Authors: Jeff Benedict,Don Yaeger
“Would you consider Mr. Harris to be a danger to the community?” Green asked.
“Based on what I’ve seen during training camp, no,” testified Warren. “He has too much at stake in the National Football League. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“What would be the impact if he’s detained?” asked Green.
“It would have a negative impact on him if he’s detained for any period of time,” answered Warren. “The detention of James Harris today would ultimately cost him his job with the St. Louis Rams.”
Warren’s testimony carried the day. Convinced that Harris had tremendous financial incentive to remain in St. Louis, Judge Mihm released Harris on an unsecured $750,000 bond. Warren then drove Harris back to camp and he was in uniform the following day. All other defendants arrested in the conspiracy were denied bond and detained in jail pending their trial.
Harris received repeated assurances from coaches and administrators that they would support him throughout the proceedings. Warren, who was assigned to assist Harris, also repeatedly reassured him that the team was behind him. “He kept telling me they wasn’t going to let me go,” said Harris. “They’re not going to let you go because Les Miller [the team’s director of player development] is a good guy. He’s going to stick with you.”
But even the friendly confines of training camp could not erase the voice of Judge Mihm saying “life in prison.” Adamantly maintaining his innocence, Harris nonetheless appreciated the reality of prison. Sleepless nights followed and soon he stopped eating. During the next two weeks of training camp he dropped twenty pounds. Lethargy set in on the field and drowsiness was obvious in film sessions and team meetings.
“James Harris was not the same football player because of all the problems on his mind,” confirmed Harris’s agent, Harold Lewis. “He just couldn’t go out there and be the same James Harris when it came to practice. He was not paying attention in meetings. His mind was not there.”
On August 17, just nineteen days after Warren assured the court that Harris’s contract provided a structured environment and job security, the Rams summarily cut Harris. At that point, Harris had yet to be paid a penny of his $2.9 million contract, which was not guaranteed but was conditional on his playing the 1997 season. Although he had received a signing bonus, he had already chewed up $200,000 worth paying for his lawyers.
Harris learned that he was cut the same way fourteen other players did, by reading his name on a list tacked up on the team bulletin board. “They called me in the office,” said Harris. “But I knew when they called me in.”
While the Rams’ dismissal of Harris appeared a turnabout, reflecting a decision to finally draw the line with players and crime, Harris was cut for one reason—his performance declined in camp. Both his mental concentration and physical prowess were suddenly lacking, and he was therefore no use to the team. “He didn’t get around the quarterback as much as you wanted to see,” said defensive line coach Carl Hairston.
Coach Vermeil made clear that his decision to cut Harris was not designed to send any messages. “I did not make the decision to release James Harris based on his off-the-field problems,” Vermeil said. “I do think his off-the-field problems influenced his play. I don’t see how a guy can play football with things like that hanging over his head, and concentrate on what he has to do to be a good football player.”
Bottom line: if Harris could have maintained his on-field aggressiveness—like Henley, Phillips, Tucker, and others—there is little question that he would be on the opening day roster.
Unemployed and running short on money, Harris was without all the safeguards that the Rams had provided him. More importantly, his incentives to appear in court, as described by vice president and legal counsel Warren, were gone.
When Warren was questioned by the authors about his testimony given under oath, he downplayed his statements to the judge. “The big thing that I was trying to stress was the fact that, when the judge asked me, while he was at training camp, how much free time,” said Warren. “Basically, that’s what they wanted to find out because they were concerned about ‘Is he gonna flee?’ All I was saying is ‘Hey, this is his schedule. They gotta be at meetings at 7:00
A.M
. and they get done at 11:00
P.M.
’”
Now Warren echoed Vermeil’s explanation for letting Harris go. “He was just released like twenty-five other people were,” said Warren. “It didn’t have anything to do with [his pending case].”
Privately, Warren disagreed with Vermeil’s handling of the Harris situation. On the day Harris was cut, Harris and Warren talked after Harris cleaned out his locker. Harris recalled the following exchange:
“I expected this,” Harris said, looking into Warren’s eyes.
“Man, they are giving you a raw deal,” Warren responded.
“I expected it,” repeated Harris.
“I didn’t expect it,” Warren replied.
I
ronically, the Rams retained players whose cases involved far more conclusive evidence. The evidence against Harris was tenuous at best. And on October 23, Judge Paul E. Riley found Harris not guilty of aiding and abetting the other co-conspirators.
More striking was that Judge Riley announced the acquittal before the defense even put their case to the jury. Citing an absence of evidence, Riley granted a defense motion for a directed verdict after prosecutors rested their case. It was the first time in his twenty years on the bench that Riley granted such a motion. Jurors agreed with the judge’s decision, telling reporters that they too would have acquitted Harris.
His friends were not so lucky. On December 8, a jury convicted Anthony Washington and Andre Hogan. On May 29, 1998, they were both sentenced, Washington to 188 months in prison and Hogan to 121 months in prison. Stanford Riley, the fourth co-defendant in the case, was acquitted of all charges. And Dwight Flowers, the informant who arranged the drug deal with Washington, was sentenced to seventy months in federal prison.
His legal problems behind him, Harris received inquiries from numerous teams, including the Chicago Bears and Miami Dolphins. The Denver Broncos, in search of another pass rusher to shore up their Super Bowl run, went as far as to fly Harris to Denver and put him through a workout. But two months out of action and the stress of the trial left him far from being in game day condition. No offers materialized. While the 1997 season came to a close, Harris spent his days sitting idly in his East St. Louis apartment, watching repeat broadcasts of ESPN’s
Sports Center
and waiting for a call from an NFL team. On March 11, 1998, he got the call. That day he signed a free agent contract with the Oakland Raiders.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
Miami Dolphins team headquarters, Davie, Florida:
“It’s a matter of anytime that there’s talent available you continually try to upgrade the bottom four or five spots on your roster,” Miami Dolphins head coach Jimmy Johnson told a group of reporters gathered at the team’s headquarters on December 2, 1997. He was explaining his decision to offer a contract to troubled running back Lawrence Phillips. “There’s a large upside,” Johnson insisted. “If Lawrence does all the things we ask in a highly disciplined program, then he can realize what his talents might be and realize the success that you probably thought he was going to have in the first place.”
Less than two weeks earlier, the St. Louis Rams suddenly cut Phillips after he was reportedly fined fifty-six times for violating team rules. In his nineteen-month tenure with the Rams, Phillips was arrested three times, served a jail sentence for domestic violence, and was twice sued by women—once for domestic violence and once for sexual assault. Having received a “second chance” at the University of Nebraska following a brief suspension for brutally assaulting ex-girlfriend Kate McEwen, the Rams also gave Phillips multiple “second chances” before finally releasing him.
Johnson assured the media that he and the Dolphins had thoroughly investigated Phillips, and that he was not the menace often portrayed in the popular press—all words that had been used by the Rams two years earlier. “Actually I expected all of the worst, with all of the rumors that you hear,” Johnson said. “And I can say this for a fact, all of the rumors that you hear are not true. We have checked out in factual information and the things that you hear are highly, highly exaggerated.”
Exaggerated?
Although the attack on McEwen which landed Phillips in jail had received excessive media play, the scope of Phillips’s abusive behavior was kept hidden from the public. McEwen, despite requests from countless national publications and television networks, never spoke publicly about her violent relationship with Phillips. But on August 16, 1996, she did file a civil complaint at the Jackson County Federal Court in Kansas. In it, she revealed a brutal litany of assaults suffered at the hands of Phillips while the two attended the University of Nebraska.
Although civil law suits are typically a matter of public record and available to the press, McEwen’s complaint was filed under seal. To the liking of Phillips and his lawyers, reporters were unable to view its content. However, on September 3, 1996, federal judge William F. Mauer surprisingly lifted the seal. In effect, Judge Mauer’s decision left the painful details of McEwen’s civil complaint available to any reporter who showed up at the courthouse and requested to see the file. Wanting desperately to conceal the details, Phillips’s lawyers acted promptly and were able to secure a court order placing the document back under seal within twenty-four hours.
But during the brief window when the case file was open,
Kansas City Star
court reporter Joe Lambe was at the federal courthouse and he made a copy of the complaint. He is the only reporter in the country to have seen the case file. Lambe reported these details from McEwen’s complaint:
• October 1994, “Phillips shoved her head into a wall so hard it broke through the wall, then choked her and would not allow her to leave his apartment.”
• April 1995, “Phillips asked her whether she was dating anyone else and threatened her, saying, ‘I’m going to shoot you in the kneecaps and then shoot you in the elbows. This is Los Angeles gang style of dealing with people.’”
• May 10, 1995, “Phillips slashed her car tires and threatened to kill her. That came after he demanded a glass of water and McEwen told him to get it himself.”
• August 24, 1995, “McEwen agreed to drive Phillips, who was drunk, home to his apartment. He forced her to stay there and sexually assaulted her.”
• September 10, 1995, “Phillips beat her and kicked her while she was at a friend’s house. She contends he then grabbed her hair ‘caveman style,’ pulled her down three flights of steps and slammed her head into a wall.”
Phillips reached an out-of-court financial settlement with McEwen, which required that she neither discuss the nature of her complaint nor the details of the payoff.
Maybe the reason Johnson could so comfortably claim Phillips’s record was “exaggerated” stemmed from the comparison of Phillips’s record with some of his other players who had either served time in jail or been convicted of a violent felony. Yet these players were never scrutinized by the press like Phillips. For example, Johnson signed little-known free agent wide receiver Charles Jordan in 1996, who developed into one of Dan Marino’s most reliable receivers in 1997. As a teen growing up in Los Angeles, Jordan was an active member of the Bloods. The authors discovered that his criminal history made Phillips look like a choirboy.
O
n June 27, 1990, Kenney Jones was gunned down in a hail of bullets while walking down a sidewalk near the intersection of 79th Street and Avalon Boulevard in Los Angeles. A five-block area between 76th and 80th Streets around Avalon Boulevard is home turf to a local gang calling themselves the Swans, a subset of the Bloods street gang. Jones, at the time he was shot, was wearing blue, the colors of a rival gang.
Neighbors were initially reluctant to cooperate with investigators’ search for the killers. But a week after the shooting, Officer Jerry Pierro received information linking Swan gang members Charles Jordan, aka “Chucky,” Tyrone Jordan, aka “Whitey,” and Glen Jones, aka “Glayball,” to the murder. According to a witness, the three were seen speeding away from the scene in a white Olds-mobile. Then on July 3, a man who lived at the corner of 79th and Avalon went to the police and revealed that his twelve-year-old son had been outside at the time of the murder. According to court documents, the boy also saw a white Oldsmobile speeding away from the scene.
When police finally questioned Charles Jordan about his whereabouts on the night of the killing, he claimed, according to court documents, that he was at home, one block away on 78th, along with Glen Jones and knew nothing about the murder. Police then separately questioned Tyrone Jordan, who pinned the murder on fellow gang members John Davis and Maurice Stevens. However, Tyrone admitted that Charles and Glen Jones
were
at the murder scene and that Charles “made comments about the victim wearing the wrong colors just before the victim was shot.”
When police tracked down Maurice Stevens, he admitted that he and Davis were at the scene as well, but insisted “that Chucky and Tyrone did the shooting.”
In follow-up questioning by the police, Jones admitted that he and Charles had concocted a story about their whereabouts the first time they were questioned. In a September 13 interview with police, Charles Jordan said that he lied about his whereabouts because “he knew that the word out on the street was that he committed the murder,” according to court documents. The officers then asked Jordan if he would submit to a lie detector test. After failing it, Jordan refused to cooperate further with police in their investigation.
In addition to being the prime suspect in the murder of Kenny Jones, Jordan had to appear in court on September 27, 1990, for a pretrial hearing on an unrelated matter. He had been charged with threatening to kill Warrena Wilson and Wilbur Holloway when they showed up to testify at the pretrial hearing of Swan gang member Craig Williams, who was himself facing two counts of attempted murder. According to court documents, on August 13, 1990, Jordan confronted the two witnesses in the hallway outside the courtroom in an attempt to scare them from going inside. Jordan’s brash intimidation tactics were witnessed by Los Angeles Deputy Sheriff Shaun McCarthy, who was in charge of the Williams investigation.