According to a report in Bloomberg, former heavyweight champion Michael Spinks sued the estate of his former promoter, Ronald E. “Butch” Lewis, alleging Lewis failed to properly manage millions of dollars Spinks earned in his career and violated agreements to continue paying the boxer’s living expenses.
Lewis, who died this year, commingled his personal funds with Spinks’s money and used the boxer’s winnings to pay personal and business expenses for himself and his children, Spinks said in a Delaware Chancery Court lawsuit. The suit also names Robert L. Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, as a defendant. Johnson serves as one of the executors of Lewis’s $8.5 million estate, according to court filings.
“Lewis’s estate has refused to honor Lewis’s promise and has failed to pay any of Spinks’s living expenses,” the boxer’s lawyers said in the suit, filed yesterday in Wilmington, Delaware.
Neither Johnson, head of a real estate investment firm, nor Leonard L. Williams, a Wilmington-based lawyer, immediately returned calls for comment on Spinks’s suit.
Lewis, 65, died at his home in Bethany Beach, Delaware, in July. A former used car salesman in Philadelphia, Lewis rose to become one of the boxing world’s top dealmakers in the late 1970s and 1980s, according to the New York Times. He represented both Michael and Leon Spinks, two brothers who each won gold medals in the 1976 Olympic Games.
