Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [160]
“As far as leeches, he never gave them anything. They just followed him and got to eat free and got fat. It wasn’t like he gave people close to him or his family money, no. He’d give a stranger money before he gave his good friend money. That’s just how he was.” Accounts to the contrary belie Acri’s convictions about the fighter not helping those close to him. They would later have a falling out.
The famed Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa once wrote about a nomadic friend who felt that “getting rid of everything he had as quickly as possible was, for him, something of a religion.” That could have been Duran. While his handouts helped him connect to the people, and distance him from the star label that so many athletes clung to, his generosity tag factored in to his current fluctuating financial state. This state was defined by an ebb and flow of income that contradicted any real consistency.
“Duran always liked to be admired and he actually had an escort of followers,” said Augustin Jaramillo, a Panama City resident. “Whatever he would tell them, they would accept. He never had problems with them because they never contradicted him, in particular after receiving the money he used to give them. I believe he used to do that in order to feel stronger and that he needed people to be constantly flattering him. This made him feel well. It was kind of a necessary expense for him. All these admirers would only tell him good things, and would hide the bad ones, in order not to contradict him. They would always tell him that everything he did was correct and maybe this is what brought Duran bad luck, because they never told him the whole truth.”
Spada added: “The man had such a big heart. But maybe it was too big. He closed my mouth once. I used to ask him why he gave all his money away. He said, ‘Because those people are my friends.’ He closed my mouth.”
Though the performance against Barkley gave Duran the juice for the final showdown with Leonard, his bag of miracles was empty. Those who watched the celebration dinner at Victor’s were privy to the last page of a legend, the last bite of the steak. Barkley represented the last sip of champagne, the final standing ovation for a man steeped in the brutal epithets of fame.
AT 1 A.M. ON December 20, 1989, 27,000 U.S. troops, backed up by Stealth fighters and Apache helicopters, invaded Panama. Operation Just Cause was launched to depose and capture the irascible despot Manuel Noriega, who was wanted for drug smuggling and money laundering. The might of Uncle Sam quickly overwhelmed the 3,000-strong Panama Defense Force, though the military operation continued for several days, mainly against small bands of loyalists. An attack on the central headquarters of the PDF touched off several fires, one of which destroyed most of the heavily populated El Chorrillo neighborhood in downtown Panama City. Most of the homes there, meant originally for laborers building the Canal, were wooden. The little houses Roberto Duran moved in and out of as a child burned to ashes. Chorrillo was laid waste.
The invasion followed a failed attempt by the George Bush administration to oust Noriega in a general election that May. For all its visible poverty, Panama had for many years enjoyed economic success thanks to revenues from the Canal and its position as one of the world’s major crossroads. But opposition to Noriega, who was strongly suspected of drug running and money laundering, led to American financial pressure that had left the tiny state a shadow if its former self. Many of the banks on Central Avenue closed; people couldn’t cash cheques and every day seemed like a Sunday on