"The only reason you made money was because you bled in the ring!"
It was a breezy spring morning in May 2008. Tony Rizzo stood in the doorway of the Montreal penthouse Arturo "Thunder" Gatti shared with his wife, watching the petite ex-stripper-now five months pregnant and standing buck naked-rage. The boxer had invited his child--hood friend and business partner inside, but Rizzo was paralyzed by the scene.
"I saw your fight," Amanda shouted, her English blanketed in a thick Brazilian accent. "You're pathetic!" She was referring to her husband's 49th and final bout, a seventh-round knockout loss to Alfonso Gómez that had taken place almost a year before. "Your mother's a whore. Your brother's a loser. Go fuck your sisters."
Gatti, a two-time world champion famous for withstanding unimaginable punishment between the ropes, apparently had the same capacity in his private life. Glancing toward the doorway, he calmly remarked, "Tony, can you believe the mouth on this girl?"
At that point Amanda reached for the crystal glasses ornamenting the penthouse. "This is top-of-the-line crystal," Rizzo recalls. "And she starts smashing it on the floor. All over the place. And you know what she's screaming? 'You're my bitch! Clean, bitch!'?"
Shaken, Rizzo retreated to an empty apartment on the sixth floor—he and Gatti had developed the new 82-unit condo complex in Saint-Léonard, an Italian borough—and vomited in the bathroom. "I come from a normal family," he says. "I wasn't used to this behavior. I could tell things were going to get a lot worse."
Fourteen months later, on the morning of July 11, 2009, Amanda phoned Gatti's sister, Anna-Maria, from Brazil. "Something serious happened," Amanda said. "Your brother is dead."
On the kitchen floor of the duplex the Gattis had rented in the northeastern resort town of Porto de Galinhas, Amanda said she found Arturo, clad only in blue briefs. His body was curled beneath a wooden staircase, a large puddle of blood staining the tiles around him. The image of Gatti battered and bruised was hardly novel, but the crime scene was so gory that the boxer's longtime manager later refused to view the police photos. A deep ligature mark showed beneath his chin; his tongue hung from his bloated, discolored face. His right ear was engorged, and on the back of his head was a three-centimeter-long gash crusted with coagulated blood. His eyes, so often swollen at the hands of welterweight rivals like Ivan "Mighty" Robinson, Floyd Mayweather Jr., and "Irish" Micky Ward, were clenched shut. A clump of mucus bulged from his left nostril. He was 37 years old.
News of Gatti's death made international headlines and was the lead story on SportsCenter. Though he had retired from boxing in 2007, Gatti was beloved by devoted fans of the sport and was once labeled "one of the greatest TV fighters ever" by an HBO exec. He was, in every sense, a modern-day Rocky—a brawler in the ring, a warrior whose heart and determination kept him fighting long after more skilled pugilists would've given up. Over his 16-year career, the former IBF junior lightweight and WBC super lightweight titleholder amassed a 40-9 record, with 31 knockout wins. The Ring magazine named four of his epic battles Fight of the Year.
The day after Amanda discovered her husband's body, Brazilian police arrested the 23-year-old, 110-pound dancer, accusing her of strangling her intoxicated spouse with a thick canvas-and-leather purse strap. But just 18 days later, after viewing the autopsy results, they released her, concluding instead that Gatti had committed suicide, using the 48-inch strip of fabric to hang himself from the staircase. Shocked at the lightning-fast investigation and skeptical that Arturo would take his own life, Gatti's family had his body exhumed on August 1 and asked authorities in Montreal to mount their own inquiry. They hired famed forensic pathologist Michael Baden, M.D., of HBO's Autopsy, and they waited for the truth. More than six months later, they're still waiting. But the story that has emerged thus far is one of a violent, tumultuous marriage whose final night is still shrouded in mystery.
"It's not true," Ida Gatti insists, speaking Italian while a family friend translates at the marble block table in her kitchen, just off Rue Armand-Bombardier in Montreal. "If my son had to kill himself, do you think he would go to Brazil to do it?"
Since Arturo's death, Ida has worn black every day. Her eyes—slightly slanted and deep brown, like her son's—come alive as she catalogs her former daughter-in-law's faults: her filthy mouth, her volatile temper, her alleged mission to have Arturo change his will so she would inherit virtually all of his $6 million estate.
Ida, her late husband, Giovanni, and Anna-Maria all came from Caserta, near Naples, before emigrating to Canada, where the five youngest Gatti siblings were born (daughter Pina, followed by Joe, daughter Marella, Arturo, and Fabrizio). Giovanni had been a boxer in the old country, and he trained his sons to be champions. "My dad was scared of nothing," recalls Fabrizio. "He was a tough man." Joe "Lightning" Gatti turned pro in 1987, and Arturo followed four years later at age 19, moving to Jersey City, New Jersey to train and adding "Thunder" to his name as a promotional gimmick.
On club shows Arturo gained a reputation as a fighter who'd rather brawl than chase a foe around the ring and box. "He had the most exciting fights on the card because of his ability to sustain punishment and pain," says Carl Moretti, a VP of boxing operations for Top Rank, Inc., the preeminent Las Vegas-based promotion company. "It wasn't so much talent as it was nuts and guts."
In 1995, after taking the IBF junior lightweight title from Tracy Patterson, Gatti became a regular on HBO. When he defended the belt three months later, challenger Wilson Rodriguez swelled Gatti's eyes so badly the doctor almost stopped the bout. Somehow his cut man managed to reduce the inflammation, and in round five Gatti drilled his adversary with a left hook that broke a rib. A round later, as Rodriguez was protecting the rib, Gatti stung the contender's open chin with a left hook. Rodriguez toppled to the canvas, remaining there for more than a minute.
"It was unbelievable what Arturo could endure before he knocked you out," says Gatti's perennial manager, Pat Lynch. "He was not going to give up—to the point that it scared you. Because you knew he would die in that ring if he had to."
In the first of Gatti's three legendary battles with Micky Ward, the combatants hurled bombs at each other for nine straight rounds until Gatti appeared to be out on his feet. When he sat down on his stool at the end of the round, he deliberately tried to bite through his lip. "It was a trick he learned from Dale Earnhardt Jr.," says Mike Skowronski, an old sparring partner turned corner man. "When NASCAR drivers are falling asleep, they bite their lip. I got a bucket of ice, pulled open his trunks, and poured it on his balls. And it woke him up. He won the 10th round."
In total, Ward and Gatti fought 30 rounds over three bouts, every one of them torturous. In round four of their final encounter, Gatti broke his hand by crashing an errant right into his rival's hip. For much of the rest of the match, "the Blood and Guts Warrior" fought one-handed, eventually winning the bout—and the Ward series, 2-1. Then he met his friend Michael Sciarra for Chinese. "We ate, went down to Bally's, and he pulled slots for two or three hours with the injured hand," Sciarra says. "Then he went to the hospital."
Gatti's friends are full of stories from New York City nightclubs and the casinos of Vegas and Atlantic City, his favorite post-fight playgrounds, where he palled around with fans and charmed endless streams of women. He hated to be alone, and everyone was invited to the party. "We'd be drinking in the car, going 100 miles per hour into New York City," says Donny Jerie, a New Jersey body shop owner and close friend. "Arturo Gatti knew how to live, bro."
"He played as hard as he fought," says Moretti. "The release wasn't the fight—it was those months following the fight. Arturo could go for days, drinking, fucking woman after woman."
But eventually the pounding Gatti weathered in the ring took its toll. By 2005 he was contemplating life after boxing and began investing in real estate with Rizzo. The next year his then-fiancée gave birth to his first child, Sofia Bella. Gatti adored the baby, but when the romance cooled he found his time with Sofia restricted.
"There was a nasty and protracted child support battle," says John Lynch, Pat Lynch's brother and Gatti's attorney. "The mother wanted a lot of money. Arturo was worth a lot of money at the time. And they got into a very contentious litigation. The whole thing left a bitter taste in his mouth. He never stated this outright, but I think he believed everyone saw him as a pot of gold."
It was with this mind-set that Gatti walked into the Squeeze Lounge, a Weehawken, New Jersey go-go bar, with his black German shepherd, Hex, in late 2006. "Dogs weren't really allowed in the club," says general manager Michael Prosperi, "but Arturo was a celebrity. So I made an exception."
Amanda Rodrigues was onstage behind the bar. Like the other girls at the club, she'd dance, swing on the 30-foot pole, and strip to a G-string and bikini top. "She said, 'Look at that dog,'" recalls bartender Naomi Prosperi, Michael's wife. "'He's humongous.'"
Tight-bodied, with a belly piercing and a loud but seductive manner, Amanda had landed in the Garden State from her native Brazil in 2000. According to her mother, Rosie Barbosa, Amanda attended Hillside High School and Union County College, a two-year school in urban Elizabeth, studying business. Along the way, Barbosa says, her daughter worked at a Toyota dealership, a Nextel store, and a clothing shop-but never a strip club.
"Her mother didn't know she was a dancer," Naomi Prosperi says.
Michael Prosperi regarded Amanda as a practiced hustler. "I'm not calling her a prostitute," he says. "But these girls are here to make money, and she was one of the best. She could talk to a customer at the bar and keep him there, spending 100 or 200 dollars. Sometimes she'd say, 'Well, I have to go make money now,' and the guy would throw down some more money for her to stay."
Gatti didn't need a dog to start a conversation with a woman. But Amanda quickly treated him like he was the only man in the room. Within days the 5'7" fighter and the 5'2" dancer were describing themselves as a couple. When Gatti visited the club, Amanda would call him over to the other girls. "She'd say, 'This is my boyfriend,' and ask him to tip me," says Jessica, a Russian girl with puffy blonde hair and a tiny G-string. "And he'd tip me with a $100 bill."
Eventually, Prosperi says, Amanda quit her job at Squeeze, and Gatti paid for her boob job—for his pleasure more than anything else. Nonetheless, he'd occasionally pop into the club to hang out.
"Amanda came here one day and asked if anyone was doing lap dances for him," says Jessica. "And I told her, 'I did.' I know it was wrong because we were friends, but that's my job. She got mad at him, they had a big fight, and after that he stopped coming here."
Prosperi describes Amanda as possessive, claiming he saw her curse Gatti in public for talking to female fans. But Rosie Barbosa says that Gatti could also be jealous—and that his friends refused to accept the real source of the couple's problems. "I love Arturo like my son," she says in halting English. "But some people, when they drink, they get crazy. When he drinks, he loses control."
If Amanda saw Gatti's temper, it didn't prevent her from accompanying him to John Lynch's Union City, New Jersey office on Wednesday, August 22, 2007—less than a year after the couple's first meeting—to sign a prenup. "Amanda puts on a big show in front of several secretaries," Lynch says, recalling their visit. "'I don't want anything. I just want to sign. Show me where to sign.' So she signs the document saying she's not entitled to anything he owns."
The next day, the couple left for their wedding in Las Vegas. That Sunday, Lynch says, the boxer phoned him at home. "John," Gatti began, "whoever prepared this agreement left this girl without the shoes she came in with." Apparently, the prenup had become a major source of discussion on the honeymoon.
About six months later, Lynch was in court when he received a call from his secretary. Arturo and Amanda had arrived at the office and wanted a copy of the agreement. "I said, 'Look, don't give him the original,'?" Lynch recalls. "'Just give him a copy.' Arturo makes a big deal out of tearing it up, and now Amanda thinks there's no prenup. That's when the battles really begin."
After a domestic dispute in Hawaii in spring 2008, police discovered that Amanda was in the U.S. illegally, and the couple was forced to relocate to Montreal. It was there that their son, Arturo Jr., was born—and Gatti's relatives allege they witnessed the couple's violent relationship firsthand. "She abused him mentally and physically," says Arturo's youngest brother, Fabrizio. "She'd sucker-punch him. You know where he was staying the last six months of his life? At my mom's house. They split up every week."
Ida Gatti often baby-sat the infant and watched the couple fight: "I heard her say, 'I'll kill you…Go fuck your mother.' Arturo told her to be quiet, that I was in the kitchen. But Amanda said, 'She can't even speak English.'?"
Police reports indicate, however, that Gatti wasn't a passive participant in these arguments. On December 7, 2008, cops were called to the couple's penthouse, where they found Amanda with a bloody nose and scratches on her face, chest, and arms. She said that Arturo had come home drunk at 7 a.m., broken down two doors, and kicked and beaten her. He was arrested and charged with assault. After a second episode in March 2009, he was ordered to stay at least 200 meters from Amanda and to avoid alcohol.
But Amanda continued to contact her husband, begging him to help her establish citizenship. Concerned that she'd be perceived as an economic refugee, she requested a substantial money transfer, texting him, "I am applying for my American visa. My bank account must show a good number so they can believe in my statement."
By May, Lynch says, both Arturo and Amanda had hired divorce attorneys. "At some point she becomes aware that there's still a prenup and she gets nothing. So she tries to reestablish the relationship—'Let's work it out.' She then takes him to a lawyer in Montreal, and on June 17 there's a new will. And she's the executor." The new will denied the existence of the prenuptial agreement. Amanda was awarded "the universality of the residue of all" the fighter's earnings. His daughter, Sofia, was conferred "no benefits."
A day later, to the dismay of Arturo's close associates, he dropped Arturo Jr. off in New Jersey with his wife's mother and flew to Europe for the beginning of a "second honeymoon." But just days into the trip, the boxer phoned Tony Rizzo from Amsterdam.
"You were right," Gatti said in a voice mail. "It's a fuckin' nightmare. I'm gonna be back sooner than I expected."
But Gatti stayed in Europe. After two weeks Amanda flew on to Brazil, while he picked up his son in New Jersey, stopped off in Montreal, and then joined his wife in South America. When they arrived in Porto de Galinhas, checking into the Dorisol Hotel, Gatti apparently began to unravel.
According to Le Journal de Montreal, sometime after midnight on Saturday, July 11, onlookers claimed to have spotted the Gattis screaming at each other outside a restaurant. Arturo allegedly smashed a bottle on the ground, then pushed his wife and pulled her by the hair. When a bystander intervened, he reportedly slugged the man, knocking him out. Amanda stormed off, leaving the baby in a stroller with her husband as onlookers turned on the former champ, pelting him with rocks and even a bicycle.
A fuming Arturo returned to the hotel with the infant. But when he found their room empty, he put the baby in a taxi and went to a discotheque to search for his wife.
The newspaper quotes several witnesses who say Gatti pushed and shoved his way through the disco—while the child remained with the cabbie. Fernando Tasso, a Brazilian attorney representing Amanda, contends that the athlete was more violent: "He didn't fight one person—he fought a group. It was a very ugly fight."
Amanda was waiting at the hotel when Arturo and the baby returned. Police estimate Arturo consumed seven beers in the room. He seemed despondent, according to Amanda, especially after he saw bruises on her from their fight. He expressed remorse, but she says she'd had enough. She told him the marriage was over and took their son into the bedroom, locking the door behind her.
Eduardo Trindade, a Brazilian lawyer contracted by the Gatti family, says Amanda told police she went into the kitchen at 6 a.m. to prepare a bottle for Junior but noticed neither her husband's cadaver nor the blood coating the floor. "Only at 9 a.m., when she went down a second time, did she notice it," says Trindade.
Police theorized that a drunken Arturo had passed out before being strangled with his wife's purse strap. Under Brazilian law, Amanda was formally accused of the crime and taken to a detention center while authorities investigated. On a local TV station, Amanda's sister, Flavia, defended the suspect: "My sister, like us, is very religious and would be incapable of killing anyone."
In less than three weeks, the police would also come to embrace this position. On July 30, Arturo's relatives were shocked to see a photo of Amanda, in oversize sunglasses and a black Ed Hardy T-shirt, passing through the jailhouse bars with a vivacious grin.
"It wasn't right to put her away automatically," Tasso says. "The investigation led to the conclusion that he killed himself."
More specifically, police said Gatti removed the strap from Amanda's purse, fashioning it into a type of noose. Perching himself on the kitchen stool, they said, he intertwined the loop around the slats on the staircase. Then the former champ slipped in his neck and kicked the stool away—dangling two feet above the ground for about three hours.
Trindade disputes this theory and accuses the police of conducting an incomplete probe. He says they neglected to do a DNA test on the bloody towels found on the balcony and to explain why the bedsheet was stained with blood even though Amanda said she'd locked Arturo out of the room. In addition, when authorities attempted a "resistance test" to see how long the 160-pound Gatti could have hung from the staircase, a similar strap holding an 80-pound mannequin gave out in five seconds. "Are five seconds enough for a person to die from asphyxia?" Trindade asks.
More important to Gatti's friends and family, is it possible that a man who refused to quit in the ring would suddenly quit on life?
"If I'd received a phone call that he'd been in an altercation in the street or there'd been a flareup in a bar, fine," says Pat Lynch.
"But to tell me he hanged himself with his little son there? Never in a million years are you going to convince me of that."
While it's possible that Gatti had become dejected over the disintegration of his marriage, he had plans for the future. In Montreal he and Rizzo had been working on a 325-unit real estate project. Arturo was also preparing to open two gyms. And Donny Jerie had just restored a candy apple red '74 Corvette for his buddy.
Jerie alleges that Gatti was a victim of premeditated murder, lured to Brazil by Amanda, who he believes invited a collection of hitmen into the room. "This was planned," Jerie says. "The will was changed. When he signed that will, he signed his life away."
It's a notion Rosie Barbosa finds offensive. "She did not kill him for money," she shouts over the phone in New Jersey. "Amanda did not come to this country for a husband. Me and my ex-husband gave her a good education. My older daughter is a doctor in Brazil. Everybody thinks my daughter did this. Why? She's not a killer."
Still, on the day of the incident, Amanda herself offered up the theory that someone might have sneaked into the duplex and murdered Arturo. Authorities were dismissive, insisting that only two magnetic keys could access the room, and neither was used after 2:26 a.m. But could Amanda have let in the attackers afterward? And where was she while her husband was searching for her in the nightclub? Gatti's family contends that no one can be certain, since the Dorisol has no video surveillance.
Because of the controversy surrounding the case, prosecutors have refused to close it. Hoping to persuade them to investigate further, Pat Lynch asked Dr. Michael Baden—the television personality and former chief medical examiner for New York City—to examine Arturo's corpse. "They had done the outside incisions but hadn't looked at the organs on the inside," Baden says of the Brazilian authorities. "They said they didn't have the facilities to do an alcohol test, and that's the easiest drug to test for."
The contusions on the fighter's body differed from those of a typical hanging victim, Baden says. As of press time he was awaiting more data from Brazil to determine whether they could have resulted from the rock-throwing incidents or the purported brawl in the discotheque—or whether a drunken Gatti could have been beaten with a blunt object in his hotel room.
In addition, Baden maintains, the mark on Gatti's neck does not match up to the strap of the purse. "The ligature was less than 180 degrees on the neck, not 360," he says. "In other words, the strap was not completely wrapped around his neck. This is not how people usually commit suicide."
It is possible, Baden contends, that Gatti was a victim of a murder ploy often used in prison riots. "The inmates will kill someone, then hang him to make it look like a suicide," he says. "But it would have taken more than one person to do this."
Despite the ongoing investigation, Amanda returned to Montreal on November 5, asking a judge for a $150,000 advance on her husband's estate. Superior Court Justice Paul Chaput instead awarded her $40,000 toward legal costs.
Several days after her request, Amanda says she's been advised not to talk about Arturo's death. But she allows that she believes it was suicide. "I don't believe my husband wanted to kill himself," she says. "I think the alcohol did. I really believe that if my husband was sober, he would never have done that."
And what of the allegations made by Gatti's inner circle that Amanda was somehow involved in his death? She counters that these are the same people who allowed the boxer to self-destruct. Now, she says, they feel guilty and refuse to acknowledge the fact that they—not she—may have contributed to his death.
"It's easier for them to blame me than to blame themselves," she says. "I'm really shocked by the things they've been saying."
Back in Montreal, Fabrizio Gatti walks down to the basement of the family house. Around a dark corner, he unlocks a door that opens to a 10'x20' room. Arturo's IBF junior lightweight and WBC super lightweight belts rest on a bed beside a photo of Gatti and Micky Ward. This is where Gatti lodged during his estrangements from his wife. A laundered pile of workout clothes sits nearby.
"He's a multimillionaire," Fabrizio says, "and look how he's living." He peeks at a picture of Rocky Marciano, teetering atop a pile of personal items in a box. "Nobody knows the truth."