The door was the type you see in squalid gangland movies — a thick slab of board reinforced with iron bars. It had no window or handle, just a tiny peep-hole and a sign that warned: ‘No Loitering’.
Since there were no names beneath the apartment buzzers, I pressed them all, then waited in the driving snow, reminded with every menacing stare that this was Chicago’s ‘murder central’ and the only white men who ventured here were bailiffs and cops.
Just as I was about to beat a tactical retreat, a red-hatted head poked from the top-floor window. With his thick-rimmed glasses and hawkish nose, he certainly wasn’t ‘pretty’, as his father once liked to describe himself, yet somehow his looks were familiar.
And when he shouted down — ‘hold on there, brother, I’ll be right with you’ — I knew that here, in this God-forsaken doss-house, I’d found the only biological son of Muhammad Ali; by broad consensus the greatest sporting icon of all time.
Now 71, paralysed and muted by Parkinson’s disease — and just ‘weeks’ from death, if we believe an impassioned outburst from his brother a few days ago — the three-time world heavyweight champion inhabits a world light years removed from this drug-blighted ghetto: an estate of millionaire mansions and manicured golf-courses in an Arizona town aptly named Paradise Valley.
During his glittering career, Ali made and lost several fortunes. In 2006, however, he sold his image rights to CKX (now Core Media Group), which also controls the rights to Elvis Presley’s image. The deal, which covers licensing rights and trademarks, was worth at least £30 million — more than enough to keep Ali and his wife in comfort for the rest of their lives.
Why, then, must Muhammad Ali Junior, 40, his wife Shaakira and their daughters, aged five and four, languish in a charity-furnished garret owned by his in-laws, scraping by on food-stamps worth £135 a month, plus the few dollars he earns selling autographed photos and doing odd-jobs?
It is a question that puzzles many people in Englewood, where he has lived for more than a decade and where his identity is well-known.
‘I’m guessing something real bad must have gone on between him and his father in the past for Ali to have left him here like this,’ whispers the manager of his local diner, Granny B’s, as I pay for our breakfast.
Ali Junior insists that the true architect of his misfortune is not his father but the boxer’s ‘controlling’ fourth wife, Lonnie, who, he claims, has not only stopped the regular hand-outs he once received, but almost completely ostracised him.
Muhammad Ali’s younger brother, Rahman, 69, who also lives on welfare hand-outs in the family’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, makes the same accusations, only in stronger terms, branding Lonnie ‘a gold-digger’ and ‘an evil bitch’ (and even alleging in a U.S. magazine interview this week that she is neglecting Ali’s care).
Lonnie’s supporters insist she is merely defending her husband from other family members who wish to leech off his fame.
Feud: Muhammad Ali Junior, left, claims his father's fourth wife Lonnie Ali, right, has virtually ostracised him
Brother and son, however, are united in the accusation that she has turned Ali into some garish waxwork exhibit, flying him around the world to be photographed, prodded and gawped at by well-meaning fans — and lining her own pockets with the proceeds of these events.
They recall with dismay his pitiful appearance during the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, where Ali’s wife had to prop him up on the podium and could be seen repeatedly imploring him to wave to the rapturous crowd — to no avail.
What is the truth behind this unedifying family feud?
Ali’s brother, who was invited by Olympic organisers to a charity function — attended by sporting celebrities such as Lewis Hamilton and David Beckham — in the boxer’s honour before the Games, claims Ali was dehydrated because he didn’t have enough to drink at the party and ‘looked helpless and weak’.
Others in Ali’s circle take a very different view of Lonnie, however. They maintain that she has been his saviour and that his fortunes — financial and physical — would have declined far more rapidly had she not come to his rescue almost 30 years ago.
So what is the truth behind this unedifying family feud?
The harsh reality is that it is the direct result of Ali’s personal foibles. While he was an amazing showman and had the courage of a lion in the ring, when it came to his private life his morals were those of an alley cat. The way he treated his first three wives and neglected some of his nine (known) children was frankly disgraceful.
His son, who has plainly suffered the consequences of this loose behaviour, theorises that it was inherited from his grandfather, Cassius Marcellus Clay Senior, who was, he says, serially unfaithful to his grandmother, Odessa.
‘It was like the song goes, “Papa was a rolling stone”,’ he told me. ‘When it came to women, my daddy and grandpa weren’t very nice people — they were whores.’
Though Ali Junior has axes aplenty to grind, the facts bear this out.
Showman: Muhammad Ali, seen in the ring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1974, was unfaithful to his wives
Glamour: Ali with third wife Veronica, who the boxer declared was 'the world's most beautiful black woman'
His father was an inexperienced Southern country boy when his head was first turned by a sassy Chicago cocktail waitress. They married after a six-week courtship — but divorced just 18 months later.
He quickly replaced her with Belinda Boyd, who was 14 and working in a bakery when she caught the 24-year-old world champion’s eye, and 17 when they wed in 1967.
They had three daughters before finally producing the son Ali supposedly coveted, Muhammad Junior.
If he was desperate for a boy, however, he had a strange way of showing it. For around the same time he sired the first of two illegitimate daughters by different mothers
Then, during the razzamatazz preceding one of his landmark fights — the so-called ‘Thrilla in Manila’ versus Joe Frazier in 1975 — his libido got the better of him again.
Champion: Muhammad Ali, seen in 1960, made and lost several fortunes during his glittering career
Though Belinda was with him in the Philippines, he began an affair with one of the models flown in from America to add glamour to the occasion, Veronica Porsche.
When Belinda caught them in a hotel room together she attacked him with more venom than Frazier, drawing blood - she fought tooth and nail to try to keep him.
However, Ali declared that Veronica was ‘the world’s most beautiful black woman’ — and she soon became wife number three.
While the new bride and groom moved to Los Angeles, the dumped Belinda sank into self-pity.
Now a hospital canteen waitress in Florida, she went on to marry and divorce three more times, and Ali Junior and his sisters were dumped with their maternal grandparents, who brought them up as well as a factory worker’s wage would allow.
‘My Daddy would sometimes drop by and hand me a fistful of dollars but I didn’t see much of him after he and my mother split up,’ Muhammad Jnr told me in a soft, rhythmical voice that sounds like Ali’s.
‘I was really sheltered as a child. I didn’t go out and have friends because Muhammad Ali’s only son had to be protected against racists and people who hated him for refusing to be drafted to Vietnam.
‘I was really sheltered as a child. I didn’t go out and have friends because Muhammad Ali’s only son had to be protected against racists and people who hated him for refusing to be drafted to Vietnam.
‘I also used to get picked on at school,’ he says, removing his glasses to show his broken nose.
‘Kids wanted to box me because I was Ali’s son — but I’ve never hit anyone in my life. Daddy never wanted me to fight.
‘I think he wished later on that he had paid me more attention.
‘At his 50th birthday (when Ali junior was 19) he took me aside and we had our only heart-to-heart.
He told me he was afraid what might happen to him in the afterlife because of some of the things he’d done.
'I told him... I still loved him, and his eyes filled with tears'
Muhammad Ali Junior
‘I told him that whatever had gone on in the past, I still loved him, and his eyes filled with tears.’
As he walks me along his rocky front path, he frequently cites Lonnie, his father’s fourth wife, as the stumbling block in his relationship with his father.
A childhood neighbour of the boxer, but 16 years younger, Lonnie had idolised him as a little girl and followed his exploits in awe. Then in the early Eighties, after Ali had retired, Lonnie heard how he was slurring his words and shaking as a result of his as yet undiagnosed disease, and that his wife Veronica wasn’t exactly the nursing type: and she did an extraordinary thing.
Resigning from her promising executive post with the food company Kraft, she left Kentucky for California, moved into an apartment near Ali’s mansion, and offered to serve as his full-time nurse.
Was it, as she and her admirers maintain, an act of kindness born of her admiration for a great man in distress and too proud to ask for help?
Or did Lonnie harbour a more cynical motive?
Act of kindness: Lonnie Ali's supporters insist she is merely defending her husband from family members who wish to leech off his fame
Whoever we choose to believe, soon after she arrived on the scene the former champion and Veronica were divorced, and in 1986 he married Lonnie, who wasted no time in bringing order to his chaotic financial affairs and purging anyone she perceived as a malign influence or sponger.
Muhammad Junior was identified in the latter category.
'I hoped he would come to my baby's funeral, but Lonnie didn't bring him'
Muhammad Ali Junior
For a while the occasional hand-outs continued, but in 2004, he says, when he visited his father’s farm in Michigan and asked for a signed pair of his boxing gloves (which he probably intended to sell, though he denies this) Lonnie overheard the request and blocked it.
Since then he has seldom been permitted to speak to his father on the phone, much less see him.
‘Five years ago, I lost a baby daughter who had a hole in the heart, and by chance my father was in Chicago - at the funeral of his former manager - on the day we buried her,’ he says, sombre now.
‘Five years ago, I lost a baby daughter who had a hole in the heart, and by chance my father was in Chicago - at the funeral of his former manager - on the day we buried her,’ he says, sombre now.
‘I hoped he would come to my baby’s funeral, but Lonnie didn’t bring him.
‘You’ll have to ask her why.’
The former boxer’s brother Rahman, who is now in poor health after a series of strokes, tells a similar tale.
Before Lonnie married Ali, Rahman was a permanent fixture in the entourage and milked his brother’s generosity to the extent that Ali even paid alimony to some of Rahman’s half-dozen wives.
After their mother, Odessa, died in 1984, Rahman also took possession of her house.
Barely a year later, however, on the orders of Lonnie - who has power of attorney over Ali’s affairs - he was evicted and forced to move to a modest flat, according to a family member.
Frail: The brother of the boxing great, seen with footballer David Beckham in London in July last year, claimed Ali 'looked helpless and weak' at a charity event before the Olympic Games
One person, however, who has benefited from Lonnie’s ‘new deal’ is Asaad Amin, 22, the son she and Ali adopted when he was five years old. Then about to be taken into foster care because a friend of Lonnie’s couldn’t afford to keep him, he is now something of a celebrity and studies at an expensive university where he excels at sports.
This plainly wounds Ali’s natural son, for when I mention Asaad’s success Ali Junior replies tartly that he doesn’t recognise his adoptive brother as part of the family, adding plaintively: ‘I am the only one who has Daddy’s name and I’m proud of that — though it sometimes feels like a curse.’
As for his seven sisters, the majority are said to empathise with him, but as the feud rages publicly they are keeping their counsel — wisely, perhaps, since all of them have traded, to a greater or lesser extent, on being Muhammad Ali’s daughters: writing books and making TV appearances.
What must Ali make of it all?
Mercifully, one doubts he has any idea that his brother and son are on the breadline and his family at war. Since the Olympics he hasn’t travelled overseas (rather dampening the claim from Ali’s brother and son that Lonnie ‘flies him around the world’).
He spends his days propped in a chair watching old movies and re-runs of his fights, only venturing outside his gated estate in Paradise Valley when his wife takes him for a drive, or to some local function.
Invited to comment on the allegations made against Lonnie by Ali’s brother and son, family spokesman Bob Gunnell said: ‘They are simply not true. Rest assured Muhammad is doing great.’
'They [the allegations] are simply not true. Rest assured Muhammad is doing great'
Ali family spokesman Bob Gunnell
And Dr Abraham Lieberman, who has been Ali’s physician for the past 25 years and sees him every fortnight, said: ‘If I had Parkinson’s I would wish I was cared for as well as Muhammad.
‘I believe he gets excellent care.’
The last time Ali was seen in public, about a fortnight ago, he was pushed into a local jewellery store and sat for half an hour, totally silent and immobile behind his sunglasses, as cameras flashed and people jostled for position beside him.
Does he have weeks to live?
While his neighbours and estate staff say they have noticed a marked deterioration recently, no one really knows, yet in many ways the question is irrelevant.
Though Muhammad Ali will remain a dollar-pulling exhibit for as long as he can be propped up in a wheelchair, The Greatest has already gone, leaving a void in which his bitterly divided family squabble over his legacy.
