The King of White-Collar Boxing, 2nd Edition - Softcover

In 1976 David Lawrence received a Ph.D. in literature from CUNY Graduate Center while he was teaching at Hunter College. Due to cutbacks he left for the insurance industry and within five years became the CEO of Allied Programs Corp. and other brokerage firms on Wall Street. He was a tournament tennis player and a ranked ski racer. He has been writing poetry his whole life and has over 600 published poems. His last book was Lane Changes published by Four Way Books. He subsequently became a boxer, rising to professional status. He fought in big venues like Vegas and Atlantic City. In the early nineties he made a movie of his fight career, Boxer Rebellion, which played at the Sundance Film Festival and the Vienna Film Festival. In 1993 he didn't pay his taxes on a few of his accounts, lost his multi-million dollar business and ended up doing a two-year bid in a Federal Prison Camp. In the early nineties and after jail he became a rapper and did three albums. He has been married since 1972 and lives with his wife, Lauren, in New York City. She is the Dreams Editor for the Daily News and has a television show, "Celebrity Dreams Decoded." His son, Graham, is 32 years old and a successful businessman. David writes every day. He teaches boxing at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn.

The life of David Lawrence reads like a Hollywood script: Gifted poet and English professor turns Wall Street tycoon, boxing pro, rapper and ends up convicted of fraud and in jail. Lawrence is brilliant, amusing and finds his redemption and happiness at the most unlikely place the legendary Gleasons Gym. The King of White Collar Boxing - a knock-out! -- --Susanne Lingemann, ZDF TV Network

David Lawrences memoir, The King of White Collar Boxing, is a charged and urgent piece of writing filled with electric metaphors-picture Hearns and Hagler rushing to the middle of the ring and slugging it out incessantly-that kept me reading compulsively. The book moves at breakneck speed through the worlds of shady business and privilege, boxing and rapping, a year or so in prison and fears of brain damage as he desperately tries to make his mark following his own code of ethics. All along we witness the inside of a fantastically manic and narcissistic brain pinballing between deep seeded inadequacy and visions of grandeur and honor as he propels himself down the social/economic ladder on a redemptive mission to find the place where things make the most sense and he feels most at home: in the ring with the basic mantra of kill or be killed and subsequently putting words to pages until I, a completely satisfied reader, end up rooting for him. -- --Tony Gloeggler, author of The Last Lie and One Wish

People familiar w/ the small press will recognize David Lawrence as almost a kind of superhero. The guy s been a boxer, millionaire CEO, jailbird, rapper, poet, & who knows what else. These elements are great ingredients for a fascinating story, & Lawrence tells it here. As a poet, Lawrence writes lines like he s throwing punches blunt, quick, hard. And he starts his book out this way, w/ paragraphs like: Courage involves the bad public relations of aggressivity. Let love die because love kills. Ooh, but we do get deep or confused. I have a lot to say. I box. It keeps me simple, honest, sincere. Like Hemingway. But pretty soon he settles down into a more rhetorical flow. The story basically goes like this: Lawrence is the Chairman & CEO of his own insurance brokerage down on Wall Street. In 1985, at the age of 38, he decides that he wants to box. Men are killers. It s built into the tips of their penises. I had spent the sixties trying to get in touch with my feminine side. Gleason s Gym in Manhattan, sparring w/ some pretty good fighters. In the course of these 329 pages we ll meet Renaldo Snipes, Buddy McGirt, Larry Holmes, Macho Camacho, Michael Dokes, Mike Tyson, rapper Kurtis Blow, Arturo Gatti, & more. Plus he meets Donald Trump, of whom Lawrence says, He was a chubby, arrogant man with hair that lay over his head like a gull s wing....He was the supreme egotist. Worse than me. Anyway, Lawrence realizes that, despite his being a millionaire, the boxers look down on him as a weakling. He gradually earns the respect of the guys he s working w/, & he develops self- respect as well. He s living in an honor society rather than a legal one. And he s writing poetry. About halfway through the book the FBI comes knocking. This is in 1990. Lawrence has spent so much time & energy on his pugilism that he has neglected the business, & two office underlings have played loose w/ a lot of cash. He ends up in Federal Prison in upstate New York for just under two years, released in March of 1995. He then focuses on his career as a rapper (which really doesn t go anywhere) & then as a boxing coach. Lawrence s exploits in the book pretty much end in 2001, when he is determined to have a brain injury (due to boxing) & he gets back together w/ his lovely, long-suffering wife, Lauren. Along the way he appears in People Magazine, USA Today, New York Magazine, on CNN & on Phil Donahue. And he s still writing poetry. Lawrence tells a good, fast-paced story. There s a lot of action, of course, & many introspective passages, where he ruminates on people & himself. Like what makes us all tick? The King of White-Collar Boxing (2016) was published by Rain Mountain Press in NYC & costs only $18.00. The text is typo-free & includes perhaps 2- dozen black-&-white photographs of the author in various stages of his adventures. --John Berbrich, BookBeat