Authors: Jeff Benedict,Don Yaeger
“How do you decide to invest in a stock?” Goldberg asked rhetorically. “You study it and decide what its growth potential is. You look at risk-reward, you look at availability of cash, you look at the industry, you look at history, you look at management. Those are the ingredients that you make a decision about. If you’re studious you don’t react out of emotion. You try to be deliberate. You try to be thoughtful. But the odds are, more often than not, if you follow your intellectualized process, you’ll be okay. To me it’s the same methodology. I try to understand the basic ingredients and then evolve from there.
“Christian had issues he needed to deal with. A lot of people do. Obviously, it helped that he was a talented athlete, because it meant people were willing to help him grow. I think it has worked.”
Only time will tell.
Kraft and New England’s community standards were put to the test again in early 1998 when fan favorite Dave Meggett was arrested in Toronto and charged with sexual assault and robbery. On June 23 Toronto authorities dropped the sexual assault charge. No matter. After his arrest, Patriots brass determined that Meggett no longer represented the standards set for their players and they cut him from the team. The robbery charges were still pending when this book went to press.
Wanted
When training camp opened for the St. Louis Rams under new coach Dick Vermeil in July of 1997, starting quarterback Tony Banks showed up with his six-month-old rottweiler named Felony. Banks and his teammates loved having Felony around. The coaches didn’t. Vermeil ordered Banks to send Felony home. It wasn’t the name Felony that was the cause of concern. No, the Rams were used to having felons in camp. It was the dog that was prohibited.
O
n March 24, 1997, special agent Larry Fox of the Drug Enforcement Agency paid an official visit to the St. Louis Rams’ front office to subpoena the Rams as part of a federal probe into a drug trafficking conspiracy. With management under attack for the repeated crimes of star running back Lawrence Phillips, news of another player under investigation was not welcome. Fortunately for the Rams, the press would not learn of the investigation until the middle of training camp, four months later.
Fox was shown to the office of Rams executive vice president Jay Zygmunt. After identifying himself, Fox served Zygmunt with the subpoena. Addressed to the St. Louis Rams, it read, “Pursuant to an ongoing official investigation being conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration of a suspected felony, it is requested that your company furnish the following information: Copies of any and all checks or payments for the length of employment fronts and backs, made to the following person: James Harris.”
One month earlier, the Rams inked Harris to a $2.9 million contract and paid him a $700,000 signing bonus. Now the team was on notice that the DEA suspected Harris of being implicated in a drug investigation. Eager to obtain more information about Harris’s alleged role in the case, Rams officials called the DEA office, but were only told that Harris was suspected of supplying currency to a drug dealer. It would be early summer before authorities were ready to turn the matter over to a federal grand jury.
The uncertainty of Harris’s legal status could not have come at a worse time. He was signed with the expectation that he would compete for the starting defensive end position. Instead, Harris now faced the prospect of prison. Meanwhile the NFL draft was just weeks away, and recently hired head coach Dick Vermeil had been on the job just two months.
On top of all this, just two weeks earlier, on March 11, a Nebraska judge sentenced Phillips, the team’s first-round pick in 1996, to twenty-three days in jail for violating the terms of his probation. After pleading no contest to charges of brutally assaulting his ex-girlfriend in 1995, Phillips was spared jail time pending no further brushes with the law. However, on June 13, 1996, just two months after the Rams drafted him, the California Highway Patrol arrested Phillips for drunk driving. He was driving eighty miles per hour in a car that had a flat tire. His plea of no contest in California triggered the jail sentence in Nebraska.
Phillips’s problems were well documented, and Vermeil came into the job anticipating that one of his major tasks as a football coach would be to work with the criminal justice system. “The Rams had invested the sixth pick in the draft overall,” Vermeil told ESPN, explaining why getting Phillips in the lineup was among his top priorities. “That’s the sixth player in the draft. That’s a real commitment by an organization. I felt it was my responsibility to do everything I could to get him to play up to his ability and make that investment a good investment.”
On February 20, St. Louis authorities charged Phillips with a series of motor-vehicle-related violations after he drove his Humvee into a pillar and then left the scene of the accident. Four days later, Phillips was again arrested, this time in Omaha, Nebraska, where a woman alleged she was assaulted, battered, and falsely imprisoned by him at a party. After arriving at the hotel, police charged Phillips with disorderly conduct.
Yet, on April 12 Vermeil was standing outside the jail doors in Nebraska when Phillips emerged with a grin and a garment bag draped over his shoulder. Extending his hand, the coach then escorted his troubled star through a sea of cameras and into the back of a yellow taxi cab. He used the flight back to St. Louis to get more personally acquainted with his number one back and impress on him his value to the team.
Despite his commitment to Phillips, Vermeil admitted to reporters that he would not have drafted him had he been the head coach in 1996. Yet, just one week after escorting Phillips from jail, Vermeil used his fourth-round pick in the draft to select Texas Christian University All-Conference lineman Ryan Tucker (see Chapter 1).
With Tucker’s criminal past showing a resemblance to Phillips’s, Vermeil tried to dispel any comparisons between the two players. “The problems [of Phillips and Tucker] are different,” Vermeil said, insinuating that alcohol as opposed to upbringing was the source of Tucker’s violence. “They aren’t maybe as deep and may be easier to control [for Tucker]. When a guy drinks a beer and gets in fights, that’s a little easier to control than environmental things in a young man’s process of growing up.”
However, Vermeil conceded that he was taking a chance with Tucker. “I think I know what I’m doing,” he said. “He’s not a thug. He’s a youngster who got in trouble and was out of line and he himself will tell you he’s embarrassed about it.”
Rams assistant coach Johnny Roland used similar rationalizations to minimize the seriousness of Phillips’s criminal conduct shortly after they drafted him. “Everybody deserves a second chance, sometimes a third and a fourth,” said James, justifying the selection of a twice-convicted criminal. “What Lawrence did had nothing to do with drugs. It was harassment. He didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t stab anyone.”
B
y the time the Rams opened training camp in Macomb, Illinois, on July 15, federal prosecutors were presenting their case against James Harris and four other men to a grand jury. On July 24, Anthony “Fat Head” Washington, Stanford Riley, Jr., Andre R. Hogan, and Dwight “Chip” Flowers were indicted on charges of conspiring to “knowingly and intentionally distribute and possess with intent to distribute cocaine and cocaine in the form of cocaine base (commonly known as ‘crack’).” Harris was indicted on charges of aiding and abetting the conspiracy by allegedly supplying over $50,000 to Washington for the purchase of cocaine.
Word of the indictments swept through training camp, prompting a quick response from Vermeil. “My first thought would be he’s not guilty until he’s proven guilty,” he told reporters. “I’d feel lousy if I said, ‘You can’t play, you can’t be a Ram,’ and they acquit him of whatever the charge may be, and it’s cost him the opportunity to make a living.”
In light of the fact that Phillips and Tucker continued to play despite allegations of criminal conduct, there was little doubt that Harris would remain in uniform unless carted off in handcuffs—or his on-field skills deteriorated. However, the investigation into Harris and his alleged co-conspirators demonstrated just how far a team will go to protect its player, despite how bad things looked.
Investigators traced the trail in the Harris case back to the night of February 6, 1996, with the homicide of Eugene Vincent Birge, an East St. Louis drug dealer. When Birge answered a knock on his front door at 11:35
P.M.
that evening, three men forced their way into his home with shotguns and 9mm semiautomatic weapons. They shot Birge once in the abdomen, twice in the chest, and once in the head with the shotgun at point-blank range. Less than thirty minutes later he was found lying in a pool of blood and pronounced dead. Anthony “Fat Head” Washington, who Harris was accused of supplying with money, emerged as the primary suspect in the ambush killing.
With so many murders annually in East St. Louis, area newspapers did not bother to report Birge’s death, dismissing him as another nameless casualty in the drug trade. However, Birge was no ordinary drug pusher. He was a dealer-turned-informant who was secretly working with the DEA. His government contact was Larry Fox, the same agent who served the subpoena on the Rams. At the time Birge was murdered, Fox was coordinating the investigation into a national cocaine ring that stretched into all geographical regions of the United States. Prosecutors had already indicted eighteen people in connection with the case. In addition to being an informant, Birge was a potential government witness in the federal trial of the eighteen conspirators. Authorities would later claim in federal court that Washington had Birge executed when Washington discovered that Birge was cooperating with the government. “He [Washington] middled the hit on the informant,” Fox said in a telephone interview.
Identified in court papers as “a distributor in the East St. Louis, Metro East area,” Washington was also suspected of participating in a kidnapping-for-ransom plot investigated by the FBI. “In 1995, Mr. Washington allegedly kidnapped an individual from St. Louis, brought him to Illinois and demanded $50,000 from his relatives to have his son returned alive,” Fox testified at Washington’s detention hearing.
Harris and Washington are close friends, their relationship stemming back to childhood when they grew up as neighbors. When Harris returned to the East St. Louis area in April 1996 after the Rams signed him as a free agent, he renewed his ties with Washington. Their renewed friendship led directly to Harris’s indictment. According to prosecutors, Harris knowingly gave Washington cash to purchase a shipment of cocaine.
Harris denied the charge. “I come home and I hang out with some old friends of mine, and because I’m hanging out with some old friends, the DEA expects me to be a drug dealer,” complained Harris in an interview with the authors. “Why? Because I go back to my old neighborhood to make sure everybody’s doing okay?”
Bob Shannon, Harris’s high school football coach and a longtime resident of East St. Louis, spent years using football as a carrot to lead kids out of the crime-and drug-infested neighborhoods that were Harris’s and Washington’s home. Other kids Shannon coached who went on to play in the NFL include Bryan Cox (who played with Harris for one season under Shannon) and Tennessee Oilers linebacker Dennis Stallings.
Shannon recalled a character-defining moment in 1984, Harris’s sophomore year of high school. With the team clinging to a lead late in the state championship game, Shannon’s team was pinned down inside their own ten-yard line. Shannon put Harris in at quarterback. On the next play Harris pivoted to hand the ball to the fullback, who cut too wide. Harris overextended himself attempting to make the handoff. He fumbled. The other team recovered and scored.
“When James came to the sideline,” Shannon recalled, “I said, ‘Why’d you try to give him that ball?’ He said, ‘Coach, it wasn’t my fault, it was his fault. He went too wide.’
“I said, ‘James, you had the football. All you had to do was keep it and we wouldn’t have fumbled.’
“ ‘It wasn’t my fault, coach. It was his fault.’
“I tried to get him to see one more time that he had made a bad decision. But he never did see it. And I knew right there with that incident with James Harris that it was going to be difficult for him to play quarterback for me because he didn’t realize that he made a bad decision.”
In Shannon’s view, the poor decision making of Harris, along with other NFL players, stems back to their decision-making processes developed as youths. “It has something to do with people being able to recognize and have a clear definition of right and wrong,” he said. “Some guys in the NFL are talented athletes but they come from backgrounds where they’ve been around gangs, been around gang members, or have been in gangs. It gets back to making good decisions. There are guys who have been able to walk away from those types of situations and be productive and say, ‘Hey, that was wrong. That was a period of my life when I could have gotten in serious trouble, but I didn’t.’ And they see the light.
“James Harris is a guy who had the wrong kind of friends and was not able to divorce himself from them after he had had a certain amount of success, came back into the community, still associated with those guys, and didn’t have a clear understanding of what’s right and what’s wrong.”
T
ipped off by an informant, the DEA pulled Washington over on March 19, 1997, while he was en route to meet a drug courier. According to the informant, Washington was to deliver cash in exchange for one kilo of cocaine. Unaware that he was under surveillance, Washington stepped out of the car while agents conducted a search. In the driver’s side door, they discovered a Boatmen’s Bank bag containing $52,000 in cash.
Not at all surprised to find the cash, the agents were nonetheless puzzled by the amount. The approximate wholesale price for one kilo of cocaine was $17,000, leaving authorities to speculate that the additional $35,000 was for additional kilos and courier fees.