Former WWE IC Champion Claims Vince McMahon Paid Him While In Prison

One former Intercontinental Champion says Vince McMahon paid him while the star was in prison for over a year.

Ken Patera, who claims to be the first real WWE Intercontinental Champion, opened up to Steve Fall of Wrestlingnews.co about Vince McMahon taking care of his family while he was in prison. Patera was arrested in April of 1984 after he and Masa Saito assaulted police officers sent to arrest them for allegedly vandalizing a McDonald’s when they were refused service after hours.

Patera was later sentenced to two years in prison as a result of the assault, and according to the man himself, his family received money from Vince McMahon during the year and a half he spent behind bars.

“Vince was sending my wife money every month. I went from making 35 – 40,000 a month to nothing. So now she’s cut off. I talked to him from prison and he said, ‘Don’t worry, Ken. I’ll take care of her and the kids’, so he had his accountant send her a check every month. I don’t even remember how much it was. It added up though.

“When I got out of prison a year and a half later, he called me and said, ‘Ken, we don’t have a place for what I want to do with you. We don’t have a place right now.’ I got out in December. ‘Can you wait until April’, I believe it was, and I said, ‘Yeah. No problem. You know when the time’s right.'”

Ken Patera Met With Vince McMahon At His Mansion After Getting Out Of Prison

Continuing, Ken Patera detailed his meeting with Vince McMahon following his stay in prison. While McMahon didn’t have any room to use him creatively until months after his release, Patera says they had a nice meeting in McMahon’s grandiose home, and McMahon kept his word to begin using the star again the following spring.

“So we got everything and he flew me back there to Connecticut to his new mansion. We had a nice talk in the kitchen. Linda was there and the kids were upstairs. They were little then. I don’t know how old Shane was. God I don’t remember. Stephanie was even younger, maybe six, seven years old.

“So Vince takes me on the house tour. It was a fu**ing huge house, indoor swimming pool and he had a big gym. It was a beautiful place, and that was before he was a billionaire. I had a nice chat with Vince and I started back in April, May, something like that, whenever it happened.”

h/t WrestlingNews.co