Tomato Can Blues

GLADWIN, Mich.

Scott DiPonio raced to make sure everything was in order — the fighters were ready, the ring girls were on time and the Bud Light was cold.

DiPonio was a local promoter who organized amateur cage fights that looked more like barroom brawls than glitzy Las Vegas bouts. With a mix of grit, sweat and blood, the fights had caught on in rural Michigan, and DiPonio’s Feb. 2 event, called Caged Aggression, drew hundreds of fans, even with cage-side seats going for $35.

Charlie Rowan, an undistinguished heavyweight, was scheduled to fight that night at Streeters, a dank nightclub that hosted cage fights in Traverse City.

Rowan’s cage name was Freight Train, but he was more like a caboose — plodding and slow, a bruiser whose job was to fill out the ring and get knocked down.

He was what the boxing world used to call a “tomato can.” The term's origins are unclear, but perhaps it’s as simple as this: knock a tomato can over, and red stuff spills out.

Rowan certainly wasn’t in it for the money. He was an amateur who loved fighting so much he did it for free.

An hour before the Caged Aggression fights began, DiPonio’s cellphone rang. It was Rowan’s girlfriend, so frantic she could hardly get the words out, DiPonio said. He asked her to take a deep breath, and, on the verge of tears, she told him that Rowan had crashed his car. He was being airlifted to a hospital. It didn’t look good.

“He was a horrible fighter,” said a local competitor. “he just showed up and would fight.”

Two days later, DiPonio said, she called back. Rowan, only 25 years old, was dead.

DiPonio drove for two hours from Traverse City to Gladwin for a makeshift memorial at the home of Rowan’s girlfriend. Rowan’s mother sat in the living room, quietly weeping.

DiPonio and other promoters planned a string of benefits for the Rowan family, including one called the Fight for Charlie. The fighters were enemies in the cage, but they pulled together to help one of their own. A heavyweight who had once knocked out Rowan in fewer than 90 seconds agreed to work as a judge at the largest benefit.

The Fight for Charlie took place March 9. Ring girls sold raffle tickets to a crowd of about 1,000. A young fighter declared from the cage that he was dedicating his bout to Rowan’s memory.

“Thank you for helping us raise money for Charlie Rowan’s family,” a promoter wrote on Facebook after one of the benefits. “Thank you for letting it all out in the cage for us.” He added that Rowan was “there with us in spirit and would have been very proud of all of you!”

Less than two weeks later, a Gladwin gun store was robbed.

When Scott DiPonio, the fight promoter, saw the suspect’s mug shot on the next day’s news, his stomach dropped. It was the late Charlie Rowan, back from the dead.

Part 2

A Blood-Soaked Allure

Mixed martial arts was born as a seedy sport on the fringes of society. The matches were short, loud and brutal, fights for those who found boxing too tame. Over the years, it’s grown into a mainstream spectacle that now draws millions of viewers on television.

The sport blends techniques from jujitsu, kickboxing, karate, taekwondo, judo and wrestling. Certain moves, like eye gouging and shots to the crotch, are generally not allowed. Across America, kids squabbling in their backyards now dream of making it to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, just as playground basketball players picture themselves in the N.B.A.

But far from the bright lights of professional matches, shadow fighting circuits have sprung up around the country, in small towns like Kingston, Wash., and big cities like New York. It’s like the early days of boxing, but with more kicks to the face.

“It’s amazing that guys will get beat up for free,” Christos Piliafas, a top fighter in Michigan, said. “They just love to fight.”

In Michigan, the bouts take place in nightclubs, community centers and casinos. Most are unregulated, with few safety requirements to speak of. In April, a 35-year-old died after losing a fight in Port Huron.

The crude violence and underground feel of cage fighting draw lusty cheers across the state. These are not carefully negotiated bouts between millionaires trailing personal nutritionists and publicists. Inside the cage at Streeters, unknown Michigan men — factory workers, fathers, soldiers and convicts — become the Wolverine, the Bloodbath, the Spider Monkey and the Nightmare.

“You build a brotherhood,” said Justin Martinson, a fighter and former Marine. “It’s the closest thing to combat.”

When Rowan entered the cage for the first time, he felt electric. Part of it was the cocaine — he was high, as he was for most of his fights. But he also loved the atmosphere: the chain link walls, the heavy metal music, the screaming fans.

Rowan could take a punch, but he was out of shape and showed little promise. “He was a horrible fighter,” said Piliafas, who competes professionally. “He just showed up and would fight. He was a great first fight for someone.”

Rowan kept his brown hair cut close and wore a thin mustache. He had a tattoo of a viking on his left shoulder, the Grim Reaper on his right; Jesus’ face on his right leg; and MOM on his left wrist. His newest tattoo was a gothic D inside a diamond, the logo for DiPonio’s mixed martial arts team. To Rowan, the Diamond D fighters were family, even if they didn’t know what to make of him.

“It’s amazing that guys will get beat up for free,” a top fighter in Michigan said. “They just love to fight.”

Rowan had struggled to find meaningful work since dropping out of school before 10th grade. He spent time in telemarketing and pipeline installation. He even worked on the carnival circuit assembling rides. He fathered three children with three women, but he drifted from all of them.

Rowan’s real family admired his passion for the cage. “I thought maybe it would be good for him,” his mother, Lynn Gardner, said. “He seemed to like it, and I thought finally he found something and can take out his aggression. Maybe it could help him turn his life around.”

Rowan was from Gladwin, a city of 3,000 that’s barely a blip amid Central Michigan’s endless wheat, corn and soybean farms. His story was pieced together from more than 50 interviews with relatives, local fighters and Michigan law enforcement officials, as well as from police reports, court records and family letters.

Gladwin families hunt on weekends, and the town’s quiet roads include Deer, Elk and Antler Streets. It takes five minutes to drive across town, from McDonald’s to the west to Shopko to the east. Jobs are hard to come by. Slouching houses with plywood-covered windows are as common as stop signs.

In some ways, Rowan had been preparing for the cage his whole life. His father, also named Charles, had beaten him and his brother ever since they were little.

“His dad would put him on the floor and stomp him in the head,” his mother said. “When he couldn’t take it out on Chuckie, he would take it out on me.”

Home was cigarettes, beer, and the blare of a television over his parents’ constant arguments. The family moved around Michigan as Rowan’s father picked up and lost factory jobs. For a while, the family gathered soda bottles for spare change.

“I thought about leaving a lot,” his mother said. “But I was never confident enough in myself and my abilities.”

Rowan’s father died of cancer in 2001. “He told Chuck that he would rather it was him” — his son — “that was dying,” she said.

Even as a kid, Rowan was always in trouble. He stole from neighbors and relatives — “guns, dumb things, work tools, money,” Scott Gardner, his stepfather, said.

In the years after his father’s death, Rowan was arrested on charges of marijuana distribution and failure to pay child support. He was charged with criminal sexual misconduct as a teenager and failure to register as a sex offender in 2007. Those records are sealed under state law. Rowan spent most of 2012 in jail on check fraud charges.

During those years, he used cocaine and did some work for drug dealers, but he kept that a secret from his family.

Through mutual acquaintances, he met Michael A. Gomez, a convict with drug and weapons charges dating back at least 20 years. The sheriff’s office knew Gomez had ties to the Latin Kings and the Mexican Mafia Gang.

While Rowan was ferrying drugs in Three Rivers in 2010, before he began cage fighting, he claimed to have lost Gomez’s shipment, maybe worth as much as $80,000. As Rowan told it, a group of thieves jumped him, cracked his ribs and stole the drugs.

Now, Rowan owed money to impatient people. He tried to lie low, but in January, a group of men beat him up behind Shopko, leaving him with two black eyes, broken ribs and blood on his baseball cap, he told friends at the time.

Rowan was desperate. Then, while he was watching TV at his girlfriend’s house, a show caught his attention. It was on the Investigation Discovery channel, something about a guy who staged his own death so he could start his life anew.

Part 3

A Way Out

Rowan had felt as if he were drowning for a while now. He owed money to drug dealers. He couldn’t keep a job. His hobby was getting beaten up in public. Now this fake-death scheme landed like a life preserver.

If people thought he was dead, he and his girlfriend, Rosa Martinez, could move far from Michigan. Maybe New Mexico. They could begin again.

“I wanted a fresh start,” he said in one of a series of interviews conducted both in person and over the phone. “To pick up and start someplace new where no one knew us.”

The phone calls were the first step — Rowan said he was there when Martinez called DiPonio, the fight promoter, to announce the car crash. She later called his mother. Rowan said it broke his heart to think of his mother picturing him dead, but he saw no other way. He could hear Martinez as she made the calls, and he said that first step of the hoax “almost killed me.”

When Martinez called back two days later to say Rowan was dead, he said, he choked up and had to leave the room.

The mourners gathered at Martinez’s home to remember Charles H. Rowan, father, son, friend and cage fighter. The guests walked up a wooden ramp leading to the front door, past a sprinkling of cigarette butts that dotted the yard’s patchy snow.

Inside the small living room, lined with brown carpet and wood-paneled walls, sat two young children, along with Rowan’s mother, who was sobbing.

Martinez looked grief-stricken. She brushed off questions about funeral arrangements and other practical matters, making clear she was not yet ready.

As the group sat quietly in the living room, she stepped away to collect a bag that she said had been retrieved from the accident.

She pulled out a white baseball cap that was stained with blood. A young boy began to cry.

They mourned Rowan as a lost soul gone too soon. But he had not gone anywhere. Rowan was upstairs throughout the memorial, he said, hiding in a child’s bedroom until the guests left. While his mother cried and his girlfriend accepted condolences, Rowan worked hard not to make a sound.

He said he thought about walking downstairs to interrupt the grieving, ending the ruse right there.

He decided not to.

Part 4

Trapped

If this was the afterlife, Rowan didn’t much care for it.

He spent most of the next six weeks hiding out in his girlfriend’s home, watching TV and working out in a small makeshift gym. He said he closed his bank account and disabled his Facebook page. He made late-night trips to Rite Aid and even kept Martinez company for a meeting at her children’s school. The couple said they were possibly moving to New Mexico, a school official later told the police.

“I went stir crazy,” Rowan said. “I couldn’t call any of my friends; I couldn’t go anywhere. I love Rosa more than life itself, but it’s just too much to be around the same person all of the time.”

Despite his efforts, the hoax began to fray. Skeptics took to Facebook, where they peppered the fight promoters with questions about death certificates and obituaries.

The promoters took offense. “I said: ‘How dare you question this? The dude is dead! Have some respect,’” the promoter Joe Shaw said.

Rowan’s family wanted to know what happened to his body. Scott Gardner, his stepfather, called local hospitals but didn’t find anyone who could help. “We felt like we didn’t have any facts,” Gardner said. Sympathy cards began to arrive, some of them with checks included, but the family set them aside.

Rumors about Rowan were bound to reach the people he owed money, and by mid-March, they apparently had. While his loved ones still thought he was dead, he sneaked away to meet with Michael Gomez in Gladwin — the circumstances remain murky. Gomez and his lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

At the meeting, Gomez threatened to hurt Martinez and her kids, Rowan said.

The walls were closing in. But Charlie Rowan, still presumed dead, had one last idea.

Part 6

Connecting the Pieces

With a thick mustache, his hair cut short, and a no-nonsense demeanor, James Cuddie would have a hard time passing as anything other than a cop. Not that he would try — everyone in Gladwin County knew him as Jim, the county detective, including many of the people he arrested. Sometimes, as Cuddie eased suspects into the back of his police car, they apologized to him by name.

It didn’t take long for Cuddie and his colleagues to connect Rowan with the Guns & Stuff robbery. When officers dropped off Martinez, they saw his ID in her home.

Then Bowman visited the sheriff’s office and said that Rowan may have been involved in the robbery. That was also a roundabout way of saying that Rowan might not be quite as dead as people had thought.

For weeks, Cuddie had heard rumors about Rowan’s death, but he didn’t think much about them one way or the other. “I didn’t know it to be true or untrue,” he said. “At that point it wasn’t an issue. I’m working on other cases.”

But now, with Richard Robinette in intensive care, Cuddie’s interest was piqued.

“I know that guy!” he shouted. “He’s not supposed to be alive!”

It should have been the most straightforward of questions: is Charlie Rowan dead or alive? But it had become bizarrely muddled.

The day after the robbery, Cuddie called the Saginaw County medical examiner’s office, which housed records for the county’s deceased. Officials there confirmed that there was no death certificate for Charles Howard Rowan. The medical examiner declared it “unlikely” that Rowan had died.

That was enough for Cuddie to surmise that Rowan was out there on the run. “Rowan and Martinez were people of interest that needed to be located,” he wrote in his report.

On March 19, the sheriff’s office released Rowan’s mug shot to the local news media.

Big John Yeubanks, a fight promoter, was smoking a cigarette in his home office, half-listening to the TV news. The story of the day was a robbery of Guns & Stuff.

The suspect’s mug shot flashed across the screen, and Yeubanks snapped to attention.

There was no mistaking it, yet it could not be.

“I know that guy!” he shouted. “He’s not supposed to be alive!”

Yeubanks called the sheriff to say there must have been a mistake — they were looking for a dead man.

Word quickly spread through the cage fighting world. DiPonio’s girlfriend pulled up the mug shot on her phone. Goatee, square jaw, pursed lips — it was Charlie Rowan.

“She showed it to me,” DiPonio said, “and I nearly threw up right there.”

At the Gladwin County Sheriff’s Office, the phone had been ringing steadily since the mug shots were released. The officers kept hearing the same strange thing: the suspect, Charlie Rowan, was already dead.

Weeks later, sitting in his cluttered basement office, Cuddie laughed at the deluge of calls. He described the one he received from DiPonio, so sure that Rowan was dead.

“I told him that I had reason to believe,” Cuddie said, “that Mr. Rowan was very much alive.”

Part 7

Voice From the Beyond

Rowan’s vision of starting a new life, in New Mexico or anywhere else, was turning to dust.

He and his girlfriend were hiding out from the local police, from federal agents working the case, from the people Rowan owed money, and from the fight promoters he tricked.

The Guns & Stuff robbery and the manhunt had put the town on edge. Rowan’s mother, still grieving for her son, was at the Chappel Dam Grocery when she heard about the attack. “I thought, ‘At least I know my son didn’t do it,’” she said.

Her relief wouldn’t last long. Soon, her phone rang. It was her son, Charlie, no longer dead.

For six weeks, she thought she’d lost him, at age 25. She never said goodbye. Now, here he was, on the phone. He had one question for her: could she give him a ride?

"He's lucky the cops got him before the fighters did."

His mother drove in a fog, past the familiar barns, churches and homes that lined the road. Finally, on the right, she saw her son, waving his arms to flag her down.

Still confused, she asked where he’d been for so long. This was all a lie? They both started crying. Rowan mumbled something about being “out of state.” He got out of the car at his girlfriend’s home, the same place his mother had cried during his memorial the month before.

His mother went to the sheriff’s office in tears the next day to tell Cuddie that her son was indeed alive. She said she was afraid he’d robbed Guns & Stuff and hit old man Robinette.

That night, Rowan said, he went to Saginaw, where he gave Gomez six of the stolen guns to pay down his debt, worth $1,000 per handgun. Gomez later told the authorities that he bought only one pistol from Rowan, according to a police report. Gomez was arrested soon after on charges of possessing weapons as a felon.

Rowan and his girlfriend were still hiding out. They booked a room at the Knights Inn in Saginaw, where a bed cost $50. “I was on edge all night, me and Rosa,” Rowan said. “I knew I was fighting a losing battle.”

They stayed on the run for about 48 hours, moving from one spot to another. The scrambling didn’t throw off Cuddie and his colleagues.

On March 20, two days after the robbery, they tracked Rowan and his girlfriend to a friend’s apartment in Unionville. The couple were arrested at about 7:15 a.m.

It was all over — and Cuddie had a definitive answer. Charlie Rowan was not dead. But he would be going away for a long, long time.

He told Cuddie that he didn’t mean for it to happen this way. He walked the officers through the robbery and told them where they could find the guns, the Batman mask, the stolen wallet.

The news was out. A front-page headline in The Traverse City Record-Eagle read, “Fighter Accused of Faking Death.”

The cage fighters felt betrayed, furious that Rowan had sullied their sport’s name.

“He’s lucky the cops got him before the fighters did,” Big John Yeubanks, the promoter, said. Organizers of the Fight for Charlie recently filed a police report in Traverse City accusing Rowan of fraud.

After the hoax was exposed, the cage fighting promoters decided to hold another benefit, this time to raise money for the Robinettes, the owners of Guns & Stuff. They have collected more than $15,000.

“We got sick of hearing about Charles Rowan and we thought, What about the Robinettes?” Yeubanks said. “Everybody was looking at this guy like he was an M.M.A. fighter from Michigan, but in fact he was a small-time tough guy who got in a cage a couple of times.”

Today, Richard Robinette is back home after a recovery that’s surprised even his family and his doctors. He started playing his banjo again. He recently fixed the bathroom sink.

He doesn’t remember much of the robbery, but he showed off a horseshoe of stitches on the left side of his head.

“You can’t sit and cry about it,” he said. “They thought I was going to die.”

A few miles away, Rowan sits inside another cage, in the Gladwin County Jail. He pleaded guilty last month to armed robbery. He’ll be sentenced in October.

In jail, Rowan wrote letters to his mother, trying to atone. “I did not mean to hurt that man and his family,” one letter read. “I hope to see you at my visit.”

Rowan’s mother usually comes to see him once a week. On a recent afternoon, the two put their hands against the clear divider that separated them.

“I’m sorry you did this, too,” his mother said. Rowan, wearing an orange jumpsuit, told her he figured he’d be locked up for the rest of her life.

He reads mysteries in jail. During his first few weeks behind bars, he tried to catch glimpses of his girlfriend, who was being held nearby. She recently pleaded guilty to armed robbery charges.

He goes over the whole strange story, step by step. He finds himself returning to the fake memorial, and the sounds of people sobbing for him.

“I didn’t realize how I impacted other people’s lives,” he said. “I don’t hold myself in high regard. I’m not a good person, I’m not a good dad and most of the time I’m not a good son.”

He thinks about his girlfriend, Rosa, and wonders whether they’ll ever be together again.

“It’s like ... ” He struggled to get the words out. “It’s like we just died.”