HUDSON VALLEY HISTORY LESSON

Photograph: Scott Duncan

Dewey Bozella’s Unlikely Journey

On June 14, 1977, 92-year-old Emma Crapser was cruelly beaten and murdered in her Poughkeepsie apartment after walking in on a burglary in progress. The police rounded up the usual suspects, which included the innocent Bozella, and after five years of unreliable tips, shoddy evidence and an overwhelming desire to convict someone in this unsolved case, Bozella was wrongly convicted of the murder of Crapser in 1983, and sentenced to 20 years to life at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

Bozella had no education, no real family, no future, and was serving out the remainder of his adult life in prison as an innocent man.

He could have given up. Hell! He should have given up, but Bozella decided to take the path of most resistance and reinvent himself and evolve into the man he never thought he would be. In the 26 years Bozella was incarcerated at Sing Sing, he was the model prisoner. He earned his GED, then a bachelor’s degree from Mercy College and a master’s from the New York Theological Seminary. He even got married, and most notably became an accomplished boxer and Sing Sing’s light heavyweight boxing champion. In all the time Bozella was making the most of his life in prison, he never stopped fighting for vindication and freedom. He was so hell-bent on maintaining his innocence that, in 1992, when offered the opportunity to lessen his sentence if he admitted guilt, Bozella declined. In 2007, after writing several letters to the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing, Bozella got the organization on his side. Two years later, on October 29, 2009, after serving 26 years in prison, Bozella was a free man.

The story could have easily ended there, with movie rights being sold and Bozella becoming an urban folk hero, but upon his release, Bozella was inspired to assist a community he had been kept apart from for decades. Working largely in Newburgh, Bozella reached out to at-risk teens (not too dissimilar from himself four decades earlier), teaching them the fundamentals of boxing and the fine art of keeping out of trouble in an environment full of temptation. All the while, Bozella kept boxing himself with the singular desire to box professionally, at least once. At the ripe age of 52, Bozella saw the fruition of his many years of labor in the form of a professional fight against Larry Hopkins (22 years his junior) at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. In what should have been a total farce, Bozella, the oldest boxer to be certified to fight in California, won the fight against Hopkins in a clear victory. The Los Angeles Times reported that Bozella kept on punching to the very end, even after his opponent Hopkins had lost his mouthpiece, as if to make certain that it was a bona fide win. As Bozella reasons it, “I didn't trust the judges.”

Bozella is back in Newburgh, with no further ambition to fight (so to speak), but with every intention of serving his community and opening a gym to support, inspire and strengthen people who want to better themselves.

Fresh Start Café in Newburgh holds a similar mission and employs low-income and disadvantaged community members who want to get a leg up in the service industry. Head chef Bill Wilklow, who identifies with Bozella’s vision and resilience (and has had the pleasure of meeting and feeding Bozella on a few occasions), has devised a culinary tribute of sorts in this fortifying sandwich dedicated to Bozella and his unflagging spirit. —E. Steinman

RECIPE

THE DEWEY BOZELLA BROCCOLI RABE HERO

Fresh Start Café
280 Broadway, Newburgh
845.863.0100