Bamboozled (22 page)

In closing, I sincerely thank you for your valuable time and consideration on this matter, literally, of life and death. I pray, and await your response with ‘hope' that you will demand the bell of justice to be heard and launch an investigation. Do peruse the enclosed
FACTS
; possibly view me via YouTube@ The Joey Torrey Story. But whichever way that the winds may blow Senator, you
must
establish a “U.S. Boxin Commission!” No child or future champ should ever enter “the ring of ‘hope' only to exit broken and bamboozled by the nihilistic Bob Arum's of the sport. Do stay stron Senator, and always keep your left up.

Until The Final Bell,

Joey Torrey

But Senator McCain tried to continue to bury and forget about the failed “Boxing Bill.”

When Bradley's fight appeared to be fixed in October, 2012, Joey,
Operation Matchbook,
and the Boxing Bill each appeared in another news cycle, but Joey remains in his cell serving his new life sentence with no help on the horizon.

Joey alternates between blaming Senator McCain and the FBI for his extended stay in prison after the supposed promises of eternal freedom. Perhaps things could have gone differently if Joey had been more of a team player.

It didn't help the prosecution that Arum had connections with the Attorney General's Office, that he fired Sean Gibbons promptly, and that no one with any evidence against him could talk without implicating themselves at the same time.

But Joey has burned many bridges, some of them repeatedly, but new people still get in touch periodically, offering to help.

Joey continues to push for McCain, as chairman of the Ethics committee, to request his contract be made public record for the purposes of his defense, launch an investigation, and have Governor Brown pardon him.

And again Joey recuses himself from all blame, saying, “I am told to do something about it, but what can I do but tell this story and back it with the facts?”

Between the side effects of his medication and a failed attempt to replace his knee, Joey says he had become deeply depressed from 2009 until recently. His health has been in decline and his weight had decreased from 230 to 190 pounds by September of 2012. His new friend Katie pushed him to go see the doctor and eat right. She began mailing him food and milk thistle for his liver, but these kind of relationships have never been long lasting in Joey's life. Will he see freedom before his downward spiral finishes him or some other hazard of prison claims his life?

Before I completed my research, I assumed, based on what he had written to
me in letters, that Joey's life was the product of never having a proper grounding at home in his formative years. So it gave me pause when I learned he was the product of affluence. At the same time, the suburbs can be the most desolate place of all and having a high-powered executive for a father—especially when you yearn for street cred—can be the loneliest place, lacking support. Still, it's not so easy to conclude what went wrong.

As a teenager with a half-dozen arrests, including one for assault with a deadly weapon, a probation officer wrote that Joey “demonstrated an ability to play both ends against the middle. He's personable, likable and bright, but … almost a pathological liar.” Joey's ability to convince an almost unbelievable number of people of his variations on numerous events speaks excellently of his charisma but alarmingly of his morality.

To this day Eric Davis says, “He was cool. He never lied to me.”

While the public pressure campaign from celebrities and professional athletes seemed to help Joey briefly escape his life in prison, it was those same stretchings of the truth that enraged Pamela Frohreich to seeing that Joey's altered perception of events would ensure that he spends the rest of his life behind bars, or at least until his perspective shifts to understand things in a way that aren't always flattering to himself.

Joey Torrey is undeniably a leader figure. And leaders, like lawyers, his other natural inclination, tend to have narcissistic traits. According to Michael Maccoby, author of
The Productive Narcissist,
the productive ones learn to retain an element of their egos while moderating the negative side effects of narcissism. According to Maccoby, the leading traits are:

• Enjoying leading others and telling them what to do.
  
• Being an entertainer
  
• Generally young and male
  
• Being an impatient, compulsive workaholic
  
• Frequent lies to make yourself seem better
  
• Dressing better than other people, regarded as attractive
  
• Liking to swear
  
• Waiting for other people to stop talking before you start
  
• Putting your needs before others
  
• Engaging in a lot of sexual hookups
  
• Cheating in relationships
  
• Feeling no remorse about the people you hurt
  
• Being dumped after four months of dating someone
  
• Hating being criticized
  
• Finding ways to punish others when you feel rejected
  
• Seeking admiration by devaluing others.
  
• Parents that were ignoring and adoring simultanesouly
  
• Choosing male friends to attain a higher social status
  
• Dropping names during a conversation to feel important
  
• Excessively bragging about having a perfect family
  

Other than the last point, which seems debatable, it's not surprising that the parole board's psychologist saw a model narcissist in Joey. Seeing his frequent contradictions, how he handled himself on the outside, and how he talks about those matters now, it articulates in one word what motivated Pamela Frohreich to go on her crusade after him.

For Big Frankie Manzioni, despite his cover being blown,
Operation Matchbook
was an unqualified success, but for Joey, all of the outrageous parties eventually had to have a morning after. Now he's a known police informer and was again transferred to Mule Creek State Prison, on the property near Soledad.

Frohreich said: “It's tempting to think a guy has done 20 years and it's time to let him go,” Frohreich said. “But the more I saw, the more I felt he wasn't rehabilitated.”

Frohreich talked to investigators who worked the case, went over old reports, and interviewed witnesses. She concluded Torres' story of wrestling a gun away from his former manager and accidentally shooting him was just
that—a good story. So she convinced a court to reject Torres' bid for a new trial.

Similar to his gang involvement, it's impossible to know if Torrey and his brother were actually involved with the Italian mob and organized crime, or if this was another good story.

Even after Joey ran away to hide in Mexico to avoid going back to prison, the friends he'd made through the phone lines understood and sympathized with his behavior.

“Let's say you've been locked up for 24 years, would you want to go back?” Davis asked.

Asked if he regrets having fled, Torres shrugs. “You gotta understand, I was scared. I didn't think I could do another day.” But he has—ten more years. He still calls the two years spent with the FBI “the most beautiful time of my life.”

“Right now my brother's a sitting duck,” said Marcy Bautista, his sister. “The other inmates think he's a rat, an informant.”