Warning: This post contains spoilers for Fight Night: The Million Dollar Robbery.

On October 26, 1970, Muhammad Ali made a historic comeback to the boxing ring after a three-and-a-half-year hiatus for refusing to serve in the military during the Vietnam War on religious grounds. Ali’s defiance led to his indictment and conviction for conscientious objection – a charge later overturned by the Supreme Court – and his titles being stripped. His opposition to the war was simultaneously praised and demonized, making Ali’s comeback fight in Atlanta against heavyweight boxer Jerry Quarry an international sporting spectacle.

The sold-out fight at the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium attracted what the late boxing writer Bert Sugar described as “the greatest gathering of black power and black money to date” and drew high-profile spectators from celebrities to civil rights leaders, politicians to mobsters. When Ali won the fight by technical knockout after three dominant rounds, Atlanta erupted into a citywide celebration. The evening would prove to be a major cultural milestone for the city, cementing its place as the “black mecca” of the American South.

“It was more than just a fight, it was an important moment for Atlanta,” civil rights activist Julian Bond recalls the evening’s impact. “That night, Atlanta became the political capital of blacks in America.”

Peacock’s new limited series Fight Night: The Million Dollar Robberywhose first three episodes are now streaming, revolves around the events surrounding a particular after-party where hundreds of guests were robbed, stripped of their clothing and forced to hand over their cash and jewelry. Based on the acclaimed 2020 iHeart podcast of the same name, Fight Night tells the story of how a local crook named Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams (played by Kevin Hart) went from organizing the party on behalf of notorious drug lord Frank Moten (Samuel L. Jackson), the “Black Godfather” of the New York underworld, and his New Jersey partner, Richard “Cadillac” Wheeler (Terrence Howard), to becoming one of the prime suspects in the case.

This is how the robbery went down

In the hours following Ali’s victory, around 200 partygoers flocked to a private Atlanta home for what was supposed to be a lavish, Las Vegas-style party. Instead, they were taken hostage by masked men with sawed-off shotguns, crammed into the home’s basement, and robbed of their money and belongings.

Creative loungingan alternative Atlanta newspaper reported in 2004 that space in the basement eventually became so tight that the gunmen ordered the victims to lie on top of each other. “Cash and jewelry were swept into pillowcases,” the story said. “This went on for hours as more people showed up. By 3 a.m., the half-naked victims were piled on top of each other like firewood.”

After JD Hudson (played by Don Cheadle), one of the first black detectives in the desegregated Atlanta Police Department, was assigned to the case, he discovered that many of the partygoers were unwilling to talk to the police. Although only five victims filed official reports, it turned out that the robbers had stolen at least $1 million worth of valuables.

Chicken Man, who hosted the party and had a long criminal record, quickly came under suspicion of staging the robbery to pay off a debt, putting him at risk of becoming a target of crime bosses seeking revenge for the robbery against them. On November 18, 1970, three men – McKinley Rogers Jr., James Henry Hall and Houston J. Hammond – were finally charged with armed robbery. While Hammonds was in police custody, both Rogers and Hall were gunned down in the Bronx in May 1971, in what was believed to be an act of revenge.

“We said last fall that it was just a question of who got them first, the police or the victims,” ​​Hudson said in a New Yorker newspaper in 1971. Just History. “It seems as if the victims were there first.”

What happened to Chicken Man?

While many believed that Chicken Man was killed in a contract killing in the days following the robbery, 30 years later he said in an interview with Fight Night Podcast writer and host Jeff Keating, Hudson, revealed that Williams had actually survived the whole ordeal and was still living as a pastor in Atlanta. “Chicken Man is alive now,” he said. “He’s Rev. Gordon Williams of Salem Baptist Church.”

Two years later, at a meeting between Hudson and Williams at Keating’s church, Hudson explained why he had come to believe that Chicken Man was innocent.

“I knew he wasn’t stupid enough to pull a stunt like that,” Hudson said, according to Creative Loafing. “This was a man who ran a multi-million dollar business from a pay phone on a street corner. He was smart. He could have run IBM or Coca-Cola. There was no way he would have risked all that to bribe someone. This was pulled off by a bunch of young thugs trying to hijack a party, and when they got there and saw how big it was, they improvised.”