Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (13 page)

Yet in one important area—knowing how to be rich—Turner had an insurmountable head start. He’d grown up with money and played like the ultrawealthy do. Between his runs for the America’s Cup, the parade of young lovelies, and the quixotic creation of CNN in 1980, he’d become an American business icon. Still, if history had proven anything, it was that Vince was a fast learner. He moved Linda and their two children, Shane and Stephanie, into a gated community of mansions in old Greenwich that no one could get into without passing a guard tower. Their new home was a classic colonial with a sweeping spiral staircase, chandeliers, and art that included a portrait of a bronzed-colored Vince sitting on a Harley before gathering purple clouds.

“The whole thing was done by a decorator,” says a family friend. “Not one single knickknack was theirs. Down the road, they’d feel entitled to their wealth. I remember Vince getting enraged when Linda had to stop and pump her own gas. But back then it was new to them. Vince and Linda were just amazed by the things they had in their own home. Vince liked to say, ‘It wasn’t that long ago that I was pumping my own septic tank.’ ”

Vince regularly had a Greenwich jeweler come into his office with cases of gifts and sat behind his desk picking out pieces worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the McMahons traveled to Paris for the first time in the spring of 1989 for Linda’s birthday, she left with an elaborate new wardrobe. Then they bought a second home in Boca Raton, Florida—a spacious pink split-level on a channel with wall-to-wall windows, porticoes, and terraces—and surrounded themselves with toys like a fifty-five-foot cigarette boat.

All of this turned Linda Edwards of Havelock, North Carolina, into Mrs. Vincent K. McMahon of Greenwich, a title she fiercely cultivated. She asked friends to invite her to the polo matches at the tony Greenwich Country Club and filled her closet with Chanel suits. And she elevated her role as a lobbyist, appearing before the New Jersey legislature in late 1989, for instance, to make the once unthinkable admission that wrestling was fake so she could get the WWF exempted from a 10 percent tax on tickets that were sold to legitimate sporting events.

In many ways, her hopes of belonging to the Greenwich social scene were no different than Vince’s ambition to belong to Turner’s world. But, as was always the case with Vince, he approached things more personally. Nowhere was that more evident than in his decision to put $20 million of self-financing into
No Holds Barred
. Though he hired a Hollywood writer who’d done two screenplays for Clint Eastwood, Vince insisted on being intimately involved in the plot. What emerged was a story about a menacing Turner-like television executive who wanted to steal Hogan away from a promotion that was good and just. Unfortunately, moviegoers weren’t as enamored with the idea. The
Washington Post
called it “charmless, stupid and badly made.” Most other reviews weren’t much better. The movie did an underwhelming $5.2 million in its first weekend and dropped like a stone after that. It was the first time that Vince paid Hogan a million dollars for anything, and after it was clear
No Holds Barred
didn’t have a prayer of earning his investment back, he was incensed that Hogan insisted on receiving the full fee.

In the larger scheme of things, though, there wasn’t time to slow down. McMahon had waited too long to get here. Friends saw his drive in the manic way he worked out in the gym, competing with stars like Randy Savage until his arms were monstrous. Sometimes during shows, he’d disappear into a side room with dumbbells and emerge with his face red and wet. Someone would inevitably tell him, “Vince, you look better than your wrestlers,” and he’d smile proudly. If that behavior had been seen in anyone else, it might have looked like a midlife crisis. But the six-foot-three promoter was always obsessed with size. He even went so far as to hire an assistant whose primary job was to keep tabs on his high-protein diet and feed him huge quantities of tuna fish. (New employees who walked by the kitchen attached to his office were usually taken aback by the strong smell.)

Shortly after it became clear that he wasn’t going Hollywood anytime soon, McMahon decided to turn that obsession into his next and most fateful gamble.

A POPULAR
piece of reading material around Venice Beach, California, gyms in the early eighties was a fanzine called the
Underground Steroid Handbook
. It not only reviewed drugs like Deca-Durabolin, growth hormones, methyltestosterone, and Periactin, it advised its readers how to take them and which mixtures produced the most rapid muscle growth. In an introduction, its anonymous authors wrote:

We haven’t told you horror stories of steroid abuse because we really don’t know any. We personally have not encountered athletes dying or becoming gravely ill from steroid usage. Sick people, we have, but not healthy athletes. And we don’t live apart from civilization. We live in a part of the USA that has the highest usage of steroids by athletes. We won’t come out and say the steroids are not dangerous; we just feel the dangers have been misrepresented.

Part of that judgment came from wrestlers. Superstar Billy Graham, a former WWWF champ with twenty-two-inch arms poured straight out of a vial of Dianabol, was one of the most devoted spreaders of the steroid gospel. “You can feel your body stretch,” he’d enthuse to anyone who asked him. “Just lay in bed and you’ll feel yourself grow.”

One of the people he spread the gospel to was Hogan, who still had a smooth face and a full head of hair when Graham bought him a drink at the Imperial Room in Tampa. According to an interview that Graham gave writer Mark Kriegel, Hogan “explained that he had done some wrestling out west but he wasn’t getting over. He asked me about steroids, wanted to know what I took.” Superstar told him about Dianabol, and about something called Winstrol, an injectable steroid that he chased down with Valium to smooth the harsh rush. “I freely gave him this advice,” he told Kriegel. “There was no reason not to. It wasn’t illegal.”

Approximately ten years later, Superstar saw the results of that meeting. The men were sitting in the locker room of the Pontiac Sil-verdome, waiting for
Wrestlemania III
to start. As Superstar told the syndicated show
Inside Edition
, “We went off to a shower stall and [Hogan] pulled down his wrestling tights. I injected him with six hundred milligrams of testosterone in the right buttock. He had scar tissue on his butt from so many injections over the years, and it was hard to shove the needle in.”

Hogan wasn’t alone. In 1988, the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his Olympic gold medal for failing a drug test in South Korea.
Sports Illustrated
devoted a dozen pages to a riveting firstperson account by a University of South Carolina lineman named Tommy Chaikin, who talked about nearly shooting himself to death with a .357 Magnum as a result of the suicidal tendencies he’d developed from his college steroid addiction. Americans were reported to be pouring $100 million into the underground steroid economy. Some were serious athletes, but many were guys looking to get rid of their beer bellies and high school kids wanting to look cool by their muscle cars. Prior to the mid-eighties, no one had ever been prosecuted for dealing
roids
, as they were called, so it was seen as relatively safe. As a result, every town and city had a local guru who claimed he could put fifty pounds of muscle on just about anyone overnight. Steroids from labs in Mexico, Europe, and South America were as common as aspirin in certain “drug gyms.”

The average male produces 2.5 to 10.0 milligrams of testosterone a day—enough to keep bone, muscle, skin, and hair growing. Load up the body with extra testosterone and the muscles grow before your eyes. But other things happen as well; namely, the body stops making the hormone when it senses a flood of it coming in from the outside. That leads to several side effects, including testicular atrophy, low sperm counts, and feminization. Longer term, steroids alter cholesterol counts (raising the bad, lowering the good) and pump up the blood pressure, causing hypertension, or what’s commonly known as
roid rage
.

Or at least that is what doctors warned could happen. But those concerns were largely drowned out in the steroid frenzy, especially when every gym had at least one guy who’d been using for years and seemed perfectly healthy. As the chief medical officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee remarked to the
New York Times
, “Some people have no gain and are fine. Some may get some gain but they also get sick. And some just grow as they sit in front of you. It’s like they pop a pill and just get bigger.”

On the surface, William Dunn was one of the success stories. The strength and conditioning coach at the University of Virginia had been using steroids for ten years. But the truth was that in August 1987, he was a mess. His joints were causing him screaming pain, and the only way he could alleviate it was by popping painkillers. He ran from one doctor to the next until he was rotating among fourteen of them to keep up with his constant need for Valium and the powerful Tylenol 4. The scam only fell apart when a pharmacist pegged Dunn for what he was—a nervous, four-hundred-pound druggie—and called the cops.

The night of his arrest, Dunn raged across his cell like a caged animal, his body literally short-circuiting. It wasn’t until he’d detoxed enough to think clearly that he told cops he had something to offer: a dirty doctor he knew in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The cops in Chesapeake, Virginia, had more pressing concerns. They filed the information away.

In the meantime, the explosion of addicts like Dunn was convincing Congress that something needed to be done about what was clearly becoming an epidemic of abuse. In November 1988, the Omnibus Anti-Drug Abuse Act toughened penalties for steroid trafficking and increased the money available to drug task forces to prosecute the pushers. By the time Dunn came up for sentencing in February 1989, his dirt about the doctor who’d provided him with his drugs had become decidedly more interesting to Harrisburg’s cops … and to the FBI.

DR. GEORGE
Zahorian grew up in an Armenian household just outside New York City in the 1950s, when Argentina Rocca and the World Wide Wrestling Federation owned Saturday nights. Through his teen years and after he graduated with a degree in osteopathic medicine from a college in Philadelphia, Zahorian continued to take pleasure in wrestling. So when the opportunity presented itself to take a parttime job with the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission, the regulator of matches in the state, he leaped at it.

Since the McMahons filmed their syndicated TV shows at the fairgrounds in Allentown every third Thursday, Zahorian became the house doctor, taking the wrestlers’ blood pressure and making himself available in the event a performer got hurt. He arrived at the tapings with his hair slicked back and wearing a bow tie, dressed in the hopes the camera might catch him applying bandages or first aid. Before long he was a fixture, dubbed “the good doctor” by the Boys.

How good a friend he was became clear when Dunn struck a deal with federal prosecutors to wear a concealed recorder during a visit to Zahorian’s medical office in the fall of 1989. As the sun started to dip on a bright mid-October afternoon, he found the forty-one-year-old doctor waiting for him.

“Man, you look good,” Zahorian said, holding out his hand.

“Tryin’to stay healthy for an old man,” Dunn replied.

Zahorian ushered him into a chair in his office and asked, “So, what do you think you’ll need?”

Dunn launched into a $650 shopping list that included a hundred steroid pills, eighteen vials of injectables, and a couple of hundred painkillers.

“Syringes?” Zahorian asked at the end.

Realizing he was out of practice since he’d gone straight, Dunn quickly added,” Really, yeah, I need some syringes.”

“Okay,” said the doctor, “I’ll throw them in for nothing.” Then he added something that piqued the interest of the agents listening. “I’m giving you better prices than
the wrestlers
[emphasis added]. But I know you, okay? I make it worth your while.”

On November 17, Zahorian took another $1,000 of Dunn’s money for 53 vials of injectable steroids and 500 painkillers. On January 19, 1990, Zahorian agreed to send 90 more vials and 245 more painkillers to Dunn’s South Carolina home by Federal Express, this time for $2,000. But that was all just a setup for the mother lode—an order Dunn told Zahorian he wanted to fill that would last him through a trip across Europe.

When Dunn walked into Zahorian’s office to collect it in March 1990, he found Zahorian a more nervous man than he’d been before. Thanks to a tip that had been received by the McMahons from a closely guarded source, Zahorian now knew the feds were snooping around his affairs. In fact, the McMahons had told one of their top aides to call him from a pay phone so they wouldn’t be recorded, and tell him to move all the records he kept on wrestlers out of his office fast.

“I’m not carrying as much as I used to,” Zahorian told Dunn apologetically. “I don’t see wrestlers anymore. I don’t see anybody. I don’t need it. I don’t need the aggravation. I mean, they’re watching the wrestlers very close. Very close.”

Then he leaned into Dunn and said, “You just watch yourself, okay?”

As Dunn nodded, Zahorian filled his arms with a staggering supply of drugs: 60 Vicodins, 1,128 Halcions, 952 Xanax, 48 Limbitrols, 4 vials of testosterone, and 85 Darvocets. In all, Zahorian had sent Dunn off with $25,000 worth of steroids and painkillers—more than he could possibly use in a lifetime.

That was all the feds needed. As soon as Dunn walked into the parking lot, his FBI control agent, trailed by an investigator from the Food and Drug Administration, walked back inside with a search warrant.

Zahorian started shaking when he saw them, and asked the men to wait in the hall outside his office while he called his lawyer. But with the door half open, the men could hear the sounds of paper tearing. “Hey, stop that,” the FBI agent said, rushing back in. When he unfurled Zahorian’s hand, he found torn Federal Express receipts bearing the name of the WWF’s tuxedoed announcer, Lord Alfred Hayes, and its star heel, Rowdy Roddy Piper.