“I ALWAYS EMULATED my father,” says Myles Valentine, pulling his shirt down after showing off the 15 stab wounds etched into his ribcage, back, sternum, and face.
We are having coffee on a drizzly afternoon in downtown Brooklyn. Now 57, Valentine spent much of his early life upriver, doing 21 years of hard time bouncing around New York state’s most notorious maximum security prisons: Clinton, Comstock, Elmira, Auburn, Downstate, Green Haven. He did four straight years in 23-hour lockup at Southport. During that time, learning to box gave purpose to his days.
“In prison, all the best boxers were what we called ‘booty bangers,’ ” Valentine says, a term for inmates who expect sex in return for small acts of kindness, like a boxing lesson or a cookie left on…
