BoxRec

According to Marshall Miles,(Joe Louis's manager,)
Louis's older brother,Lonnie Barrow (4 years older),
was the only man in the world that Joe Louis was"physicially afraid of",
(even as Heavyweight champion).
According to Joe Louis,Lonnie was built like him but a little taller then Joe.
Like Joe ,Lonnie was also a known serious gambler(particularly Blackjack).
Lonnie Barrow was found dead in his apartment above the shoeshine parlor
that he owned in Detroit Michigan June 1960(age 49).
His cause of death was listed as from the fumes of a gas heater.
It was believed to be either an accident or suicide,
(a piece of pipe was found nearby that either removed or fell off from the gas heater).
However there may be a third cause.....murder?

Here is a link to a rare photo of Lonnie Barrow taken in 1952,when he was in his early 40's.)


http://books.google.com/books?id=XY8DAA ... pg=PA43&dq

here is some more info about Lonnie Barrow.

http://books.google.com/books?id=-F1VJg ... g=PA156&dq

Interesting info...thanks!

In the recent documentaries about Joe Louis like the HBO show,
Some People in it wondered why it was that Joe Louis was so paronoid about
being killed by gas fumes?
Around 1967 Louis started taping up the ventilators in his hotel rooms,
opening windows,putting maynaise in cracks in the rooms.
IMOP I think Joe Louis may have had some doubts in the back of his mind that Lonnie Barrow's death
was either suicide or an accident that a piece of the exhaust pipe to the gas heater fell off or Lonnie himself had taken it off.
As he was a HEAVY gambler too.
also Joe Louis did associate himself with a woman back in the 1950's/early 1960's
who was a pick-up for the mafia(she delivered skimmed money
from city to city usually from the casino's in Las Vegas).but thats another mystery.

His brother was probably murdered....But who really knows.

One one thing is for sure,after Joe Louis retired for good from the ring in 1952,Lonnie Barrow wasn't able to to hit up Joe for large amounts of money for the gambling addiction that he had .
Joe Louis couldn't afford his own
gambling addiction either after he retired.
Maybe if he was murdered by some elements of organized crime,it may have been somekind of a message to Joe Louis to not go to the authorities,
talk to FBI or pay up?

Brutu wrote:One one thing is for sure,after Joe Louis retired for good from the ring in 1952,Lonnie Barrow wasn't able to to hit up Joe for large amounts of money for the gambling addiction that he had .
Joe Louis couldn't afford his own
gambling addiction either after he retired.
Maybe if he was murdered by some elements of organized crime,it may have been somekind of a message to Joe Louis to not go to the authorities,
talk to FBI or pay up?

Could be, that's something I was thinking.

Did you see the other related thread here?
Boxing mysteries-Who was Annie Mitchell?

Brutu wrote:Did you see the other related thread here?
Boxing mysteries-Who was Annie Mitchell?

Just checking it out."Annie" seems to be a really connected person to the Mob.But I wonder if Joe was involved with her romatically, if that was the case, even worse scenario for Joe.It's ironic, you think Joe would be having these types of encounters while champion, his life post-boxing, more to it than I imagined.

bump.
I was going to bump up the thread on "Annie Mitchell"(whom Joe Lous talks about in his 1977 autobiography MY LIFE,
but could not find it in the archives here.
Has it been erased ?

that re-hash anti-American propaganda HBO documentary would have done better to re-search stuff like this
and who Annie Mitchel really was too.

Brutu wrote: ↑20 Nov 2011, 22:23 Here is a link to a rare photo of Lonnie Barrow taken in 1952,when he was in his early 40's.)


http://books.google.com/books?id=XY8DAA ... pg=PA43&dq

looks a kindof mean and embittered dude somewhat ?

Caractacus wrote: ↑19 Nov 2018, 15:46

Brutu wrote: ↑20 Nov 2011, 22:23 Here is a link to a rare photo of Lonnie Barrow taken in 1952,when he was in his early 40's.)


http://books.google.com/books?id=XY8DAA ... pg=PA43&dq

looks a kindof mean and embittered dude somewhat ?

Replying to yourself again

yeah,but Only because "Great Minds think Alike").
BTW do you have anything that would be actually interesting to add to this thread topic
that you would like to share with everyone ?

Brutu wrote: ↑20 Nov 2011, 22:23 Here is a link to a rare photo of Lonnie Barrow taken in 1952,when he was in his early 40's.)


http://books.google.com/books?id=XY8DAA ... pg=PA43&dq

Damn that was interesting, reading a copy of Jet from 1952. (Didn't see much about Louis' brother, just a pic, sorry.)

I would have bet a bottom dollar that Jet magazine was a '60s invention. I figured it didn't exist until it could first sell Jheri-curl ads.

Scroll down and read some of the gossip anecdotes under "What People are Talking About."

I was personally shocked, shocked that Delores Baker chose to stop recording under her previously successful pseudonym "Little Miss Sharecropper."

There is a sardonic, understated wit at play here, coming from a 1950s Black perspective. Very interesting to read, I wonder if there are any Jet magazine fight articles available? I would love to read their perspective on the 1950s fight game.

I really thought Jet magazine was as sixties as the Afro; even the name jet is a surprise for a magazine that hit the stands as early as 1950.

Alot of JET articles can be found under the Google Books feature.

Yeah I use to read JET magazine at lot all through the 1973 on up to the late 1980's
( the first part I always went to first was the Jet Beauty of the Week" of course.
(because almost always they usually posed in a bikini)
But they also had a lot of interesting crime related stories too that you would have never read about in the National newspapers
but they stopped that feature back in around the late 1980's.

you don't think people were capable of "rubbing out" someone
if they were in debt to the mafia ?