For quite a while Thursday, Ed Brophy passionately detailed the International Boxing Hall of Fame’s roots and mission inside a Scranton federal courtroom.
Brophy, the hall’s director, went on and on about its meaning to the sport and to the tiny village of Canastota in upstate New York, where it’s based.
At the trial of four men accused of roles in stealing artifacts, art and sports and other memorabilia from many museums, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Camoni would ask what sounded like a simple question.
Brophy would expound for minutes at a time, sometimes adding details unrelated to the original question, often bringing up Canastota.
“We’re a blue-collar community and boxing is a blue-collar sport,” he said.
When Camoni asked about Nov. 5, 2015, Brophy choked up.
He couldn’t speak.
“The phone rang …,” he said, pausing again.
It was a hall security guard calling with the news: Someone had broken into the museum and burglarized it.
Brophy’s riveting testimony highlighted day four of the trial of four men from Lackawanna County’s North Pocono region – Nicholas Dombek, Damien Boland and Alfred and Joseph Atsus.
For a minute or two, Brophy described getting the call and driving up to the hall in the middle of the night.
He choked up again. Senior U.S. District Judge Malachy E. Mannion suggested Brophy drink water.
Brophy sipped and went on. He pulled into the driveway, he said. He saw six different police cars and yellow tape.
He exited his car and saw broken glass from a window. Inside, he saw the smashed display cases. He knew what they contained.
“I never thought in my life, I’d see that … or imagined that,” he said. “I never could imagine … somebody coming into our museum taking and destroying something.”
Thomas Trotta — who has pleaded guilty and will testify later in the trial — broke in, smashed multiple display cases and stole four championship belts won by former middleweight champion Carmen Basilio and two won by another middleweight champion, Tony Zale, federal court documents allege.
Boland is accused of driving to the museum. The Atsus brothers are not accused of roles in the boxing museum burglary.
Basilio, a Canastota native, often helped out in the community after his boxing days ended and even testified publicly about Mafia control of the sport.
“Carmen was our hometown hero,” Brophy said, choking up again. “It was crushing … to know someone broke into the Hall of Fame and stole something.”
When Basilio won the boxing title he dreamed of since boyhood, “Carmen went down to his knees and said a prayer,” Brophy said.
In Canastota, residents ran out into the streets in celebration.
Later the day of the theft, federal prosecutors allege, Dombek pried gemstones from the metal title belts before melting down the metal into “easily transportable pieces.” Boland and Trotta later drove to New York City and sold the pieces for $400.
As Brophy testified, three members of Zale’s family listened intently on the courtroom’s polished brown wooden benches.
Tears streamed down the cheeks of Zale’s great-niece Haley Zale and her mother, Deb Zale, who dabbed her face.
“I lost it. I was crying. I was trying so hard to stay composed, but that was the first time I ever saw the photo of the display cases broken with all the glass around them,” Haley Zale, a boxing match referee, said in an interview later.
Ted Zale, Deb’s husband and Haley’s dad, sat stoically and seethed.
Zale, 76, a Lansing, Michigan, resident and retired investment broker, talked about Tony Zale’s father dying when he was two years old, hit by a car while bicycling to pick up medicine to treat his son’s mumps and chicken pox.
Tony Zale, a Gary, Indiana native, hit hard times after boxing and even worked in a steel mill doing “every dirty job they had, scraping cinders out of blast furnaces,” his nephew said.
Offered $25,000 for his title belts, Zale refused. In his worst times, he wouldn’t part with them.
“He earned it. He earned it. He knew he did. And nobody could take it away from him,” he said.
Ted Zale, who learned to box growing up because all the Zale boys had to, explained his quiet courtroom rage.
“What happened to me was, I guess, not unusual for a boxing family,” Zale said. “I wanted to punch those guys out so bad, you know, bad knees and all. I would go after them, and I would make short order of them.”
The trial is scheduled to resume Friday at 9:30 a.m. and last up to six weeks.
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