He is standing at the doorway of his apartment on the corner of 57th Street and 1st Avenue and exuding the menace that has shadowed him since he forged his demonic reputation on the streets of the Bronx in prewar New York.
Jake La Motta: self-confessed rapist to read his 1970 autobiography, wife-beater, misogynist and former middleweight champion of the world; the first boxer to lick the great Sugar Ray Robinson; the man lauded as having the most indestructible chin in the history of the ring; the sociopath immortalised by Martin Scorsese in his seminal 1980 biopic Raging Bull. "What's the emoygency?" he growls as I quicken my pace to shake his hand.
He beckons me through the door of his studio apartment. Tiny but comfortable, it is on the seventeenth floor of a portered block in a slick part of midtown Manhattan. Sir Harry Evans, former Editor of The Times, and Tina Brown, the author and columnist, live across the street and around the corner is the home of the late Katharine Hepburn.
La Motta, 86, is wearing nothing more than a pair of colourful Bermuda shorts, which seems to exaggerate his distinctive top-heavy anatomy: large head on a short body. His torso is lean and healthy. "Take a seat." he says, gesturing to a chair in a mirrored corner of the room. His weathered face is a complex study in irritability, complacency and charm.
It is the autumn of 1938. Franklin D. Roosevelt is President, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is on general release, the Munich Pact has just been signed and the Great Depression is eating away at the fabric of American society. The 17-year-old La Motta is living with his family in a rat-infested tenement building in an immigrant Bronx slum and, despite his youth, has already forged a reputation as a violent small-time hoodlum.
The youngster has spent the day figuring out how to mug Harry Gordon, a local bookie, who always carries a few bucks in his pocket after doing the rounds in the neighbourhood. Gordon tends to take the same route home and, as the clock ticks past midnight, La Motta is poised in a dark corner with a length of lead piping wrapped in a newspaper.
Gordon appears, walking slowly, and La Motta creeps up behind. He whacks his quarry around the back of the head with the lead pipe; Gordon staggers but stays on his feet. La Motta is so enraged that his victim has not lost consciousness that he loses control, bludgeoning Gordon again and again across the skull until he crashes to the ground. La Motta then reaches inside his coat pocket, removes his wallet and vanishes.
The story in one of the next day's newspapers is depicted as follows: Harry Gordon, 45, with a record of bookmaking arrests, was found beaten to death in an alley off Brook Avenue in the Bronx at 4 o'clock this morning...
Source: https://www.boxingforum24.com/threads/g ... ead.52402/
Disturbing interview of an 86 year old Jake LaMotta. This article is from The Times UK from around 2008.
-
Inkdevil
Re: Disturbing interview of an 86 year old Jake LaMotta. This article is from The Times UK from around 2008.
This is the current 'top person' at the Times. England.
