Killed in Brazil?. Jimmy Tobin
he think of the wife he would leave permanently, the son who may never grasp why he was separated from the man whose name he shared, that unforgettable man he could never fully remember? Did Gatti think he was giving up? Did he think he had a choice?
These are questions an autopsy can't answer. And Gatti, leaving no suicide note, left them unanswerable, lost forever at the thud of a toppled stool.
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So many questions left to be answered by the people who cared most for him. And these people couldn't agree on an answer. Amanda had her own explanation for Gatti's suicide. “I believe that when we got home and he saw he hurt me, he thought I would leave him, that I would tell him to just let me go, that I would separate from him,” she told the Associated Press after walking out of jail. “He did that in a moment of weakness. He was drunk, maybe he didn't know what he was doing, maybe he thought I would leave him the next day.”
A charitable treatment of this explanation might read as follows: a new widow, one who discovered her husband's dead body, who spent nearly three weeks in jail while being investigated for murder, who answered countless questions about her knowledge of the events that widowed and jailed her, provided the only explanation she could imagine.
As far as explanations go, it is a poor one, maybe understandably so, but a poor one nonetheless. Because while Amanda might well have been about to leave Gatti in the morning, it is hard to imagine that Gatti, even in his despair, would consider a failed marriage reason enough to make his two children—Junior as well as a daughter from a previous relationship—fatherless. Yes, it appeared like he and Amanda were trying to salvage a tumultuous marriage with their second honeymoon. And yes, Gatti's friends and family pleaded with him to escape a toxic relationship. But he told them he'd submit to a spin on the marital Catherine Wheel to preserve his relationship with Junior.
Accepting—as many did not—that Gatti and Amanda were trying to find happiness together does little to make Amanda's explanation more satisfying. If their union was so strong, so important that ending it would show the world what Gatti was ultimately capable of, why couldn't Amanda provide greater insight into what drove him to suicide? Granted, she may not have known him any better than anyone else. Their relationship was only a few years old. It can take much longer than that to learn who a person is, especially if they're afraid to lose you. Still, Amanda's explanation for Gatti's death hinged on the importance of her in his life and his drunkenness. And that may have been all she could honestly offer. She didn't have to offer more given the conclusions of the police investigation (her explanation was mostly immaterial where that was concerned). But it did little to dampen suspicions.
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Just how strong was the bond between the two, anyway? In a phone interview she gave shortly after Gatti died, his mother Ida said that the couple was always fighting, that Amanda was “yelling all the time,” telling Gatti “I'm going to kill you!” And there was hostility in more than their speech. In April of that year, Gatti violated a restraining order filed against him. Who filed the restraining order wasn't clear in the record but Ida confirmed it was Amanda. She had called 911 claiming that Gatti hit her. He was charged with assault and released on bail. Gatti was ordered to stay two hundred yards away from Amanda and to abstain from alcohol. Not that he did; not that Amanda wanted him to.
Then there is Duva's story about the night she learned Gatti died. It was July 11. Duva was standing in her kitchen when her phone rang. Rick Reeno of boxingscene.com was on the other end. “Did you hear the news?”
“I thought it was a hoax,” remembers Duva. It wasn't, and so with Gatti's manager, Pat Lynch, in Italy, she traveled to the Prudential Center in Newark, where Tomasz Adamek was fighting Bobby Gunn. Gatti's friends were at the fight, and Duva made it her duty to break the awful news. She remembers walking through the arena, telling Gatti's friends as she saw them. One of his friends responded in a way Duva has never forgotten:
“She finally killed him.”
“The people that were closest to him,” says Duva, remembering all those difficult exchanges, “this was their reaction.”
This was the same reaction Gatti's younger brother Fabricio had to the news. “The first thing that popped into my mind? She killed him.” At a time when the details were unclear, when there was little more to process than loss and shock, mariticide was the only explanation for those who knew Gatti best.
Further domestic dysfunction was revealed in 2011 when the Gatti family tried to annul the final version of Gatti's will (a will that left everything to Amanda). In Quebec's Superior Court, Gatti's friend, Antonio Rizzo, testified to the marriage's stormy nature. Rizzo said it was a union marked by continuous fights, that Gatti had become increasingly worried that Amanda might take Junior from him, and feared what she was capable of while in Brazil. Recounting a conversation he had with Gatti about this fear, Rizzo remembers his friend saying, “She wants me to sign a Brazilian passport for him. But if she takes my son I'll never see him again.” These fears weren't the product of paranoia either. Duva remembers Lynch sharing a story of a neighbor who lost custody of his child when his 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.”
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It hadn't always been that way. Duva recalls Gatti excitedly