One of the oldest streetfighting tactics is to load your fists with something, be it a cigarette lighter, (or better yet a roll of nickles), and it gives you a something to really squeeze down on and stabilize your fist. (and with the nickles add alot more weight to the hand)

I’m sorry, but your conclusion here about plaster just do not add up. One of my good friends is a ER doctor, and we have had very long discussions about all of this. Plaster by itself would be useless to either a doctor or a boxer, because it would crumble easily. That’s why casting tape is used. The idea behind making a proper cast is the layering of the gauze, which gives it its tensile strength. In order to do this right, Cap had to prepare the inserts first — which were also gauze – with the hardening agent, most likely plaster-of-paris. The hardened blocks were concealed under folds of clean gauze, which is why the commissioner had to “peel back” a layer in order to discover them. If you’ve wetted the surface of the pad and additional plaster preparation was applied to the area of the wrap that locks in the pads, you have created a weapon with very good tensile strength and very little compaction (the outside does tremendous damage, the inside is relatively protected.)

You need to revisit how all this actually went down, I think:

1. Nazim walks into the dressing room and sees that they already started wrapping Tony’s right hand outside of his presence. Nazim protests initially because he sees them applying tape directly to Tony’s skin, which in itself is against the rules. he demands they begin the wrap again. Gueverra says he’s cool with it, though, so Nazim demands that the head commisioner Lohuis come in to settle the dispute. Chances are, he already smells something is up. Lohuis arrives, with a second state inspector Mike Bray arriving with him.

2. They wrap Tony’s right hand too more times in the presence of Nazim and Lohuis, with Lohuis and Nazim both protesting that they were still putting too much tape on the skin.

3. After finally satisfying both the coach and the commissioner with the right wrap, they start on the left hand. At this point, Nazim’s is very suspicious, probably because Cap’s second is white as a sheet and sweating up a storm at this point. Nazim asks to feel the gauze knuckle pad before it is added to the wrap, and he feels that it is hard. Gueverra says it feels okay. Lohuis asks to feel it, and he agrees with Nazim that it feels very hard. Lohuis, not Nazim, peels back the top layer of the pad, and “a square block of old wet gauze fell out that was covered with plaster. And it had an old dried-up blood stain on it.”

4. At this point, time is running late. Tony is supposed to be doing his ring walk , but one of Tony’s hands — his right — has already been wrapped, gloved and signed by Gueverra. Lohuis orders them to unglove and unwrap the signed glove. When they inspect the right knuckle pad, they find the same thing.. a wet, hard block of old gauze disguised under a layer of clean gauze.

5. Lohuis and Nazim bring the knuckle-pads back to Shane’s locker room, where they are met by Shane’s lawyer and doctor. Shane’s doctor examines one of the pieces, and when he scratches it the scratched area is chalky. He says “This is the same plaster we use to make casts in the hospital.’” The pieces are locked in an evidence box, and taken away by Lohuis for further examination by CSAC.

6. At the hearing, the commissioners involved give their eye-witness testimony:

Gueverra:
“It was sweat-soaked, thinner and harder in certain areas, not hard as a rock, but firm and hard,” Guevara said, adding it had a stain “like old blood” on it. “It was not flexible. It was very firm.”

Bray:
“There was a blood stain on the corner of the pad; [it was] moist and dirty looking with a white substance smeared across the pad, like a cast plaster … I can see a substance smeared in the middle of this pad,” Bray said, reading from notes he’d filed about the inspection.

7. During the hearing, the knuckle pads are examined by the panel before being shipped off to the lab. The panel concurs that the gauze pads are hard. Afterwards, Capetillo falls on his sword:

“I committed a big mistake. I don’t want this young man [Margarito] to have problems. I’m here to cover any responsibility. I take full responsibility. I committed this innocent mistake.” Capetillo explained he accidentally pulled the insert from his training bag and placed it in Margarito’s knuckle wraps on Jan. 24, just before Margarito’s fight with Shane Mosley.

8. Weeks pass while waiting for the lab results. The delay in testing was explained by the deputy AG in charge, Karen Chapelle, in the following way:

“The Justice Department does not view [testing the wraps] as a high priority as they are seriously backlogged with murder and assault cases.”

9. When the Justice Department came back with their results of testing the hard, moist knuckle pads, here were their findings:

A Department of Justice senior criminalist who inspected the wrappings under stereomicroscope and X-ray flourescence spectrometer reported calcium and sulfur were discovered, noting the elements make plaster of Paris with the addition of oxygen.

That’s it. That’s the chronology of events as I understand. It’s not exhaustive… for instance, its missing a lot of shifting white-noise/bullcrap statements from Arum Capetilo, Margarito, that are almost to ridiculous to be believed. Now I really AM done with this. If anyone wants to continue this discussion, they are welcome to, but if you are going pursue the line of thought that “this is all some sort of big misunderstanding” you had better dispute at least a few, if not all, of the above. If, on the other hand, you out to “prove a negative” (i.e. you don’t believe Margs did it, so you’re going to ignore every stitch of evidence that says he might have), you can do that to. But I’m out. I won’t be a part of that shameful discussion.

Capetillo is both clever and scheming enough to get a loaded glove signed off as being ‘good’ and yet is stupid enough to try to use a bloodstained, plaster coated wrap in front of Nazim Richardson, who was evidently already suspicious.

The story all along is that at least one hand was already wrapped when Nazim entered the room, which was what made him suspicious to begin with. Once he was re-wrapping, he couldn’t just throw out part of the wrap, that would be VERY suspicious.

The wraps were set in plaster, and therefore were ‘hard’ when examined, yet they were soft enough for Capetillo to unwrap and rewrap Toni’s hands 3 or 4 times.

The wraps WEREN’T set in plaster, and as far as I know, nodoby has ever said they were. The part that had materials comprising unset plaster was a knuckle pad, so that wouldn’t be rewrapped and unwrapped.

There is simply no way that Toni would sweat enough to make the mixture set.

I don’t know enough to dispute this, but while it’s unlikely that it would harden like a cast, moisture could still make it harden in patches. If you leave plaster powder out without a cover, it gets specks that harden just from the moisture in the air. I assume this would have the same effect. Also, don’t forget that moisture from the arms runs down and into the gloves, so it’s not just a matter of sweaty hands.

a man sweating this much would have gloves that closely resembled water balloons, but we’ll leave that alone for now

If you feel the inside of gloves after a fight, the padding is quite wet. It wicks into the padding though.

Sure there could be other reasons he had those chemicals in his gloves, but it seems disingenuous for them to say it contained ‘elements of plaster’ if there wasn’t a way it could actually turn into plaster.

The California State Athletic Commission didn’t catch the gloves this time, so the Vegas Athletic Commission missing it is hardly out of the question.

Mosley never “juiced.” He doped.

And if there was a blood test, which presumably there was, either (a) they would have caught it, or (b) he’s using something they don’t test for and he doesn’t need to deflect attention anyway.

Sounds like its time to play everyone’s favorite game… “Shift the Focus to Shane.” Wonderful.

what the hell does ‘troll city’ mean? Is that referring to people who drop by and change the focus of the conversation?

got it, apt term

Margarito still maintains his innocence, claiming his trainer applied the illegal substances to his hand wraps without his knowledge.

He’s not saying his gloves weren’t loaded… he’s saying they WERE loaded, but that he didn’t know about it. For anyone who’s ever had their hands wrapped for a fight who has read the descriptions of these knuckle pads by Dean Lohuis, Scott Bray, Che Gueverra, Nazim Richardson, Robert Olvera and the entire CSAC investigative panel – you should already know how unlikely it is that Margarito did not know something was up. He would have had to have shot his hands up with enough cortisone to cripple a racehorse.