Muhammad Ali’s second wife has warned there are likely to be claims to his $55 million fortune from a string of illegitimate children the boxer fathered.
Khalilah Camacho-Ali stood by Ali’s side for almost a decade, at a time when he’d been stripped of his world championship title for refusing to fight in Vietnam.
But he cheated on the mother of his four oldest children so shamelessly that she divorced him.
Yesterday, as he was laid to rest in his home town of Louisville, she said his family should steel itself for many claims to his estate.
‘They’re going to come out of the woodwork like roaches,’ she said. ‘I had to protect Ali from lots of paternity suits. I went through a lot with that man – he had a real dark side.’
Ali had at least nine children, two of whom were illegitimate. A tenth has also made a convincing claim.
Khalilah has little time for Ali’s other surviving wives. Ahead of the funeral, the 65-year-old said: ‘I’ll say hello to them but I’m not going to be their friend.’
She was talking of Ali’s last wife Lonnie and Veronica (No. 3), who was having an affair with the boxer while he was still married to Khalilah. She added: ‘Neither of them has any conscience.’
Now living alone in a Florida retirement block, Khalilah says proudly: ‘He wouldn’t have been who he became without me.’ Their marriage was a ‘rollercoaster ride’.
They travelled the globe together – and she tolerated his philandering to keep the family together.
But she reached breaking point following his crushing victory over Joe Frazier in 1975’s Thrilla in Manila after she watched on TV as the Philippines president, Ferdinand Marcos, was introduced by Ali to his mistress, the model Veronica Porche.
Khalilah immediately flew to the Philippines and burst into his hotel suite – catching the couple in flagrante. She didn’t quite float in like a butterfly but she certainly stung like a bee. Incandescent, she smashed mirrors and scratched Ali’s face, drawing blood.
Although she hopes their four children – Maryum, Jamillah and Rasheda, and Muhammad Jr – get something from his fortune, it is more important to her that Ali’s ‘first family’ behave properly.
That said, she has nothing but contempt for his widow Lonnie’s behaviour towards her son Muhammad Jr and Ali’s brother Rahman, who reportedly fell foul of Lonnie after she decided the pair were spongers. But her issues with Lonnie, who married Ali in 1986 (after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s), go further back. She says Lonnie – a former neighbour of the boxer – was too close to Ali even during his marriage to her, Khalilah.
Unlike other Ali wives, Khalilah didn’t have to convert to Islam for him. Although she was born Belinda Boyd, she was brought up in the faith, her father a lieutenant in the radical Nation Of Islam movement. A karate black belt at the age of ten, she later became a bodyguard of the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.
Mentored by the civil rights firebrand Malcolm X, Ali was converted to the Nation’s hateful views (although he later forsook it for mainstream Islam) and dropped his ‘slave name’ of Cassius Clay. After a disastrous first marriage to cocktail waitress Sonji Roi (now deceased), he was searching for a good, obedient Muslim wife.
Khalilah was 15 and working in the Nation’s bakery in Chicago when she first caught Ali’s eye. He had already lost his boxing licence when he proposed marriage – asking not her but her parents.
The couple married in August 1967. Khalilah was 17, and a virgin, and he was 25. Money was initially so tight Khalilah had to cash in the funds saved for her college education. She gave him his first four children in rapid succession, and became his publicist and planner.
For all his many virtues in the ring, Ali was an insatiable womaniser. Khalilah often walked in on it, as she did hours before he lost to Joe Frazier in New York in 1971, his big comeback fight after his boxing licence was restored.
When his aides wouldn’t allow her into his room before the fight, she realised he had a woman with him. ‘I couldn’t believe it. Not that he would mess around but that he would mess around just before the most important fight of his life.’
The last straw came when he flaunted his affair with Veronica. Khalilah filed for divorce in 1976 and told him she wanted to remain friends. His ‘unforgivable’ infidelity aside, he was a ‘wonderful, sweet and loving person’, she says. – Daily Mail