Longtime Detroit resident and former heavyweight boxing champ Leon Spink’s dead at 67

[CassTechGrad]

UPI. January 16, 1981

"Detroit Mich: Leon Spinks, the former heavyweight boxing champion, told police today he was attacked on a Detroit city street and awakened hours later in a motel to find he had been robbed of $45,000 worth of clothes, jewelry and other items.
Spinks told authorities he had been hit on the head and stripped of his clothes and left on a bed at the Cranbrook House motel on 8 Mile near the Lodge and that his gold dental plate was among the items taken.

Spinks, who bought a house in Detroit a few years ago, told police he was leaving a west side bar last night when he was struck on the head. He told the police he did not see who attacked him.”

Later that year the bank evicted Spinks from his $125,000 house on W. Outer Drive just off Grand River in the Rosedale Park section of Detroit for failing to make his mortgage payments. Thomas Hearns ended up buying the house for $55,000.