The amazing story of boxing’s American gangster
When Joseph Parker fought in Providence, Rhode Island recently, Dylan Cleaver seized the opportunity to catch up with one of the city’s more infamous fighters.
In a boxing gym on the main street of North Providence, next door to Larry’s Lounge and across the road from Dollar Tree, the American Dream meets American Gangster.
The gym is so new that it is yet to earn that timeless fragrance of sweat and leather.
There is wall-to-wall Everlast equipment; the canvas inside the ring has retained its sheen. If blood has been spilt in there, it is not immediately obvious.
The gym is near empty. There’s Solomon, a young black guy who looks like a welterweight, and John, the heavily tattooed local chapter boss of the Hell’s Angels. They’re hitting bags, not each other.
A white Mercedes sedan pulls up outside Legendary Boxing. Out steps a light heavyweight with a permatan and slicked-down hair. He’s 45 and built like a beer fridge; perfectly capable, he reckons, of going 12 rounds with anyone you might want to put in front of him.
He doesn’t lock his car. He doesn’t even raise the windows. He doesn’t need to.
Nobody would be stupid enough to steal from Jarrod Tillinghast.
The former boxer was another face in the crowd when Joseph Parker fought Alex Leapai at the Dunkin’ Donuts Centre in his home town of Providence.
The main event on the card was the WBO middleweight title fight between Pole Maciej Sulecki and local hero Demetrius “Booboo” Andrade.
The latter carries the burden of returning Providence to boxing glory not seen since Vinny Pazienza stalked the ring in the 1980s.
Many thought it would be Tillinghast filling that void. After all, he had a name that was instantly recognisable in Rhode Island and beyond — for most of the wrong reasons.
Jarrod’s father Jerry Tillinghast made his name as the local mafia’s go-to guy for muscle. Rumour has it he racked up a body count in service to the Patriarca family — who ran the bulk of organised crime in New England, a region covering the six northeast states of the US from Connecticut to Maine — that would make your average psychopath blush.
His son, Jarrod, has quite a story, too, and he’s here to share it. It’s a boxing story, sure, but it’s more than that. After two hours or so of listening and not much talking, you feel like you’re nearing the climax of a Scorsese movie.
The only difference is that it’s all true.
‘Boxing saved my life many times over,” Tillinghast says. “I should have been dead like 75,000 times.
“I grew up with payback on my mind. It made me say, ‘F*** everybody, I’m doing this my way and I’m going to take out everybody in my path. I was knocking guys out as far as I can remember. I had heart and I had balls and that’s a tough combination when you’re misguided and you don’t care.”
If Tillinghast’s outlook on life sounds like it falls somewhere between anarchic and nihilistic, you need to understand his past.
Jerry Tillinghast might have been Irish but he lived his life in service to the Italians. His surname meant he could never be a “made man”, but it was no impediment to him becoming one of Raymond Patriarca snr’s most loyal and trusted associates.
“He took a real liking to my dad,” Tillinghast says. “My dad was his guy, his ace. My dad came out of the military, Vietnam. He was big and strong and came back home and somehow, some way, ended up linking up with Raymond and the rest is history.”
Jerry was implicated in the 1975 US$3 million Bonded Vault robbery, the largest in Rhode Island history, although he wasn’t convicted. He was also the chief suspect in several underworld murders.
His career choices finally came to a head in late 1978, when he and brother Harold were arrested and subsequently convicted for the murder of loan shark George Basmajian. The court noted that Tillinghast fired six rounds into Basmajian, stopped and reloaded, before putting another three into his body for good measure.
The brothers then went to drink at a popular Providence bar, where they were arrested.
So Jerry wasn’t much of a father at a time when the perpetually angry Jarrod could have used a dad.
Terry Tillinghast wasn’t much of a mother, either.
A drug and alcohol addict, Terry “raised” Jarrod in a house of 24-hour party people.
While his siblings slept, Tillinghast would sit at the top of the stairs and try to keep an eye out for his mum.
“She does well now, but in those days, you wake up the next morning and your mother’s face looks like the Elephant Man because of her boyfriend. All I could do was think, ‘I can’t wait till I’m big’.
“It made me nasty, mean. The times I woke up to my mum being beaten — and not just beaten but unrecognisably beaten — as a kid to see that, it was very difficult for me.”
With an absentee father and an addict mum, the odds were against Tillinghast living a straight life, so he made his way the only way he knew how. From a young age, he ran with a crew from the Silver Lake district of Providence.
They quickly made a name for themselves with the police and social services, and other criminals.
Although Silver Lake was an Italian stronghold, they weren’t mafia.
“They were just my clique, not wiseguys, and we were a strong crew. We were robbing drug dealers — anything that we could make money out of. We were into a lot of stuff.”
It was the sort of “stuff” that was getting talked about. That talk filtered back to his father in prison.
“At this stage, I was biting people’s ears off, pinching noses. I had one foot in training school [jail for youth] and one foot out. I was in courts every day but I really liked freedom. I was a street fighter. I was knocking people out. My left hook, it’s sinister.
“I went to visit my dad one day and he said, ‘Kid, you’re going to be right next to me. What are you doing? You’re going to be in prison next to me at the rate you’re going. If you want to fight, why don’t you try to make money?’ I said, ‘That’s a good idea’. I walked into a gym at 15 and gave it a shot.”
The bond was instant. Tillinghast trained for two months and despite being 15 with a 16-year-old age limit, entered his first regional Golden Gloves tournament.
In the final, he met John Kimbrough, a much older, taller man. The fight is on YouTube. Tillinghast looks like a kid because, well, he is, but the boyishness can’t hide his fury. Tillinghast gets the decision. And Tillinghast kept winning. Before boxing, he knew he was good at being bad; now, in the ring, he was good at being good.
“I was a boxer-puncher. My heels don’t hit the floor and I can knock you out with either hand and I was good looking.
“I was a deadly combination: I was sexy, I kick ass; I take your girl and your money,” he says, unable to contain a rattling laugh.
Tillinghast went on to win close to 20 Golden Gloves tournaments but the reputation he was gaining from boxing couldn’t completely fill the void of the notoriety he’d earned on the streets, hanging with his crew, creating mayhem, making easy money.
“At one point in my life, the police, the CIA and the FBI were all following me. Growing up with my name, I’d get pulled over. ‘Tillinghast, get out of the car, where you going?’ The first time I was searched and frisked, I was 14 years old.”
Even when he turned pro in 1996 and KOed the unfortunate Robert