been in shape like that before. I scared myself."
But the Tyson fight was postponed - a payday Gross could not make up with his fight, a month later, against future World Boxing Federation heavyweight champion Bert Cooper.
"I needed money," Gross said. "So I went out on the corner."
During the next year, Gross said, he committed numerous street robberies all over Baltimore in an effort to get drugs or money for drugs. And his boxing buddy, Boardley, became a ruthless and ambitious West Baltimore drug dealer who employed Gross to do his killing in what became known as "the war against the Downers." This urban shootout took place over the summer months of 1986 as Boardley's gang - according to federal prosecutors, one of the most profitable and violent in Baltimore history - fought for territory against brothers Spencer and Alan Downer.
Even as Gross became more deeply involved with Boardley and the gang's $50,000-a-week drug operation, he managed to train and to fight, his trainer unaware of his addiction.
That summer, he got his delayed shot at Tyson. Gross was one of three heavyweights booked to fight the 19-year-old knockout artist as Tyson primed for a title bout with Trevor Berbick.
In Fire and Fear, a book about Tyson, former world light-heavyweight champion Jose Torres writes: "Of the three boxers scheduled to fight Mike - Reggie Gross, William Hosea and Lorenzo Boyd, I was most concerned with Gross. I had seen him in vicious battle in Pennsylvania against Jimmy Clark and I was so impressed with both fighters I urged [Tyson's manager] to keep an eye on them and to put them on his list of possible opponents for Mike."
On June 13, Gross met Tyson at Madison Square Garden and came out swinging his big arms. In the first round, he unleashed a 10-punch flurry, including a jolting uppercut that briefly stunned Tyson. "The crowd released a collective murmur as if they'd shared the pain," Torres wrote in his memoir.
"I say to myself, 'Oh my god, I hit him,' " recalled Gross, 15 years after the bout. "I hit that man on the chin. I say, 'Suppose I hit him one more time with this right hand. I'm gonna knock his block off.' "
But Tyson exploded from a crouch with a left hook that sent Gross to the canvas.
"I say to myself, 'Oh my god, I'm on HBO, let me get up!' "
And Gross got back to his feet.
"Tyson landed two more left hooks to floor Gross again," The Sun's Alan Goldstein reported. "He gamely regained his feet, but referee Johnny Lobianco decided he was in no condition to continue."
Gross received $50,000, his biggest payday as a fighter.
When he looks back on his record of earnings, Gross said, he feels he should have done better - and might have, he added, with a more sophisticated manager. He received as little as $1,000 for some of his best fights. In 1987, he did better, making $10,000 for fighting future WBF heavyweight champion Adilson Rodriquez in Brazil, $15,000 for going eight rounds with future WBC heavyweight champion Frank Bruno in Spain. In 1988, he earned $8,500 in his defeat to Canadian champion Donovan "Razor" Ruddock on the undercard of a Spinks-Tyson title bout.
But when you've become addicted to drugs - and when the police have come after you and charged you with murder - that kind of money disappears fast.
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'. The style was never impressive to me because it is damn near MMA like, but I can't deny the accomplishments. Respect the sport above all else, Hatton retired one of my all time favorite fighters and I have to respect it.
foolishness
