The Fix Was In—but Then Battling Siki Got Mad

In the fourth they fought toe-to-toe, and Siki pounded him relentlessly in the fifth. Often they were locked in clinches, with Carpentier hanging on. At one point, when Siki tumbled over backward after having disengaged himself, Carpentier helped him to his feet.

Siki was not to be mollified. In the sixth he continued to punish Carpentier. The two became intertwined and then, tottering and defenseless, Carpentier spiraled to the canvas. He lay unconscious at Siki's feet, his left leg caught in the ropes. Either just before or just after the referee finished the count, Carpentier's handlers dragged him to his corner. There they heard the announcement that Siki had been disqualified for tripping. Carpentier was still champion.

The fans were not overjoyed. One report has it that they spat on Carpentier as he left the ring. Siki wept. An hour later the officials reversed themselves, awarding Siki a technical knockout on the grounds that Carpentier's manager had thrown in the towel (a sponge actually) before Carpentier went down. There was talk of funny business and a subsequent investigation. "But nothing was done," says Lorant.

Dunkel Gassen did not impress the critics when it was released in September 1923. "Siki was no actor," says Lorant, but adds that he also made the same judgment about a young woman he had screen-tested in Germany. "Go home and get married and have children," he told Marlene Dietrich.

Lorant left the cinema in 1928 to become editor of a new kind of magazine in Munich, one that told stories mainly through photographs. Called M�nchner Illustrierte Presse, it was the forerunner of such magazines as LIFE and Look. After Hitler sent Lorant to jail as an enemy of the Reich in 1933, influential friends in Hungary, where he was born, worked for six months to obtain his release.

As soon as he was set free, Lorant got out of Germany and went to London, where he wrote a best-selling book entitled I Was Hitler's Prisoner. He also edited several magazines and came to the attention of Churchill. After Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Churchill asked Lorant to make a tour of the U.S. and write a series of articles about America's neutrality. Lorant did, and he decided to stay in the States and write books, which he has been doing, in Lenox, Mass., in the Berkshires, ever since.

As champion, Siki turned into a boulevardier whose frequent companion was a lion cub he kept on a leash. He unwisely elected to make his first defense against an Irishman named Mike McTigue on St. Patrick's Day, 1923, in Dublin. The 20-round bout went the distance but McTigue got the decision.

After that, Siki lived and fought with decreasing success, mostly in the U.S. He had 31 more fights and finished his 13-year career with a 64-25-5 record. According to the New York World, he walked the streets of Manhattan with his retainer, who carried a jug. At a signal from Siki—a slap on the face—his man would pour wine down Siki's throat.

Battling Siki died in 1925 at age 28. His obituary in the World began with the sentence, "Just before dawn yesterday a policeman found a powerful black man dead in the gutter of West 41st Street, near Ninth Avenue, with two bullet holes in his back." His killer was never found.