Panos Eliades took on Don King and the boxing establishment to get Lennox Lewis another shot at the world title. Roy Collins reports
HE calls himself the Greek godfather. A fitting enough moniker for a man who has made a fortune liquidating people and, by way of a hobby, sending round his boys to bash other men’s brains in.
His own life has been threatened, most dramatically while relaxing with his family on a Cyprus beach a few years ago, and visitors to his central London office have been known to sport bulges in the inside pocket of their jackets which do not match the shape of a mobile phone.
Yet remarkably, Panos Eliades (44) is not that kind of godfather. Not that kind of liquidator. He’s made a multi-million-pound fortune from liquidating businesses in trouble. One man’s business collapse is another man’s riches, and in the recession-hit Eighties, Eliades struck gold.
Five years ago, slightly bored and apparently with more money than good judgment, he invested in Lennox Lewis, then just another raw heavyweight with promise. Lewis, who regained his WBC world heavyweight title when he he beat a weeping Oliver McCall last weekend, is now one of the richest men in sport while Eliades is involved in a fascinating fight for the control of boxing with the American promoter Don King.
“Everyone in boxing, particularly King, saw me as a soft touch,” Eliades said. “But I’ve had 20 years of dealing with villains, people who are actually incapable of telling the truth. They come into my office with assets all over the place and go into liquidation. They’re even more devious than people like Don King, so I could see him a mile off.”
Using classic bullying tactics, King phones Eliades from America in the early hours of the morning and keeps him talking until breakfast time, hoping weariness can succeed where negotiation fails. During one conversation, King offered Eliades $16-million to sit back and let Mike Tyson clean up in the ring and out of it before offering Lewis a title shot. Eliades told him “that sort of money won’t change my life”, and proceeded to win decisions over King in the United States courts to regain control of last week’s event.
Eliades lives in a private road in north London which Ringo Starr, Lulu and the Prince of Qatar have all called home. So has the disgraced financier Roger Levitt. When Levitt went under, Eliades put up half a million pounds of bail money and, in exchange, Levitt recommended that he buy out his contract with Lewis from the liquidator.
Eliades, who had never been to a professional fight before, agreed on 170 000. Even Frank Maloney, Lewis’s manager, said: “I thought he must be a brave man to put in that sort of money without really knowing what he was going into.” Eliades’s wife forbade her husband to put a drachma into boxing. “So I didn’t or, at least, I told her I didn’t. Lennox’s first fight under me was against Gary Mason – and Mason was the favourite. I watched it on TV, jumping around all over the place, and Angela said: ‘What are you getting so excited for? It’s only a boxing match.'” Eighteen months later, when Lewis, again the underdog, fought Razor Ruddock in London in a world title eliminator, Mrs E might have been furious to the point of decree nisi if she had been aware that her husband was in for 1,8-million.
Eliades says: “People say to me, ‘You’re making so much money from boxing.’ They don’t realise the risks I took. If you take risks, you deserve to take the rewards. In that Ruddock fight, I was one punch away from losing 1,8-million.”
Boxing now takes up 50% of Eliades’s working life, which has virtually required him to get a season ticket on Concorde – sometimes he takes it for a day trip to New York. For relaxation, he goes to Rome twice a year to pick up a suit or six, takes breaks in the south of France, and eats at restaurants such as the Ivy in London’s Covent Garden. That’s when his chef Georgina – “one of the greatest Greek cooks” – is not knocking up food for a party of 40 at home. “We’ve got some great staff,” he says. “Some of them looked after my wife as a child.”
Among his fleet of cars, he’s proudest of his Bentley Turbo with a sort of personalised number plate. PAN 0S was unavailable so he settled for PAN 1X, naming his business Panix Promotions to bring it in line. He insists, however, that “I am very low profile. I’m not like Donald Trump, walking around with eight bodyguards so that people know who I am. I’d rather stay at home and be quiet.” He’s also become a role model for the Greek community. Strangers phone up and ask if such and such a family is suitable for their daughter to marry into – which is why he has christened himself the Greek godfather.
Eliades is the son of Greek Cypriot parents who came to England in the Forties and made money from a restaurant business and then property. Though they were wealthy, they believed a silver spoon was part of the family cutlery, not a suitable object for implanting in a baby’s mouth.
“My parents never gave me a penny. When I got my chemistry degree at Loughborough, I said to my mum, ‘I think I’ll retire now.’ She said, ‘You can’t retire, you haven’t started work yet.’ I did another three years’ study to become a chartered accountant and she still wouldn’t give me any money. So I worked for the accountancy firm Stoy Hayward, who really wanted me to play in their football team.
“I was an amateur player with Sutton United – I wanted to be a professional footballer but my dad would not let me – and in exchange for playing in Stoy Hayward’s team they let me work with Chelsea, who were having financial difficulties. So every day I was mixing with heroes like Ray Wilkins and Mickey Droy.” He moved on when he discovered that you have to liquidate to accumulate, eventually striking out on his own and amassing his fortune from the “feel-bad factor” of the Eighties.
He made enough to reject that extraordinary offer from King, and he won’t regret it even if Evander Holyfield buries that honeypot by beating Tyson again. “I couldn’t let King treat me like that. I might have had $16-million in the bank but I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. I asked Lennox and he said don’t take the money.
“He knows I don’t need him to make a fortune because I’m already comfortable. He knows I’m not going to double-cross him.”