Who Made George Gorgeous? - The Troubling True Crime Stories of Lord Patrick Lansdowne and Gardenia Davis

Anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the history of professional wrestling knows the oft-repeated story of Gorgeous George, the innovator and influencer who paved the way for the glitzy, showbiz future that was to come. In an age of grayscale grappling, he was a splash of colour, with coiffured hair, glamorous robes, showbiz razzle dazzle and a host of heat-garnering bits of business - he had a male valet who he would insist disinfect the ring before wrestling, he sprayed atomizers of perfume at his opponents, and minced around the ring at the very height of the Lavender Scare. Wrestling had long known that there was money to be made in tapping into social anxieties - contemporary to George were any number of supposedly unreconstructed Nazi villains (most of them Americans donning a monocle and a cartoon accent, but one day on this blog I'll revisit the story of some actual Nazis who set foot in the ring), and before him the duelling fascination and revulsion of Orientalism gave wrestling a litany of Terrible Turks, and even the first encounter of George Hackenschmidt and Frank Gotch was deeply coloured by nationalist sentiment - but George played on concerns about the decline of American masculinity in a way tailor-made for the television age. And that is always the crux of the Gorgeous George story - in the 1950s, he was said to have sold more televisions than Milton Berle, the unquestioned king of the TV variety show, and ushered in a new age, not just for professional wrestling, but for all of American pop culture.

To that end, there's something of a cottage industry in the "fortuitous encounter with Gorgeous George" anecdote in celebrity biography - Muhammad Ali credited George's patter, and the way he made people pay to see him even when they wanted to see him lose, as a vital inspiration for his own public persona, while Bob Dylan's Chronicles Vol. 1 recounts a chance run-in with George in almost mythic terms, where the unlikely meeting culminates in George telling the young Bob, "you're making it come alive", giving him the inspiration and encouragement to continue on his chosen path. From the comfort of the TV screen, he provided similar inspiration for James Brown, and for John Waters. Blondie's Debbie Harry - a self-confessed wrestling fanatic in the '70s and '80s, and a regular attendee of WW(W)F shows at Madison Square Garden - recounts a story of meeting Gorgeous George during her time working as a Playboy Bunny; given that George died in 1963, some 3-4 years before Harry places this story, one wonders who she actually met. 

In wrestling, so the conventional history often goes, George laid the foundations for what was to come, by putting the emphasis on presentation and character above his not insubstantial wrestling skills - he began his career as a carnival shooter. Every bleach-blonde, robe-wearing, strutting and preening heel from Buddy Rogers on down, and every gay panic heel from Adrian Street to Goldust is said to have taken their lead from the Gorgeous George blueprint, while some have claimed George was the first wrestler to use entrance music - his choice of theme was Elgar's "Pomp & Circumstance", later used to tremendous effect by "Macho Man" Randy Savage. Savage - born Randall Poffo - later regretted the choice; a devotee of George, he felt that he had done him a disservice by causing people to associate the theme with the Macho Man rather than the Gorgeous one. In the late 1990s, Randy even bought the rights to the Gorgeous George name, offering it to WCW to use for his brother, Lanny Poffo, who had proven as The Genius in the WWF to have a knack for portraying himself as an effeminate, cowardly heat magnet, but it never came to fruition, with Savage instead, confusingly, giving the name to his new manager, Stephanie Bellars. There were others - Richard Phelps wrestled for Jerry Jarrett's Memphis territory as Gorgeous George Jr. until George's widow threatened legal action, and Robert Kellum, who had a brief run in WCW as the Liberace-inspired Maestro, also worked under the name Gorgeous George III, claiming to be George's legitimate grand-nephew.

History, as we all know, is never quite as simple as all that, though - there's rarely one great man who innovates and who all after follow. George's act, as masterful as it was, borrowed liberally from the pop culture of his time, and from the social anxieties of 1950s America, but he also had a handful of antecedents within wrestling. Today, we're going to look at two of them.

The first, who Lou Thesz has credited as George's main inspiration, was one Lord Patrick Lansdowne. Lansdowne was a farm boy from Ohio, born Wilbur Finran, who began wrestling in 1930 as Patrick or Wilbur Finnegan, a plucky babyface for the Irish-American crowds, but with limited success. It was in 1933 that he began to try his luck as a villain, first as Duke or Lord Finnegan, before expanding the name to Lord Patrick Lansdowne Finnegan and, by mid-1934, dropping "Finnegan" altogether, and with it, the last suggestion of Irish heritage. Having failed to catch on as a hero, Lansdowne realised that there was an easy way to make the heavily Irish audiences that he had once hoped would cheer him on bay for his blood - the former farm boy reinvented himself as an English aristocrat. 

It was a gimmick that attracted nuclear heat from the Irish and Irish-Americans, and soon from Americans across the country. Lansdowne styled his hair ridiculously, he wore a cape and a monocle, affected an outrageous accent, and was accompanied to the ring by valets and butlers. As George would after him, he insisted that his servants disinfect the ring ropes, spray perfume on the ring and his opponent, and would even insist that matches pause for a tea break. More than a decade before George wound up his gramophone, Lord Lansdowne was played to the ring by a recording - or, for the particularly big matches, a live performance - of "God Save The King". He and George crossed paths at least once, in the late 1930s, when George was simply George Wagner, a struggling wrestler in the early days of his career.

Lansdowne's mark on the historical record doesn't end as a forgotten wrestler and inspiration for one of the greats, but in a far grimmer tale. Enter Thelma Todd, the quintessential golden age Hollywood starlet - a blonde beauty in the Monroe mould, Todd was whisked away to the bright lights following a beauty pageant win; so far, so Mulholland Drive. Signed to Paramount, Todd soon discovered a gift for comic timing that led her to roles alongside Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, and the Marx Brothers, but she had no shortage of dramatic roles either. Everything was looking bright in her professional life, but Todd's personal world was in turmoil. Divorced from her second husband, film producer Pat DiCicco, after a two year abusive relationship and one drunken fight too many, Todd embarked on a number of short-lived flings, before moving in with her new boyfriend, the film noir and horror director Roland West, who at the time was still married to silent film actress Jewel Carmen.

On December 14th, 1935, Thelma and Roland had been fighting, and Todd left the apartment they shared above a café she managed, to attend a glamorous party at the Café Tropicana. She stayed drinking and partying for hours, until she bumped into ex-husband Pat DiCicco, and his new beau, and left shortly thereafter, at around 3am. Two days later, Monday December 16th 1935, she was found by her maid, slumped over the wheel of her 1932 Lincoln Phaeton car, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Todd had been chauffeured home, and apparently dropped off some distance from her garage, yet her hair, clothes and shoes bore no sign of dirt, wear or tear from the walk. She was still dressed in her Café Tropicana party clothes, though the autopsy found that she had eaten food not served at the party. The autopsy also found that she had a broken nose. Though the official verdict was that her death was accidental "with possibly suicidal tendencies", her friends and family doubted the explanation of suicide. She had left no note, had left the party in high spirits, and her car was full of Christmas gifts she planned to give out to friends and family. One explanation was that Todd had locked herself out, and turned on the car's engine to keep herself warm, but the key to the house was in her handbag, by her side the whole time. Unsurprisingly, the mysterious death of a glamorous starlet was the stuff of grim tabloid dreams. Paparazzi photographs of Todd's body, still inside the car, made the rounds of America's most muck-raking newspaper, and speculation was rife.

Jewel Carmen, estranged wife of Todd's boyfriend Roland West, told the jury that she had seen Todd driving around Hollywood Boulevard at 11pm on December 15th, hours after the police estimated she had died, and long after she had left the Tropicana party. Others reported having seen or spoken to her in the hours leading up to her death, in manners that contradicted the police's version of events no end. Roland West, who, like Todd's previous partners, had become controlling and possessive, was hounded by the press, and accused of everything from intentionally locking the garage door once Thelma was inside, to having her murdered on his yacht, the MV Joyita, and planting her body in the garage once the deed was done - an elaborate ploy that in itself would have taken far longer than either the accepted timeline or Carmen's testimony allows for. Incidentally, the Joyita would be the centrepiece of another mystery - following the attack on Pearl Harbour, it was acquired by the United States Navy and, after the war, sold back into private ownership. In 1955, it was found adrift, some 600 miles west from its scheduled route, missing four tons of cargo and abandoned by its crew and passengers - twenty-five men, women and children in all, all lost.

From one mystery to another, if Thelma Todd was murdered, then by whom, and why? Roland West and Jewel Carmen remained the centre of the media circus surrounding Todd's death and the ensuing trial, but there were other possibilities. Fingers were pointed at Todd's ex-husband, Pat DiCicco, who had a sideline in some very shady businesses, along with a string of violent and abusive relationships. Two years after Todd's death, DiCicco was alleged to have been in a fist-fight with comedian and Three Stooges creator Ted Healy at the Trocadero that may have led to Healy's subsequent collapse into a coma and death, though Healy's alcoholism undoubtedly played a factor, and in fact, when recounting the events of the fight/assault to wrestler Man Mountain Dean, Healy was unable to name his attackers. What's more, one of DiCicco's business associates was the crime boss and father of modern American organised crime Lucky Luciano, yet another former abusive partner of Thelma Todd. Together, DiCicco and Luciano had tried to pressure Todd into allowing them to run an illegal gambling parlour out of Todd's café, and Todd persistently refused. Was that sufficient motive? Roland West was also rumoured to have Mafia ties, and to have suggested using their property for the gambling parlour in the first place. On his deathbed, in 1952, West allegedly confessed to involvement in Todd's death, and countless Hollywood conspiracy, true crime and gossip books have speculated about widespread conspiracy and cover-ups, though in reality, it's unclear if the supposed deathbed confession ever even happened, and if it did, whether it bore any resemblance to the facts of Thelma's death.

There was one more mystery, however - two men who had been seen with Todd at the Trocadero party, and were allegedly due to escort her to another event the following night, a party hosted by Martha Ford, wife of actor and vaudevillian Wallace Ford. To add yet another macabre note to this story, Ford's real name was Samuel Jones, and he took his stage name from a fellow actor that he had illegally ridden the rails with upon first arriving in America, who had been killed beneath the wheels of a train. At least one of Todd's apparent mystery guests was speculated by the press to have been the last person to see Thelma Todd alive. One was actor Duke York, the other was Lord Lansdowne. It was Duke York, who had starred alongside Todd in her final film All-American Toothache, that told the press that he and Lansdowne were the mystery escorts. York was a bit part actor - monsters, brutes, bruisers and goons, mainly - but it was his name that Todd had found amusing, and he explained that Todd wanted her to mimic the attire of Lansdowne, all starched shirt, top and tails and monocle, so that she could introduce him at Sunday's party as "The Duke Of York" alongside Lord Lansdowne.

Both Lansdowne and York testified in court, and Martha Ford claimed that she had received a phone call from Thelma Todd on Sunday afternoon, around 4pm, saying that she would arrive at the party within the hour, with a mysterious guest. The authorities dismissed all of these claims - they apparently didn't believe that Lansdowne or York were the guests in question, and their timeline of events rendered a 4pm phone call from Thelma Todd impossible - if the police reports were true, she had already been dead for hours.

Roland West disputed the claims of York and Lansdowne, insisting that it was nothing more than a publicity stunt, and that he knew who Todd's mystery guest would have been, tacitly admitting that the "mystery guest" conversation had taken place, but refusing to name names. It's not above professional wrestlers to crowbar their names into even the most tasteless of stories, but this? Would an actor then at the height of his career, even as a bit player, risk tarnishing their reputation with the suggestion of an involvement in a murder? While, if it were a lie, York and Lansdowne may have been aiming for a sense of reflected glamour through association with Hollywood high society, by positioning themselves as potentially the last men to see Thelma Todd alive, they must have realised that their names would come under suspicion, and that not all publicity is good publicity. Whether Lord Lansdowne's connections to Thelma Todd are true or not, like so much of the last days of her life, we will never known.

So what came next? Duke York continued to work until his death in 1951 - he took his own life, shooting himself in the head while on the phone to his estranged lover, Catherine Moench. Roland West and Jewel Carmen finally divorced in 1938, and both went into relative seclusion; neither ever made another film. West remarried to Lola Lane - the inspiration for the name of DC Comics' character Lois Lane - in 1946, and died in 1952, followed a long period of decline, a stroke, and a nervous breakdown. Lansdowne's wrestling career continued unabated, with numerous regional title wins under his belt, and matches against some of the biggest stars of the '40s and '50s, including a loss to Randy Savage's father, Angelo Poffo, in 1950. He retired from wrestling that same year but, still experimenting with new tweaks to his aristocratic formula, only after briefly reinventing himself as not just Lord Lansdowne, but "The White Rajah of Shalimar", accompanied not by servants and valets but by Indian slaves. 

Another man who crossed paths with Lord Lansdowne, and an inspiration for the Gorgeous George gimmick, was in fact a childhood friend of George, and the two had broken into wrestling together. That man was Sterling Davis, better known to American wrestling fans of the 1950s as Dizzy Davis, and to Mexican fans as Gardenia Davis. 

A friend and running buddy of George's in their early days together, struggling to find a niche in Houston's bustling wrestling scene of the 1930s, Davis was by all accounts the superior wrestler of the two, and it was that talent that caught the attention of Salvador Lutteroth, a former military man in the Mexican Revolution who, enamoured with the wrestling matches he saw in El Paso, in 1933 created Mexico's first Mexican-owned wrestling promotion, Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre (EMLL), now trading as CMLL, the oldest continuous wrestling promotion in the world. Professional wrestling had been introduced to Mexico in the 1860s, during the Second Franco-Mexican War, and, growing from roots in Greco-Roman wrestling rather than the Catch style that American wrestlers preferred, evolved into a distinct style with its own tropes, conventions, and psychology, but it was under the stewardship of Salvador Lutteroth that it grew to become a cultural phenomenon. It was Lutteroth who introduced and popularised masked wrestlers to Mexico, and who encouraged the wrestlers under his employ to wrestle an acrobatic, fast-paced and high-flying style that would come to characterise Lucha Libre, and who discovered talented future legends like Gory Guerrero and the great El Santo and, crucially, Sterling Davis.

In EMLL, Sterling developed the character of Gardenia Davis, a preening pretty boy in homemade robes, who blew kisses at his opponents and handed out flowers to his audience. In an intensely patriarchal and masculinist society, an effete American deploying every queer panic trick in the book was a lightning rod for crowd antagonism, and it made Davis a star. On his return to Texas, where he continued to wrestle as Dizzy Davis with none of Gardenia's campery, he suggested that his friend George Wagner give the gimmick a try, and granted him permission to try it out in America, where Davis never bothered, convinced it wouldn't get over with an American audience. Not his wisest choice.

In Mexico, Gardenia Davis unwittingly created the blueprint for an entire subgenre of luchadore - the Exotico. These were wrestlers like Davis, who exploited the conservative homophobia of audiences through exaggerated performances of camp, effeminate and often offensive subversion of sexual and gender norms. Davis was a direct influence on Adorable Rubi, who upped the ante with ever more flamboyant ring attire and mixed ballet moves with his Lucha style, and led a stable fellow Exoticos named Ola Lila, or The Lilac Wave. From the 1980s, the role of the Exotico began to shift, from cisgender, heterosexual men exploiting conservative sexual politics, booked as snivelling, cowardly heels or lower card comic relief, to a transformative opportunity for genuine LGBTQ+ wrestlers, like Pimpinella Escarlata, or the great Cassandro. While Cassandro has been outspoken about the homophobia, abuse, violence and depression that they have faced throughout their career, they have also become an icon of LGBTQ+ representation in wrestling, and deservedly so. Today, Exotico influence can be seen across Lucha Libre and beyond, and today's Exoticos may be straight, gay, bi, cis, trans, or anything in-between, and while it was far from Sterling Davis' intention, much of that evolution can be traced directly back to the first time he passed a beautiful gardenia to a gentleman in the front row of a Mexican armoury.

In 1949, Sterling Davis' career was so successful - whether mincing and pouting in Mexico, or brawling and shedding blood in Texas - that he wanted to take the next step, and move from headlining shows to running the show. He tried to break away from Houston promoter Morris Sigel, and with backing from some Texas oil barons, applied for a promoter's license, with lofty promises that 50% of his profits would go directly to paying his wrestlers. That application proved to be disastrous, because not only did the combined powers of Morris Sigel and the National Wrestling Alliance conspire to keep Davis out, it meant that Davis had to be questioned by the State Athletic Commission. It was under questioning that several incidents from Davis' past were brought to light, which he and his lawyer tried to deny. His record ran to 18 arrests in a three year period, included a suspended sentence for burglary in February 1935. Davis's promotional aspirations were finished.

Sterling attempted to sue Sigel and his associates, accusing them of running an illegal monopoly, and with much evidence - some six years later, the NWA would be under federal investigation for exactly that - but he was unsuccessful when Sigel's lawyers argued, not incorrectly, that the State Commission was well within their rights to reject a license application on the grounds of character, and that Davis had, after all, committed perjury. Meanwhile, his home and signpainting business both suffered mysterious fires, almost certainly the result of arson - but arson from associates of Morris Sigel, or perhaps a botched insurance claim from Davis when his appeal was rejected? Who knows.

Davis had lost huge sums of money in his failed attempts to run against the NWA, but by raising the spectre of monopoly, the Alliance couldn't afford to blackball him from wrestling, and he returned to the ring in New York in 1950, even burying the hatchet with Morris Sigel and returning the following year. In 1956, he lost a Hair vs. Hair match to Dory Funk Sr. In 1959, he competed in a messy, unrewarding Boxer vs. Wrestler match with the great fighter Archie Moore, who, as an African-American boxer, often had to turn to such gimmick fights when denied the high profile bouts he deserved. His health failing, he finally retired in early 1960, ending a career spanning almost 30 years, in which he wrestled a litany of all-time greats: Gorgeous George, Lou Thesz, El Santo, Verne Gagne, Gory Guerrero, Dory Funk, Buddy Rogers, Lord James Blears, Freddie Blassie, Mad Dog Vachon, Ricki Starr, George Gordienko, Killer Kowalski, Jules Strongbow, and even a 1957 intergender tag match with Peggy Allen against Bulldog Plechas and The Fabulous Moolah.

Sterling Davis kept busy outside of the ring throughout his career, earning a Psychology degree and working as a consulting psychologist in Texas, and starting a business designing women's clothing, but it would be more peculiar extra-curricular activities that brought him back into the headlines.

In February 1974, Sterling Davis was tried in Dallas on thirteen counts of fraud. A skilled confidence man, Davis had somehow convinced seventy people that there was significant money to be made in bullfrog farming. Claiming to own a 650 acre bullfrog farm, and to sell bullfrogs to universities (look, I'm not pretending to understand the scam, okay?), he secured thousands of dollars in investments, and sold a makeshift Start-Your-Own-Bullfrog-Farm kit to dozens of gullible frog farmers-to-be. The kit, costing $3000, involved two portable swimming pools with poor filtration, an instruction manual, a piece of sheet metal that Davis called an "automatic feeder" and, of course, a few frogs. The instruction manual claimed that bullfrogs could be taught to feed in captivity if they were given a revolving selection of live maggots and rabbit food from the enclosed feeder, but despite budding frog-shepherds' best efforts, most of them ended up releasing the poor starving frogs when they failed to eat a single morsel. Even at trial, Davis insisted that the feeders worked perfectly for "more prosperous clients", ever attempting to get more cash out of his marks.

Davis was fined $10,000, forced to pay restitution to his former clients, and sentenced to five years in prison, plus five years probation. He got out of serving prison time through pleas of ill health, coming not long after undergoing open heart surgery, and continued to plead innocent, claiming that he was only a management consultant on the whole bullfrog farming affair, misled by unscrupulous salesmen. In any event, he was forced to sell off much of his two-acres of land, and to seek fresh employment that met the terms of his parole.

Davis turned to his psychology qualifications, and found another scam. Claiming to possess ancient mystical knowledge, Davis tutored night students in the techniques of what he called Transcendental Relaxation, in order to avoid legal threats from the organisation behind Transcendental Meditation. Somehow still possessing enough money to furnish an office with vibrating chairs and expensive sound systems, in 1975 he returned to practicing clinical psychology.

Meanwhile, Sterling Davis wasn't the only member of the Davis clan facing legal trouble. His son, Sterling Blake Davis Jr., had served time in an Arizona prison for possession of almost 800 pounds of marijuana, and in May 1974, just a few months after his father went on trial, Davis Jr. was arrested again while out on parole, this time in Saltillo, Mexico, and again charged with possession of marijuana.

Blake Davis, as he was known, claimed that he was strapped naked to a bed in a Saltillo prison while interrogated, and forced to sign a confession written in Spanish, that he couldn't understand. He attempted to escape by tunnelling through the floor, and by bribing his wardens, but to no avail. He was beaten and tortured with razorblades by Mexican fellow inmates. Finally, in August 1975, he was to be transferred to a tiny, cramped and windowless jail in Piedras Negras.

The American prisoners at Piedras Negras whiled away their time - as prisoners accused of trafficking narcotics, Mexican law allowed them to be detained indefinitely until trial and sentencing - fantasising about elaborate escape plans, or waiting for regular visits from the US consul, who brought news of US congressional hearings on the planned negotiations to release American inmates from Mexican prisons. For Blake Davis, though, he didn't need to fantasise and speculate, he had something better - he had Sterling Davis for a father.

Across the border in Texas, from his oak-lined psychiatrist's office, Sterling Davis was drumming up interest and investment, and though he had found no success in interactions with the American embassy in Mexico, the Mexican embassy in America, or with various attorneys in Mexico, he had stumbled on a remarkable fact - strictly speaking, so long as no one was injured, and there was no property damage, Mexico had no law against jailbreak. The game was on.

Davis found out the names of other Piedra Negras inmates and reached out to their friends and families through whatever channels - legal or otherwise - he could find. Through some of his shadier connections, he reached out into Dallas' seedy underbelly, looking for co-conspirators, with little luck - he could no longer afford to offer the kind of money that would appeal to mobsters and professional hitmen, and the job was hardly inviting; failure guaranteed imprisonment, death, and likely both. What's more, Davis' money was drying up as every group he hired to do the job ultimately backed out - one gang used their advance to buy a truck and enough guns to storm the jail, then spent the rest on alcohol and partied too hard to get the job done, while others were crazed, far-right militias who were happy for any excuse to go crossing the border with an enormous stockpile of explosives. One group finally made it as far as the jail itself but, likely having got word of some kind of plotting, they had amped up security, with the poorly paid and compliant local guards now backed up by armed soldiers on the rooftop.

Sterling Davis finally found two men up for the job. One was Don Fielden, an ex-Marine who spoke openly and with no guilt about the men he killed while serving in Vietnam. Almost losing a leg from exploding shrapnel, he was discharged in 1972, and returned to an America that now sneered at the men who served in Vietnam, and found himself unable to find work, unable to get a disability pension, and drinking heavily. He eventually managed to get occasional work as a truck-driver, but developed the habits of driving drunk, and firing his pistol from his cab - unsurprisingly, two days before Christmas 1975, he was fired. In February 1976, a friend in a dingy truckers' bar passed word of Sterling Davis' jailbreak plan on to Fielden.

Don Fielden was, despite having gone off the rails, an old soldier in search of a mission. He almost immediately cottoned on that Sterling Davis was a conman, and had little sympathy for an imprisoned drug dealer, but civilian life had been cruel to him, and the offer of $5000 to scope out the jail would amount to the most money he'd seen in years. 

Mike Hill was a career criminal, who walked out of school one day and simply never went back, spending his teenage years sleeping rough, and bouncing between friends' houses and state institutions, until in 1965 he was convicted of burglary. He went straight - or as straight as Mike Hill ever could - by operating a junkyard in Dallas, though he did so while armed to the teeth, paying cash-in-hand to anyone who could tow in an illegally parked car, with no questions asked. That ran him up against local government, and a handful of new charges to add to the list. One way or another, he knew Don Fielden, and he was invited to come along to Mexico.

Don Fielden had by now been to Piedra Negra, he had spoken to Blake Davis, and sketched out his plans on napkins to sell to Hill. They drove down to Mexico, and, to Hill's surprise, found that this wasn't another reconnaissance mission he was being taken along on to get a feel for the place - Fielden intended to pull off the jailbreak that very night, before Mike Hill had been given any real chance to think about anything more than the drink, drugs and women he assumed would be waiting for him in Mexico.

On March 1st, they checked into a motel, and Mike Hill was horrified. The jail was heavily guarded, and the street provided no obvious cover. Every time Fielden suggested using fire or explosions to distract the guards and police, Hill's stomach knotted with fear, and he instinctively poured himself another mug of coffee, or rolled another joint. Any time they tried to case out the street, the sight of two suspicious Americans nosing around either attracted the attention of the local police, or of local prostitutes, pimps, drug-pushers and trinket-sellers. It wasn't going well.

Back at the motel, they phoned Sterling Davis Sr. It was the first time he and Mike Hill had spoken. Sterling was not 100% certain that his son was even still in the same jail, and was reluctant to send any money until the job was done, while Fielden was itching to get going soon enough that he still had enough cash to cover the motel bill. Hill realised that he had made a huge mistake. Not only that, but as he made his way toward the jail at midnight, Mike Hill realised that he had no idea what Blake Davis looked like - if Don Fielden didn't make it, was he supposed to rush around asking everyone until he found the right guy?

That night's attempt didn't pay off, after a run-in with the police. Hill was able to sweet-talk them into convincing him they were two lost tourists looking for a bar and brothel, and Fielden was able to dispose of their guns in the undergrowth, but while Mike Hill was finally able to get the drinks and the women he'd been dreaming of, they were losing precious time.

Wednesday was visitors' day. Unarmed, Hill and Fielden were allowed in, and while Hill was finally face-to-face with Blake Davis for the first time, he was still nervous and scared - it seemed that every guard knew why they were there, that it couldn't be more obvious. The jail itself - and Hill had seen the inside of a few in his time - absolutely horrified him. 

It had been three days. They no longer had enough fuel to get back to Dallas, and had been drinking up all of their money. Fielden managed to convince a friend to wire him $50, enough to pay the motel bill, refuel, and head for home. Back in Dallas, the two men were having doubts about each other's abilities, and Hill finally met with Sterling Davis, and - one conman to another - doubted his credibility, and didn't trust that he could afford to put up the kind of money he was offering, with only a photocopy of a $5000 cheque to prove his worth. By now, though, Mike Hill had looked into the eyes of Blake Davis and the other Piedra Negra inmates, and he felt that he owed them their freedom. 

Mike Hill managed to blag his way into a $1000 loan, claiming that a big repossession job in Mexico could bring in ten times that much for his business, and brought his eighteen year old protégé Billy Blackwell - an illiterate former employee in his car-towing business - as a third man.

In the early hours of March 11th, the three returned to Mexico. Billy went ahead with a black ski-mask and walkie-talkie, while Mike and Don had to pull the old "which way to the brothel?" trick to evade the cops again. 

When they made it to the jail, it was on Billy's advice that there should only be three cops left in the building after the majority had left. When they burst through the door, five police officers and five guards were interrogating an 18 year old Mexican girl, arrested on drug charges, but under intense scrutiny for alleged involvement with the Liga Communista 23 de Septiembre, a Marxist-Leninist militia named as a terrorist organisation by the Mexican government - in 2019, the government apologised for years of human rights abuses, kidnappings and torture of alleged Liga members.

Mike Hill, Billy Blackwell and Don Fielden were hopelessly outnumbered, but they had the element of surprise on their hands, and most of the police and guards were unarmed. They managed to force Davis out of his cell, and to subdue the police without a single shot being fired. Only one prisoner opted to remain in his cell, the remainder - male and female, Mexican and American, including the 18 year old currently being questioned - agreed to join in on the jailbreak, but one prisoner complicated things, taking the opportunity of his newfound freedom to attack guards. It was a mess. It was chaos.

Somehow, as a fresh batch of cops rushed to the scene, the jailbreakers were able to make it to their car while all other prisoners fled in every direction. They crossed the bridge into the United States, flinging guns and ski masks from the car as they went. Somehow, they made it.

Some of the prisoners had been rounded up and recaptured on either side of the border, and they had begun to talk. The story was breaking in the press, and it was a PR disaster for Mexico/American relations. But nobody was naming names. Sterling Davis and his unlikely associates had gotten away with it. Davis Sr. and Jr. both recognised there was money to be made in telling their story, and began talking about movie rights - it just so happened that one of Sterling's patients was a screenwriter, and maybe they could fictionalise this just enough to keep suspicion away from Sterling himself. He was, after all, still on probation for fraud.

The three co-conspirators took their money and went on with their lives. Blake Davis turned himself in. He knew that there was no way he could get away without his name ever coming to light, and figured that, of a three year sentence for possession, he had served 14 months in the United States, and now 23 months in Mexico, the authorities would agree that he had served his time. Instead, he was charged with parole violation and sent right back to prison.

With little other options left, Don Fielden and Sterling Davis went to the press. In Fielden's telling, he was the mastermind, and Mike Hill just a warm body in the operation, and it was a heroic, soldierly campaign. Hill was furious, so sold his story in retaliation. Jailbreak might have been legal in Mexico, but possession of sawn-off shotguns and other paraphernalia in the United States wasn't, and the courts were adamant that they would pin something on these two men. This was becoming an international incident - the Mexican authorities tightened securities, denounced American inaction, pushed for extradition of American prisoners, and talk of a US-Mexico prison exchange went from the stuff of minor diplomats to within the personal purview of Henry Kissinger.

A few months ago, Mike Hill was an ex-con trading junked cars for $25 apiece, now he was appearing on 60 Minutes, interviewed by Dan Rather. The media circus had the participants at each other's throats, each convinced that they were the true mastermind of the plot, and equally certain that things would have gone better had the other fella not been there at all. Both Hill and Fielden tried to cast themselves not as desperate outsiders, or criminals on a job, but as principled freedom fighters, outraged at the conditions in the Mexican jail. Mike Hill seemed to repeat the story enough that he began to believe it.

Sterling Davis' application for a state psychiatrist's license was rejected, after the University of Mexico City categorically denied ever having issued him a degree. Like so much else in his life, his much-vaunted qualifications were a fake. He had been claiming to the press that he had spent upwards of $70,000 trying to free his son, but had paid barely $200 of the fine from his fraud conviction. He was begging and borrowing money anywhere he could, promising on movie rights and future incomes, the old con-man's trick of money now for money later. But there was no money.

Mike Hill - whose real name, as it turned out in court, was William McCoy Hill - and Don Fielden were both convicted on counts of possession and export of illegal firearms, Sterling Davis was convicted for possession of illegal firearms and conspiracy. Billy Blackwell was acquitted. 

The once glamorous and hated American heel of the Mexican wrestling scene had become the centrepiece of an international incident, and all of his scams and schemes had finally collapsed in on him. His efforts to see his son freed from jail only put both men behind bars. His grand schemes to make his fortune amounted to nothing, and left him penniless, without the big Warner Bros movie deal he always promised was just around the corner. He died, a forgotten man, on 19th December 1983.

It's a wild coincidence that both of the men who left the biggest imprint on the career of Gorgeous George also found their names amid some of the wildest true crime stories of the 20th century, yet even that hasn't allowed them to step out from George's ample shadow. 

As for George himself? Gambling debts, alimony payments and alcoholism left him a shell of his former self by the end of his career, and in his final match he symbolically lost his once-gorgeous blonde locks in a Hair vs. Mask match against The Destroyer in November 1962. He was 47 years old, but suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, he looked a decade older. The following year, he suffered a heart attack on Christmas Eve. Two days later, he was dead, but his star would shine bright for decades to come.

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