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Bas Rutten says heroine “junkie” Paul Tyler, who previously worked as matchmaker for the doomed WBKFF, is responsible for the promotion’s quick demise.
Bas Rutten, who was expected to serve as president of failed promotion World Bare Knuckle Fighting Federation (WBKFF), believes current Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC) matchmaker Paul Tyler was responsible for WBKFF’s demise. WBKFF famously folded and did not pay the contracted fighters.
“I got contacted about two months before the event, for the originally planned event, which was sooner than Nov. 9,” Rutten tells Pull No Punches podcast hosts Kajan Johnson and Shakiel Mahjouri of his initial involvement with WBKFF. “I started realizing the matchmaker, Paul Tyler, was a great matchmaker but had no clue what he was doing. He said he had done 50 shows but he really had no clue what he’s doing.”
“Paul Tyler used to be a junkie, and I say ‘junkie’ and not an ‘addict’ because he used to steal money to supply his drugs. That’s when you’re a junkie. When you’re an addict, you have a problem but at least you don’t bother other people with it. That used to be his past. This is to say, because he was smoking heroine I assume, well that’s not really good for your teeth. He doubled his weight, his size and all that kind of stuff,” Rutten continues. “For a person like that, for any organization, he couldn’t be on camera.”
Rutten was brought in to be the face of the promotion. Although he was publicly described as the company president, Rutten says he was not contractually expected to take that role until after the first event.
“We found out one of the managers from certain fighters, yeah there was a big conflict of interest. For instance in the main and co-main event, three of the four fighters were him [had the same manager],” Rutten reveals. “Tom was taking advantage of. What we know now is Paul Tyler was working with that manager… The main and co-main event [purse] together for the first show was $1.25 million.” Rutten says he subsequently had to renegotiate the contracts with all fighters on the card to make the event financially viable.
“Paul Tyler was apparently still doing things,” Rutten says, suggesting drug use. “I drove in the car with him to go to a meeting to go to a sponsor. He was swerving all over the road,” he continues. “Later on we found out he was still doing it. That was a scary situation. He started messing up and messed up again… I had a problem with painkillers. I’m seeing him and saying, ‘if he was an ex-junkie and now he has a chance — because he was going to get a cut of the company — let’s give him a chance. This is a great way for him to leave a bad life.’ So I tried to save him two or three times. Eventually they called me, said they pulled the plug and he’s fired.”
“As soon as he was removed, we found out that — for instance — Brennan [Ward] and Johnny Hendricks, we sent both these guys $10,000 to train. When we were talking to those guys, they only received $5,000,” Rutten said. “One of the girls who used to work with Paul Tyler when he was still there and said, ‘wait a minute, $5,000. I remember a thing because Paul didn’t have a bank account. He asked me if he could use my bank account.’” Rutten says Tyler used the girl’s bank account to funnel money to the unnamed manager. “So what happened is the manager took $5,000 away and Paul Tyler took $5,000 away and only $5,000 per fighter went to the fighters. Now we realized he was also stealing money from the fighters together with the other manager.”
Rutten accuses Tyler of having a vendetta against Rutten and WBKFF founder Tom Stankiewicz.
“Paul gets angry, apparently, because we’re mentioning this to people,” he says. “He calls [Tom’s] bank and says this is not a normal organization. These guys are drug dealers and this is money laundering business. They freeze all the assets, they bring investigative services, they start a whole background check and they freeze the money for 90 days.”
“We cannot 100 percent say it was him, but he was the only person who knew which bank Tom dealt with,” Rutten adds. “Presumably.”
Rutten says he has a large cache of behind-the-scenes WBKFF footage. He would like to one day put the content out, perhaps in the form of a documentary. Stankiewicz is currently in federal prison on unrelated money laundering charges.