BOXING / EARL GUSTKEY : Cohen’s Biggest Battle Wasn’t in the Ring

Jack Cohen, the manager of veteran heavyweight Tony Tucker, will watch his fighter challenge Lennox Lewis tonight for a world heavyweight championship.

A boxing manager’s dream, right? The biggest night of his life, right?

Cohen will be as excited as anyone else in the Thomas & Mack center tonight, but this is a 62-year-old man for whom every day is special.

Every day since April 15, 1945.

That was the day Cohen was liberated from the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.

So no matter what happens to his fighter tonight, Jack Cohen will survive.

After all, this is just a fistfight.

Jack Cohen survived the Holocaust.

When the Germans invaded Holland in May, 1940, Cohen’s family could trace its roots in Amsterdam to the 1600s, and before that, to Portugal. Cohen’s real name is Jack Cohen Rodriguez. His father was a textile trader.

Within five years, every member of Cohen’s family--including his father and his father’s 11 brothers--disappeared in concentration camps.

“In February of 1942, the Germans began rounding up Jews in Amsterdam,” Cohen said.

“They would go into a section of the city in the early morning and park trucks so as to block off an entire section. Anyone on the streets with a Jewish passport was picked up. In those days, you had to wear a yellow J on your clothes. I still have mine.

“My dad was picked up in the first roundup, but he escaped. But he later received a summons saying he’d been ‘selected’ for assignment to a labor camp. When he left, we never saw him again.

“He arranged for me to be adopted by my Uncle Philip, who was the best diamond cutter in Amsterdam. He was on the German’s exclusion list because of his occupation.

“But we were both picked up in 1943. My uncle and his wife and their daughter and I were taken to a local theater, then put on a train to a Dutch camp at Westerbork.

“After a few weeks, we were put on a train to Bergen-Belsen. We were put in a section where families were kept together. It was in the same section as Anne Frank, who I knew.”

Frank, author of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” died at Bergen-Belsen.

Cohen said that later, his aunt and uncle were taken away and never seen again. Then sometime in 1944, he said, word came down that he and his cousin, Rachel, and some other children were to report to the train station.

Destination: Auschwitz.

“We were standing on the train platform when a woman said to us, ‘Children! Come here!’ “Cohen said.

“It was Luba Frederick, a Jewish nurse from Russia. She worked in an SS hospital that treated officers from the Russian front. They hated the camp officers.

“Luba Frederick kept us hidden in that hospital for a year. That’s where we were when the Canadians liberated the camp.

“Luba became known as ‘the Angel of Belsen.’ She’s in her 70s now and lives in Miami.”

Cohen, who lives in Los Angeles, is a real estate investor and also owns an attorney referral service.

He says he lives one day at a time, and enjoys every one of them. And he wants the same for his fighter, Tony Tucker.

“Tony came to me three years ago, with a lot of problems,” Cohen said.

“He’s been through a lot. And I want to help him do something great with his life.”

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Some boxing people in Las Vegas were surprised to see Carlos (Panama) Lewis working with Tucker this week.

Ten years ago, Lewis’ boxing license was permanently revoked by the New York State Athletic Commission. He was charged with removing horsehair padding from the gloves of his fighter, Luis Resto, in a 1983 New York match against Billy Collins.

Collins, badly beaten by Resto, never fought again. Ten months later, he drove his car off a Tennessee road and was killed. To this day, his father claims his son’s death was a suicide and links it to the beating he took from Resto.

It was Collins’ father who, on the pretense of congratulating Resto after the fight, shook hands with him--and wouldn’t let go of Resto’s hand. He yelled for a commission inspector, claiming the winner’s gloves were bereft of padding.

An inspection showed that the gloves had been cut from the inside and padding had been removed.

After the commission revoked his license, Lewis was charged with assault, conspiracy, criminal possession of a weapon--the unpadded gloves--and tampering with a sports event. He served three years in a New York prison.

State boxing commissions are supposed to honor one another’s suspensions. So what happened in Nevada this week?

“We can prevent Lewis from working a fight and from being in any fighter’s dressing room at a fight show,” said Marc Ratner, acting Nevada commission executive officer.

“But we’re not empowered to prevent him from working in gyms or training sessions. We’ll take this up with the commission and try to get that authority.”

Randy Gordon, executive officer of the New York commission, said if he heard of any New York gym operator permitting Lewis to train fighters, that gym owner’s license would be pulled.

“Lewis has applied for a license three times and we’ve turned him down every time,” Gordon said. “His lawyer tells us Lewis has a family to support. Well, what about Billy Collins’ family? I have a photo of Billy Collins’ face the day after that fight. You couldn’t have made him look any worse with a blackjack.

“What Lewis did was a crime against boxing. Pete Rose can’t even wear a major league baseball uniform. Now, if we can’t throw a character like Lewis out of boxing after what he did, then boxing is in pretty sad shape.”

Boxing Notes

The report that Madison Square Garden is getting out of the boxing business doesn’t necessarily mean that fights will never again be held there. The New York Post and Daily News both reported Friday that Paramount Communications, the Garden’s parent company, will close its boxing promotion business. MSG boxing confirmed the story Friday. “It’s true, but it simply means MSG boxing will be phased out this year, that we will reorganize under a different name and different address,” said Steve Griffith, Garden boxing communications director. “Boxing’s a portable sport. We’ve promoted fight shows all over the world. We’ll just be doing it under a different name and at different venues.”