In English, the term ‘warrior’ refers to a courageous soldier or fighter known for their expertise and experience in warfare. It is a tribute reserved for the bravest in the boxing arena, those who can endure incredible levels of pain and keep advancing.

If you’ve ever had the chance to witness the historic matches of the late Arturo Gatti, whether live or later on, you’ll understand why calling him just a warrior doesn’t do him justice.

Gatti, a former champion in two weight divisions from Quebec, Canada, wasn’t the most polished boxer when compared to more celebrated figures in boxing history. However, his legendary trilogy with his fierce opponent Micky Ward undeniably showcases his unimaginable resilience and unwavering bravery in the ring.

The Montreal brawler took more punches in three fights with Ward than most champions do throughout their entire careers. The same can probably be said for Ward. Yet both men refused to wilt until the very final bell at the end of 30 grueling rounds together. That’s why their battles are up there with the greatest in history.

And that’s why news of Gatti’s apparent suicide in 2009 rocked boxing to its core.

Arturo’s wife, Amanda Rodrigues, found her husband dead at roughly 9 a.m. on July 11 while on vacation in Brazil with their 10-month-old son, Arturo Jr. 

Laying in a large puddle of blood on the kitchen floor of a condo they rented in the northeastern resort town of Porto de Galinhas, Pernambuco, with his head partially under a kitchen counter and a small purse strap nearby, the boxing legend was battered and bruised on his body and had a deep ligature mark beneath his chin.

His tongue was left hanging from his discolored face and his right ear was engorged. He had a three-centimeter-long gash crusted with coagulated blood on the back of his head. 

Gatti’s family and friends, refusing to buy into the theory that he died by suicide, said he was in perfect health and displaying no signs of mental-health problems or drug abuse. An initial toxicology report carried out by Brazilian officials showed no drug activity in his body. No evidence of late-stage chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head, was ever found posthumously, either.

Rodrigues, his Brazilian wife of just under two years, was arrested on suspicion of murder 24 hours later despite stressing she had no involvement in his death, with lead detective Josedite Ferreira arguing that her story – which included the claim that she initially noticed Gatti’s body at around 6 a.m. without realizing he was dead -contained multiple contradictions. Ferreira was adamant it should be treated as homicide.

Rodrigues spent 18 days in prison, but Ferreira was removed from the case before her release.

The eventual verdict from the Civil Police of Pernambuco was suicide by hanging.

For Pat Lynch, Gatti’s longtime manager, ally and surrogate father according to many, something wasn’t right.

‘I actually believe in my heart that Arturo did not kill himself,’ Lynch tells the Daily Mail. ‘The last thing I wanted was his kids to think that he gave up on them. That was very important to me.

‘So I tried to uncover every stone that I possibly could.’

Lynch served as Gatti’s manager for the entirety of his 16-year career and remained one of his closest confidantes up until his death. The Canadian boxer was an usher at Lynch’s wedding in 1992, and a godfather to his youngest daughter, Cameron.

Their bond was as tight as could be, with Lynch also keeping tabs on Gatti’s movements outside the ring both during and long after his boxing career ended. Along with the pair’s good friend Mike Sciara, they were on hand to make sure he never stumbled into any perilous situations.

And Gatti always repaid the favor. 

‘He was the type of guy, even when he was world champion, if the babysitter cancelled on us on a Friday or Saturday night and we were going out to dinner, he would say, “No problem, I’ll come over and I’ll babysit,”‘ Lynch remembers.

‘He had a heart of gold, he’d give you the shirt off his back. He was truly just a great kid.’

Lynch was vacationing on Italy’s Amalfi Coast with family and friends when his panicked daughter urged him to call his brother John – a lawyer who served as Gatti’s attorney throughout his boxing career. John delivered the devastating news over the phone. 

While it was nothing short of a hammer blow, both he and his wife, Lisette, were not entirely surprised after fearing the worst when Gatti suddenly altered his will just weeks prior.

Almost completely out of the blue, Lynch said, on June 17 Gatti signed a new life-insurance policy which left his entire $3.4 million fortune to his wife and her family, despite telling those closest to him that he was planning to file for divorce and end a marriage they said had become truly toxic. Rodrigues was believed to be present when the policy was changed.

‘A couple of months before he died, I received a call from a financial advisor who said, “Hey Pat, I just received a call from Arturo and he wants to change his will,’ Lynch tells the Daily Mail.

‘I said, “What? The last I heard they were gonna get a divorce. They’re not getting along, it’s not good… what do you mean?”

‘So I come home and tell my wife, this is the god’s honest truth, the first thing she says to me is, “She’s gonna kill him. If that will gets changed she’s gonna kill him.” They were the first words out of my wife’s mouth.

‘So we’re in Italy, we get the call. I fall down on the bed and my wife says, “What’s going on?” I tell her and she says, “Oh my god she did it.”‘

To thicken the cloud of doubt surrounding his apparent suicide, Gatti allegedly left a chilling phone message for his business partner, Tony Rizzo, prior to the family trip to Brazil.

‘Yo, Tony you were right,’ he said in the message. ‘It’s a f****** nightmare. I’ll talk to you later, alright? I’m going to be back sooner than expected.’

The night before his death, Gatti is also said to have had a blazing argument with Rodrigues on the streets of Porto de Galinhas, according to multiple witnesses.

Lynch, who refused to attend Gatti and Rodrigues’ wedding in 2007 after sensing ‘something in my gut that didn’t feel right’ about the marriage, was and still is convinced that his beloved friend was murdered.

When Brazilian authorities concluded that Rodrigues was not involved in her husband’s death, Lynch sought the help of private investigators Paul Ciolino and Joseph Moura, who assembled a powerful team of law enforcement and medical experts to get to the bottom of what truly happened on July 11.

While Lynch sensed that foul play was involved, Ciolino, also speaking to the Daily Mail, says he warned Gatti’s manager that he would only report back with his true findings, whether he liked them or not. 

‘We always approach it from that angle of, “He probably committed suicide so let’s see what happened. What does the evidence tell us?” And that’s how we started with Pat,’ Ciolino recalls.

Yet after a nine-month investigation, those findings suggested that, at the very least, Pat’s suspicions were justified.

‘We had a consensus after examining everything that it wasn’t even possible that this was a suicide,’ Ciolino reaffirms 16 years later.

With the help of Dr. Alfred P. Bowles, an acute care physician and esteemed expert in biomechanics, kinematics and injury causation, he and Moura built a replica of the crime scene and the set of stairs Brazilian police claim Gatti hanged himself from using the purse strap that was found next to his body.

‘There isn’t even the slightest chance in hell that he hung himself with that purse strap,’ Ciolino insists. ‘It wasn’t strong enough to hold 30 pounds, never mind 156 pounds or whatever he weighed at his death.’

What also raised questions was the position of Gatti’s body, and Rodrigues’ claim that she initially thought he was ‘drunk and sleeping’ when she saw him sprawled out on the kitchen floor hours before she notified the police.

If he did indeed hang himself from the stairs before falling to the ground when the purse strap gave way, how did his head end up underneath a kitchen counter? Where did the gash on the back of his head come from? And how, when the physical evidence implied he died at 3 a.m., had Rodrigues not noticed the thick pool of blood surrounding his body at 6 a.m.?

‘Lots of people say, “How did you not see the body on the floor?” He was sleeping on the lower floor, so it’s more than normal that I locked my door, we had just had a fight,’ she said in her initial police interview. ‘It was more than normal at 6:30 a.m. when I went to make Junior’s milk, that I was upset, because I am a human being. When I fight, I don’t go kiss.

‘I did not pass by his body. I didn’t step on his body. I looked and he was lying down. There was no blood, there was nothing. I never thought that my husband would commit suicide.’

The team of experts also took issue with the initial investigation conducted by the Brazilian authorities, which they allege was littered with multiple failings such as inadequate protecting, securing and photographing of the crime scene, a lack of crucial fingerprints, and no testing for hair, blood, fibers, DNA or other substances.

Moreover, a neck chain that was pictured on Gatti at the morgue could only be seen in one photo taken from the crime scene, with other close-ups showing him without it. Ciolino and his fellow investigators therefore concluded that the crime scene had been manipulated. His body was also bruised, as Lynch recalls, ‘like he’d been beaten with a bat’ – a disturbing sight which was not included in the initial autopsy.

Retired FBI Special Agent Stephen K. Moore – who spent 25 years working extensively overseas on homicide, terrorism and white supremacist investigations – was also part of the team looking into Gatti’s death.

‘It was just like they were trying to find the quickest way to resolve this and get rid of it,’ Moore says about the Brazilian authorities. ‘It wasn’t something where the investigators were saying, “Oh I’m fascinated, I can’t wait and I’m gonna dig into this case, I’m gonna live it until I know who did it.”

‘It sounded more like, “Oh god, there is no upside for us on this. If we say the Brazilian woman did it, then our own country is gonna go ballistic about this. If we say that Gatti killed himself, then oh my gosh we’re gonna get it from the foreign press.”

‘So I think that regardless of whether he killed himself or he was murdered, there was no real significant, valid investigation done.’

Moore is still not sold on the physical evidence as definitively as Ciolino, Moura and the rest of the team given it was allegedly doctored by Brazilian police, casting doubts over its accuracy. ‘I would not stake my reputation on my belief that he was murdered,’ he says before adding, ‘but I think that’s most likely.’

And like Ciolino and Lynch, he believes the sudden altering of Gatti’s will provides the greatest suspicion.

‘If a person takes out a life insurance policy or changes a will to benefit them and the person dies within months under questionable circumstances, it’s kind of like when you see a woman murdered in her home… you’re looking for the boyfriend or husband – ninety percent of the time that’s who did it,’ Moore explains. 

‘Ninety percent of the cases I have seen that I’ve worked, where there’s a murder by a disgruntled spouse who doesn’t want to go through a divorce and lose all the money, it’s almost always a life insurance policy.

‘So all other things being the same, if I was absolutely 50-50 on it, the fact that she [accompanied him when he] changed his will months before he died… that’s not a woman who thinks she’s gonna be married to him for a long time.’

According to the report compiled by Ciolino and Moura, Rodrigues met Gatti while working at a gentleman’s club in New Jersey in June 2006, just over a year before he brought the curtain down on his boxing career. To this day, she denies ever working as an ‘exotic dancer’ in the establishment, despite Ciolino and Moura including photographs and statements in their report suggesting otherwise.

Instead, Rodrigues claims she met Gatti in a New Jersey park while they were both walking their dogs, she was 19 and he was likely around 33. 

They tied the knot a month after his retirement in August 2007, not long after Gatti – said to be worth millions at the time of his death – signed a prenuptial agreement which would have left his wife with nothing if they divorced.

Over the next two years their relationship rapidly deteriorated, with multiple reports of police-involved domestic disputes eventually resulting in him seeking out a divorce attorney in May 2009.

Around the same time, Rodrigues got wind of a new lover in her husband’s life.

Then came the trip to Brazil, which Rodrigues described as a final attempt to get things back on track.

So why, with their marriage seemingly on the rocks, did he suddenly decide to leave his fortune to Rodrigues and her family?

‘He had an iron-clad prenup with her. He had an iron-clad estate plan for his daughter, and he voluntarily signed that new will – there’s no doubt in my mind,’ Ciolino says. ‘But then he’s on the phone to his best friend and says, “Listen, that’s all bulls***. I’m gonna change it as soon as I get back home.” Well, he never got back home.’

‘She manipulated him into signing it,’ he claims. ‘Here’s the base problem, Arturo was in a custody fight with his first girlfriend, Erica, [over first child Sofia] that cost him half a million dollars. They finally resolved their issues, but he was so damaged by the thought of losing a second child that he would have done anything to avoid it.

‘I think he thought he could then go to Brazil and resolve this thing, and basically buy her off.’

The report put together by Ciolino and Moura also includes a troubling witness statement from one of Gatti’s former neighbors, who claims to have heard Rodrigues telling him during an argument roughly a month before his death, ‘Why don’t you come down to Brazil? I’ll show you.’

Gatti is said to have responded, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna come down there and see what you’re going to do.’

Another witness statement alleges that Rodrigues frequently claimed ‘only death’ could ever separate them before Gatti put the wheels in motion for a divorce.

In September 2011, Ciolino and Moura made their report public after concluding that Gatti was ‘rendered unconscious with an unknown object, and then manually strangled with the purse strap or a similar device.’

‘Death would have been by ligature strangulation, with blunt force head injury,’ their closing argument continues. ‘Amanda Gatti, either alone or with assistance from an unknown person or persons, had the opportunity, means and motive to murder her husband.’

Two months later, a Quebec coroner ruled there was no ‘hard evidence’ that Gatti’s death was caused by ‘foul play’ or suicide after a separate investigation was carried out by Montreal pathologists.

The coroner, Jean Brochu, said the initial missteps from the Brazilian authorities made it too difficult to conclude with absolute certainty what happened on the night of July 11, 2009, despite stating that Gatti had died a ‘violent death.’ The probable cause of death was listed as asphyxiation by neck constriction.

‘I think the Canadians made a political decision all day long. They didn’t want to p*** off the Brazilians,’ Ciolino tells the Daily Mail.

‘I talked to the medical people in Montreal, and I’m pretty certain they were gonna call this a suicide until I called them and said, “Listen, you have no idea what kind of evidence we have. You’re gonna look like fools if you do this.”

‘I laid out our case of the physical evidence, nothing else. And they decided to leave it undetermined at that point, another political decision.’

Almost 16 years after Gatti died, the initial ruling of death by suicide remains. No one has been charged with homicide.

The former super-lightweight and super-featherweight champion’s family later filed a lawsuit against Rodrigues for wrongful death, which she denied. Rodrigues won and was not found liable. Both sides also entered a legal battle over the $3.4 million estate Gatti left to her – alleging that she manipulated him into doing so. Rodrigues won that lawsuit, too. 

Rodrigues herself also sued a number of publications for libel over articles written in 2009 that described her as a stripper before reaching settlements.

She denies any involvement in Gatti’s death to this day.

While not pointing the finger at Rodrigues directly, Ciolino still doubts the suicide theory. ‘I went out and hired the greatest medical examiner ever born, Cyril Wecht. And if you know anything about Cyril Wecht, he doesn’t give a s*** about what anybody thinks,’ he adds.

‘There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that this kid was murdered.

‘[But] I never had any expectations of justice being served in this case because of the multiple jurisdictions involved and where the crime happened. My job was always to give a report to Pat Lynch and eventually Aruto’s family that told them what happened to their friend and loved one.

‘We were hired to give them our best opinion as to what happened to this kid.’

After Ciolino and the group of experts backed up his suspicions, Lynch says he will always hold the opinion that his ‘surrogate son’ was murdered, despite not knowing for sure who was responsible.

‘Me knowing him better than anybody in his adult life, you’ll never convince me that he committed suicide that night in Brazil. You’ll never convince me of that,’ he tells the Mail.

‘I really don’t know [who killed him], I just know in my heart that he really didn’t commit suicide.’

His hopes of the case being reopened are low. ‘As time goes on people tend to forget and everybody’s life moves on. It’s kind of sad, it really is. Especially as we feel we never got justice. All of us are hurt by it,’ Lynch said.

‘The only way something will ever come up with this is if whoever committed this heinous thing finds god and has to clear their conscience. That’s the only way I see it happening.’

Lynch may have enjoyed a close relationship with him outside of the ropes, yet few knew Gatti as intimately as Ward after their three historic wars inside them. The latter even went on to train his former adversary in the latter stages of his career.

So perhaps most tellingly of all, Ward, like many, cannot accept that he threw in the towel on the night of July 11, 2009. ‘I never believed that he did that, that he took his own life – never,’ the American fighter said in 2013.

‘He had a son that he loved to death. He had a daughter, Sofia, that he loved to death. Two kids.

‘He wouldn’t do it. No way. I don’t see it.’

The Daily Mail has reached out to the last-known lawyer on record for Rodrigues and the Civil Police of Pernambuco for comment.