AP 12/01/05
Richard Hirschfeld, a colorful confidant of boxing champ Muhammad Ali who spent most of the last eight years as a fugitive from the federal government, killed himself Tuesday in jail.
Hirschfeld, 57, died the same day authorities told his attorney that final arrangements had been made to move him to Norfolk, Va., for trial. He had been on the lam for more than eight years until he was arrested in October in a closet at a lavish riverfront home in Fort Lauderdale.
Paramedics were called to the jail, and Hirschfeld was pronounced dead a short time later at a hospital, said U.S. Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Trish O'Steen. Authorities would not say how he killed himself.
Hirschfeld accompanied Ali to the Middle East in 1985 in a highly publicized attempt to gain the release of American hostages in Lebanon. They later had a falling out over the legal rights to the boxer's life story.
Nobody likes to hear that sort of thing.