Luis Resto was born in Puerto Rico then moved to New York when he was nine years old. In what may have been an unfortunate premonition of him as a fighter, as an eighth-grade student, he elbowed his teacher in the face which got him six months in a rehabilitation center for the mentally disturbed.
After the incident, his uncle signed him up for boxing lessons at a Bronx gym, and, as they say, the rest is history.
In 1975 and 1976, Resto won the 147-lb Golden Glove Open Championships. After winning back-to-back Golden Gloves titles, he turned professional in 1977. Six years into his young career, he had a decent 20-8-1 win-loss-draw record.
Resto faced Billy Collins Jr. on June 16, 1983. Styles makes fights in boxing, but the fight was expected to be one-sided considering Resto’s light-punching style against Collins’s 11 wins by way of knockout.
According to George Mackenzie of theversed.com, 10 rounds later, and the fight is over. Collins’s eyes are swollen shut, Resto has tampered with his gloves. The alarm was raised by Collins’s father and trainer, Billy Sr., who shook Resto’s hand.
Screaming that he thought the gloves had no padding, Collins Sr. demanded that the New York State Athletic Commission impound the gloves. An investigation discovered that an ounce of padding had been removed from each glove, the barroom equivalent of using a knuckleduster.
To think Collins’s was subjected to 10 rounds of this is bad enough—it would later emerge that Resto’s wraps had been hardened in plaster of Paris.
After a month’s investigation, the New York State Boxing Commission determined that Resto’s trainer, Panama Lewis, had removed the padding from Resto’s gloves. The commission suspended Resto’s boxing license for at least a year, stating that Resto should have known the gloves were illegal.
Collins, who suffered a torn iris and permanently blurred vision, would never fight again. His career was over, and he fell into a downward spiral. He drove his car into a culvert while intoxicated and died a few months after the fight—his father would later speculate that this was a suicide.
Randy Gordon, former Chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, wrote in his Bleacher Report article in 2011 in The Ring and called it “Murder, Plain and Simple.”
Resto, who had worn the gloves which did the damage to Collins, swore he didn’t know the gloves had been tampered with. His cornermen pointed fingers at each other and whispered behind each other’s backs. One cornerman, Artie Curley, died of cancer not long after the incident. He had told me—and others—that Panama Lewis had doctored Resto’s gloves.
The editorial opened up a legal case and both Lewis and Resto were put on trial. They were found guilty of assault, conspiracy and criminal possession of a deadly weapon. They were sent to prison for several years.
Gordon continues, “Three summers ago, HBO aired a documentary entitled Assault in the Ring. It was a disturbing, human drama piece about an incident which took place inside the ring at Madison Square Garden in 1983 and the three young men involved. It was so disturbing it won an Emmy for Executive Producer Eric Drath.”
Drath also directed a documentary on the same story and he said, “It was like a bare knuckle fight,” with Collins the only person in the ring wearing padded gloves as Resto was “killing” and “assaulting” Collins with loaded gloves.
In “Assault in the Ring,” after 25 years, Resto admitted to Collins’s widow, now Andrea Collins-Nile, that he cheated, that knew the gloves were loaded and the padding was removed and that there was hardened plaster on his wraps.
One might ask, was Resto ever remorseful?
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