Issue 119
September 2014
Gareth A Davies, MMA and Boxing Correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, London, UK, recalls how MMA saved one man from a knife-wielding killer
Superfan. I’ve often wondered what that meant. Now I know. I met 44-year-old Philadelphia resident Joe Lozito by chance in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles in June. We were both there for the same reason: there was a fight on.
Lozito’s been a UFC fan since UFC 1.
He attends most events and is well-known to Dana White, and many fighters.
Visible on the back of Lozito’s shaved skull is a long scar, like you’d make with a carving knife. We talked about an extraordinary incident, one which changed Joe’s life forever.
On Saturday, February 12, 2011, Lozito was heading from his Philadelphia home to his New York City workplace. Because of work on the tracks he didn’t take his usual train out of Penn St. And what happened next was… unbelievable.
“From nowhere this guy comes up and starts banging on the engineer’s door” explains Joe. “He says, ‘Let me in!’ The police on the other side of the door go, ‘Who are you?’ and he says, ‘I’m the police.’ They then say, ‘You’re not.’ It
was weird because, without incident, he walks away.
“Suddenly, a gentleman standing next to me goes to the same door and tries to get the police to come out. He’s banging on the window, but they don’t come out. The first gentleman who’d been banging on the window makes his way back and as he does, the second guy runs back near me. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’
“Well, before the first gentleman reaches the door, he suddenly, just two feet away from me, takes out this eight-inch knife and looks me dead in the eye, saying, ‘You’re going to die! You’re going to die!’ He then plunges the knife into my face, right under my left eye.”
Instinctively, Lozito attempted a single-leg takedown. “I shot in for his legs, but It was the worst takedown ever, and looked more like a football tackle,” he adds, now like Joe Rogan doing commentary.
“As I was taking him down, he’s stabbing me in the head. One, two, three times. At this point I had a lot of adrenaline, so wasn’t feeling any pain.”
Lozito reckons he was 80lb heavier than his assailant. “He’s on his back, I have dominant position and he’s still stabbing upwards. I’m trying to grab his wrist.”
The man flails. Lozito is then stabbed three more times before he knocks the knife from the man’s hand.
Then, and only then, did the police come out. “They waited for the situation to be diffused, and then I got a tap on my back from the male cop, who was bigger than me, and he said, ‘You can get up now. We got him.’”
Lozito then explains the anger and frustration he’s carried ever since. “They not only witnessed the incident, they were actually on the train to arrest this man. What I didn’t know at the time was that his name was Maksim Gelman and in the previous 28 hours he’d killed four people and injured five others. There was a city-wide manhunt for him.”
The police had been tipped off Gelman was on the New York subway system, and the place was crawling with them.
“Yet when they were looking directly at the man they were hunting, they did nothing. It’s disgraceful.”
Worse was to come. The NewYork Police Department treated the officers as heroes. Yet it was Lozito who almost died that day because of blood loss, and he spent two days in hospital.
“I always tell people, ‘If you want to believe their story, just get the two of us in a room and ask what really happened.’ I remember all of it. The fight probably lasted a minute. It takes longer to tell the story.”
The lamentable part is that Lozito has still not had justice from the NYPD. A case he brought against the city was thrown out. Gelman, meanwhile, was sentenced to over 200 years in prison.
Dana White happened to be in New York just after the incident. When White heard Lozito retell his story on a TV show that evening, he went to meet him and feted Lozito as the hero he clearly is.
“The UFC and Dana White have been amazing. The fact they were there for me in my darkest hour helped me heal so much. I can’t describe it,” explains this admirable man who, like a true fighter, acted selflessly in the right cause.
Back then Lozito wasn’t training. He’s now at Bellmore Kickboxing Academy, where Costas Philippou, Gian Villante, Dennis Bermudez and many others train.
While Lozito may not have received recompense from the courts, he has written a book: The New York Subway Hero: My Battle with Evil and a Spree Killer. You can order it at nysubwayherobook.com, and I’d highly recommend you read this superfan’s life story.
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