Gold in the Mud
The Twisted Saga of Jailhouse Boxer James Scott’s Battle for Redemption:
Prison inmate No. 57735, accused of murder and serving a 30-40 year stretch inside Rahway State Prison for armed robbery, introduced himself in a letter to reporter Beth Schenerman at The New York Times on Dec. 17, 1978, writing, in a rare moment of understatement, “This is a unique story.” After returning to prison three years earlier, the former professional boxer had long since been recognized as one of the most feared and dangerous of the 1,150 inmates then living behind the walls of New Jersey’s most notorious maximum-security prison, a place journalist Ralph Wiley described “as if the world had dropped the sum of its sores into one of New Jersey’s gritty smokestacks, then chose not to watch as the results of the experiment filtered down into place.”
