Wrestling With Sin: 561

Brian Damage

This is the 561st installment of the ‘Wrestling with Sin‘ series. A group of stories that delves into the darker, underbelly of pro wrestling. Many of the stories involve such subjects as sex, drugs, greed and in some cases even murder! As with every single story in the Sin series, I do not condone or condemn the alleged participants. We simply retell their stories by researching interviews, newspapers, magazines and various other sources of media.

Daddy Issues

Jenni Haas aka Jenni Santana is the daughter of former WWF star Tito Santana. Jenni was conceived out of wedlock, after Tito had an affair with another woman while on the road. Jenni said she didn’t discover that the WWF Hall of Famer was her real father until just a few years ago. After Tito was informed he had a daughter from an outside relationship, Jenni set up a phone call with the wrestler to introduce herself to him and get to know her father. She recalled that phone call and said the first words out of Tito’s mouth was…“I don’t have any money to give you.”

Jenni said she was taken aback by that comment, because she never wanted anything from him other than getting to know him personally. Despite the rocky start, Jenni said Tito warmed up to her and they got to know each other. She told Tito of her aspirations to become a pro wrestler like him and said that he offered to help her out and answer any questions she might have about the business. Unfortunately, that all apparently changed as time wore on.

Jenni said that when meeting her father at wrestling conventions, he would become very cold and distant with her. Jenni believes that the reason for this stems from Tito’s wife Leah of close to 50 years. Jenni feels that Lea wants her husband to distance himself from his past and what he did in it. Jenni surmises that Tito and his wife want to keep the appearance that Tito Santana always had a squeaky clean image from his wrestling days and want to distance themselves from her because it sheds a little bit of a negative light on his career.

Punching His Ticket to New York City

Joseph ‘Toots’ Mondt was in control of one of the most powerful and profitable territories in the United States based in New York City. Despite this fact, the New York territory seemed to be hemorrhaging money. With gate receipts way down, Mondt decided to sell his stake in the territory to one of his bookers…a former wrestler named  Ignacio “Pedro” Martinez. Martinez decided to keep Toots Mondt on as a booker and general manager of the territory.

Even though New York was now under new ownership, the territory continued to suffer and lose money. A year later, Martinez still struggling to turn a profit, sold his stake back to Mondt for approximately $25,000 which was to be paid within a 100 weeks. Business continued to fater and that left many promoters across the country scratching their heads. How could a once strong and plentiful territory struggle as much as it was?

In 1954, Toots and his New York office filed for bankruptcy. Martinez, who was still owed over $19,000 from Toots, realized he would never see his money again. In February of 1954, Martinez showed up at Madison Square Garden and confronted Mondt about the money he still owed him. Not liking the answers Mondt was giving him, Martinez knocked Mondt out with one punch. Mondt lost the territory and was eventually won by Vincent J. McMahon. Vince Sr. was able to resuscitate the dying territory into a moneymaker once again.

Questions still remained of how the territory lost so much money over a brief amount of time. One of the main reasons was Toots Mondt spent a lot of time at the horse track. Mondt had bet a lot of money (Both his own and the territory’s) on gambling on horse racing.

Dog Style

In the early 1980’s. in the Mid South territory, the Junkyard Dog was one of wrestling’s most popular stars. Despite JYD’s immense popularity with fans, there was a promoter based out of Mississippi who worked for Bill Watts, who refused to book the Junkyard Dog in his area. His name was George Culkin and according to Jim Ross, was a rampant racist. Culkin, who was well respected in the wrestling industry and was a community leader outside of the business, supposedly hated JYD simply because of the color of his skin.

George Culkin would call up Watts and request that he not bring JYD down to Mississippi. Jim Cornette said that while George Culkin may not have been a card carrying member of the KKK, he certainly was on their Christmas list. The Junkyard Dog knew that Culkin hated having to work with him, so when it was time to do promos advertising JYD down in Culkin’s territory, the Dog went into business for himself. He would say how excited he was to go back down to Mississippi to see his very good friend George Culkin and have dinner with him at his home eating fried chicken and watermelon.

These promos would enrage Culkin to the point where he demanded that Bill Watts fire JYD and Jim Ross who was conducting the interview. Obviously, Watts laughed at Culkin’s demands knowing that the Junkyard Dog was a money making machine for the territory.

To Cav and Cav Not

Alex ‘Cav’ Cavanagh was a Scottish pro wrestler who competed for such promotions as Insane Championship Wrestling and the Scottish Wrestling Alliance. He was arrested in July of 2023, after setting up a meeting with what he thought was a 14 year old girl. The underaged female was actually a decoy set up by police. Cavanagh chatted online with the decoy for several weeks, where the conversations became sexual in nature.

The decoy told the wrestler that she was 14 years old and if that was “cool” to which Cavanagh replied that it was. A meeting was set up at a train station in Glasgow. Cavanagh was greeted by the police and arrested at the scene without a struggle. Cavanagh confessed to police at the scene…“I made a bad mistake, I am bang to rights, I did it, like I said it’s black and white.” He would plead guilty and was placed on the sex offender registry. As of this writing, he was still awaiting sentencing pending investigators doing a background check to Cavanagh’s past.

You can read all previous ‘Wrestling with Sin’ pieces here.