Berserk: The Shocking Life and Death of Edwin Valero
By Don Stradley
Hamilcar Publications, November 14, 2019, paperback with photographs, £7.99.
“There’s no telling what went on during the next few hours, or where his paranoia took him, but in that room something terrible happened. At 5:30 a.m. Valero appeared in the lobby. As calmly as one might order something from room service, he told the staff that he had just killed his wife.”
Don Stradley uncovers the gritty details in the life and death of the undefeated (27-0, 27 KOs) Venezuelan boxer Edwin Valero, who once held the record for consecutive first-round knockout wins by a professional prizefighter.
Valero was a boxing fan’s fantasy: a reformed street fighter with a sledgehammer punch who could knock opponents cold moving backward or forward. A dedicated athlete by day, he was a street hooligan by night.
Abandoned by his father as a child, Valero started drinking at age nine and using drugs at eleven. Several stints in prison as a teen put him off a life of crime, but his growing fame and promise as a boxer couldn’t prevent his behaviour from becoming increasingly out of control.
He took his beautiful young wife Jennifer to hospital with a bullet wound in her leg, saying gangsters had driven by their home in Caracas and shot her. He played around with unregistered guns, and was obsessed with Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez, even having the president’s face tattooed on his chest.
With a perfect record in twenty-seven fights, the demonic Valero (known as ‘El Inca’ and ‘El Dinamita’) seemed destined for a clash with all-time-great Manny Pacquiao. But fate would dictate otherwise.
When an old head injury was discovered in a prefight physical after Valero had signed a contract in the United States, he was banned from fighting there. Although cleared to fight anywhere else in the world, his dream was to make it big in the USA, and those hopes were dashed.
Fuelled by cocaine, booze, and paranoia, Valero blazed into a mania that derailed his career in the ring and resulted in the brutal death of his young wife—and soon afterward, his own. In chilling detail, Don Stradley captures one of the darkest and most sensational boxing stories in recent memory, which, until now, has never been fully told.
With first-hand accounts from the men who trained Valero and the reporters who covered him, as well as insights from psychologists and forensic experts, Berserk is one hell-ride of a book.
Don Stradley is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in various publications, including The Ring, Ringside Seat, and ESPN.com.
Along with his boxing coverage, he’s written about baseball, NASCAR, and professional wrestling.
Past books include Schooled, a dual biography of Lebron James and Jim Morris, and a chapter in The Ultimate Book of Boxing Lists by Bert Sugar and Teddy Atlas. Don has also written about the movies for such magazines as Cinema Retro and Noir City. Don lives in Massachusetts, USA.
Berserk: The Shocking Life and Death of Edwin Valero is part of the Hamilcar Noir series, ‘Hard Hitting True Crime’ which blends boxing and true crime. Also available as an eBook.
Hamilcar Publications, the book publishing division of Hannibal Boxing, is a Boston-based publisher focused on the world of professional boxing.
Hamilcar’s titles showcase the work of the finest boxing writers in the world, offering compelling subjects that appeal to fans of the ‘sweet science’ as well as to readers who are passionate about great nonfiction storytelling, regardless of genre.
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