MONTREAL – Friends of ex-world champion boxer Arturo Gatti say his final months with his Brazilian wife were tumultuous, but it didn’t stop him from agreeing to pay her $1 million if he was unfaithful to her.
Just weeks before he died, Gatti and his wife Amanda Rodrigues enlisted the help of a Montreal notary who helped them each draft a standard final will and testament in June 2009.
He also drew up a separate legal document that would give Rodrigues $1 million if she could prove Gatti was ever unfaithful to her.
A Quebec judge has begun hearing the particulars at a civil trial in Montreal aimed at settling Gatti’s multimillion-dollar estate, subject to a bitter dispute between Rodrigues and the boxer’s family.
At the centre of the debate is the validity of two wills with different beneficiaries.
Lawyers for the Gatti family claim the boxer did not understand the 2009 will, which leaves everything to Rodrigues.
They argue that a previous will – a copy of which has not been found – is valid and leaves the fortune to his family.
The last will was drawn up in June 2009 by Bruce Moidel, a 78-year-old Montreal notary with more than five decades of experience.
Moidel testified he suggested the couple update their wills when he heard they would be travelling without their baby son, Arturo Jr., now a toddler.
In Gatti’s 2009 will, no money was left to Gatti’s daughter from a previous relationship -Sofia Bella.
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Moidel testified Gatti wanted his daughter’s name in the document but had made other financial arrangements for her.
Moidel was also the one to suggest $1-million infidelity agreement – one he admitted was a first in his career.
“I explained it to him (Gatti) in general terms and I do believe he understood it,” he said.
Moidel testified that Gatti was not pressured at all to sign anything and he believed the boxer knew what he was signing.
“I have no way of knowing what he understood, that’s something only he can answer,” Moidel replied after intense questioning from Carmine Mercadante, a lawyer for the Gatti family.
Friends and acquaintances were perplexed by the new will. The couple’s relationship had soured in the months leading to his death and they weren’t living together.
About two weeks before the new wills were signed, a Montreal police constable had been called to the Gatti family home after Rodrigues allegedly keyed his car.
Gatti referred to Rodrigues in the police report as his ex-wife.
But Moidel said the couple he encountered in June 2009 seemed a “happy, joyful couple.”
And he described the will as a “perfectly normal, typical will.”
Moidel added: “I certainly never expected to be testifying about it.”
A man described as one of Gatti’s very best friends said things had been sour for months between the boxer and Rodrigues.
Chris Santos testified that the couple married in 2007, much to everyone’s surprise. Gatti returned to Montreal in 2008, but by early 2009 things had fallen apart.
Santos said Gatti was afraid of losing his son.
“He said to me ‘I don’t see my little girl, I don’t want to lose my baby boy,'” Santos said during testimony interrupted by frequent objections of hearsay from Rodrigues’ lawyer, Pierre-Hugues Fortin.
“He loved that kid to death, he loved him so much.”
Gatti was found dead at the age of 37 in July 2009 at an apartment he and his family had rented in the Brazilian seaside resort of Porto de Galihnas.
Brazilian authorities initially said Rodrigues was a prime suspect in the case but later released her when an autopsy in that country concluded he’d committed suicide.
That report said Gatti hanged himself with a handbag strap from a wooden staircase column in their apartment.
A news conference is scheduled for Wednesday in New Jersey where Gatti’s former manager, Pat Lynch, is expected to reveal the results of a private probe he says proves Gatti didn’t commit suicide.
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