By the end of the 2011 season, Gronkowski had racked up incredible numbers, setting the NFL records for receiving yards and touchdown receptions for a tight end. Playing in his shadow, Hernandez nevertheless made it into the league’s top five for tight ends in receptions, yards, and touchdown receptions. Combined, the two tight ends had 169 receptions—shattering a record the Chargers had set in 1984—and an unprecedented 2,237 receiving yards.
With Hernandez as the joker in his deck, Belichick turned the duo into the most effective tight-end pairing in NFL history.
But, like Urban Meyer before him, Belichick was discovering that Aaron Hernandez required careful supervision both on and off of the field. In fact, Meyer had warned Belichick to “keep an eye” on Hernandez.
“What Urban told Bill, as far as I know, was ‘You’ll have to stay on top of him,’” Albert Breer, the NFL reporter, explains. “Cryptic as it was, that bit of advice was right on: The minute you let him out of your sight, you’re in trouble.”
Chapter 31
On January 14, 2012, the Patriots hosted the Broncos in a divisional playoff game.
The Patriots had won thirteen games in the regular season. The Broncos had won eight. Their quarterback was Aaron’s old teammate, Tim Tebow.
In their last game, six days earlier, on January 8, the Broncos had beaten the Steelers—after losing their last three regular-season games by an average of sixteen points. On January 8, Tebow wrote “John 3:16” in his eye black. He ended up throwing for 316 yards, averaging 31.6 yards per completion.
In the first three quarters, he threw 16 passes.
The game’s only interception, by the Steelers quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, had been thrown on 3rd down and 16.
Ratings for CBS’s telecast of the game had peaked at 31.6.
It had been exactly three years since Tebow had written “John 3:16” under his eyes for the BCS National Championship Game. Within a few hours, “John 3:16” became the most searched-for term on Google, followed by “Tebow” and “Tim Tebow.”
It was a miraculous string of coincidences. But Tebow would need more than a miracle to beat the Patriots.
It was below freezing in Foxborough. The air was dry and clear but the field was rock hard. As the teams faced off, their breath shot toward the ground in billowing puffs of silver smoke. But Aaron Hernandez burst out on the fourth play of the game, running the ball forty-three yards downfield—his longest run of the season. The Patriots scored a touchdown with the next play, then scored four more in the first half.
Hernandez carried the ball five times in the game, giving the best rushing performance a tight end had ever shown in the NFL playoffs. Rob Gronkowski proved his mettle again by making ten catches for a total 145 yards. Early in the fourth quarter, Hernandez was taken out of the game with a head injury—one of several sustained in the course of his football career. But the Patriots’ victory was decisive: a 45-10 rout.
“I wish I had [Aaron’s] moves,” Gronkowski told the New York Times after the game. “He can really juke it.”
A few weeks later, the boy from Bristol found himself in Indianapolis, playing in his first—and only—Super Bowl.
American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson sang the national anthem, accompanied by a children’s choir.
As she came to the “broad stripes and bright stars,” NBC’s cameras zoomed in on Aaron.
Hernandez looked lost in thought. With his mouth slightly open, he swayed side to side as he took in the moment.
Four years earlier, in Super Bowl XLII, the Patriots had gone into the game with a perfect season under their belts. Beating their opponents, the Giants, in Arizona would have given them the first 19–0 record in NFL history. And the Patriots did hold the Giants at bay—until the very end of the fourth quarter. With 2:37 left on the clock and the ball on their 17-yard line, the Giants began a spectacular eighty-three-yard drive, culminating in David Tyree’s astonishing, one-armed catch and Plaxico Burress’s game-winning touchdown.
It was a stunning upset, and the game had been thrilling. The Fox telecast broke all previous Super Bowl records. And now, the same teams, same coaches, and same quarterbacks were facing each other again in Indiana.
The Patriots won their coin toss and deferred, giving the Giants first possession. The Giants moved the ball at first. But the Patriots pushed the Giants back for three plays in a row, sacked Eli Manning twice, got the Giants out of field goal range, and forced a punt.
Then, on the Patriots’ very first play, Tom Brady found himself in trouble in the end zone, threw the ball away, and got flagged for intentional grounding, resulting in a safety. The penalty gave the Giants a two-point lead.
By the end of the first quarter, the Giants had widened that lead to nine points. A second-quarter field goal by the Patriots brought the score to 9-3. Then, Brady led a spectacular, fourteen-play, ninety-six-yard drive, resulting in a Patriots touchdown.
Heading into halftime, Aaron’s team had taken the lead by one point.
Madonna played the halftime show. Then, in the third quarter, Hernandez caught a twelve-yard pass, faked out linebacker Chase Blackburn, and brought home another epic drive, totalling eight plays and seventy-nine yards.
Aaron’s touchdown gave the Patriots an eight-point lead.
During the regular season, Aaron’s end-zone dance had become an internet meme.
After each touchdown, Hernandez would pretend to toss money into the air—making it rain.
Now, in a revised version of the routine, Aaron pretended to open a safe, remove stacks of bills, and toss them into the air.
“I’m trying to get this money,” Aaron had told his childhood friend, Tim Washington. “That’s the goal, and I’m going to bust my ass in any possible way to get it.”
The goal had been met. Among other things, Aaron’s end-zone pantomime conveyed his cockiness—and the sense that, at the age of twenty-two, he had become a bona fide superstar.
At that moment in Indianapolis, Aaron Hernandez stood at the top of the world.
The Giants scored two field goals in the quarter and sacked Brady on a third down, injuring the quarterback’s already-tender left shoulder. But the Patriots held the score to 17-15.
In the fourth quarter, Patriots receiver Wes Welker dropped a crucial, game-winning pass.
“It’s a play I never drop,” Welker would tell the New York Times. “I always make it. And in the most critical situation, I let the team down…It’s one I’ll have to live with.”
Finally, the Giants had an opening. Late in the quarter, Eli Manning took advantage of that opening, with an eighty-eight-yard drive that culminated in one of the most bizarre plays in Super Bowl history.
The Patriots were down to their last time-out. The Giants were on their 6-yard line.
There were sixty-four seconds left on the clock.
The Giants were within twenty-four yards of a field goal. It had been four years since their kicker, Lawrence Tynes, had missed a field goal of less than thirty yards.
All that the Giants had to do now was run the clock down before kicking the field goal and winning the game.
Of course, Bill Belichick understood this. His only hope was to let the Giants score a touchdown, regain possession, and use that last minute to score again.
Eli Manning understood it, too. He passed the ball off to running back Ahmad Bradshaw, who ran hard up the middle, instead of trying to run down the clock.
If the Giants scored now, the Patriots would still have a minute of play.
As he approached the 2-yard line, Bradshaw seemed to realize that no one was trying to stop him. Manning screamed at him to fall down.
The Patriots had parted like the Red Sea.
Right at the goal line, the running back planted his feet, crouched, and spun around. But it was too late—Bradshaw’s own momentum continued to carry him over the goal line. As he flopped backward, awkwardly, the Giants scored.
The odd, ugly touchdown gave the G
iants a four-point lead, but left the Patriots fifty-seven seconds to work with—and with a quarterback like Tom Brady, fifty-seven seconds could be an eternity.
Brady’s first pass, to receiver Deion Branch, was incomplete. Hernandez lost focus and dropped an easy catch. The Giants sacked Brady again on third down, forcing the Patriots to use their final time-out, sixteen yards shy of a first down.
Branch and Hernandez redeemed themselves on the next two plays. Branch ran out of bounds, at the 33-yard line, for first down. An eleven-yard catch by Hernandez moved the Patriots up to the 44. An illegal substitution penalty against the Giants moved the Patriots up another five yards.
Then, with nine seconds left on the clock, Brady threw a perfect Hail Mary to Hernandez in the end zone.
Surrounded on all sides by Giants, Hernandez stretched his hands out and jumped for the ball.
The Giants jumped higher. As Aaron fell backward, two Giants fell on top of him.
The ball went flying. Gronkowski lunged for it, missed.
Once again, the Giants had beaten the Patriots.
Hernandez was heartbroken, he told reporters. At twenty-two, he had many more years to bring home a Super Bowl ring. But in the off-season, Aaron’s world began to crumble.
Chapter 32
Hernandez had settled in a town house in Plainville, Massachusetts, two hours east of Bristol, Connecticut. Once again, he was within driving distance of his family, and his boys. There were old friends like Carlos Ortiz to hang out with. There was Aaron’s cousin Tanya, and TL Singleton—TL and Tanya had recently gotten married. And there were new friends, like Alexander Bradley, who had met Aaron in Bristol while he was still living in Florida.
Bradley was tall and imposing, with a broad chest and broad shoulders. He was soft-spoken. And he was intelligent.
You had to be smart to be as successful as Bradley had gotten to be in his chosen profession.
Bradley sold weed—in “large amounts,” by his own estimation. He had a rap sheet: marijuana, cocaine, and battery assault were all on the menu. But Alexander Bradley and Aaron Hernandez got along well. The first time they’d met, Hernandez had no cash with which to buy marijuana. Bradley had given him an ounce on the house.
“I used to give him credit for weed all the time,” Bradley would say. “He didn’t have much money before he got drafted. I loaned him money…I wound up getting into it with my girl over hanging out with him so much. I wasn’t around as much. She was like, ‘If you want to hang out with your boy, hang out with your boy, but this is not going to work out with us.’”
Hernandez and Bradley cemented their friendship by smoking and playing video games for hours on end, and when Hernandez became a Patriot, and moved back to New England, he and Bradley saw each other much more often—three or four times a week, with phone calls and texts on the days in between. They gambled together, driving to Foxwoods Casino or Mohegan Sun. They went to clubs in Boston, Hartford, and Providence. Once, Hernandez took Bradley on a vacation to Miami.
“We were definitely best friends by 2012,” Bradley would tell the jury, during his testimony in one of Aaron’s subsequent murder trials.
On Sunday nights, he and Aaron went to Cure Lounge, a nightclub in Boston’s theater district. Waitresses carried buckets of champagne around its big room, trailing comet tails of dry ice. Sometimes, at the bar, or on the dance floor, patrons would recognize Hernandez and stare.
“He would ask me, ‘Why don’t people stare at you like that?’” Bradley would say.
“I would respond to him, pretty much, ‘Because I’m not you.’
“He didn’t like it when people stared at him,” Bradley explained. “He felt like they were trying him. What I usually would say was, ‘You’re a famous NFL player. That’s what’s gonna happen. It’s not that big of a deal.’ In other words, I would try to explain to him that people weren’t trying him all the time. It’s just the situation—the position he was in—and he didn’t need to overreact all the time to that type of scenario.”
Bradley thought that Hernandez was paranoid. The average person wouldn’t be bothered to this extent. But it began to seem as if, every time they went out, Bradley had to step in to stop Hernandez from starting trouble.
“He acted in a manner—like a tough guy all the time. He had a problem with things that most people don’t have a problem with.”
A few months after the Super Bowl, Hernandez and Bradley were at a Boston nightclub called Rumor.
“What are you looking at?” Hernandez said to a man he’d caught staring.
“I’m looking at you,” the man said.
Hernandez got up in the other man’s face.
“You lost me a lot of money on the Super Bowl,” the man protested.
The room grew tense, but Bradley stepped in, defused the situation, and got Hernandez to walk away.
Of course, Aaron also did things for Alexander Bradley. He supplied Bradley with Patriots tickets. In return, Bradley kept Hernandez supplied with all the weed he could smoke.
According to Bradley, Hernandez went through as much as four ounces a week.
Bradley did other things for his friend, too, acting more like a personal assistant, at times, than a friend. Bradley says that he would drop Aaron off at his cousin Tanya’s house on Lake Avenue, where Hernandez would sometimes spend days doing drugs with Tanya, TL Singleton, and their friends.
And, in addition to the weed supply, Bradley serviced Hernandez’s cars, did his shopping, and supplied him with firearms.
“He felt like people thought he was soft or something—and he was out to prove something,” Bradley explained. “He was fed up with the whole feeling-as-if-people-were-trying-him situation, so he wanted a firearm to protect himself, in the event…”
According to Alexander Bradley, downtown Boston was the place where Hernandez felt he was “tested” most often.
“In the Cure area,” Bradley said. “That’s where he was on heightened alert all the time.”
Jeff London was a promoter for Cure Lounge and other nightclubs in Boston. He met Aaron during his rookie year on the Patriots and, over time, grew to consider him a “good friend.” London took care of several Patriots who went out clubbing. From time to time, he’d ask female patrons if they wanted to meet one football player or another.
But, like Alexander Bradley, London noticed that Hernandez could be paranoid and “super-aggressive”—and that he became more paranoid, and more aggressive, as time went by.
“I’ve seen him punch people,” London says. “I’ve seen him do everything. Five times. Ten times. He’d smack people, punch them in the head, get violent with them.”
Because Hernandez was big and intimidating, he tended to get away with it.
“They would just walk away after he hit them,” says London.
One day, despite their friendship and the promoter’s own size (6′1″, 270 pounds), Hernandez picked a fight with London.
The promoter had spotted Hernandez, Bradley, and a third man walking into Cure. He approached to see if there was anything that he could do for the tight end.
“Is everything cool?” London asked. “Do you need anything? You up for a table?”
Hernandez sneered at him: “You’re a fed, a snitch. Get the fuck away from me.”
“It took me by surprise,” London would say, “because, obviously, I’m neither. The bouncers came over ’cause they saw me and I was in shock. His two boys came over to me and I was trying to explain to them: ‘What is he talking about?’”
As he so often did, Bradley stepped in to cool the situation. By now, this had become a typical night out with Aaron. Nevertheless, Bradley and Hernandez kept on going to Cure.
Chapter 33
Early in the summer of 2012, Hernandez gave Alexander Bradley $350, which Bradley used to buy a .357 Magnum. Silver, with a brown handle, the gun had a couple of rounds in the chamber when Bradley bought it. The next time that Hernandez came down to Bristol, Bradley
handed the firearm over.
“It’s straight,” Aaron said as he inspected the gun, meaning that he thought the firearm looked good.
A few weeks later, on July 15, 2012, Hernandez met Bradley at Bradley’s place.
It was a Sunday, their favorite night to go out.
The two friends had a few drinks, a couple of blunts, and talked about where to go: West Hartford, Providence, Boston. They settled on Cure. As they walked to their car, Bradley noticed that Hernandez was holding a silver revolver.
Aaron did not have his club clothes with him, so Bradley had loaned him jeans, a T-shirt, and a Cardinals hat. They walked out to Aaron’s Toyota 4Runner, an “endorsement car” that the Jack Fox Toyota dealership in Providence had lent him. Popping the hood, Hernandez stuffed the gun down into the engine block. Then, with Bradley driving, they set out for Boston, pulling into a parking garage on Tremont Street after midnight and walking around the corner to Cure.
Just ahead of them, a group of five friends—all of them Cape Verdean men—were trying to enter the club. One after the next, Daniel de Abreu, Safiro Furtado, Aquilino Freire, Raychides Gomes-Sanches, and Gerson Lopes took out their IDs and paid the entrance fee. At the same time, Aaron and Alex stepped into a special entrance for VIPs, skipping the line and the $20 cover. But Cure had a no-hats policy. There were no exceptions, not even for VIPs. Hernandez and Bradley both had to give their hats up to the bouncers.
Aaron was not happy about it. As he went in, he gave one of the bouncers a hard time.
Then, he and Bradley went straight to the bar.
Daniel de Abreu, who was twenty-nine, and Safiro Furtado, who was twenty-eight, had both been born in Cape Verde, an archipelago off the African coast, but they had met in America.
All-American Murder Page 8
