Chris & Nancy

by Irvin Muchnick

  [1]. Bergman was the brother of the far better-known 60 Minutes investigative producer, Lowell Bergman, who would be portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider, the movie account of corruption in the tobacco industry.

  [2]. World Wrestling Federation Entertainment (WWFE) — shortened to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) as the resolution of a trademark dispute with the World Wildlife Fund — would migrate to the New York Stock Exchange, and as initial stock prices dropped to a more realistic plateau, McMahon lost his brief residency on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. Still, his worth settled in the high hundreds of millions of dollars, his company had capitalization of a billion-plus, and thanks to the designations of different classes of stock, the McMahon family remained firmly in control of the company.

  [3]. Mero’s ex-wife Rena (now married to mixed martial arts star Brock Lesnar) was “Sable,” the first of the WWF divas to pose for the cover of Playboy.

  [4]. Yahoo Sports enterprise reporter Peter’s excellent coverage of Operation Raw Deal is at http://sports.yahoo.com/top/news?slug=josteroids092407 &prov=yhoo&type=lgns.

  [5]. The indictment of Signature’s owners was dismissed on technicalities in September 2008, but nine other defendants had already pleaded guilty.

  [6]. In 2009, WWE released Anderson/Kennedy, whose career was plagued by injuries.

  [7]. A facsimile of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s news release on the toxicology report (undated but released on July 12, 2007) is included in the companion disk. See “Order the DVD” at the back of this book.

  CHAPTER 13

  Congress Cuts a Promo

  ON JULY 6, 2007, REPRESENTATIVE Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican, called for a Congressional investigation of “allegations of rampant steroid use in professional wrestling.” Stearns said in a press release:

  Between 1985 and 2006, 89 wrestlers have died before the age of 50. Of course, not all of these deaths can be attributed to steroid use. However, this abnormally high number of deaths of young, fit athletes should raise congressional alarms. Millions of young wrestling fans, for better or for worse, look up to professional wrestlers as role models. The Anabolic Steroid Act of 1990 makes it a felony to use and distribute these drugs. Congress needs to investigate the recent events and find out how big of a problem steroid use is in professional wrestling. Steroid use is a major public health problem that deserves Congress’ full attention.[1]

  As chair of the Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Stearns in 2005 had conducted hearings for legislation he called the Drug Free Sports Act, which would have established a single testing standard for pro sports and set up a “three strikes” progression of punishments for violators, culminating in a lifetime ban. The bill stalled, and with the takeover by Democrats of majority control of the House of Representatives following the 2006 elections, the chairmanship of the subcommittee passed to Bobby Rush of Illinois.

  Now the subcommittee’s ranking minority member, Stearns joined the Benoit cable news yak-a-thon. The same month, former wrestler George Caiazzo (“John Kronus”), a star at Extreme Championship Wrestling in the 1990s, died at age thirty-eight in the usual sudden and mysterious way. Including Chris and Nancy Benoit, Caiazzo was the industry’s seventh death in a thirty-day period[2]. Weeks later, Brian Adams, whose most prominent role had been as “Crush” in the old WWF tag team Demolition, died at forty-four of an overdose of painkillers and antidepressants. Adams also was a heavy steroid user; even in retirement, his name was found by prosecutors on the Signature Pharmacy customer list.

  In August, Stearns visited the Funking Conservatory, a wrestling school in his Ocala, Florida, district, which was owned and operated by former pro wrestling star Dory Funk Jr. On the school’s web TV show, the congressman was named a recipient of the Funking Conservatory Fighting Heart Award and presented with a pair of wrestling boots signed by Funk. Perhaps that was what the congressman was after all along. With no leverage to force hearings, anyway, minus the active support of Chairman Rush, Stearns soon relinquished his ranking position on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection for the same spot on the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee.

  Inevitably, Congressional investigations of wrestling would take a back seat to the public’s superior fascination with steroid scandals in legitimate sports. The post-Benoit atmosphere on Capitol Hill reflected this push-pull dynamic. Important developments in the baseball steroid story — whether the November 2007 indictment of home-run king Barry Bonds for lying to a federal grand jury or the report to Major League Baseball the next month by former Senator George Mitchell — either could create a rising tide of attention for the wrestling sidebar, or bury it.

  The campaign by the executive branch against steroid traffickers was already drawing the connections between real sports, “sports entertainment,” and the unregulated marketing of “wellness” products to amateur jocks, youth chasers, and the otherwise vain and foolish. But the public education process was never about logic so much as it was about the ability of politicians to get a rub from proximity to celebrity hooks and themes. Thus, when baseball’s Roger Clemens challenged the Mitchell Report finding that he had been injected with growth hormone by his personal trainer, Brian McNamee, and demanded a forum for clearing his name, Congressman Henry Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had the perfect vehicle. In February 2008 Clemens and McNamee testified before the Waxman committee, and a global Internet TV audience, with competing accounts of the former’s familiarity with the needle and the damage done. Clemens wound up suing McNamee for defamation. The Justice Department wound up investigating Clemens for perjury.

  Congressman Rush’s subcommittee of Commerce and Energy, which felt the steroid issue was more appropriately under its direct legislative purview, fired back later in the month with an omnibus hearing on steroids and sports at which the heads of the major team sports and their players’ unions said their pieces. Rush had wanted to include WWE, too. In November he emailed a Baltimore Sun reporter, “Given recent developments — the impending Mitchell report and reports of widespread abuse in professional wrestling — I believe it’s time we get a formal update on what progress is being made to eradicate steroids from all sports and sports entertainment.” Vince McMahon, however, declined the invitation to appear at the Rush subcommittee hearing on February 27, 2008. McMahon explained that his lawyer, Jerry McDevitt, was unavailable to accompany him that day.

  “I am exceptionally and extremely disappointed,” Rush said. Steroid abuse in pro wrestling “is probably worse than in any professional sport or amateur sport. . . . The number of deaths in the professional wrestling ranks is startling to say the least. The tragedy of Chris Benoit has been well documented. I want to assure Mr. McMahon that this committee fully intends to deal with the illegal steroid abuse in professional wrestling. And we hope he will be part of the solution and not part of the problem.”

  While Rush harrumphed, what the public didn’t know was that Congressional scrutiny of WWE had already played itself out behind the scenes. For all practical purposes, the game was over. In the last four months of 2007, McMahon and others from his organization were interviewed privately by counsel and investigators of the Waxman committee. That body would never issue a formal report. Instead, Waxman released his personal findings another full year later.

  ***

  Despite being injected with exhibits totaling nearly a thousand pages, the Waxman report was not a report, but only a letter, dated January 2, 2009, to John Walters, director of the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. The committee did not promulgate legislative recommendations or otherwise act on the basis of the chairman’s letter. Given the constitutionally designed tension between the White House and the legislative branch under the principle of separation of powers, the Waxman letter wa
s most deferential. Noting that he would soon be moving from Oversight and Government Reform to the chairmanship of another committee, Energy and Commerce, Waxman launched a booming punt to Walter: “I want to provide you with information from the Oversight Committee’s investigation into the use of steroids in professional wrestling, which over three million children and teens watch regularly. I also request that your office examine the systematic deficiencies in the testing policies and practices of professional wrestling that the investigation has found.”

  The supplements consisted of transcripts of interviews by committee staff with WWE executives Vince and Linda McMahon and their daughter Stephanie McMahon Levesque, and with consultants contracted to support the WWE wellness program[3]. The committee also questioned Dixie Carter, owner of the much smaller Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, and published data on TNA’s drug-testing.

  The history of WWE testing fell into three periods. In 1987, two wrestlers, The Iron Sheik and Hacksaw Jim Duggan, were pulled over by New Jersey state troopers and arrested, the former for cocaine possession and the latter for marijuana. The incident, embarrassing on its face for WWF, was made worse by the status of the busted performers as, respectively, a heel and a babyface engaged in a story line feud and therefore, by the code of kayfabe, not supposed to be seen fraternizing. McMahon later explained the origin of company drug testing this way to the House committee staffers: “The first policy was generally put in place because it was perceived, and I believe accurately so, that we had a cocaine problem. And it was the ’80s and a lot of people were engaged in that kind of party atmosphere. That is the reason why. I don’t even know if we tested for steroids in that first policy or not.” McMahon didn’t add the joke among the talent of that period: “You’re suspended if you test positive for cocaine or negative for steroids.”

  In 1991, following the prosecution of Dr. Zahorian’s Pennsylvania steroid farm, WWF undertook the second iteration of its drug-testing program, targeting banned anabolics. Zahorian’s trial revealed the shipments of packages by Zahorian to many wrestlers who testified at the trial, as well as to McMahon and Hulk Hogan, who didn’t. McMahon himself admitted to brief “experimentation” with the steroid Deca-Durabolin (nandrolone), after apparently having been turned on to it by Hogan during the filming of his flop No Holds Barred, WWF’s first Hollywood feature.

  For four years, WWE consulted on its new protocols with Dr. Mauro DiPasquale, a Canadian doctor who was such an authority on drug-testing technicalities that his 1987 book, Drug Use & Detection in Amateur Sports, was an underground classic used by steroid freaks to figure out ways to beat the system. David Black — a Ph.D. in pharmacological forensics who had spun off his lab on the Vanderbilt University campus into Aegis Analytical Laboratories, Inc., a for-profit contractor for sports leagues and law enforcement agencies — handled the specimen analysis.

  A couple of top names from that period, The Ultimate Warrior and the British Bulldog (Davey Boy Smith), were terminated, though the lack of transparency in such cases always raised suspicion that running afoul of drug tests was the pretext rather than the reason for the dismissal.

  But by 1996 the Zahorian-fueled scrutiny of wrestling had faded, and so had the WWF drug policy. McMahon was losing millions of dollars and his dominant pro wrestling market share in fierce competition with WCW. Top talent was jumping to WCW for both higher pay and the lure of a drug-testing apparatus even weaker than WWF’s. So in an October 25, 1996, company memorandum, McMahon announced, “WWF, effective immediately, is suspending drug testing and collection on a group basis.” He said the incidence of illegal and performance-enhancing drugs had become “so slight that group testing is no longer cost effective or necessary.” The promotion reserved the right “to test any individual any time for the use of illegal substances”; such testing would proceed in a handful of cases, “for cause.” In his interview with Congressional investigators, McMahon explained “cause” as “if someone were tardy consistently, if they missed dates, if they would fall asleep when they’re not supposed to fall asleep. Any aberrant behavior, I think, would have been, in all likelihood, a reason, a probable reason to test.”

  The third and current version of the policy, the wellness program, was formulated after the November 2005 death of Eddie Guerrero. Linda McMahon conceded this obvious link; Vince maintained that he had begun developing the program “prior to Eddie’s untimely demise.” David Black’s lab was brought back with an expanded role, though still only an administrative one, if not a clerical one — certainly one lacking the autonomous authority to interpret positive test results and impose penalties. This became evident when committee staff asked Black about WWE’s failure to suspend Randy Orton after his name showed up in the summer of 2007 on the Signature Pharmacy list. Black said, “Oh, sure, I would agree that that’s not good.”

  As the program evolved, Dr. Tracy Ray, a physician with the famous Birmingham, Alabama, sports medicine clinic of Dr. James Andrews, was engaged as the “medical review officer” to help make determinations on therapeutic use exemptions. Like Black’s lab, though, Ray issued recommendations, not binding decisions. Still later, Dr. Frederick Feuerbach, a cardiologist, added heart tests. The Oversight Committee examined all these aspects of the WWE wellness program.

  ***

  The pièce de résistance of the Waxman paper blizzard was the 122-page transcript of the committee staff’s December 14, 2007, interview of Vince McMahon in the Rayburn House Office Building lounge. In that session, the WWE chairman was, by turns, bullying, self-pitying, creatively evasive, and utterly in character.

  Earlier in the year, as WWE came under the microscope of the two Congressional committees, McMahon did a TV skit in which he compared these authorities to Barney Fife, the bumbling deputy sheriff portrayed by Don Knotts on the old Andy Griffith sitcom. Though dated, this was a favorite pop-culture image of McMahon’s son-in-law, Triple H, whose wife, Stephanie, came in behind it in a backstage pep talk to the wrestlers. She bucked up the nervous talent by assuring them that Vince was not worried at all. In fact, Stephanie said, he planned to wear a clown wig at the eventual hearing.

  McMahon’s brazen December interview was not a formal hearing. His disdain for the investigators there fell just short of the mocking tactic Stephanie had promised, and the act would not have played as well live in public and on C-SPAN. But lawyer McDevitt and WWE lobbyists had worked to ensure favorable ground rules.

  “Per our discussion with Jerry beforehand, we’ve not alerted the media,” senior investigator Brian Cohen said near the beginning of the session. “Our intention was that you were able to come in here without having a media circus.”

  In lieu of a media circus, McMahon and McDevitt presented a two-person private circus. The latter objected on points large and small. The former was smug and smarmy.

  When senior investigative counsel David Leviss recited routine language seeking confirmation that the interviewee was not using a recording device, McDevitt bristled: “Why would you even think we would do that? What good-faith basis would you even have to ask a question like that, whether we’re recording this. We know it’s against the rules. . . . I’m stunned by your question.”

  McMahon chimed in, “Are you guys recording any of this, other than the stenographer over here, in terms of television or radio.” No. “Just thought I would ask.”

  The stage was set for the most aggressive wise guy act since Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.

  “What is your current position with the company?” Leviss asked.

  “Do we have to go through this rigmarole? Why don’t you just get to the meat of it? You know who I am,” McMahon replied.

  A Republican campaign contributor, McMahon joked, “Why is it Republican [committee members’ staffers] are smiling and the Democrats aren’t?”

  He said he didn’t want to be penalized for WWE’s problems: “We have problems sometimes because of the nature
of our business, you know, that require things to be fixed. I had a double quad tear on both legs. You’re sympathetic with that. Thank you. If only it were genuine.”

  He said he was looking forward to receiving “a gold star” from the committee for being so cooperative. On a follow-up question, he wanted to know if the investigators were “trying to slap my wrists.” Committee counsel said they were just trying to understand a complex subject. “Great,” McMahon said. “Thank you very much. I don’t want you to spank me on the butt either.”

  He took umbrage at being asked his opinion of the possible long-term effects of steroids. “I’m not a doctor. I would suggest if I wanted to know long-term effects of any drug, I think the first place I would go is the FDA [Food and Drug Administration]. That would be the first place I would go. And, quite frankly, I don’t think the FDA tells anyone about the long-term effects of steroid usage or abusage. And I would suggest to you that that might be someplace where your committee and Mr. Waxman, since you have oversight over these areas, might want to begin.”

  Had McMahon’s company ever sought an expert medical opinion on this question? “No.”

  McMahon insisted that the chief target of the wellness policy was not steroids but the abuse of other prescription drugs. “There were a number of incidents in which, in the past, people have fallen asleep when they shouldn’t, which would indicate that they were taking too many painkillers, things of that nature.”

  When McMahon was told that unnamed witnesses had expressed to the committee their view that WWE’s business model relied on talent using “steroids or illegal drugs,” McDevitt interjected: “Vince, don’t even take these baits. You don’t have to answer those kind of questions. We’re not here to answer those. And if you think you can ever get a subpoena to ask questions like that, go ahead and try.”