He knocked out Cerdan in the 10th round to become the world middleweight champion. Jake LaMotta, right, fights Marcel Cerdan in Detroit in 1949. Bigger roles included low-budget films such as Chivato (1961) and House in Naples (1965), and he later cashed in on his Raging Bull success with a bigger part in Hangmen (1987). His movie credits included a bit-part in The Hustler (1961), starring Paul Newman, along with a cameo with another former boxer, Rocky Graziano, in the Sophia Loren film Firepower (1979). LaMotta could turn on the charm when it suited, and had a comedian’s sense of timing with his anecdotes and one-liners, which continued to earn him a living several decades after the paid fighting had ended. If I had hit them properly, they would be dead.” But I never really and truly hit my wives. He spoke of one particular attack on his second wife, Vicki, attempting to explain his behaviour: “If you had a girl and she was beautiful and other people were trying to invite her out and seduce her, wouldn’t you get angry? I saw these jerks and schmucks coming out with lines and it bothered me. The fighter also admitted to having raped a woman as well as beating the women he married.
It was a crime to which LaMotta confessed in his memoirs, published after the bookie – who never knew the identity of his assailant – had died. Sugar Ray Robinson falls through the ropes of a Detroit ring under the impact of Jake LaMotta’s fists in 1943. It was only years later, when “the ghost” – as LaMotta described him – turned up in his dressing room, still bearing the scars of the attack, to offer his congratulations after LaMotta had won the world middleweight title in 1949 from France’s Marcel Cerdan, that “the Bronx bull” realised he was not a murderer after all. The subsequent beating was so savage that he left the man for dead before escaping with a wallet full of cash. LaMotta had followed Harry Gordon, a neighbourhood bookie, whom he knew, as he carried his day’s takings, and attacked him with a piece of lead piping.
Living a feral life and frequently in trouble with the law, he spent time in the notorious Coxsackie Reformatory for delinquent youths after being convicted of attempted burglary.īut he was scarred for many years by another incident in which he believed he had beaten to death a man he had mugged.
The loose change thrown into the ring by the adult spectators helped to pay the family’s rent. Born Giacobbe LaMotta in the Bronx neighbourhood of New York, he had an impoverished childhood and told of how his father – a Sicilian by birth and the only man he feared, owing to the regular beatings – would force him into fights with other children.
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