It is Saturday night inside Madison Square Garden, and we are waiting for Jake LaMotta. Ring 8, the New York chapter of a charitable organisation dedicated to taking care of veteran boxers, is hosting a Hall of Fame dinner at boxing’s own shrine, and the Club Bar and Grill is boisterously full of men with broken noses and slicked, oiled hair. The smell of cologne is oppressive. But where is LaMotta, one of the guests of honour? No one seems to know.

A wooden plaque lies on the club bar. A small pair of ornamental ceramic boxing gloves – worn, old, with string laces, looking very much like gloves from a distant era – decorates the plaque. Beneath them, on another brass plate, the name Jake LaMotta is boldly engraved with the legend: ‘A true warrior who often took on bigger opponents. One of the greatest chins in boxing history. Middleweight champion from 1949 to 1951. Fought dramatic six-fight series with Sugar Ray Robinson. 83 wins, 19 losses, 4 draws, 30 KO’s’

It might have added the appendage:’Icon to a whole new generation of boxing and film fans following the immortalisation of his life by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull .’

Norma Graziano, the widow of the great Rocky Graziano, a petit peroxide-blonde woman in her seventies, is seated at one of the round dining tables. She is there to receive an award on behalf of her late husband of 47 years, who was world middleweight champion in 1947.

Norma Graziano is looking up at one of the overhead television screens, watching a black-and-white film of Rocky in combat with Tony Zale. Her expression is inscrutable. Then she turns away. ‘I can’t bear to watch this,’ she says. ‘I hate to see Rocky get hit. In the beginning, I used to sit at ringside but then it got too hard for me to watch. There were times when I felt like jumping into the ring to help him.’

Norma is told that LaMotta is expected at the dinner. ‘I hope not!’ she says.

But weren’t Rocky and Jake pals from the old days?

‘We all came from the Lower East Side. Rocky and Jake were from the same era, but I can’t deny that’s all they had in common.’ She shifts uncomfortably in her seat. ‘Look, I don’t like the man, but Jake was a great fighter. Rocky and me, we both respected Jake as a fighter.’

Hall of Fame great and former middleweight champion Emile Griffith, smart in a tuxedo and with a small gold boxing glove on a chain around his neck, is mingling at the bar with former champions Juan La Porter, Carlos Ortiz, and Vito Antuofermo. Eugene ‘ Silent’ Hairston sits with his sign interpreter. Hairston, a deaf mute, lost the use of an eye when a cut sustained in a fight failed to heal properly. At the age of 22, he was forced to retire from boxing. Asked about the best fighter he ever encountered, Hairston, struggles for articulation, whispered one name: Jake LaMotta.

Tony Mazzarella, the treasurer of Ring 8 and the guiding force behind the dinner, is eventually asked why LaMotta has not arrived to collect his award in person. ‘Jake wanted to be paid five hundred dollars to come tonight,’ he explains. ‘I told him that none of the other fighters had even asked for money so why should he be paid? Jake’s not a nice guy.’

Mazzarella’s experience with LaMotta is not uncommon. LaMotta, learning perhaps from modern sportsmen, likes to charge for his time. He was recently asked to sign a pair of boxing gloves for a charitable foundation. De Niro had already signed them for a buyer who had promised, in return for LaMotta’s signature, to make a generous donation to charity. LaMotta said he would sign if he was paid $500. The money was not forthcoming. He didn’t sign.

A month or so after the Madison Square Garden event, and disappointed at not having met him that night, I called LaMotta at home (we have mutual friends). He answered the phone; his breathing was heavy and laborious. Requests for interviews are invariably met with a standard response: ‘You know, I normally get paid five hundred dollars for this sort of thing.’

So I ask him if he would like to meet for lunch or dinner in one of his favourite restaurants in his midtown East Side Manhattan neighbourhood. ‘Speak to my fiancée about it,’ he says, in his unmistakable Bronx accent. His fiancée is Denise Baker, a divorced mother of two whose lithe figure and shiny black hair belie her 53 years. Once a successful dancer and singer, Baker met LaMotta 10 years ago in PJ Clarke’s, a favourite midtown New York hangout of Frank Sinatra’s. She’s been with him ever since, devoted, protective, ever by his side.

Even at the age of 81, and after six marriages, LaMotta remains attractive to women. ‘The Champ doesn’t have much money,’ Denise tells me, when she comes to the phone. ‘And he’s always getting asked to do this sort of thing. He’s popular all over the world and his fans love him. Later this week, we’re off to Washington to attend a black-tie event to raise money for a children’s charity.’

So is Jake doing some charity work?

‘Actually, he’s getting paid for going,’ she says.

In the end, she agrees for us to meet, so long as I pay for dinner.

In person, LaMotta can be surly and taciturn. Experience has hardened him; he has known real tragedy in his life having lost two sons, one to cancer and the other in a plane crash. Craig Hamilton, an expert in boxing memorabilia who knows him well, says: ‘Jake is not a friendly guy. Perhaps to a pretty woman he would be. But the truth is, he’s a miserable fuck.’

There are those, however, who see LaMotta differently. ‘He is one of the most fascinating personalities that the fight game has ever produced,’ says boxing historian Mike Silver. ‘This is a guy with depth. It’s easy to say that he’s a wife-beater and a bum; but he’s also deeply complex, a true entertainer who loves attention. Jake would have loved to have been an actor. He’s a performer in every sense of the word.’

LeRoy Neiman, a distinguished sports artist with a passion for boxing, is equally fascinated by LaMotta. ‘He was always colourful and conspicuous, noisy and a roughneck. But he’s a genuine guy; tough with his own way of speaking and doing everything.’

Whether one likes LaMotta or not, no one who has ever met him can deny that there is something genuine about the man. He acknowledges who and what he is and from where he came. As the result of Raging Bull , he has become larger than life in every sense, but his fame began with boxing.

Walking into Raffaele, a small Sicilian bistro on the East Side, Jake, accompanied by Denise, is immediately recognised by a fellow diner who stands up to shake his hand. The excited owner of the restaurant rushes over to greet him. ‘My public,’ LaMotta says, delighted by the attention. ‘I’m more famous today than I ever was when I was fighting. That movie has made me a legend.’

Now 81 years old, LaMotta still has an aura. ‘Look at my beautiful fiancée,’ he says, as if addressing the whole restaurant. ‘I want to make her my wife; she’ll be lucky number seven. I’m still functioning, even at 80. Denise has got a great body, she excites me every time she takes her clothes off. Hey, some guys can’t even function at 40.’

Dressed in grey trousers, a black and grey patterned polo shirt, and complementary tweed sports jacket, he is short and stocky. He has well-defined square, straight shoulders and a muscular chest kept remarkably youthful by a healthy exercise regimen. He claims to do daily shadow boxing and as many as 50 push-ups. His head, framed by thick white hair, looks large on his body. I search his face for signs of the scars and wounds from his 106 fights; it’s impossible to miss them. His broken nose is flattened and turns up at the end; his right eye opens only slightly, as if permanently swollen, but his skin is clear and relatively unlined. The real surprise are his hands, which are small, delicate and soft to touch. ‘I broke them six times,’ says LaMotta, holding his hands out. ‘Nature heals them. When you break bones they heal up and come back even stronger. I wasn’t born to be a fighter. My hands are too small and look at these short arms.’

Asked why he missed the Ring 8 dinner, he replies, ‘Look, no one’s heard of those guys who were there. I’m the only one left that matters. I’m the Godfather of Boxing. Everything is out in the open with me. What you see is what you get. I ask for personal appearance fees because I’ve earned them. I deserve them. My presence at events is what they need so they ought to pay for it.’ He laughs.

LaMotta has recently returned from England where he attended a dinner for Chris Eubank. ‘I don’t really follow boxing today, but the Mike Tyson-Lennox Lewis fight, now that’s a match I’d have loved to have seen. Lewis is a good fighter, I think, but not a great one. There have been three great heavyweights – Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali. I know I would have had trouble in the ring with those guys. But there are heavyweight champions I think that, even as a middleweight, I could have beaten. Floyd Patterson, for example. Tyson could have been one of the greatest except that he got himself all messed up. All that talk of him raping those women – well, I don’t believe a word of it. Anyway, what does a girl think she’s doing by going up to Tyson’s hotel room in the middle of the night?’

Jerry Izenberg, an American sportswriter, has written perceptively of how boxing is dominated by the bottom of the immigration barrel. ‘People fight to get out of the ghetto. Today’s great fighters are mostly black and Hispanic, but in the 1920s there were great Jewish fighters. Then you had the Irish fighters and Italians like Rocky Marciano, Rocky Graziano, Roland LaStarze, and Jake LaMotta. The Italians in New York loved LaMotta. Of course, they also loved Mussolini until he started losing.’

Jake LaMotta was born to immigrant parents on the lower East Side of Manhattan on 10 July, 1922. His family moved to the Bronx when he was young. He learnt how to box while serving time in Coxsackie Reformatory for delinquent youths. He turned professional in 1941; soon he was fighting as the ‘Bronx Bull’. When he was at his peak, baseball and boxing were the only two truly national sports in America. Today, interest in boxing is, at best, intermittent; it is largely dominated by interest in the heavyweights with a few charismatic fighters such as Oscar De La Hoya occasionally drawing public attention. But when LaMotta was fighting, the middleweights were respected, as they were again in the late Seventies during the era of Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns .

In the ring, LaMotta had an unforgettable presence. Many fighters were as skilled as he was, but very few were as tough or as uncompromising. Fans loved him because, when they went to see him box, they knew they would see a real fight. They knew he could never be broken.

What LaMotta valued most about himself, apart from courage, was his honesty. In the early years of his career, he was blacklisted because he refused to do business with the Mob. His fight against Billy Fox on 14 November 1947 changed all that. The Mob visited him at home before the fight: if he ever wanted to fight for a world title, he was told, he must lose to Fox. He did as he was instructed, allowing himself to be knocked out in the fourth round. He was paid generously by the Mob, but, once news leaked out about what had happened, his license to box was suspended for a year by the New York State Athletic Commission. After this humiliation, LaMotta became deeply depressed. He recalls being ashamed to walk the streets of his own neighbourhood because so many of those he knew had gambled on him to beat Fox. The truth was that he had betrayed not only his supporters, but also himself; he had violated his own code of honour.

LaMotta would eventually fight for a world title on 16 July 1949. On the morn ing of his fight against the French middleweight Marcel Cerdan, he woke feeling confident and calm. His confidence was rewarded when Cerdan tore a muscle in his shoulder, which left him unable properly to defend himself. The fight was halted after 10 rounds. LaMotta had everything he wanted: he was a world champion, he was married, with three children, to his second wife, Vikki LaMotta, an exceptionally attractive blonde who, years later, would became a ‘celebeauty’ in her own right after posing for Playboy. He had everything he wanted yet his triumph brought him little happiness because, as he saw it, his victory was tainted by his calculated capitulation to Billy Fox. He began to train less and eat and drink more; he was losing his old determination, the fanaticism and edge that had served him so well in the ring.

Back in Rafaelle, Jake, having started with a green salad, is now drinking a good merlot with his veal chop. He asks the owner of the restaurant for a cigarette, although he knows there is a strict ban in New York on smoking in public places. The owner, eager to please his famous friend, obliges and, for the rest of the evening, I find myself peering at LaMotta through a swirl of cigarette smoke. He assures me that he did not start smoking until his boxing days were over. ‘Even now, I smoke only three days each week. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are my days for going out to enjoy myself, which is when I drink as well.’

He’s enjoying himself now all right, accepting a steady flow of complementary brandies while the waiter serves dessert, a generous portion of tiramisu. ‘That hits the spot,’ says Jake.

LaMotta was not a popular champion. Purists despised him for having thrown the Fox fight. Others simply disliked his abusive personality. Newsweek described him as ‘more hated than any other champion’. The sportswriter W.C. Heinz published an article about Jake entitled ‘The Most Hated Man in Sports’.

On 27 October 1949 Marcel Cerdan was killed in a plane crash while returning to America for a rematch with LaMotta, who went on to defend his title against the Italian middleweight Tiberio Mitri and then later against Laurent Dauthuille. Yet it was not until he fought Sugar Ray Robinson for the sixth and final time on 14 February 1951 that public attitude to him began to turn. That fight – predictably remembered as the St Valentine’s Day Massacre – was watched on television by more than 30,000 people, then a record for a televised US sports event. It was broadcast live on radio in Australia and New Zealand. Pan-American pilots announced updates to passengers as they flew around the world.

Robinson, the welterweight champion, weighed in at 155 pounds. LaMotta, at 160 pounds, was defending his middleweight crown. LaMotta entered the ring before a virtually all-male audience, characteristic of the era, wearing his trademark leopard skin robe. For eight rounds, the two men fought on relatively even terms. Then Robinson took command, punishing LaMotta with blow after cruel blow. LaMotta was defenceless; he was at once a chopping block and punching bag. The fight was stopped in the 13th round. Robinson had hit LaMotta with his hardest shots but hadn’t been able to put him down.

LaMotta’s courage in defeat brought him new respect from the boxing media. Dan Parker of the New York Daily Mirror wrote: ‘Jake LaMotta wasn’t much as middleweight champion until the last few minutes of his reign. Then he atoned for everything. Beaten to a bloody pulp by Ray Robinson, half-blind with his title beyond hope of salvaging, Jake had one precious possession left and nothing but fierce pride to defend it with. As the thirteenth round of their Chicago Stadium battle opened, no one had ever knocked him off his feet. Through two agonising minutes, Jake braced himself and helplessly took everything Robinson fired at him with fortitude that made the early Spartans seem cowardly.’

Robinson himself would later call LaMotta the ‘toughest fighter of the era’. After losing his title, LaMotta had eight more fights before retiring. On 31 December 1952, he was knocked down for the first time in his career by Danny Nardico in the eighth round of a club fight in Coral Gables, Florida. It was time to stop.

Can he remember the physical pain he endured, especially during the ‘St. Valentine’s Day Massacre’ with Sugar Ray? ‘Pain never meant anything to me,’ he says, ordering another brandy. The restaurant is virtually empty now; our plates are being cleared away.’I was the kind of guy who could go to the dentist without Novocaine. I did stupid things like that. Looking back, I realise now that I was using self-hypnosis and the fact is I can hypnotise others as well as myself.’

So, no pain, therefore, no fear?

‘I was only frightened of one man in my whole life and that man was my father. He used to hit me all the time because I was the eldest, I guess. I never liked him, but, in the end, I bought the old man a five-story apartment building in the Bronx. I bought his respect.’

How good was Jake LaMotta? ‘Jake was a great fighter,’ says the trainer and television commentator Teddy Atlas, who worked with the young Mike Tyson. ‘I don’t use that term loosely. If anything, he was underrated. He was more than just a tough guy: he was much smarter in the ring than he got credit for and far more subtle. Fighters today are faster and more athletic than the boxers of old. They have state-of-the-art equipment and training regimens. But Jake would have broken down most of today’s middleweight contenders. He lost five times to Sugar Ray, but four of those losses were so close that you could have flipped a coin to pick the winner. And Jake had a much better jab than he got credit for. In fact, he was able to outjab Robinson because he was able to slip Robinson’s jab coming in and counter with his own. Also, Jake fought a lot of black guys who the other top white fighters of the day wouldn’t get in the ring with. And he beat almost all of them.’

Emanuel Steward, who has trained Lennox Lewis, Naseem Hamed, and Thomas Hearns, is another who admires LaMotta’s toughness and resolution. ‘He wasn’t flashy, but he had his own unconventional way of fighting. He’d work his way in behind a pesky jab and extended right hand. Then he’d trap his opponent in the corner and blast away at the body with his short arms and use non-stop combinations. He was a smart fighter. In the ring, he was relaxed and calm. His mental state was very tough, and that means so much. That’s what makes a fighter.’ Angelo Dundee, who trained Muhammad Ali, says: ‘He was very tough and determined and definitely championship quality. In the ring, he could take the heart out of just about anyone.’

After retiring from boxing in 1953, LaMotta owned a cocktail lounge and liquor store in Miami. Then, in 1958, after a spell in prison, he moved back to New York, where he moved restlessly from job to job. He experimented with stand-up comedy (the celebrated opening of Raging Bull portrays him alone and overweight in an anonymous dressing room, practising his gags before a mirror) and worked, for a time, as a bouncer at a topless club. ‘But none of that diminished Jake LaMotta,’ LeRoy Neiman told me. ‘Nothing could. He’d stand in the doorway of the Mardi Gras Club and look perfectly right. Jake is a survivor. Without the movie he would have managed to be all right, but that film really made him.’

Raging Bull is perhaps the best film ever made about boxing. It has none of the posturing or mawkishness of the Rocky series. It is about violence, ugliness, and paranoia. It shows us something of the dark truth of the fight game. The portrayal of LaMotta is as ruthless as it is compelling: nothing about him is suppressed, including his brutal treatment of his wives.

The aftermath of Raging Bull must have been a confusing time for LaMotta. He had expected to be glorified in the film; instead, Martin Scorsese produced something much closer to the truth of his life and to the truth of his own autobiography, also called Raging Bull, on which the film had drawn.

‘The movie was a double-edged sword,’ says Teddy Atlas. ‘In the fight community, Jake wasn’t forgotten before Raging Bull but, to the public at large, he had drifted into anonymity. Then, after Raging Bull, his fame spread. So without the film, he wouldn’t have had the public recognition as a fighter that he deserves.’

In the end, as Mike Silver has put it, ‘you have to distinguish between the Bronx Bull and the Raging Bull, between the fighter and the man they made the movie about.’

Is LaMotta still in touch with De Niro? ‘Bobby phones occasionally,’ he says. ‘He’s a lovely man but his lifestyle is different from mine, the people he sees are not my kind of people, we move in different circles.’

When LaMotta speaks about Raging Bull his face is difficult to read. He is closed and guarded. His eyes are blank. At the same time, his voice grows ever-louder, betraying something of the true hurt that friends say that he felt about the way he had been portrayed.

‘I come from poverty,’ he tells me, as we prepare to leave the restaurant. ‘But I still had a great time as a kid, running around barefoot in the summer. Rocky Graziano and me, when we moved to the Bronx, we started our own rock and roll group. He’d rock ’em and I’d roll ’em’. He laughs, as do the waiters loitering by the table. I have the sense that he is about to launch into one of his old stand-up routines, an entertainer to the last. ‘We got stealing down to a fine art,’ he says. ‘Only thieving things started with the letter ‘a’ – a bike, a car, a wallet …’

He pushes up from his chair, still laughing, shakes hands with everyone, then shuffles to the door.

The great rivalry: La Motta v Sugar Ray Robinson
Jake LaMotta is best known for his rivalry with Sugar Ray Robinson, whom he fought six times. Robinson is often considered, pound-for-pound, to be the greatest fighter of all time. In his first 131 fights, his only loss was to LaMotta. He, in turn, beat LaMotta five times. Their encounters, which took place over a nine-year period, constitute one of boxing’s greatest rivalries.

2 October 1942, Madison Square Garden, New York
Robinson wins (10 round decision)
Both men had big reputations but their first meeting was an anticlimax. LaMotta was more tentative than usual, showing too much respect for the prodigiously talented Robinson. LaMotta lost the decision but managed to win three rounds and was not knocked down. LaMotta learnt his lesson and would be more aggressive next time.

5 February 1943, Olympia Stadium, Detroit
LaMotta wins (10 round decision)
Having gone into the rematch against Robinson as an outsider, LaMotta used his 16-pound advantage to revert to the familiar bullying style that he had abandoned in their first contest. He countered Robinson’s speed by attacking out of a close-in, crouched stance. It upset Robinson’s rhythm and, in the eighth round, he was knocked down (he fell through the ropes) for the first time in his career. Robinson survived a nine-count but, ten minutes later, his unbeaten record had gone.

26 February 1943, Olympia Stadium, Detroit
Robinson wins (10 round decision)
Just three weeks later at the same venue (Robinson had beaten Jackie Wilson in between), LaMotta attempted to repeat his previously successful tactics. The decision went against him, despite once again knocking Robinson down.

23 February 1945, Madison Square Garden, New York
Robinson wins (10 round decision)
It was back to LaMotta’s home town two years later but, after another 10, evenly contested rounds, Robinson was again victorious. ‘I kept swinging and Jake kept standing,’ Robinson said later of his opponent’s determination.

26 September 1945, Comiskey Park, Chicago
Robinson wins (12 round decision)
As with the previous four fights, the fifth went the distance. LaMotta was still boxing well – he had knocked out George Kochan just seven days before – but, once again, Robinson was quicker and more nimble. It would be six years before they met for one last showdown.

14 February 1951, Chicago Stadium, Chicago
Robinson wins (TKO, Round 13)
Known as the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, their sixth and final meeting was the most brutal. For the first eight rounds it was close, but thereafter LaMotta became a virtual punchbag. Though the fight was stopped in the 13th round, the Bronx Bull stayed on his feet.

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