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The mysterious death of Sonny Liston: Heroin overdose or murder?
Death of Sonny Liston. Photo via Instagram (@sonnyliston_official)
In the early 1960s, Sonny Liston was on top of the world as the boxing world champion after capturing the heavyweight title with a demolishing first-round victory of Floyd Patterson.
Less than a decade later the glory was long gone.
On January 5, 1971, Liston was found lying in his Las Vegas residences. He was believed to have been dead for six days.
Following a police investigation, the Las Vegas police came to the conclusion that the cause of Liston’s death was a heroin overdose.
Investigating police officer Sgt. Dennis Caputo of the Clark County Sheriff’s Department was one of the first police men on the scene.
“It was common knowledge that Sonny was a heroin addict,” Sgt. Caputo said. “The whole department knew about it.”
However, coroner Mark Herman said traces of heroin byproducts were found in Liston’s blood system, but claimed the amount wasn’t large enough to have caused the former champion’s death.
The death of Sonny Liston possibly Mob orchestrated
Another theory is that Sonny Liston was murdered by the Mafia who had a big influence on boxing in America at the time. The mob reportedly had control of the champion’s boxing career, a career that actually started after Sonny served a two-year prison stint for armed robbery.
According to the book “Warjac: Most Wanted”, written by Greg Swaim, the Mob hitman James John Warjac claimed he had helped to kill Sonny Liston via an enforced heroin overdose, which appeared to be a common execution technique.
“My father told me the story about Sonny’s death – he was there when he was killed, along with others in the Mob,” Swaim claimed in his book.
To this day nobody knows for sure how the former heavyweight champion died, and since there is no official record of his birth, it’s sadly not even known how old Sonny Liston was when he passed away.
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