I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

  During the off-season, each of the thirty-two clubs has a ninety-man upper limit on its roster, which leaves room for 2,880 players in training camp, plus an additional thirty-seven per team who may be in reserve. By the time the regular season rolls around, each team has room for only fifty-three players, or a total of 1,696 players in the league.

  Competition is fierce, and when the best are playing the best, it’s no surprise that players get injured. But in this high-stakes game, an injury can mean lost money, status, and hope. Some injuries can end an NFL career before it even gets started.

  In Eric’s case, he made the first cut with the Patriots in the 1988 season, but he played only three of the sixteen regular games. This would be the high point of his NFL career, and it didn’t last long.

  During the fifth game, Eric got hurt, and was hospitalized for ten days with two broken ribs and a liver contusion. He went on injured reserve status, and was ultimately released from the team as a free agent, meaning that he was no longer under contract. This left him free to sign with another team.

  In general, when a player under contract is on an active-team roster at the beginning of the season, but is released midseason, he would be paid for that full year, said Michael Signora, the NFL’s vice president of football communications. But without seeing Eric’s contract, Signora said he couldn’t confirm how much Eric got paid.

  In March 1989, Eric was back and ready for action. Signed as a free agent in the off-season by the Dallas Cowboys, he was released in mid-August after turning his right ankle before training camp. He was promptly picked up by the Indianapolis Colts, only to be released about two weeks later after playing just one game. He got a second chance with the Patriots, who signed him as their seventh linebacker on September 6, 1989.

  “Right now, I’m feeling very Patriotic,” he told The Boston Globe. “I’m not taking it for granted. I was lucky. I was lucky coming out of college.... It’s been a long and winding road; now I’m used to this. But I think it’s time to settle down and play football.”

  Eric’s ankle gave out again and he was cut about a week later after playing what would be his last game in the NFL. His daughter Kayla was born about a week after that.

  The New York Jets signed Eric as a free agent in March 1990, but he never got to play a game with them after fracturing his hand and spraining his ankle in training camp. He was released in late August with an injury settlement.

  Rebuffed by the NFL, Eric did what many players over the years have done, and that is to try out for one of the less prestigious leagues, such as the Canadian Football League, NFL Europe, United States Football League, United Football League, National Minor League Football, or World League of American Football (WLAF).

  After recovering from his injuries, Eric was drafted by a team in the WLAF in its 1991 inaugural season. Playing outside linebacker for the Barcelona Dragons, he not only became a team favorite, but the first player with a fan club: La Penya Naposki, with five thousand members.

  “I was just running onto the field and people started to scream,” Eric told the Associated Press. “I didn’t know what they were doing. I even looked around to see who was following me, to see who they were cheering for, but there was nobody. Suddenly, I realized it was me.”

  His ability to speak some Spanish helped his popularity rise, especially with the children who walked with him from the stadium to the practice field each day, asking for autographs or to hold his helmet. A crowd of kids even swarmed the twenty-five-year-old when he stopped at the local McDonald’s.

  The AP described Eric as “fast approaching superstar status,” noting he was helping the Dragons “to fashion the league’s toughest defense en route to first place in the European Division.”

  But when the team made it to World Bowl finals that year, Eric was on the sidelines with a pulled groin muscle.

  While Eric’s European football career was taking off, his marriage was dying. In March 1991, when his daughter Kayla was about eighteen months old and his other daughter, Krista, was almost five, his wife filed for divorce in Danbury, Connecticut, just a few weeks after he’d left for Barcelona.

  Citing an “irretrievable breakdown” in their relationship, Kathy asked for alimony and child support, saying she was “without adequate funds to support herself” and the children, whereas Eric, as a professional football player, had “considerable income and funds.”

  The judge ordered Eric to pay her $475 per week, but by mid-June, Kathy had already filed a motion for a contempt order, complaining that he owed her more than $3,800.

  Eric returned to the United States from Barcelona that summer and was signed by the Washington Redskins in July. He arrived at camp, still injured.

  Even after taking a month off, he bruised his shoulder and reinjured his groin during the second practice. He passed the physical, but he ended up pulling the same groin muscle again, and left in August.

  The Redskins paid his doctor bills, he said**, and “we were even. They won the freaking Super Bowl that year. My luck. The doctor told me I’d probably never play football again. Probably my worst [injury], even worse than the ribs.”

  Nonetheless, he recovered enough to play a second season with the Barcelona Dragons in 1992, when his weight rose to 260 pounds.

  “We all know where we are—we’re in the WLAF. Now you can say that’s only one step away from the NFL, but it’s also one step away from a nine-to-five job somewhere,” he told the AP that May.

  Eric tried out with the Seattle Seahawks, and was signed in July 1992. But after wearing a cast all summer, he was the first player to leave training camp later that month because of his pesky groin injury and a torn arch in his left foot.

  He dropped off his playbook at the front desk and announced he was retiring, walking away from the NFL in what one spokesman called Eric’s “final transaction” with the league. The NFL declined to comment on anything further relating to Eric Naposki.

  After he’d lost his NFL income in the fall of 1991, Kathy requested that he pay her a “suitable sum” for support each week. In the meantime, she had to live with and borrow money from her parents. With two small children and an estranged husband who wasn’t paying any support, she couldn’t make ends meet on a $680 welfare check and $160 in food stamps each month.

  Kathy petitioned for sole custody in January 1992, saying that Eric had “shown no interest or inclination to visit the children in the past.”

  The couple’s inches-thick divorce file in Connecticut contains a series of motions for contempt orders against Eric for not making his required payments, along with repeated pleas he filed to lower his payments because his “financial circumstances” kept changing.

  By August 1992, Eric had relocated to Irvine, California. Court records show that his child support debt had risen to $20,400, that he claimed he owed $15,000 to his mother and other creditors, and had only $350 in cash.

  The state of Connecticut had joined Kathy in her collection efforts by this point, which is typical when a spouse receives state-subsidized welfare benefits. A family court judge issued a capias—another term for a bench warrant—with a $5,000 bond for Eric because he wasn’t paying support or attending required hearings.

  In January 1993, the state tried to garnishee his wages with the World League, but it had suspended operations by then. Eric, who was working private security and jobs as a bouncer at popular upscale nightclubs in Orange County, submitted pay stubs to the court to prove that his net weekly earnings were only $567 a week. He said he couldn’t even afford to travel to the East Coast to attend a hearing, let alone pay his support debt.

  But some of this wasn’t his fault, he wrote, blaming the court for sending the hearing notice to an old address. Calling the $288 court-ordered weekly payments “completely ridiculous” and “utterly devastating,” he said there was “absolutely no possible way” he could afford them. Furthermore, he wrote, I am quite anxious to have this matter resolved. I do feel, however, that I
am being judged rather harshly. Please remember that I only got divorced, I did not commit a felony. And to be honest, I am very tired of being treated like a criminal.

  After his split with Kathy, Eric started dating a woman named Samantha, whose father was a big football fan. And along the way, he befriended an attractive woman he met at the gym named Nanette Johnston.

  He stayed in Dallas for a few months to promote some videos. Then, after breaking up with Samantha, he and Nanette began dating around January 1994. He played football in Edmonton, Canada, for a few months that year before returning to live in Tustin.

  CHAPTER 20

  Bill McLaughlin may have been worth $55 million on paper, but he’d been having increasing cash flow problems in the months leading up to his death, even after earning more than $2 million in annual gross income in 1993 and 1994.

  Working out of his home office, he made his own schedule. He enjoyed exercising his biomedical and entrepreneurial muscles as he searched for a cancer cure and tried to adapt the blood filter to other consumer uses, such as water filtration and wine separation. He also liked to play with real estate and development deals, such as the property he’d bought in Palm Springs with hopes of building a Mexican-style village.

  But by the fall of 1994, that project wasn’t going well, and he lost money on his desert properties. He’d purchased the two homes in Las Vegas as an investment and to save a significant amount in personal income and corporate taxes, but he’d acquired them at the top of the market, right before the values plummeted. He’d also made a bad investment in Fiji in 1989, and had failed to repay a debt of at least $5 million to an offshore bank, which ended up going under.

  As money got tighter, Bill told his daughter Jenny that Nanette’s routine of going to the gym and taking the kids to school every day was getting old. If some of his businesses didn’t start producing some income, he said, he was going to have to tell her to get a job. Nonetheless, he took Nanette on a first-class tour of Europe, because he’d never been there before.

  Bill told his friend Denis Townsend that he gave Nanette a monthly allowance, no questions asked, and he let her write checks to pay the bills. But Townsend said Nanette had very little to do with the desert projects or business decisions in general; she just did the books.

  Townsend said Bill had been thinking about reversing his vasectomy in 1993, and never would have stood for Nanette seeing other men. Similarly, Bill’s buddy Don Kalal said Bill told him that Nanette wanted a monogamous relationship.

  In 1993, when Bill told his longtime accountant, Brian Ringler, that Nanette wanted to get married, Ringler advised him to wait.

  “Why don’t you give it some more time and see how it goes,” he said. “There’s no harm in waiting. You can always get married in the future.”

  Bill gave Nanette the diamond ring she’d been wanting, and by the fall of 1994, the couple was shopping for a bigger home. Bill told Jenny that he was thinking about trading four or five properties to afford a new one. And on October 27, 1994, realtor Betty Comegys showed the couple a property in South Laguna worth $5.5 million.

  When Bill talked to his brother in late 1994, however, Patrick got the sense that Bill had already made up his mind that he wasn’t going to marry her.

  The question is, how much of this did Nanette know? Was she playing both of her men to see what or who would break first, or did she have a plan all along? And what, if anything, did Bill know about Nanette’s various schemes?

  After several years of legal battling against Jacob Horowitz, a decision in Bill’s favor finally came down on October 3, 1994. Using some arcane calculations, the arbitration panel determined that Bill had $9 million coming to him from the holding account where Baxter had been funneling royalties, ruling that Horowitz had, in fact, breached the contract. The next $18 million in royalties would go to Bill and Baxter Healthcare, and Horowitz would give up his half, $9 million, before he got any more.

  Bill was obviously pleased about the court ruling, but he told his attorneys, Paul Gale and Ray Bogucki, that he was frustrated with the holdup of the payout because he needed cash for his real estate deals in the desert. He’d been receiving $500,000 to $550,000 in royalties every quarter—or about half of the disputed royalties, which varied depending on sales—and the same amount had been going into the holding account.

  Bill complained that he had to borrow money in November to meet his various obligations before the royalty check came in on the fifteenth. But the arbitration panel wouldn’t allow him to move any cash until a final judgment was entered. The release of the money was also complicated by the fact that it had been placed into the investment pool run by Orange County, which filed for bankruptcy on December 6, 1994.

  Not surprisingly, this long and drawn-out struggle with Horowitz had frustrated Bill to no end. He’d always believed that his former partner had breached their contract, and Bill believed that excused him “from paying Horowitz any royalties otherwise due him.” Hearing that Horowitz’s lawyer had made it his life’s mission to keep Bill from getting his share of the money only made him more upset.

  The antagonism between Bill and Horowitz came across in the interview that police conducted in Santa Barbara two days after Bill’s death. Horowitz said the war wasn’t over because the arbitration was “still active,” and that he disagreed with the legal interpretation that Bill had been victorious.

  “I won my royalties. I don’t consider that having lost.... He didn’t win against me, and I didn’t win against him,” Horowitz said, referring to the panel’s October ruling that neither one had to pay the other’s legal fees. “It’s a complex litigation and it’s still going on.”

  Horowitz appealed that ruling, so it wasn’t until well after Bill’s death that the courts confirmed the $9 million award to Bill’s estate. After Horowitz lost his appeal, he was ordered to pay the $9 million to Kim McLaughlin, the estate’s executrix.

  All of Horowitz’s lawsuits were ultimately dismissed with prejudice in June 1996. It was unclear from the court records whether Horowitz ultimately had to pay Bill’s voluminous legal fees.

  While Bill was working on his various investment projects, Nanette was pursuing a few of her own. In early 1994, she met a personal trainer named Robert Cottrill at the Sporting Club. As the year progressed, Cottrill saw her and Eric Naposki kissing and holding hands, working out three times a week together, so he assumed Nanette and Eric were boyfriend and girlfriend. She and Cottrill chatted from time to time, but it wasn’t until the summer that they started talking business.

  Nanette asked what else Cottrill did for a living. When he said that he was moonlighting as a software developer and looking for investors in a start-up business, she expressed interest. She told him she was an independently wealthy retiree after inventing a medical device that she’d sold to Baxter, and was now living on the royalties. Cottrill was impressed that she’d been able to retire so young. Hers was the kind of success to which he aspired.

  She was also asking him all the right questions: How was he planning to structure his company? Was he planning to find other investors?

  After she inquired if he had a business plan, he got to work on one and finished it a few weeks later. They met at his apartment to talk in November.

  Nanette said she was interested in investing $100,000 to $200,000, but she didn’t want to be active in the business. They would have to wait a bit, though, until she had the cash in hand.

  “She wasn’t liquid, so she couldn’t readily get the money and get it to me,” he said. “She said her money was parked offshore, and she had to manipulate the money around to get it, bring it onshore, and that’s tricky.”

  He never heard from her again.

  After the good news about the lawsuit came down on October 3, Nanette quietly made preparations for all the money she expected to be flowing in very soon.

  On October 17, she filed articles of incorporation for Krishel, Inc.—a title that combined her children’s
names, Kristofer and Lishelle—in the state of Nevada. Nanette named herself president, secretary, treasurer, and director of the corporation, which could issue 25,000 shares of common stock by a board of directors. She also established a trust account with the same name, and had deposited $220,000 into it by January 26, 1995. On February 13, 1995, the trust paid $2,500 to Coastal Elite Security, Eric’s private security business, and $15,000 to Julian Bailey, Eric’s criminal defense attorney.

  It appeared from these and other transactions that Nanette thought she stood to gain control of much more of Bill’s money upon his death than he’d provided for in his living will, even though she insisted she believed the opposite.

  By the time the NBPD detectives discovered the corporation and seized the balance in the trust account, which they believed she was using as a “funnel,” it contained $192,000.

  One of Eric’s coworkers from the Metropolis nightclub ran into him and Nanette at the mall soon after Bill’s murder. Seeing that their hands were full of shopping bags, he noted that Nanette didn’t seem to be grieving about her fiancée’s murder.

  Bill’s death also didn’t stop her and Eric from celebrating over New Year’s, when the couple took a two-day trip to San Francisco, to get away from it all. Nanette paid for their stay at the Amsterdam Hotel on January 2, 1995, using the credit card from Bill’s “S” corporation.

  CHAPTER 21

  Based on the notebook journal that police found in Eric’s car, he was well aware of his past mistakes, character flaws, and financial weaknesses, as well as his need for self-improvement.