Killed in Brazil?. Jimmy Tobin
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.”
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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.
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It looked to many like the Gattis had exhausted their life together. Yet even if that were true, might Gatti not have retained some perspective on what a future without Amanda could promise? After all, he “loved his children, traveling, enjoying his retirement,” said Lynch, “[h]e was happy, upbeat, and enjoyed life. He had too much to lose.” Interestingly, for Lynch, Amanda did not figure in the list of things that Gatti found joy in. That may have been a coincidence, but maybe not. This omission suggests that Amanda's absence from Gatti's life would make it no less worth living.
There is evidence Gatti himself was unconvinced of the emptiness of a world without Amanda. Days after their 2007 wedding, Gatti visited a New Jersey lawyer with Amanda to tear up a copy of the couple's prenuptial agreement. That agreement left Amanda with nothing in the case of divorce, not even alimony. According to The Canadian Press, Amanda testified that Gatti destroyed a copy of the agreement as an unsolicited gesture of his love for her. Does this testimony really contrast with the one Rizzo provided, which depicted Gatti as a man fearful of not appearing devoted?
This ceremonial shredding may have been a gesture of love, but Gatti made sure the prenuptial agreement remained valid. By 2009, when the couple's marriage was experiencing periods of increasing turmoil, Gatti asked his lawyer in New Jersey to send a copy of the agreement to his divorce attorney in Montreal. Amanda too had been in contact with a divorce attorney by this time. Even the momentary nihilism that might have precipitated Gatti's suicide, then, seems out of place. Gatti had loved, lost, and recovered; he was capable of planning responsibly. There is futurity in these legal proceedings that makes Gatti's suicide puzzling. A man planning for his future does so because he intends to have one.
We accept that love can kill. The world has its share of suffering Werthers who, unable to obtain their sole desire, embrace a liberating nothingness. But the love between Amanda and Gatti wasn't unrequited—they were on a second honeymoon, with their baby no less. Loss too can precipitate suicide. It's called “the widowhood effect,” a term used to capture what is, according to the British Medical Journal, a strong association between spousal bereavement and death.
To see Amanda walk through the iron doors of a Brazilian jail, smiling and waving in the bursts of flashbulbs like a coy paparazzi obsession, was to see a woman who looked anything but bereaved. Perhaps this isn't fair, reading into the body language of a woman moments into her freedom a perhaps criminal absence of sadness. And yet it is an image that stuck in the craw of Gatti's friends and family. So maybe it isn't right to say that analyzing Amanda's behavior as she crossed the threshold into freedom is unfair. It might be unfair if she were innocent. But there were a lot of people who doubted she was.
By the letter of the law, of course, Amanda was indeed innocent. Still, Gatti's family and friends remained unconvinced by the police investigation's results. What they saw in Amanda's smile was the satisfaction of a woman who'd gotten away with murder. And they were going to wipe that smile from her face.
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The first step for the Gatti family was requesting a second autopsy. The initial autopsy indicated that Gatti “may have committed suicide.” It failed to rule out the possibility that he didn't. Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lawrence Cannon, supported the family's request for a second autopsy, formally asking Brazilian authorities for further information about the case. According to forensic