Читать книгу Berserk: The Shocking Life and Death of Edwin Valero - Don Stradley - Страница 9

Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

—Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust.

During the early morning hours of Sunday, April 18, 2010, in the lobby of a hotel in Valencia, Carabobo, one of the best fighters Venezuela had ever produced spoke quietly with his wife. He was a celebrity in his country, a fiercely patriotic man, a proud father of two. Though the couple presented a relaxed picture, the poor woman was probably shaking with worry. Edwin Valero, twenty-eight, had for weeks seemed hell-bent on killing her.

The hotel staff may have sensed that Valero's circuitry wasn't quite right, and hadn't been for a long time. The feelings of paranoia that had jabbed at him in recent times were now wading in with more withering volleys: the suspicion that his wife was having an affair; the fear that people meant to do him harm; and the fear that police, gangsters, even his own mother were conspiring against him.

Ugly stories seeped out of Venezuela. Valero was unhinged and out of control. He'd spent nine days in psychiatric care. His wife had been hospitalized with mysterious injuries. Yet his manager was still trying to set up a fight for him in Mexico. Valero hadn't yet fought a major opponent, but pundits had dubbed him the sport's next moneymaker. He was the fantasy of all boxing fans, a reformed street fighter with a sledgehammer punch who didn't even need proper leverage to knock opponents cold.

“He loved to be in the ring,” said Rudy Hernandez, a trainer who knew Valero in earlier days. “I told him, ‘The difference between you and a lot of other fighters here is that you love being in the ring. That's why you're going to be a superstar. Keep working as hard as you do, and you'll be the next superstar of boxing.’”

He'd come at opponents like an evil spirit. He was a bizarre vision of a fighter: he'd charge in with his hands low, his eyes ablaze with cold fire. Sometimes he'd yell or hiss when he threw punches. To be in the ring with him must have been nightmarish. “There is something inside me that I have to unleash on someone,” Valero once said. “Perhaps it's anger, hatred I feel at having been denied a childhood.”

Gales of paranoia whipped through his mind now. Increasingly distrustful and depressed, Valero had spent the weeks after his latest victory arguing with family members and embarrassing himself in public. He believed criminals from Venezuela's underworld were following him. He confessed to a doctor that he was a drug addict. He told his manager that events in his childhood haunted him.

He was in a morbid tailspin. A psychologist said Valero's problems stemmed from an old head injury and extended drug use. The word “psychotropic” appeared repeatedly in medical reports.

Just two months earlier he'd scored an impressive tenth-round stoppage of Antonio DeMarco, a solid fighter who some had predicted would stand up to Valero. In the early rounds, DeMarco boxed well. Yet Valero grew stronger with each passing round, roaring forward like the living bulldozer in Theodore Sturgeon's old science fiction tale, Killdozer. DeMarco's corner, realizing their man was done, stopped the fight after the ninth. It was the greatest victory of Valero's career, but after this bout his strange behavior reached a scary crescendo.

The fighter's wife, Jennifer, had dealt with his behavior for years. For reasons known only to other women who endure abusive husbands, she stayed with him. Perhaps it was for the sake of their two children, eight-year-old Edwin Jr., and five-year-old Jennifer Roselyn. Valero loved his children. He had been abandoned by his own father and vowed to give his son and daughter the love he hadn't been given. But bizarre things happened around the Valero home. He once took Jennifer to the hospital with a bullet wound in her left leg. He said gangsters had driven by their home in Caracas and shot her. Meanwhile, he had his chest tattooed with the face of Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez and played around with unregistered guns.

As the clock reached 1:35 a.m., Edwin and Jennifer made their way to room 624. Valero had asked the staff to check under the bed to make sure no one was hiding there. He believed someone had been following him and Jennifer all night. Once he was satisfied the room was empty, he and Jennifer went inside. 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.

• • •

He was a storyteller.

He described his early days as if he'd been born in the Seventh Circle of Hell. People absorbed the stories and spewed them out in different ways. Some said he'd been a homeless child, starving in the street. Others said he was an industrious little kid who went door to door selling bags of garlic to housewives. You get the sense that he had some unimaginably hard times but manufactured a frightening autobiography to amuse people. He was selling uplift and desperation.

We know his father left the family. Edwin mentioned it in practically every interview. The father, Antonio Domingo, eventually got sick of being the villain in his son's story.

“Ask my other children if I have been a bad father,” he said. “I left the house because of problems with his mother, but I never abandoned them, I was always aware and I helped them financially. Edwin told me one day: ‘Dad, I say all that because it gives me more fame, so they see me as the child who suffered a lot.’”

Domingo asked Valero to stop telling those stories. Valero never stopped. Valero controlled the narrative. He was hawking poor pitiful me.

Yet, even if he enjoyed portraying himself as the forsaken child who fought his way out of the rubble of Venezuela, other family members say Valero's childhood was indeed traumatizing for him. He cried often, even as an adult. He was stuck on the idea that he'd been deprived of a regular upbringing. “Edwin had a void that he never explained,” said his younger brother Luis. “He never said what he felt.”

Listen to his family and friends. You might find yourself believing he never touched drugs until the months before he killed Jennifer. Listen to them. You might even believe he didn't kill her. You might end up believing the stories about kidnappers and thugs and government conspiracies.

The trainers and sparring partners who knew Valero won't buy that he had major mental malfunctions. A psychologist who diagnosed Valero in Venezuela dropped a word: schizophrenia. Valero's old gym acquaintances can't accept such things. He'd been too focused. He could hit a heavy bag so hard that the foundation of the city seemed to quake. How could such a good fighter be schizophrenic? Old-time head doctors had a term for it: funneling. A person like Valero could focus on something with a sniper's precision even as his mind frayed at the edges. It's that ability to focus that kept the bad thoughts at bay. Of course, this kind of focus only works for a while. The mind falls in on itself.

Jennifer was no match for him. Valero once told a reporter he wished he could keep his wife and children in a crystal box so no harm could come to them. When she was found dead, the blood from her slit throat had clotted on the hotel carpet. It looked like a small pig had been slaughtered. Still, her body was placed on the floor very much like a little doll in a box.

Some reports said he had taken her to the hotel against her will. Others said they were both on the way to a rehab center in Cuba. She was a drug user. She needed help too. The story has two sides. And with each side, there are those who deny and debate and disbelieve.

You could tell it as a straight psycho tale. You could simply focus on her injuries. The bite marks. The gunshot wound. The perforated lung. The time she overdosed and nearly fell off the roof of their apartment. The sad look on her face as she sat ringside. He's winning championships. She's fearing for her life.

You could tell it that way. You could get away with it. There's a thirst for madness. You could draw from a big pool of nasty details and rumors.

He had secrets. We learned enough of them to think we knew him. We'll never know him.

The Venezuelan media treated the Valero case as a tragedy. The American coverage made it a horror story. It's possible that it was both. You take what you need and project it to your audience. Americans like to judge; Venezuelans wanted a hero.

He's dead now. Mental illness and drug addiction took him down. He was found in a jail cell, a picture of his family stuffed into his mouth.

He's dead now.

He doesn't care how the story is told.

• • •

Edwin Antonio Valero Vivas was born in Bolero Alto, a tiny village in Merida, Venezuela, on December 3, 1981. Wedged between three national parks, Bolero Alto, is part of a parish named after Gabriel Picón González, a war hero who helped win the Battle of Los Horcones in 1813. It was a place where superstition still lived, where the elders might tell stories of babies being snatched by river witches. Less than 100 miles away is Lake Maracaibo, where on most nights of the year you can see terrifying lightning storms at the mouth of the Catatumbo River. The indigenous storytellers claimed this odd atmospheric phenomenon, which could produce up to 240 lightning strikes in an hour, was actually millions of fireflies trying to communicate with the earth. The image of these ruthless electrical storms suited Edwin, a restless boy embarking on his own stormy future, a boy born with lightning in his fists.

The third child born to Eloisa and Antonio Domingo Valero, Edwin came into the world as Venezuela was enjoying an unprecedented boxing heyday, with Ernesto España and Antonio Esparragoza earning accolades and championships. Edwin learned that he, too, could fight. Even at a young age he was brawling in the streets, settling arguments by throwing punches.

When Edwin was seven, his father left the family for another woman. For the rest of his life, Edwin would portray his father's departure as an apocalyptic event.

Eloisa moved the brood north to La Palmita. She took a job in El Vigia as a dishwasher. Edwin and his older brother Edward worked selling fruit and spices in El Vigia's Railway Plaza.

A vibrant city located on the Chama River, El Vigia's hallmarks included the magnificent Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, plus factories, shopping plazas, universities, parks, and a baseball stadium. Being the second-largest city in Merida, El Vigia must have seemed to Edwin like a futuristic metropolis.

The brothers also worked in a bicycle shop owned by a former fighter, Dimas Garcia. When Edwin said he would like to be a boxer someday, Garcia told him the business was too dangerous.

But Valero had known danger from a young age. Though El Vigia was a sophisticated city, it was a haven for pickpockets, kidnappers, and drug dealers. Like many poor boys from the country, Valero was drawn to the city's dark underbelly. When he wasn't selling fruit, Valero was running with kid gangs. He had become a little criminal. His mother couldn't control him. Edwin was a wild, dirty child, unwilling to bathe or wear shoes. Yet Eloisa never believed Edwin was as bad as his friends. She alleged that his new pals had even killed people. Edwin, she said, “was not a bad boy. Just a little bit off.”

Valero started drinking at age nine and using drugs at eleven. At thirteen he dropped out of school and enrolled in a tae kwon do academy. When his mother claimed the classes were too expensive, he quit and went back to selling garlic. Valero would later describe these years as “work, work, work.”

Sometimes he'd add his catchphrase: “I didn't have a normal childhood.”

• • •

Francisco “Morochito” Rodríguez was one of the country's most acclaimed amateur fighters. He remains the only Venezuelan boxer to ever win a gold medal at the Olympics, doing so at the 1968 Mexico games. Rodríguez used his fame to establish a small boxing gym in El Vigia. One day on his garlic route, Edwin noticed the place offered free boxing lessons. He convinced Edward that they should look into it.

Oscar Ortega took pity on the boys. Ortega was a respected boxing coach in El Vigia. When he found out Edwin and Edward couldn't afford bus fare home and were sometimes sleeping on the streets, he let them sleep on the gym benches at night. He also made sure they were fed. Years later, Valero would ask Ortega to be his godfather.

“Boxing just attracted me somehow,” Valero said, “and I decided to give it a try. One week later, I was living in the gym, where professor Oscar Ortega formed me as a fighter.”

Ortega liked this feisty little lefthander whose body seemed loaded with springs. Even at thirteen, Valero punched with unusual power. Ortega gave him keys to the place. Edwin would let himself in at night when he had nowhere else to go. Sleeping on hard benches wasn't ideal, but Edwin had a place to dream and think about the future.

Ortega fretted over Valero. The kid was a bit of a loose cannon. Valero would tell his coach, “Don't worry professor. I have my feet on the ground.”

Ortega tried to teach Valero that a boxer's life was difficult. One of the country's best, Vicente Paul Rondon, had recently died in a Caracas slum, destitute and forgotten.

Valero had no use for cautionary tales. In fact, Valero was jailed over a dozen times before he was fifteen. (One police file cited forty arrests throughout his life.) Ortega would always bail him out. Valero bragged that he was given preferential treatment because he was an athlete. Still, he couldn't curb his taste for larceny.

He robbed local university students, stealing small motorbikes and storing them in the gym. He later claimed his bike stealing got him six months in jail, which convinced him to get out of the criminal life. Other sources mention a seven-month stint for assaulting a woman at gunpoint. Valero is also believed to have shot and killed a rival over a stolen motorcycle. He hid out for weeks in Caracas like a fugitive.

Many look back at Valero's young life and say he was simply a rebel who did as he pleased. But Valero's dual personality—diligent athlete by day, street hooligan by night—reflected Venezuela's own double nature.

Venezuela is a country where luxury hotels are side by side with shanty­towns. It's an oil-rich country but has tottered for years on the brink of economic disaster. It was once the wealthiest country in Latin America, yet many homes are without floors or windows. The country is famous for beauty pageants, but its rate of violence against women is among the world's highest. The country is beautiful, known for mountains and lakes and religious statuary—a 153-foot concrete Virgin Mary stands on a hill in Trujillo like a bored sentinel—yet Venezuela is one the most crime-ridden countries in the world. Glossy tourist pamphlets advise visitors to not go out at night.

Venezuela's escalating crime rate was a result of the 1970s oil boom. Encouraged by the swift growth of the cities, a glut of country people drifted into urban areas. The result was overcrowding and a lot of unemployed young men. Boys who had been the sons of farmers became robbers. They formed kidnapping rings. This was Valero's world.

Unlawful activities aside, Valero's life took another turn when he was seventeen. That's when he noticed a pretty girl whose aunt lived near the gym. She was Jennifer Carolina Viera Finol, a thirteen-year-old student at Simon Bolivar High School. She was of Portuguese descent, dark haired, dark eyed, willowy. She was a typical Venezuelan girl, one who imagined she would be a model or a pageant winner. Edwin told his buddies that Jennifer would someday be his wife. Jennifer's sister, Andreína, introduced them.

Edwin and Jennifer grew close quickly. He picked her up at school every afternoon on his yellow Yamaha motorcycle. Jennifer's parents objected. Then they relented. They could see the pair were in love.

By the time Jennifer turned fourteen, Valero had convinced her to be with him forever. It would be years before they were officially married, but they drove off in a banana truck to live together in Tovar, twenty-six miles west of Caracas.

At the time, it probably seemed like the height of romance.

• • •

Young love didn't interrupt Valero's amateur boxing career. He won eighty-six bouts, losing only six. He won three consecutive national amateur championships. He'd found his calling.

He journeyed to Argentina to qualify for the 2000 Olympics. He lost on points to Brazil's Valdemir Pereira. After that, he took the wrong bus home from the Caracas airport. He found himself in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Bandits took his passport, his money, even his silver qualifying medal. He cried for two weeks.

Valero would, however, win the 2000 Central America and Caribbean Championship in Caracas, defeating Francisco Bojado for the gold medal. Bojado would be Mexico's Olympic representative that year in Australia. Beating him must have given Valero some satisfaction. The fight was close, but Valero stunned Bojado in the final round. He impressed Bojado's trainer, Joe Hernandez. “He was,” Hernandez would say years later, “a monster.”

As he entered manhood, Valero stood a bit over five feet six, and weighed around 126 pounds. He was the size of Antonio Esparragoza, the power-punching star from Cumaná. Esparragoza had represented Venezuela at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, turned pro the year Valero was born, and enjoyed a four-year reign as WBA featherweight champion. Valero admired Esparragoza but told his coach that he wanted to be even greater, to be world famous like Muhammad Ali. It was a grand vision. Even the best Venezuelan fighters rarely fought outside of Latin America.

Still, it appeared Valero was turning pro at a good time. Though heavyweights had always taken the spotlight, some of the most popular fighters in the business—Johnny Tapia, Marco Antonio Barrera, Erik Morales, and a new star, Manny Pacquiao—were in the featherweight range. They fought in Las Vegas and were featured on HBO. Valero and his team must have been encouraged by the growing prestige of the lighter fighters. With a style suited to the professional ranks, and a hunger for fame, Valero could invade these lower weight classes like the Visigoths sacking Rome. Perhaps, unlike most Venezuelan fighters, he'd leave his mark in America.

But the story nearly ended before it began.

On February 5, 2001, Valero was ripping down the street on a motorcycle. His father had been in a car accident, and he was on his way to help him. Stories varied. Either Valero slammed into a car and hit his head on the back windshield, or he flew over the car and landed headfirst on some asphalt. He wasn't wearing a helmet.

He spent thirteen days in a hospital. Doctors found a small blood clot between Valero's scalp and skull—not in his brain. They gave him a choice: he could wait six months to see if the clot would clear up on its own, or they could operate and remove it. Wanting to get out of the hospital and resume his boxing career, he opted for a relatively simple procedure where the clot was drained. It wasn't considered major surgery.

He probably thought that was the end of the matter. He was nineteen years old, strong as an ox, and crafty as a rat. He had Jennifer at his side and a promising future as a boxer. A little knock on the head wouldn't stop him.

• • •

Seventeen months later, on July 9, 2002, Valero made his professional boxing debut at United Nations Park in Caracas. He needed just a bit over two minutes to knock out a fellow named Eduardo Hernandez.

Hernandez never fought again.

The months after Valero's surgery had been torturous. He wasn't allowed to fight right away. He took odd jobs to support himself and Jennifer but proved inept at everything. In March, Edwin Jr. was born, adding to Valero's pressures. Broke and desperate, Valero enlisted in the Venezuelan army. After two busts for fighting, he was dishonorably discharged.

“I like to hit men,” Valero said years later. “It liberates me.”

Valero finished out 2002 with first-round knockouts over Danny Sandoval, Alirio Rivero, Luis Soto, and Julio Pineda.

Pineda never fought again.

Sandoval tried Valero a second time in March 2003, but again, it was lights out in one round. In May, Edgar Mendoza fell to Valero in the first.

Mendoza never fought again.

The Valero of these early fights was calm, efficient. He had a picturesque right jab. He looked like an archer when he threw it. He threw his left cross with supreme confidence. His trainer at the time was Jorge Zerpa, an experienced hand.

In May 2003, Valero was matched against Colombian Dairo Julio. Though decidedly better than Valero's previous victims, Julio failed to get out of the first round.

Valero was 8-0, with eight knockouts. A Valero representative contacted Joe Hernandez in California to assist with Valero's American debut. Remembering Valero from the 2000 Caracas tournament, Hernandez was eager to see how the kid had improved. He would soon hail Valero as the best prospect to come out of Venezuela in thirty years.

• • •

From the moment Valero entered the Maywood Boxing Gym in Los Angeles, Hernandez saw immediately that someone new and unusual had arrived.

He had high cheekbones and piercing eyes. He looked regal, carrying himself like he'd already been a champion for years. The only thing that ruined the picture was an explosion of acne that covered much of his face, as if teen hormones still percolated inside him. Valero was fighting at super-featherweight, but his frame could easily carry another ten or fifteen pounds. He was raw, high spirited, with extraordinary power and speed. Hernandez tended to time rounds at four and a half minutes, and Valero would punch nonstop. Sometimes he seemed unpolished. Sometimes he looked like a veteran who knew every move in the book.

Hernandez noticed the effect Valero had on sparring partners: No one could last two rounds with him. Hernandez paid fighters extra to work with Valero, but they wouldn't do it. Mike Anchondo, a future titleholder and a Maywood gym regular, asked Hernandez, “What do you feed this guy? Nails?”

It was decided to bring in Juan Lazcano, “The Hispanic Causing Panic.” Lazcano was bigger than Valero and a veteran of nearly forty fights. Preparing for a bout in Las Vegas and on the brink of major recognition, Lazcano agreed to spar with the young Venezuelan. Lazcano, who had defeated some quality fighters, must have hated the experience. Though stories differ as to how many rounds he actually sparred with Valero, the one thing all agree on is that Lazcano never came back. He left his gloves and other boxing gear behind, never to claim them.

There were times in Maywood when Valero seemed to defy logic. Many southpaws look awkward in the ring, but Valero was fluid, graceful, athletic. There was such precision in his work that he seemed less like a boxer and more like a fencing master. He was cocky, too. He would tell Hernandez that he was going to hurt his sparring partner with a particular punch, and then he'd do it. Hernandez would tell him to take it easy on his poor sparring partners, but Valero was impulsive. Hernandez once compared Valero to Michael Jordan. “It was that kind of ability,” the trainer said.

Urbano Antillon was a sturdy Mexican-American super-featherweight from Maywood. He sparred a few times with Valero, but he wasn't impressed. The next time they sparred, Valero hit him so hard that Antillon's head swiveled and his legs shuddered. The session was stopped.

Brian Harty was on hand to record some of Valero's workouts for Maxboxing.com. He recalls Valero as tireless, almost robotic. Valero might have cracked a joke in between workouts, but once he was focused, his concentration was unbreakable. “It's impossible to know if the way I describe him now is affected by what ultimately happened,” Harty said, “but there was just a constant buzz around him—and I mean like an electric buzz, like one of those bug zappers. I can't imagine him sleeping.”

Valero buzzed his way through a number of LA gyms, from the fancy ones with modern equipment to the ones where salsa music blared from the house speakers and old fight posters seemed stuck to the walls through sheer humidity. He was like a gunslinger walking into a new town. Nobody knew who he was. There were only whispers and rumors about this gym gypsy who knocked people around. He'd smash them on the arms, in the ribs. Sometimes he'd hit a guy a few times and the guy would simply quit. If someone stayed with him for a few rounds, Valero would playfully pat him on the shoulder at the end of the session.

“He obviously enjoyed being in the gym,” Harty said. “I don't know how a person is able to summon punch after punch with such aggression like he did, though. Whatever was driving him, it was always right there below the surface for him to tap into.”

Hernandez invited members of the local media to watch Valero spar. Among the first to see him was Doug Fischer of Maxboxing.com. In a 2004 column for ESPN.com, Fischer described what had seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime thrill.

“Only two fighters that I have witnessed train in the past ten years come close to Valero's athletic perfection, Shane Mosley and Floyd Mayweather Jr.—and I'm talking about these two multi-champs when they were at their physical peaks,” Fischer wrote. “Valero's aggression, bursting speed, brute strength, and intensity reminded me of the lightweight version of Mosley. His poise, technique, balance, and craftiness reminded me of the ‘97–’99 version of Mayweather.”

Though Valero and Jennifer had an apartment, he spent much of his time in tiny quarters he shared with Hernandez, Anchondo, and Daniel Ponce de Leon, a strong Mexican southpaw who would soon become quite successful. Fischer recalled the volatile natures of Valero and his stablemates, especially with the addition of alcohol. There had been a particularly nasty brawl between Valero and de Leon in a Dallas hotel lobby. “There were chairs turned over and blood everywhere,” Fischer said. “These three, they had a particular dysfunction with alcohol. When they got drunk, they got crazy.” Valero was already stubborn with a temper. When alcohol was introduced, Fischer reckoned, Valero became “a maniac.”

In de Leon, Valero met his equal. De Leon was known to rip off his shirt in a bar and challenge a rival to fight bare-knuckle. “The story I heard was that de Leon bit off a piece of Valero's ear,” Fischer said. “That's why Valero started growing his hair out.”

Valero's main beef with Anchondo and de Leon was rooted in envy. They had main-event status on local shows, and received monthly stipends. In Valero's eyes, Anchondo and de Leon were inferior. The truth was that Valero wasn't well connected. Anchondo had been a pro for three years, and de Leon had been on the Mexican Olympic team in 2000. Valero, conversely, had been fighting in Venezuelan backwaters. “He was a gamble,” said Fischer. Joe Hernandez was acting as Valero's manager and trainer. Oscar De La Hoya's father Joel was a silent partner. There wasn't much careful planning involved with Valero. “It was more like, ‘Let's take a gamble on this guy.’”

Sometimes Valero's wrath was directed at Hernandez. “They split every month,” said Fischer. “Little things would set Valero off. For instance, Joe was very old school, and when the guys appeared in public at a boxing event, Joe wanted them to dress up. Valero thought he was being disrespected. He'd say, ‘Fuck it. I'll train myself.’ But Valero liked Joe, and he'd come back.”

“He wasn't a sweet kid,” said Hernandez.

Despite the drinking and flare-ups, Valero was generally likable. “He was quiet,” said Fischer. “Respectful. Shy. He kept to himself. When he trained, it was like no one else existed. He was in his own little world. But if he talked to you he'd be really cool and sincere. He took pride in himself. And when he shook your hand, he crushed it.”

Valero occasionally talked to his new associates about his criminal past. He said he had known thirty people who were already dead and buried. In El Vigia, Valero said, one had to be either a drug dealer or an assassin. He claimed a contract had been taken out on him, but the killer who drew the assignment was a friend and couldn't do it. Why the contract wasn't given to someone else was a detail Valero didn't explain.

The impression Valero gave was that boxing had saved his life. Without boxing, he said repeatedly, he'd be in prison or dead.

• • •

Valero's first professional bout in America took place on July 19, 2003, at the Activities Center of Maywood—which has since become Maywood's YMCA—on the undercard of a show headlined by de Leon. Valero was matched with Emmanuel Ford, a thirty-two-year-old with a record of 5-20-2. Ford was on the canvas three times before the bout was stopped in the first.

Five weeks later, Valero fought at the Marriot Hotel in Irvine, California. On a card headlined by female minimumweights, Valero met Roque Cassiani, a thirty-three-year-old Colombian who had been in the ring with some good fighters. Valero knocked him out in the first. After a return to Caracas to score a one-round knockout of Alejandro Heredia, it was back to Irvine. This time Valero faced a 0-4 opponent named Tomas Zambrano. As had become his signature, Valero needed less than a round to win.

Valero was 12-0 with twelve knockouts. None of his opponents had heard the bell for the second round. He'd already fought three times in America, more than most Venezuelan fighters. He'd even signed a contract with Oscar De La Hoya's Golden Boy Promotions, only in its second year of operation but considered a major promotional firm. The plan was to bring Valero to New York for an HBO fight against Francisco Lorenzo, a respectable fighter from the Dominican Republic.