wife left for Brazil with their baby. It was Duva's understanding that, second honeymoon or not, Gatti was going to Brazil to come home with Junior, and that on his return he planned to change his will once more.
Throughout his testimony, Rizzo apologized to the court for replicating the language Amanda used in her fights with Gatti. He told the court about a night at the couple's penthouse on Jarry Street in Saint-Leonard, Quebec. Amanda, screaming, hit Gatti over the head with a broom, smashed crystal all around him, and demanding he clean up the mess. “You're a loser,” Amanda told him, “the only thing you're good at is bleeding, your mother's a whore, your sisters are prostitutes.” Rodrigues's lawyer objected to the story on the grounds of it being hearsay and therefore inadmissible. But it is hard to unhear such things.
Rizzo wasn't the only person in Gatti's life who had seen that side of Amanda. Gatti's childhood friend, Chris Santos, offered testimony that supported Rizzo's depiction of the Gatti marriage. He, too, said Amanda was “foul-mouthed and bad-tempered” and had once given Gatti a black eye. Amanda herself testified to keying her husband's truck after an argument. The incident produced $4,000 in damages. In the police report Gatti filed that night, Amanda was listed as his ex-wife. Details like these Amanda tried to explain away as idiosyncrasies of her marriage, incidents that, for the uninitiated, appeared worse than they were.
At times, money was at the root of these eruptions. Despite a notary giving the court a copy of Gatti's last will and testament, Rizzo said Gatti complained in the months before his death of the pressure from Amanda to leave his estate to her. “I told him: ‘It's fine. You have two kids, your relationship is upside-down,’” testified Rizzo, “‘You leave half to your daughter and half to your son.’” Gatti's response? “‘You don't understand. Amanda wants me to leave everything to her. I will never do that.’”
Then there was the voicemail Gatti left Rizzo, a voicemail Rizzo saved for years after. At the time he left it, Gatti was in Amsterdam, on the European leg of his trip with Amanda and Junior. That trip had started in Paris, where Gatti surprised Amanda with a romantic trip up the Eiffel Tower. While taking in the view, Gatti had champagne brought over. There was a diamond ring in Amanda's flute, a gift from her husband. Amanda said it was here that Gatti apologized for his behavior, that he swore he would mend his ways for his family.
There is none of that optimism in the voicemail.
“Yo Tony, you were fuckin’ right,” said Gatti in the voicemail. “It's a fuckin’ nightmare. I'll talk to you later, alright? I'm gonna be back sooner than I expected. Ciao.” This sounded nothing like a man recommitting to his marriage. It sounded very much, however, like the words of a man who spent some of his marriage living in his mom's basement instead of going home to his wife. “A world champion. Living in a basement,” remembers Rizzo. “Incredible.”
▾ ▾ ▾
It hadn't always been that way. Duva recalls Gatti excitedly introducing Amanda and her family to his inner circle at a fight. He said she was a student, that they met walking their dogs. “She didn't look like a student,” remembers Duva, but Gatti wouldn't discuss the matter any further. The real story, many people hold, is that Amanda met Gatti at Squeeze Lounge, a New Jersey gentlemen's club where she worked as an exotic dancer. Former employees of the establishment have corroborated that story. Amanda vehemently denies it. There is no record of her being an employee of Squeeze Lounge, and she has taken legal action against news organizations that claimed she was. But a photo of her in the club wearing a bikini has fueled suspicions regardless.
For Duva, there was something a bit peculiar about the Rodrigues family too. She remembers being struck by how happy they were, exhibiting a strange amount of joy at the new relationship. Gatti was smitten, enamored with a girl he was convinced liked him for who he was—not for his fame, not for his money, but for his charming and fun self. Was Gatti right? Had he found in Amanda—who was slack-jawed when she found out he earned his living in the cruelest sport—someone drawn to the man he was away from the spotlight, the crowds, the fast life? Or was Gatti succumbing to a willful naivete? It isn't hard to understand why he might want someone who desired a quieter, less destructive version of himself. Mario Costa, who owns the Ringside Lounge, a bar next door to the gym a nineteen-year-old Gatti joined when he moved to Jersey City, said the fighter “lived in go-go bars.” Costa saw Gatti's life as one desperately lacking structure.
If it was structure, peace, even a sort of amorous innocence Gatti was looking for, however, there is little evidence that he found it with Amanda. “He had terrible taste in women,” recalls Duva. “And the one woman who really cared about him [Erika Rivera, his ex-fiancée and mother of his first child, Sofia], she really couldn't take it.” There is a nod here to Gatti's wild side, of its prohibitive force, and perhaps in that an explanation for his poor taste in women. It may be difficult to find a girl to settle down with when you never settle down yourself. Still, women troubles aside, Gatti “was really good at picking his friends,” said Duva, a tinge of regret softening her voice, “I just wish he would have taken his friends’ advice.”
▾ ▾ ▾
In a sad irony, the girl who Gatti believed loved him for him, ended up embroiled in a bitter dispute over his money. His family sued to have the will that left Amanda the beneficiary of his estate declared invalid.
The fight over Gatti's will hangs over and lays beneath the entire ordeal of his death. Like so many before, it was a fight Gatti was supposed to have ended with his own hand. That this struggle persisted after his death does him a disservice. He had left his affairs in order or at least assumed he had. This can be a courtesy the dying leave the living, a gesture of love and consideration for those left behind. But in another sense, Gatti's will wasn't a courtesy to the living, it was an act of extortion—extortion he intended to overcome once he returned to the United States. In its devotion to Amanda, Gatti's will was evidence of her innocence. But that devotion is also suspicious. Rewritten so close to his mysterious death, Gatti's will can also be interpreted as a placating gesture performed to appease the mother of his son, a woman whose ability to tear him from his son left Gatti fearful. More, it is a motive for murder. Submitting, even temporarily, to the pressures of his wife, Gatti left everything to her before departing for a foreign country where he died violently while she slept only feet away. The timing was too convenient: if Amanda was going to kill her husband, it made sense to secure her fortune first. The will can't be all of these things at once, either Gatti killed himself or he was murdered. But if nothing else, Gatti's will reveals the touch of madness in his marriage.
Montreal notary Bruce Moidel was responsible for drafting the final version of Gatti's will. He testified in the civil trial. Moidel remembers his meeting with the couple as “a normal, typical meeting for a young couple about to fly off and leave a baby behind with family” (Arturo Jr. did not accompany the Gattis on the first leg of their vacation). But that impression flipped quickly. As the trio worked their way through the will's details, Amanda began to air mistrust of her husband. She seemed convinced that Gatti would one day be unfaithful. Where such jealousy might figure in drafting a will is unclear, but it proved to have financial consequences. Straining to convince his wife of his devotion, Gatti told Amanda he'd give her a million dollars in the event he was unfaithful. And he wasn't just talking. Moidel eventually drafted an agreement accompanying the will stating that if Gatti ever cheated on Amanda he would have to give her the money. Moidel, who became a notary in 1958, admitted he'd never encountered a measure like that, and that it was entirely the work of the couple.
Was Gatti unfaithful? Did Amanda have reasons for doubting him? The answers to those questions have yet to breach the silent respect for the dead. Gatti's gesture, however, in its overcompensation, is difficult to interpret as anything but an indictment of his marriage.
▾ ▾ ▾
It looked to many like the Gattis had exhausted their life together. Yet even if that were
