Bob Lee — He Built the Sanctioning Body, Then Sold the Rankings It Existed to Protect

Robert W. “Bob” Lee Sr. founded the International Boxing Federation in 1983 and ran it for the next sixteen years, which gave him an unusual relationship with the truth about who the best fighters in the world were: he decided it, and the decision was for sale. On August 17, 2000, after a trial in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, a jury convicted him on six counts — conspiracy to commit money laundering, three counts of interstate travel in aid of racketeering, and two counts of filing false tax returns. In February 2001 he was sentenced to 22 months in prison and fined $25,000. The verdict word on the record is Convicted, and it is precise: he was found guilty.

It must be stated just as precisely what the jury did not convict him of. Lee faced 33 felony counts, and he was acquitted on all but six — including the racketeering charge and the bribery counts that sat at the very heart of the government’s case. The prosecution’s theory was that for thirteen years Lee and his lieutenants had taken roughly $338,000 from promoters and managers to inflate boxers’ positions in the IBF rankings and to grease the sanctioning of lucrative title fights. The jury accepted that money had moved illegally and been laundered and hidden from the tax man; it did not, on the evidence before it, convict him of the bribe-taking that explained why the money moved at all. The conviction was real and the central allegation went unproven at once.

A sanctioning body’s rankings are the closest thing boxing has to a constitution. They determine who is a mandatory challenger, who gets a title shot, and therefore who gets the multimillion-dollar purse — which means the body that controls the rankings controls the money, and Lee controlled the body. The scheme came undone the ordinary way: an insider went to the FBI. C. Douglas Beavers, the chairman of the IBF’s ratings committee, agreed to cooperate, wore a wire, and described how payments had been divided among Lee, his son, and a senior official. The IBF survived its founder, but only under federal escort: a court installed a monitor and a consent decree, and the organization spent nearly five years rebuilding a ratings system that was supposed to be fair from the start.