Knockout

For six months New York State's new athletic commissioner, Julius Helfand, traded legal punches with boxing's racketeers in an effort to demonstrate just who is really boss of New York's professional prizefighting. Managers, seconds, promoters, nearly everyone he tackled, refused to stand up and scrap. They ducked questions, danced away from each accusation, remembered little more than their own names (TIME, June 6). They felt fairly sure they had finished those early rounds without taking much of a beating.

Last week they learned how wrong they were. After spending a few more weeks studying their empty testimony, Lawyer Helfand threw a massive book at every single member of the Managers' Guild. In round and rolling phrases that are seldom heard over coffee and bagels on Jacobs' Beach, he accused the guild of engaging in "vague and shadowy" activities, of actions that were at once "malevolent, monopolistic, flagrant, shocking, vicious, arbitrary and illegal, absolute and autocratic, underhanded and dishonest." Guild members, said Helfand, had consorted with "the sinister and shadowy figure of the notorious Frankie Carbo,"and, what was worse, had displayed"an incredible and amazing ignorance" of their own organization. For all this and a few assorted other fouls, Commissioner Helfand knocked the guild right out of the ring, said that any manager who wanted to keep his state license would have to resign from the guild before Jan. 15.

All of a sudden, guild spokesmen started talking tough, made noises as if they would fight back in the courts. International Boxing Club President James D. Norris wondered out loud just how he would promote more fights in New York without the guild to do business with. But onetime Assistant District Attorney Helfand is too good a lawyer to make a move that the courts are likely to overrule. The odds are that the Managers' Guild is dead. If its members want to stick with boxing, they will have to mend their ways and operate on their own. But, said one guildsman last week, "if it took Helfand six months to decide on this step, how can you expect us dumb guys to decide on an answer in three minutes?"

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