When the rebels stormed Charlie Perrière’s house, he was sure his days were about to come to a swift and bloody end. The night before, 66-year-old Perrière, fearing what was coming, knelt down on the floor of his home in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. He began to pray. “God, I have no weapons, no army, I’m not a fighter. Tomorrow, it seems like the Séléka will enter Bangui,” he whispered, referencing the brutal rebel group that was about to topple the government. “I put all my belongings in your hands … please protect me.”  

Hiding out in his large house in a leafy part of Bangui, not far from high-walled ambassadorial residences, Perrière feared for his life. When the militants stormed the grounds, brandishing guns and demanding the keys to a neighbor’s car parked in his driveway, there was little he could do. He did not have the keys, he told them.  

“It was as if I had just poured oil onto the fire,” Perrière tells me when I meet him in the same courtyard three years later. He describes how the group of young men grew furious at his response, even though he had already handed over the keys to his own car. They started shooting in the air and ganging up on the slender man standing alone in his yard. 

That was until one member of the group — a scrawny street kid brandishing a rusty machete — peered closer at Perrière and, his eyes growing wider, whispered something to the leader. The man turned around to stare at Perrière with a strange expression on his face.  

Perrière held his breath. 

“Charlie Perrière, really? Is it really you?” the fighter asked after a few seconds. 

Suddenly, he was warmly patting the older man on the back. 

“And then he began apologizing, and telling me, ‘My mom is simply fanatical about your music, my brother!’” says Perrière, smiling at me with amused disbelief as he recalls the moment from a chair in his verdant garden. 

The leader told the gangsters to give Perrière his car keys back, and told the youths that no one was allowed to return and pillage this particular house. 

Most people in the West would struggle to pinpoint the Central African Republic on a map. Its international claim to fame is the dire poverty of its citizens and its terrifying, bloody, seemingly never-ending wars. The 2013 war reached a peak when a mostly Muslim faction, Séléka, swept into Bangui, staging a coup d’état and eventually forcing the president to flee. This provoked a violent backlash from mainly Christian and Animist groups known as “Anti-Balaka” militias. Hundreds of thousands of citizens ran from their homes. Those who did not manage to escape were slaughtered, their bodies thrown in the river or stuffed down water wells. Youths armed with machetes, their eyes glistening in a drugged haze, spiked decapitated heads as trophies on sticks and paraded them around the streets. Aid workers watched helplessly as armed thugs took over the towns and villages, stringing human intestines across the roads as barriers — a gruesome warning to others to proceed no further. 

Here in Bangui, one of the ways of finding normalcy amid the chaotic years of cries and gunshots has been through another form of sound — the country’s rich music tradition. Whether the rhythmic drumming of the tam–tam, the strumming of the guitar, or the bubbling sounds of the balafon, a xylophone of wood and animal skins — music is a constant here. And Perrière is one of its undisputed kings. His fame probably saved his life.  

Years earlier, he was the leader of the favorite orchestra of one of the most notorious, colorful and strange despots in history, Jean Bédel Bokassa. Today Perrière is still considered a national star — yet, like every story involving the feared Bokassa, Perrière’s path to celebrity was far from a conventional one. 

It was the late 1960s, and Perrière, a talented but struggling teenage musician, was tired of surviving on a shoestring. As he made preparations to leave his native country for a new life in the Congo, he had an unexpected meeting that would change his life. 

Perrière was a star singer in his church choir, and he had been performing with an orchestra that was invited to play in front of Bokassa. After the concert, when the players were invited to salute the great leader, Perrière was summoned to report directly to the man himself. The prospect was exciting — but also terrifying. 

Bokassa is often caricatured as one of Africa’s most tyrannical dictators, a ruler who fed his opponents to crocodiles, adored diamonds and women, and crowned himself as emperor of Central Africa. The anecdotes from his time abound with absurdities, stretching from the beginning to the end of his reign. The night he seized power in a coup d’état on New Year’s Eve in December 1965, he brought his deposed predecessor (who happened to be his distant cousin) to the palace and wrapped him in a tight hug before dispatching him to prison, notes historian Brian Titley in his book Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa. Following Bokassa’s ouster in 1979, the French troops who drained the emperor’s alligator pond at Villa Kolongo discovered bone fragments belonging to some 30 victims, writes historian Martin Meredith in his book The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence. Mutilated bodies were also found in the residence’s refrigerator, while locals testified that others were regularly fed to the lions. 

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While these horror stories are well documented, few of the historical accounts of Bokassa pick up on one of the emperor’s greatest passions — music. A soldier who blitzed through the ranks to become the head of the Central African army, once he became president, Bokassa realized that military might would only take him so far. As he sought to consolidate and aggrandize his power and influence both at home and abroad, he believed music would be an effective tool.  

“Bokassa tried to use radio and musical groups as part of his effort to create a cult of personality to support his rule,” writes Jacqueline Cassandra Woodfork in her book Culture and Customs of the Central African Republic. And he was determined to make Perrière a part of these efforts. 

Bokassa had heard Perrière sing, and upon making inquiries he was disappointed to learn of the youngster’s plans to leave the country.  

So that night at the presidential palace in central Bangui, the despotic leader addressed the terrified musician in a kindly but firm tone — and one that left little room for doubt. 

“He told me: ‘As head of state, I can’t forbid you from going to Congo, but … as a father, I wish that you wouldn’t go,’” recounts Perrière. “After that meeting, my mother had advised me that I had better stay,” adds Perrière, who quickly agreed. “If I had run away to Congo, it would have been like treason.” 

So he stayed. But it was a long time before he heard from the great leader again. Months rolled by with no news, and Perrière wondered if Bokassa had forgotten about him. Then, one day, a presidential security vehicle showed up unannounced on the doorstep of Perrière’s mother’s house, sirens blasting. The president — at that point he had not yet appointed himself emperor — was summoning Perrière for another meeting at the palace. 

This time Bokassa actually congratulated Perrière for staying put. Perrière recalls that the leader was seated at a long table with ministers around him. “He turned to me and said, ‘My son, do you know why I sent for you?’ I said, ‘No, your Excellency.’ And then he said, ‘It was to thank you, because I gave you a piece of advice and you respected it. That means that you are a nationalist at heart.’”  

Perrière continues his story: “He then asked me why I had wanted to go, and I told him, ‘My father is dead, my mother is raising my 10 brothers all on her own, I am the oldest of the family and I need to help my mother. We have no help here, we have no means of developing [our lives].” He told Bokassa that his band played on rented instruments, which swallowed up most of their earnings.  

Bokassa turned to his ministers and ordered them to procure instruments for what would become Bokassa’s “Imperial Orchestra.” This marked the start of Perrière’s decades-long career making music as a private bandmaster for one of the world’s most feared and murderous despots. 

Despite their radically different statuses, Bokassa may have seen something familiar in the young Perrière. Bokassa himself was an orphan; his father had been killed in a dispute when Bokassa was 6 years old, and his mother killed herself soon after. As a teenager, Bokassa was educated in missionary schools and had initially planned to study for the priesthood, before joining the French Army when World War II erupted. After he helped to establish the newly independent country’s national army, Bokassa formed a music band among the military, dubbing it Commando Jazz, writes Luke Fowlie in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture.  

For Bokassa, music was a power-wielding political tool, so much so that he made his personal orchestra — called “Tropical Fiesta” — into a key tool of his global diplomacy, taking the musicians with him on state visits all over the world. 

“He told me once: ‘Listen, Charlie, the young generation don’t understand the importance of music in a country. … It is the artists who enable others to get to know a country,’” recalls Perrière. “This was his goal: to introduce a country through its music.”  

“He adored music,” says Aggas Zokoko, the orchestra’s lead singer and the band’s leader in recent decades. “I think the connection Bokassa had with musicians was unlike any other connection he had with others.” 

Others have a more cynical take on the emperor’s personal orchestra. “He had what we call la folie de grandeur,” that is, megalomania, says Alex Ballu, a veteran radio star and cultural journalist in the Central African Republic. “He needed musicians to travel with him, to augment his presence, to sing his praises and so on.” 

Such practices were also common in neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), under Mobutu Sese Seko, a bespectacled dictator known for his distinctive leopard skin hat as well as mass violence and corruption.  

“Popular groups were required to literally sing the praises of their leader,” writes Fowlie. “Bangui’s chosen orchestras became emissaries for the Bokassa government, touring internationally throughout Central and West Africa as well as Europe.” 

Though Bokassa saw music as a diplomatic tool, he also loved it with an all-consuming passion that was obvious to all. 

“Once, we were traveling to Vakaga (in north Central African Republic) when the plane was struck by lightning mid-flight and we almost crashed,” recalls Zokoko. Upon landing, some of the musicians were so shaken by the experience that they ran away and hid, refusing to perform that night. 

“And Bokassa noticed and said: ‘OK, lower the mic down a bit for me. I will sing with you.’ And he did!” 

While Zokoko describes the singing as merely “not bad,” his eyes light up as he remembers the emperor getting more and more into the spirit, taking up a guitar and beginning to serenade one of his wives from the stage. 

“It was a beautiful evening that I will never forget,” says Zokoko wistfully.  

Bokassa also constructed the country’s first major recording studio in the grounds of Berengo, his palace near his home village and the place he envisioned as the future capital of the Central African empire. While some historians see the move as a cynical effort to win the love of the people through music, the country’s musicians benefited financially in a way that they have rarely done since. 

“The first time I played for him it was in Berengo,” recalls Zokoko, who had been recruited by Perrière. He describes Bokassa sitting in the palace with his family, as the orchestra played purely for the leader’s personal pleasure. 

“Sometimes we would just perform for him alone. He’d sit on the sofa. Afterward, he would say, ‘Thank you, my children.’” 

Every aspect of each performance was meticulously planned, and the musicians, who had previously struggled to make ends meet, suddenly found themselves catapulted to stardom, traveling around the world, dressed to the nines. 

“He would clad us in all the top fashions,” muses Zokoko. “We would play in front of all of these heads of states in beautiful suits.” 

“He wanted all the artists to look good, to portray grandeur,” Ballu, the music journalist, says. “The ministers didn’t like the musicians much, as they would often be chatting up their wives,” he adds, laughing. “But Bokassa always defended them, and paid them good money.” 

But it was far from all fun and games. “When you worked with the emperor, everything had to be done perfectly,” Perrière says. “By the book, just like in the army. … When the emperor loses his temper, everyone is in trouble,” he adds, recalling a bitter experience when he found this out for himself. 

“Once, I sang a song that he didn’t like,” he recalls. “It was a song for his birthday.” Performed and broadcast live over the radio, the musicians hadn’t even had a chance to finish playing before “suddenly the curtains began closing in front of us. We turned around and there were armed security guards standing behind us, gun barrels pointing.” The next thing Perrière knew, he was being marched off to prison. 

He spent one month behind bars, an experience which, shaking his head, he describes as “terrible.”  

“My wife was traumatized. It was very difficult.” 

Upon being let out, Bokassa summoned Perrière and explained to him the particular line in the song that he didn’t like, a lyric he deemed too insulting for Bokassa’s image as a strong man.  

“You, the artists, everything you say or do, it’s heard by the whole world,” Bokassa told him. “You can build someone up or break someone easily. So the advice I’ve always given you is: ‘When you compose a song, make it go through a censor in order to avoid any problems.’” 

From that point on, all of the songs went through a censor. 

Perrière’s month in prison was far from a unique incident. Tropical Fiesta and other bands playing for the government had to comply with the emperor’s every wish. Fowlie writes that another orchestra, Centrafrican Jazz, was dissolved in 1975 at the height of its popularity, allegedly over a spat between Bokassa and his wife, who is said to have favored the group. (Some allege that the group became so popular — even with Bokassa’s mistresses — that the ruler split it up out of jealousy, according to an article by musician Sultan Zembellat.) 

As Bokassa’s rule continued, he became more dictatorial and his eccentricities grew. He had maintained a historical admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte since his time as a young trainee in the French military, and during his reign this respect morphed into blind obsession, culminating with Bokassa crowning himself “Emperor of Central Africa” on December 4, 1977, the 173rd anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation. 

Bokassa invited Pope Paul VI himself to crown him. Though the pope, along with a multitude of other state leaders, declined the invitation, preparations for the coronation progressed full steam. To emulate Napoleon, Bokassa dressed himself in a 30-foot-long scarlet mantle, designed by the same atelier that had prepared Napoleon’s. It was decorated with pearls, diamonds and rubies. 

“The whole country was mobilized to take part in the coronation,” Perrière remembers. “There were white horses brought especially from France, all the gold-gilded carriages … it was extraordinary.” The total cost was an eye-popping $20 million USD — a bill footed entirely by France — while the population of the Central African Republic was mired in deep poverty. 

Just before the coronation, musicians from all over the country were asked to compose songs. Perrière’s entry was chosen as one of the official songs for the ceremony. “I was stuck for one week trying to compose it. I turned it over and over in my head. And afterward, it simply came to me, just like that.” 

The song, titled “Révérence à Nos Souverains” (“Reverence to Our Sovereigns”), became a hit, and it is still featured on compilation albums of African music. 

Alongside the Imperial Orchestra, other renowned musicians were invited to attend, among them Manu Dibango, a star from neighboring Cameroon. The scenes that greeted him upon arriving at the presidential palace in Bangui surpassed his wildest expectations, Dibango wrote in his autobiography Three Kilos of Coffee.  

“Money flowed like water,” Dibango wrote. “The church was sumptuously decorated.” But the night ended somberly. “That evening by moonlight, we were giving our concert when a violent storm suddenly erupted, the carriages were soaked, the projectors broke down, the musicians got drenched. The dignitaries thought only of hiding themselves in their Mercedeses.” 

And, just like a sudden tropical storm, two years later, Bokassa’s swift downfall began. 

The key event that triggered his dethroning came in 1979, when around 100 schoolchildren were massacred at Bangui’s central prison, following Bokassa’s orders to arrest them. The children had been taken while protesting an order that forced them to buy overpriced school uniforms made in a factory owned by one of Bokassa’s wives. An independent judicial inquiry subsequently concluded that the prison massacre was carried out “almost certainly” with the personal participation of the emperor, writes Meredith in The Fate of Africa.  

The incident proved to be the final straw for the French, who had been bankrolling Bokassa and his government. In September 1979, while Bokassa was away on a state visit to Libya, French troops helped restore former president David Dacko (Bokassa’s cousin) to power. Bokassa fled by airplane into exile on the Ivory Coast. The Imperial Orchestra was disbanded, and some of its musicians, Perrière included, moved abroad. 

Several years later, in 1986, Bokassa returned to the Central African Republic, hoping to be forgiven and welcomed back. Instead, the deposed emperor was arrested, marched off to jail and then put on trial.  

Today, upon landing at Bangui M’Poko International Airport, the first glimpse any visitor catches of the Bokassa era are the small, toylike airplanes from the 1960s and ’70s, in faded yellow, red and white. For years, people have believed that the planes are haunted by the ghost of the emperor, since it was Bokassa, Titley writes, who established the national airline, and the small airplanes date back to that time. During the 2013 war, the planes gained an unexpected — if ill-fated — second life as shelters for people fleeing marauding gangs. The displaced have since been forced to leave the airport and return to rebuild their destroyed homes. More than 40 years after Bokassa’s lavish and garish coronation, the Central African Republic is one of the poorest countries in the world, ravaged by war and strife, the ongoing pillaging of natural wealth, and rampant corruption. The avenues Bokassa built are crumbling, the buildings gutted and reduced to skeletal remains, weeds growing in what used to serve as kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms. Life expectancy is just 52 years — the shortest anywhere on the planet, according to the World Bank.  

“Bangui la Coquette” (“Bangui the Flirt”) was the city’s nickname back in the Bokassa era. It’s now “Bangui la Roquette” (“Bangui the Rocket”), the locals quip wryly, due to the brutal fighting that has destroyed many parts of the city. 

Bokassa’s Berengo palace has been extensively pillaged. When Perrière was being held at gunpoint in his front yard, Berengo was already being used as a base by child soldiers fighting with a motley crew of armed gangs, answering to the highest–paying militia leader of the day. In recent years, Russian soldiers and mercenaries have descended on the former royal palace, setting up training camps for soldiers inside the grounds, according to a 2019 CNN report. In exchange, Russian companies reportedly “won” exploration rights at a number of sites to look for diamonds and gold. 

And yet, when I visited Bangui on a reporting trip in January 2018 — my fourth one after meeting Perrière in 2016 — I could still feel Bokassa’s presence in the ruined city. Vintage French magazines like Paris Match with Bokassa on the cover were being sold on the streets, locals pointed out the sprawling boulevards and other structures built by the former ruler, while the music and songs of the Bokassa era rang out around the city. 

And Tropical Fiesta is playing once again. One night, I went to a show. The venue was in a garden next to a ditch, off the main road in Bangui. Lit up sparsely by a few functioning street lamps, it was guarded by a half-broken gate.   

A balafon player began striking a few notes. A drumbeat, a clash of cymbals, and then guitarists, singers, and dancers emerged onstage, clapping, smiling, and dancing to the complex beat of a Central African rumba. 

As the music got started, more and more people began to arrive, many middle-aged, but also several youngsters, as well as children weaving in between the adults’ legs. 

Clutching large bottles of beer, the older men looked up at the stage with a faraway gleam in their eyes. The women, wearing figure-hugging dresses made out of colorful cloth, shook their hips languidly. 

Before long it became a party — families, friends sitting around plastic tables, chatting and waving away mosquitoes, while others invited friends and lovers to dance. 

Zokoko, who now heads Tropical Fiesta, was there, getting ready to sing, surrounded by friends and fans. The violence in and around Bangui had died down, and the usual rhythm of life had slowly begun to resume. Just a few years earlier, during the fighting that swept through Bangui in 2013, live music had virtually stopped, Zokoko explains to me during a pause in his performance. It resumed slowly at first, with people dancing only until 8 or 9 p.m. and then going home because of the fear of attacks. “And we don’t make as much money as before,” he adds bitterly.  

Yet the songs played on, people sang along, their eyes half-closed, smiling as if trying to spirit themselves back to a different era, before the country was riven by war and armed gangs. 

Alongside the music, a certain nostalgia for the era of Bokassa had emerged. Several years ago, youth activists dug out the emperor’s throne, long stripped of its diamonds and rubies, from a dump behind the city’s main stadium. Painting it a bright yellow to represent the gold that once encrusted it, the youths decided to set the throne on a display on one of the capital’s busiest avenues. 

“We were furious to find this object abandoned for decades” Heritier Doneng, a youth leader of Patriotes Centrafricains, a group that describes its aim as defending the country’s cultural values, tells me on my reporting trip in 2016. 

“Yes, people speak of Bokassa because they’ve had enough of this suffering, of the misery without end that we are experiencing here in CAR,” he adds. “Bokassa serves as an example, a model of the economic revolution. In his time, we were the best in Central Africa, now we are the worst.”  

Bokassa has earned a reputation as a “builder,” responsible for commissioning Bangui’s spacious boulevards, stadiums and many other buildings. “During the reign of His Majesty, the town of Bangui was more beautiful than Brazzaville, more beautiful than Libreville, than Yaoundé, Malabo and N’Djamena,” says Zokoko, naming neighboring capitals. “Today we are back to zero.” 

“It seems that people have forgiven him a lot,” Perrière muses about his former boss. “Because all the regimes who came after couldn’t do what he did. Those rulers who came after brought a lot more suffering since.” 

After a moment’s pause, Perrière adds quietly: “Bokassa was a dictator, he took decisions himself. Now it’s a democracy, things are moving slowly, and people are beginning to miss Bokassa.” 

Rehabilitation of the reputation of a nation’s former authoritarian and brutal strongman is a familiar trend, seen everywhere from the enduring veneration of Stalin in Russia to the nostalgia for Brazil’s violent military dictatorship of the 1970s. 

“Bokassa had his brutal side, particularly toward the end, but he was also the only of CAR’s presidents who had a vision for the country and built things,” says Yale University professor Louisa Lombard, who has published three books on the Central African Republic.  

Lombard describes Bokassa’s reign as “a time of calm and hope in the country, in a region that had not yet turned to full-on civil war, and at a time when France was still providing a lot of support.” It is not surprising then, Lombard adds, that most people look back on the time with nostalgia, pinning the credit on Bokassa. “The country feels utterly humiliated. … There is an enormous desire for national solutions to the country’s problems.”  

“Bokassa always used to say, ‘You can’t feed people with politics.’ But today, everything has become political,” Zokoko says. In the 2016 presidential election, there were 30 candidates, inspiring Zokoko to compose a song titled “My Beautiful Country, Where Everyone Wants to be President.”   

Since Bokassa’s demise, numerous politicians have sought out Zokoko and other members of the former Imperial Orchestra, asking to have songs written for them. Sometimes those requests are impossible to turn down.  

The same year that the Séléka descended upon Perrière’s front yard, they tried to storm a venue where Zokoko’s band was playing. “Someone from the Séléka came with 16 armed thugs and wanted to get inside. And I said, ‘No, no, it’s Mother’s Day celebrations there, you can’t go in.’ And so, they realized who I was, and asked me to compose a song for them!” Zokoko adds, explaining that even though he was only paid 5,000 XFA ($8.50) for it, he was relieved to get the armed group off his back. 

“Some politicians still haven’t paid me,” he notes. 

Today, the violence has subsided, and the atmosphere is more free, though the concert scene has not yet fully returned, and violence pops up sporadically, such as in November 2017, when a concert for peace by a local band playing was derailed by a grenade attack that killed four people and injured 20 others. 

Today, the music of Bokassa’s band is heard everywhere: at weddings, birthdays, funerals and more, serving as a kind of social glue, a way to start repairing the splintered communities throughout the country.  

“We sing about togetherness,” says Zokoko. “We sing the songs of yesterday, in Sango” — the primary language here — “and in French. We are not politicians, we are musicians, but we want to give this ambience of social cohesion, so that it comes back to us.” 

Sipping a beer and laughing at the 2018 concert, Pascal, a beefy former director general of a security company with the look of a nightclub bouncer, says he comes to hear the band play whenever he can. 

“Musicians are like philosophers,” he says wistfully. “They have the power to reunite everyone with their songs.” He describes the impact of the band’s diverse membership, which includes people from various religious groups, as well as some who are typically marginalized by society here, such as a musician with a disability. “Christians, Muslims, disabled — all united. We are brothers and sisters, it’s the politicians who wanted to divide us. God knows, the solidarity between us will return. Look around: Everyone is here,” he says, gesturing at the bustling compound.  

Perrière, however, is not at the party. After Bokassa was deposed, Perrière emigrated to France in order to get treatment for his son who was sick. There, he worked a succession of different jobs, including in a coffee house, before later deciding to return home and resume his musical career. But he did not rejoin Tropical Fiesta; instead he returned to his religious music roots. He became a born-again evangelical Christian and turned to composing mostly religious songs — as well as to moonlighting as an occasional wedding singer, he tells me with a twinkle in his eye as he hands me a CD of songs he recently recorded for a local bride and groom. The studio in his house is named SDJ — “Studio of Jesus,” he tells me. Today, he divides his life between Paris and Bangui, living off of profits from his music career, as well as the money earned by a Bangui restaurant that he runs, which caters to the country’s elites. 

As for Bokassa, despite being sentenced to death twice, first in absentia while he was abroad, and then in a courtroom in 1987, his sentence was gradually eroded in the ensuing years. In 1993, as part of a general amnesty, he was set free, having served just six years in prison. Perrière was among those waiting at the jail entrance for the former emperor, who had newly reestablished his own strong belief in God. Bokassa emerged from behind bars clad head to toe in a white robe and declaring, “I am the thirteenth apostle.” 

Bokassa died in November 1996 of a heart attack at age 75, and he is survived by as many as 60 children, according to the New York  Times’ obituary. In 2010, then-president François Bozizé officially rehabilitated Bokassa, and even went as far as to posthumously award him the state’s medal of honor, declaring that Bokassa has “given a great deal for humanity.” 

For Perrière, his former boss remains somewhat of a mystery. He found Bokassa both paternal and petrifying. 

“Everyone was scared of him. Everyone. It was standard,” says Perrière, while at the same time going on to describe how in his more tender moods the emperor would call him “my son,” and how in turn he and others would call Bokassa “Papa.” 

Perrière speaks of his time with Bokassa with a sense of wonder, replaying scene by scene in his mind and then pausing to remember more.  

As for Tropical Fiesta, Perrière is glad some of his songs continue to be sung and danced to throughout Bangui and beyond, and he stays in touch with his former bandmates. “I help them, I give them advice,” Perrière says, smiling. “They play old songs, but they also have a new repertoire.” The fact that the musicians of Tropical Fiesta did not put down their instruments, that they have continued this long and even play new songs, offers a glimmer of hope for the country. 

“Many groups sing for reconciliation,” he adds quietly, after a moment’s reflection. “Whether it’s effective or not, everyone needs to make their contribution for peace.”   

The International Women’s Media Foundation supported some of Inna’s reporting from the Central African Republic as part of its Africa Great Lakes Reporting Initiative.  

The night of December 18, 2004, began as an ordinary evening for Blair Cobbs’s father, Eugene. At 33, the elder Cobbs was already a seasoned veteran of the drug trafficking trade. He was flying solo to his hometown of Philadelphia, having taken off from Compton Airport near Los Angeles. After a quick fuel-up in Missouri, it was somewhere over West Virginia that things began to go bad for the self-taught pilot. He was flying above a snowy, wooded landscape when mechanical problems compelled him to scramble for the nearest landing strip. He was forced to attempt an emergency touchdown at the Wheeling Ohio County Airport. It was going to be a tricky landing, as the tower was closed and lighting was limited. 

Eugene descended late, missed the runway, and skidded on the ramp, before regaining altitude and hurtling into a ravine in the woods surrounding the airport. Miraculously, he exited the aircraft basically uninjured, save a minor head wound. But he had little time to linger. It’s unknown whether he turned to consider the plane’s $24 million haul of cocaine, but what he did do was flee through the woods, leaving it all behind. 

When he came to a road near the airport entrance, he flagged down the first driver he saw. He waved a wad of $100 bills and asked for a ride. The driver said that Eugene, who asked where exactly he was, had a gash on his head.

Airport officials would not discover the wreckage until early the next morning, when a worker on a routine field check noticed that a section of the eight-foot perimeter fence near runway 21 was damaged. The plane was then spotted, and proper authorities and responders were dispatched. Airport manager Thomas Tominack’s initial reaction was that the pilot was lucky to have survived, as portions of the aircraft, including a detached wing, were strewn throughout the vicinity. “The survival rate at that particular crash scene would have been very, very, low,” Tominack says. “It was a bad crash.” He notes that the plane didn’t even land at the airport, but rather bounced off the ramp before hitting the top of the fence and landing in a ravine amid a patch of what locals call “tanglefoot.”

The second thought responders had was that there sure was a hell of a lot of cocaine on board. “I know one thing,” Sheriff Bernie Kazienko told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “it was the most dope I’d ever seen.” Indeed, it was the largest drug seizure ever in West Virginia at the time, with 525 pounds inside the airplane. According to the Northern District of West Virginia’s District Attorney’s Office, investigators “uncovered numerous packages of cocaine wrapped in various forms, including duct tape, saran wrap, vacuum sealed bags, and even as Christmas presents.” Photographs were taken of the tall stacks of cocaine. Longtime West Virginia lawman Richard Ferguson recounts that “it was like after somebody killed a large bear or something,” with everyone wanting their turn to pose with the evidence. 

Eugene’s first order of business after the crash was to get the hell out of West Virginia. He checked in to a Holiday Inn Express outside of Weirton under the name of Marquis Munroe. He stayed for one night before making his way out of town. 

Meanwhile, investigators began piecing things together at the crash site. With no pilot present, they moved on to the plane itself. Records showed that the Aerostar had been purchased in Alabama for $290,000 in cash. The invoice was signed without a personal signature, only the name of a company, Pacific Designers Inc., out of Beverly Hills. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) had been keeping tabs on the plane, and by the time of the crash they were familiar with the identity of the pilot, according to United States Marshal Terry Moore. 

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had also been keeping an eye on Eugene, who was described as a notoriously bad pilot known to frequent small, quiet airports where he could fuel up and depart quickly. According to the Post-Gazette, the FAA had put his plane on a watch list, having cited him on four occasions since 2001, offenses including reckless flying, disregarding air traffic control signals, and lying about his medical status. The FAA had ordered him to retake his flying exam. Eugene had refused, and his pilot’s license had been revoked. He continued to fly, however, using his plane to deliver drugs all over the country. Prior to the crash, federal agents in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Chicago had all been looking into his cocaine distribution business.

“On December 20, 2004, the DEA was able to obtain a warrant for Mr. Cobbs’s arrest,” says Moore. Subsequently, “There were many attempts to locate him throughout the U.S. He had ties to Philadelphia and California, so pretty much the span of the United States. And nobody was able to find him at the time … Mr. Cobbs was a fugitive from justice.”

Eugene Cobbs went on the lam. Back in California, his son, Blair, was about to have his world changed forever.

At the time of the crash, Blair Cobbs was 15. He remembers vividly the day he learned that something was wrong. He had been living easy with his father and stepmother, along with a younger sister, in a grand, white Victorian mansion in the Hollywood Hills. (Documents would later reveal that Eugene Cobbs had a cover business under the name of Builders Plus Management, Inc. Blair’s stepmother owned a beauty salon.) Blair attended the Beverly Hills school that served as the inspiration for the high school in one of his favorite movies at the time, Clueless.

“I was pretty well off,” Blair tells me over coffee at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas. “You know, when you’re doing good it just sort of seems normal, especially when you’re a kid. It’s like, ‘You don’t have an airplane? I have an airplane. We all got a Bentley. No? Well you’re going to get one, surely.’”

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Blair’s life hadn’t always been so luxurious. His mother died when he was 11, and his grandmother, whom he was close with, died the same year. He and his stepmother never really bonded. She had a son Blair’s age from a previous relationship, and Blair never felt accepted. As a young teenager, Cobbs, who is mixed race, was picked on relentlessly. In middle school, he was perceived as the white kid in a predominately black school, with red hair to boot. “Even though I’m mixed, I don’t really have a race as far as my features,” he says. “I was called cracker. … Those were a really bad few years.”

But by 2004, after a change of schools, those days were behind him. “Everything was cool sailing for like a year in Beverly Hills.”

Then one day he came home to a DEA raid. His stepmother was crying, and all he knew was that something really bad had happened. She didn’t have a lot of details. Maybe his dad was alive, maybe not. Cobbs couldn’t get a straight answer. “That’s when it really hit me,” he says. “You can feel it before it happens, that you lost it all.” 

In the ensuing months, Cobbs struggled in his father’s absence. He didn’t know about the crash, but he began to piece things together. “It kinda crept up on me that it must have been something illegal when I started noticing [unusual] things,” such as his phone being “obviously” tapped, full of echoes and strange noises every time he picked it up, and an unmarked white van parked in front of his house, around the clock, with men wearing headphones seated inside. The strange feeling of being under surveillance actually stirred some hope inside the young teen. “Maybe my dad’s not dead.”

Six months after the crash, it was summer in Beverly Hills, and his dad was still gone. Then Blair experienced another day in which everything changed. His stepmother instructed him to pack everything he could fit into one duffel bag. His sister did the same. They were given a couple of “horrible fake IDs” and ushered into a car. His stepmom drove south toward Mexico. When they got to the border, the children were dropped off by their stepmom, given minimal instructions, just a list of checkpoints about where to go — and with that, the kids walked into a foreign country alone. First a taxi, then a bus, deep into Mexico. That’s when Cobbs bottomed out: fear, dread and utter uncertainty. Would they live or die? Only the task of taking care of his younger sister drove him. “Just as long as my sister’s OK, that was propelling me to keep moving forward, because she was there with me.” 

Somewhere near Tepatitlán de Morelos, in the state of Jalisco, a full 1,623 miles into their journey, they finally saw their father. They could breath easier, but only a little bit. 

From Tepatitlán, the Cobbs family moved on to Guadalajara. There, using a fake name, Blair enrolled in a high school with an intense Spanish program, to try to get him up to speed on a language he did not speak. 

They lived with their father and his girlfriend, and though Eugene wasn’t around much, Blair’s sister was now safe, and with that knowledge Blair struck out on his own, wandering the city, getting to know the streets. “The whole city was all about circles; one highway circles the whole city, called Periférico. You can get almost anywhere through the Periférico.” He felt like a drifter. And though he was getting to know the city, he felt like he didn’t know himself. The fact that they were all using aliases triggered a deep sense of loss in Blair, a loss of self. “You start forgetting yourself completely,” he says.

No identity, no roots. Blair felt as if he didn’t belong to any group, that he had no culture to claim. “I’m not black, I’m not white, I’m not Mexican.” He was out of place yet again. The Americano in Mexico. Sticking out like a sore thumb. 

Eugene Cobbs had shaken U.S. law enforcement, but his problems had not eased. Looking back, Blair says he understands why his father tried to shield them from the reality of the situation, but, still, the kids knew it wasn’t good. “Things always happened,” Blair remembers. “It was a very hazardous place. … You’d get held up at gunpoint, or people would break into your crib with AKs,” he says with the nonchalance others might use to describe a noisy neighbor. If it wasn’t a gang, it was the cops, he says, and if not them then simply citizens, random people looking to get a piece: “Because you look like you have some money, because you look like you don’t belong there.” Each day he lived with a prevailing fear that the bad guys were closing in. It felt like they were just waiting “until someone knocks us off.” 

Blair doubted he would ever get out of Mexico. 

Then he met a friend. On a lonely Mexican basketball court, he ran into 15-year-old Rodney Pinz, who was from the States and spoke English. The two started hanging out, but the fugitive’s son remained guarded. “Even if I couldn’t tell him who I really was, it was cool to have at least one friend,” Cobbs says. “That friend probably saved my life.”

Pinz remembers a presence of fear engulfing Cobbs’s home. “He definitely seemed down,” Pinz says. “So I invited him into my world. I had him meet friends, meet girls, good stuff, teenage stuff. He would come to my house. My family made him food.”

A shared affinity for boxing led the pair across town, “to the ghetto,” Pinz says. “Like the ghetto ghetto” — where they found a gym known as El Lobo (the Wolf). 

Blair Cobbs had long revered the sport of boxing. But while he was eager to learn, he was short on skill. He had no idea how to block or defend. He took a shitload of punches. He remembers his first sessions at El Lobo: “I beat the first guy I ever sparred, and then I got beat up real bad by the next guy. I didn’t know the rounds lasted more than 30 seconds. I got tired.”

Black eyes were a constant companion as a result of his new hobby. It mattered not.

“I never stopped coming.” 

One Saturday, after about a week at the gym, Cobbs had an opportunity to box a real bout. “You think I should fight?” Pinz remembers him asking. “I was like, ‘Man we just got here.’ But he fought and he won!”

An old trainer at the gym started tutoring him, working to bend him into fighting shape. Cobbs began working out at the gym from sunrise to sundown, sparring and learning combinations. The trainer put him through 10- to 12-round full-body sparring sessions. Cobbs was still just a kid, but he was already fighting professionals. 

At nightfall, he would grab an agua fresca or something to eat at a taco stand and then return. Besides sparring, he’d swim and run. “I never stopped working,” he says. In reality, he simply had nowhere else to go, and nothing else he cared about. “So I would just train until I couldn’t train anymore. And then I’d show up again.” 

Since he’d left California, Cobbs’s hair had grown into a high, red-tinted Afro. When they asked him his name at the gym, “I used my middle name, Romero,” he says. “And a very conventional last name. At the time I really liked Roy Jones, so I just called myself Romero Jones.”

Each weekend, the local gym held “smokers” — unregulated amateur boxing exhibitions. Fighters showed up looking to make an impression. Cobbs was an outsider, and the spectators were usually not on his side. But he learned how to work the crowd. How to win their favor. 

Blair kept boxing throughout his teenage years, while the darkness within him grew. He enjoyed the sport but hated life on the run. Outside of the gym, he struggled. But inside the ring, this mentality made him dangerous. He didn’t care what happened to him. “You can knock me down, knock me out,” he says. It didn’t matter: “You’ll have to kill me in that ring.” 

When he was 18, Cobbs had grown to around 130 or 140 pounds. He was tough to beat at that weight. So for one fight he was matched up against a guy in a heavier class, a Mexican fighter who weighed about 180 pounds. After winning nearly every recent match, now Blair was about to get his ass kicked, and to make matters worse, his dad was in the crowd to see it, one of the few times he attended. In the first round, Cobbs got hit hard, the punches too heavy to block. It was a small ring, and there was nowhere to run. He was getting destroyed. The bell rang for the second round. Things were just about to turn from bad to worse, and then Cobbs remembers thinking, “What would Mayweather do?”

At the time, Cobbs was watching all of the professional fights he could, and Floyd Mayweather Jr., the brash superstar with the flashy trunks and the nickname “Pretty Boy,” stood out. It was the effortlessness in Mayweather’s movements that really impressed the young boxer, the way he beat his opponent, the way he broke him down. “Pop, boop, pop, pop, boop. This motherfucker is making this shit look so easy,” Cobbs remembers. 

During the second round of his big fight, Cobbs recalled how Mayweather liked to use a shoulder roll to pick off shots and then get close, get inside and land short shots. By midway through the second round, he was doing it himself — shoulder roll, block, defend — and the tide was turning. That’s when his opponent reared back for a big right hand, a right hand “that had death written all over it.” If it landed it would have meant the end for Cobbs. But he saw it coming and pulled back and delivered his counterpunch, striking his opponent’s exposed chin, and boom, his adversary hit the canvas. The crowd started chanting, “Romero! Romero!” 

“I think that was the pivotal point where I was like, ‘This is what I want to do,’ and I just never stopped,” Cobbs says. “That moment lasted forever. I never stopped no matter how bad it got in my life.”

Indeed, things would get worse for young Blair before they got better. 

Blair and his sister returned to the States the same way they entered: on the sly. After spending roughly three years on the run, their father sent them to Edgewater, New Jersey, back to living with their stepmom. After an arduous bureaucratic process, they also regained their actual identities. 

The kids got out of Mexico just in time. Their father was kidnapped for ransom in late 2008. When the price was met and Eugene was released by his captors, he was almost immediately arrested. 

Blair Cobbs tells the story of his boxing exploits in a fever, but when it comes time to discuss his father, his cadence slows, and the discomfort he feels about those experiences is clear. 

Eugene Cobbs was taken into police custody at Valle Real, “a gated, exclusive community outside of Guadalajara,” according to Federal Marshal Terry Moore. After four years on the lam, Eugene was extradited to Houston and then transferred to Wheeling, West Virginia, where he pled guilty and was sentenced to more than 12 years — 151 months — for conspiracy to distribute cocaine and operating as an airman without a license. After his arrest, he was discovered to have at least five aliases, with matching IDs. 

Blair tried to push the news from his mind. He tried to keep boxing. From his stepmother’s house in New Jersey, he bounced around to different gyms in New York City. 

But it wasn’t long before the redheaded stepchild felt like he’d worn out his welcome in New Jersey. So he returned to the place of his birth, Philadelphia. While his sister stayed behind with their stepmom, Blair moved into the half-abandoned house on a corner lot that his grandmother had once lived in.

When asked about what he did for work in Philly, he answers, “Oh my God,” before contemplating and reeling off a résumé of dead-end jobs, the first one at Abercrombie & Fitch, which at $7.25 for a few hours a week turned out to be little more than enough to pay for the TransPass he needed to get there. 

Despite his vast life experience, none of what he had learned would help him deal with being alone in Philadelphia. He didn’t have much, but he was constantly getting robbed. “They would rob me going to work, or going to get a job. Because at that particular time getting a job was almost a full-time job, you know, going out applying at this place or that, I would be out all day if I needed to, for possibly one opportunity.”

His house didn’t contain much to begin with, but it was soon looted of nearly all of its possessions. Then the electricity was turned off. Followed by the heat and gas. Wintertime. Putting on every piece of clothing he owned just to survive the night. “I’ve been in plenty of those situations,” he pauses, thinking. “I was in one situation, where I was broke … I ran through everything I could find [of value]. I was panicking. Because I was really hungry. A couple days went by, and I hadn’t eaten. You know, I’m working and everything, but I haven’t eaten. I don’t have any food money. When I find a little gold ring. Possibly my grandfather’s engagement ring or something. It saved my life.” 

He took the little gold ring to a Cash For Gold joint at a nearby shopping center. He only secured around $30. “But it was the most important 30 bucks in my life. It kept me alive,” he shakes his head, the memory sparking a wry smile. “And, uh, yeah, so that was pretty tough.”

He worked at Chili’s as, he says, “probably the worst waiter in the history of waiters.” And then there was Sky Chefs, preparing flight meals near the airport. “I ended up getting put in the frozen food section. I was in the refrigerator,” he says incredulously. “Freezing my ass off. And they would be pushing you, making you work hard as fuck. And you had to get there at 6 o’clock. I didn’t have a car. I would get up at like 2:30 in the morning to try and catch the first bus I could possibly get.” But in the end it never mattered, because after a series of connections, buses and trains to get there, he still arrived late nearly every day. He made it three weeks and one paycheck, and he was out. After that, he finally found the one job that would hold him until he turned pro, at a coffee shop. There, a bit of stability allowed him to get back to training. 

He trained at James Shuler Memorial Boxing Gym, the former stomping grounds of Bernard Hopkins and “Terrible” Tim Witherspoon, in West Philadelphia. On June 28, 2013, at age 24, he made his professional debut, flooring Martique Holland in the first round in Ruffin, North Carolina. 

He quickly got off to a 4-0 record. But then the fights stopped coming. He got a lesson in the politics of boxing. The most important thing to know about the fight game is that “you can’t do it by yourself,” he says. “The biggest problem with boxing in America is that you need funding to get to the elite level. You can be very good and it almost doesn’t matter because you need funding. You need support. A lot of backing.” He could best all of the killers in Philly and it wouldn’t be enough if he didn’t have the right team behind him and a promoter to get him on the right cards and the right fights. 

Around the time of his first professional fight, his father was also making a change. On April 10, 2013, Eugene Cobbs decided that prison life no longer suited him. He’d been serving time at Fort Dix in New Jersey before being transferred to a minimum-security facility, FCI Morgantown, in West Virginia, after earning marks for good behavior. 

It was the morning hours, before 10 a.m., and Eugene Cobbs had been assigned cleaning duty in the parking lot. But at 4 p.m., when the prison guards did their count, they discovered that prisoner Cobbs was unaccounted for.

“He walked away from FCI Morgantown,” Marshal Moore says. “Due to the security of the facility, it’s fairly easy to walk away from. It’s not an over-the-wall escape or anything like that; there was no hidden tunnel. He was cleaning a parking lot and just walked away.” A fence surrounded the facility, but it was only three feet high. Eugene’s prison garb was discovered nearby. Moore was tasked with tracking him down. 

By the time of Eugene’s second manhunt, Moore, who had entered the Marshal Service immediately following graduation from Fairmont State University in West Virginia, had expeditiously ascended the ladder to supervisory deputy. He was 29 years old, and despite a right arm marked in ink, he looked every bit of 16, with short blond hair and a baby face. He openly shares a penchant for vacations to Disney World. His ambition and enthusiasm for the job are evident, and they extended to the pursuit of Eugene Cobbs.

Moore says that at the time he’d seen his share of escapes. Nine out of 10 times, the guy would scramble, nervously, maybe call a girlfriend to rendezvous at the nearest hotel, or meet up with his drug dealer. “We get them relatively quickly,” and they usually don’t make it far, he says. But when Moore answered the phone this time and heard the name Eugene Cobbs, he stood on alert. He remembered the first chase. “I knew it would be a good hunt,” Moore says. “I was like, this is going to be something.” Not easy for sure, Moore knew, recounting that Eugene had previously eluded justice for four years. 

Moore explains that after escaping, Eugene walked to a nearby garage, Dinsmore Tire & Auto, where he called a cab. The driver took him to a Kroger grocery store in nearby Sabraton, West Virginia, where he waited while the escapee went inside and received a Western Union money order. The cabbie then drove Eugene an hour and a half to Pittsburgh and dropped him at a Greyhound station. 

“We had aired Mr. Cobbs’s picture on the news to see if anybody had seen him. And I got a call from a local cab company who advised that they had picked up Mr. Cobbs on April 10,” Moore recounts. “We immediately obtained warrants for Mr. Cobbs.”

A second international manhunt was now taking place for Blair’s father: “The Coke-Plane Fugitive,” as one newspaper dubbed him. Moore says Eugene Cobbs was a clever and experienced criminal, who “knew how to avoid detection.” Moore believed that he would follow a similar game plan as he had the last time. “After he made it onto that bus,” Moore says he knew: “He’s making his move. He’s going to Mexico.”

Moore started interviewing family members and acquaintances, and nobody knew a thing. “So we’re kind of stale on his trail at that time, and that’s when I really start to dig into the escape investigation.” Moore went to the tire shop, watched a surveillance video of the fugitive getting into the cab, then another of him entering the Western Union. Through subpoena requests, the investigative team got information from Western Union that indicated that Blair’s stepmother was the one who had wired Eugene the money. She was eventually arrested for assisting in the escape.

But the account of how Moore eventually got his man is much less cinematic. The marshal was seated at his desk, the phone rang, and he was given an anonymous tip. Simple as that. “In this case,” Moore says, “the tip was the golden ticket” that allowed him and coordinating authorities to ascertain Eugene’s exact location. On June 23, 2014, Mexican law enforcement arrested Eugene Cobbs in Tepatitlán. He did not put up a fight, although he did present false identification documents. But Moore saw the photos from the arrest scene and was given a description of the suspect’s tattoos. “I knew at that point, 100 percent, it was Cobbs,” he says. “It was a good grab.” 

Eugene was extradited from Mexico that very day and escorted to Los Angeles, where he was taken into custody by deputy marshals, then transported, once more, to West Virginia. 

Moore describes Eugene as a “gentle” guy, who never showed a penchant for violence; each time he was arrested, he surrendered peacefully. “He never tried to be that hardened criminal that gives you problems.” (Eugene Cobbs declined requests to be interviewed for this article.)

Back in Philadelphia, by the time Blair found out his dad had escaped, Eugene was soon back in custody. “It was very short-lived,” Blair says. 

On August 11, 2014, Eugene Cobbs pled guilty to the escape and was sentenced to 14 months, to be served consecutive to his prior sentence. 

Meanwhile, Blair’s boxing career was stuck in neutral, and he remained at his 4-0 mark, with no fights on the horizon. He wasn’t going anywhere if a promoter didn’t sign him. It stung even worse that nearly all of his rivals and competitors were getting inked to deals, while he had to “bleed for everything,” he says. Here he was, in his peak fighting years, 23 years old, and he couldn’t even get a fight. 

It was at that point that he decided to take a gamble on a flight to Las Vegas to try to get noticed, to try to get backing. It was a risky proposition. He had a steady job and a girlfriend, Melissa. And to top it off, he and Melissa had recently welcomed a son of their own into the world. He made the trip anyway.

Once in Vegas he was able to get a few sparring sessions in front of some prominent eyes. But in the end, his manager at the time made a mess of things, Cobbs says. 

The trip was an abject failure. 

To make matters worse, when he got back to Philly, he’d lost his job at the coffee shop. He soon lost his apartment. “Now I’m homeless,” he says. “And I don’t even care, not about boxing, like I’m finished with life.” 

His girlfriend and son stayed with one of her acquaintances, but Blair, unable to support himself, let alone a family, bounced around. 

Sometimes he slept in his car. 

Other times it was abandoned buildings. 

Things in Philly remained bleak. So futile that Blair remembers jokingly thinking, “I wish I could sell drugs,” he laughs, “but I couldn’t sell drugs. I didn’t have any fucking friends.”

It took him nearly a year to get back on his feet, both mentally and spiritually. To get up and take another shot. 

“I’m in this continuous state of being reborn. Constantly moving from one place to the next. But dying too. Going through the worst experience I could possibly go through and surviving that to move on, to another level. But did I really survive or did a piece of me just die in order to live on?” he ponders. “That’s a question I ask myself. There was a lot going on from a mental perspective.” 

Finally, Cobbs caught a break. He hooked up with Kenny Mason, a trainer who had worked with recent middleweight world champion Julian Williams. Cobbs began to find a rhythm with Mason. Mason also gave him a place to crash. Sort of. “I was living in Kenny’s closet,” he says. (It was literally a walk-in closet.) But it was in that closet that Cobbs found God. “I went through an experience of growth,” he says. “Learning how to think, how to manifest my dreams into reality.” He prayed and meditated. He put up a vision board. It wasn’t a great situation, but he says it’s what he needed. And it wasn’t all bad, if not for the dog he shared the closet with. “The dog wanted to evict me.”

He found a church, Casa de Gloria. And he got back to the gym. It was there, at Joe Hand’s Gym, that he met Bernard Hopkins, a boxing legend and one of the most successful fighters in history. Hopkins offered him some desperately needed encouragement, and Cobbs picked up his training even more. He started training other boxers as well, to earn some dough. 

He decided to give Vegas another shot. He couldn’t stay in Philly any longer. “Let’s just go,” he told his girlfriend. Through it all, he says Melissa stuck with him. “I think it’s just that we didn’t have anybody else,” he marvels. “We didn’t have anything else but each other.”

“We took those couple bucks I had from training and just took off,” Cobbs remembers. “We only stopped for gas, too afraid [the car would break down] — we gassed it while the car was still running, because I’ll be damned if we didn’t make it.”

There was no alternative. Cobbs saw only two options if he remained in the city: Death or jail. 

“As we left Philadelphia you could feel the weight being lifted. As the miles started passing, the freer we started to feel. We were as happy as hell. It didn’t matter what happened in Vegas. It was better than being there.”

The car was packed: father, mother, son. Everything they had.

“Straight to Vegas. Two days.”

Once in Vegas, Cobbs and his family were still homeless. They lived out of their car north of Vegas at a pit stop frequented by truckers. Sometimes they pitched a pop-up tent. It didn’t matter. He calls it one of the most peaceful times of his life. “We were happy there,” he says. “No responsibilities or obligations. It was just us living, day to day. And being appreciative of each moment that passed. Because each moment was a better moment.”

After all that he’d been through, somehow Cobbs now looked at the world with optimism. In Mexico he had felt low and therefore he was low. He’d hit rock bottom in Philadelphia. Now his new attitude led him out of the hole. He could feel the universe conspiring for his success. 

He hooked up with a distant relative who put him and his family up for a few weeks. He and Melissa got jobs, his at the Cromwell Hotel. Soon enough, they had a place of their own. And after his cousin put in a word with an ex-boxer, the former super-bantamweight titlist Bones Adams, Cobbs had himself a trainer. Adams had a gym behind his house in Las Vegas, right down the street from Cobbs’s new place. Just like the rhythm in the ring — pop, pop, pop — all of the things he needed in his life started to click into place. Next, he hooked up with a manager, Greg Hannley. Hannley staked him, with around two grand a month, so that Cobbs could train full time. 

Adams says that right from the start he saw the potential. “Phenomenal skills, strong, fast, and athletic as can be. He does things most people can’t.” Adams does admit, however, that at the time, “He was very wild … out of control, crazy [in the ring].” 

His first fight in three years was on May 18, 2017, in Tijuana, where he scored a second-round technical knockout. He was finally 5-0. Pop, pop, pop. By year’s end, he’d be 7-0. In 2018 he was named the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame prospect of the year. 

In 2019 he was signed by Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions and won the North American Boxing Federation welterweight title (an achievement, but not the heralded World Boxing Council or World Boxing Association titles he and other boxers are mainly chasing). Golden Boy Promotions touts his three 2019 fights as “the most prominent fights of the year in boxing.” Ringtv.com (“The Bible of Boxing”) said of his November 2019 win over Carlos Ortiz: “The Blair Cobbs show continues to be a thrill a minute,” while noting that his lively post-fight interview “was just as entertaining as his fight.” 

In the summer of 2019, Blair’s father was released early from Fort Dix. Eugene is now living with Blair and his family in Vegas, and just like his son, the father is looking for a fresh start. 

Blair, the rich kid from Beverly Hills, the American in Mexico, the poor kid in Philly, they’re all part of him now. But he has evolved. He’s even earned himself a new moniker: He’s now Blair “The Flair” Cobbs, a nickname given to him by an onlooker during one of his sparring sessions. But Blair has taken the handle and run with it.

What does “The Flair” mean? “It encapsulates everything that everyone would ever want to be,” Cobbs says. “People want to be a rock star. People want to have charisma. They want to be great, greater than they are. They want to believe, to have the passion and drive that they can do anything. … Someone who’s genuinely one of a kind. That’s what ‘The Flair’ is.”

Fight insiders still describe Blair Cobbs, a southpaw, as a wild man in the ring, and spectators love the passion he brings. He’s brash and has a swagger — and to top it off, when he enters the ring he even lets out a “Woo!” in the style of legendary pro wrestling star Ric Flair. 

But he’s also quick to point out: “[It’s] ‘The Flair’ who has that confidence. Blair Cobbs doesn’t.”

“That’s a real person within me,” he says. “Living through all kinds of crazy shit, I kept dying and reinventing myself. I kind of just developed these multiple character personalities and [The Flair] just comes out whenever the cameras are on me.” 

Some people will say that, at 30, he’s too old to be a prospect. But Cobbs will tell you the time off just means he’s fresh. That he hasn’t taken the punches, and that his boxing age is young. 

He still likes to put on a show, but Adams, who recently stepped aside as Cobbs’s head trainer, says he’s done a good job of cleaning up the recklessness in the ring. And his biggest asset is the most important: “He doesn’t want to lose,” Adams says. “He has the will to win.”

On Valentine’s Day, 2020, at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California, “The Flair” scored a split decision victory over Samuel Kotey, who had sported an impressive 23-2 record going into the bout. He hopes it’s the stepping-stone he needs for a title shot later this year.

Blair Cobbs remains undefeated. And he believes that his best chapter is yet to be written.