The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  In his first remarks after Odin Lloyd’s murder, Robert Kraft described himself as “duped” by Hernandez, saying he’d had no knowledge of his troubles. That is arrant nonsense: every team knew him as a badly damaged kid with a circle of dangerous friends and a substance problem. Once a Patriot, Hernandez practically ran up a banner that said STOP ME! I’M OUT OF CONTROL! He’d get high all the time driving away from games, say friends of the family, “smoking three or four blunts” in the ride back to his place. He avoided all contact with teammates after practice, even among the guys in his position group, which is unheard of in the league. Since his arrest, several Patriots have called him a “loner,” saying, “No one hung with him.” Retired lineman Matt Light went a step further, telling the Dayton Daily News that he “never believed in anything Hernandez stood for.”

  Instead of teammates, Hernandez built a cohort of thugs, bringing stone-cold gangsters over to the house to play pool, smoke chronic, and carouse. “One of his uncles went to Boston to talk to him, and these scary-looking dudes are hanging out in his game room,” says a friend. “They wouldn’t say hi or shake his hand, and when he brought it up to Aaron, he laughed him off.”

  There’s broad agreement that the problem snowballed once Hernandez signed his megadeal last summer ($40 million over a five-year term, including the largest signing bonus, $12.5 million, ever given to a tight end). In an alleged letter to a supporter from jail, he acknowledged that he “fell off especially after making all that money,” though he added, with the diplomacy of a preschool kid, that “all the people who turned on me will feel like crap” when they hear “not guilty.”

  But even before fixing his name to the deal, Hernandez raised the stakes on bad behavior. Six weeks earlier, at a Boston club called Cure Lounge, he and his crew got into a scrap with some men from Cape Verde, a bar brawl that bred two murders, police suspect. Afterward, a few blocks from the club, a silver Toyota 4Runner with license plates from Rhode Island pulled up beside the sedan carrying the Cape Verdean men. A gun came out the window of the Toyota, spraying the sedan. Safiro Furtado and Daniel Abreu were killed by the barrage. The Toyota sped off and went missing for months, despite a statewide search by Boston cops. It turned up a year later, undriven and caked in dust, in the garage of Hernandez’s Uncle Tito back in Bristol.

  Hernandez had a dismal season, hobbled by an ankle sprain that cost him six games and about half his yardage from 2011. Then, a week after the Patriots’ loss to the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC Championship game, he and a friend named Alexander Bradley were pulled over by a state trooper on Boston’s Southeast Expressway, going 105 miles per hour. Bradley, who was behind the wheel, was charged with driving under the influence and speeding, but once again Hernandez (who stuck his head out the window and said, “Trooper, I’m Aaron Hernandez—it’s okay”) walked away with no summons or team-imposed fine. Weeks later, driving from a strip club in Miami, he allegedly shot Bradley in the face, then dumped him, badly hurt and bleeding but alive, in an alley north of the city. (Bradley, keeping it gangsta, declined to tell cops who had shot him and where. No street code says you can’t get paid for it, though; he’s filed suit against Hernandez in civil court.) Then, months after that, Hernandez and his crew got in a beef outside a nightclub in Rhode Island. Someone matching Ernest Wallace’s description pulled a .22, then ditched it beneath a car. Police traced the piece to a Florida gun shop near Wallace’s parents’ house, where a second .22 had been purchased that would later turn up in the woods near Hernandez’s mansion in the wake of the murder.

  By now, even Hernandez seems to have sensed that he was wildly off course. According to a source close to Hernandez, he flew to the NFL Combine in Indianapolis this past February and confided to Belichick that his life was in danger. Hernandez was trying to break away from the gangsters he’d befriended. He worried “they were actually trying to kill him,” says the source. Hernandez began arming himself, stashing a rifle in his gym bag and installing a 14-camera security system at his mansion. “He was very paranoid, but was that because of his addictions or because he was trying to leave the gang?”

  This past spring he skipped out on team training drills, going to California to rehab an aching shoulder and take a much-needed break from New England. But while out there, according to the source, he blew off sessions with his therapist, Alex Guerrero, and stood up Tom Brady, who was running a camp for Pats receivers. Worse, the police were called out to his Hermosa Beach rental on March 25, summoned by his fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins, after a loud dispute during which Hernandez put his fist through a window. No arrest was made, but word got back to Belichick, who exploded and tendered notice: any more disruptions and he’d be traded or cut at the end of the 2013 season.

  Mortified, Hernandez returned to Boston; Belichick, per a close Hernandez associate, had told him to lay low, rent a safe house for a while. In May, he leased a condo in Franklin, Massachusetts, that Carlos Ortiz referred to as the “flophouse,” 12 miles from his mansion in North Attleborough. Wallace moved in there, telling neighbors his name was “George,” and drove Hernandez to and from team workouts. Neighbors described them as “quiet” or absent, until the day after Lloyd’s shooting, when Wallace and Ortiz camped out there before taking off in a rented Chrysler for Bristol, according to a statement Ortiz gave cops.

  En route, said Ortiz, Wallace claimed Hernandez had shot and killed Lloyd. Of course, Ortiz also said he’d stayed in the backseat and couldn’t say exactly what happened, a contention everyone but his government-appointed lawyer laughs at. The dust-addled Ortiz, the only one of the three men not indicted, is now the star witness in the case against Hernandez, and his account is probably worthless if he takes the stand. Meanwhile, Hernandez is paying a team of strong lawyers to defend him in his first-degree murder and weapons charges, and there’s speculation he’s paying the legal bills for Wallace, who is being charged as an accessory. It will shock no one if Aaron Hernandez tries to save himself by turning on his friend Ortiz. He and Wallace could tell the same story in court: that it was Ortiz who shot Lloyd out of misplaced panic, and that all they’d meant to do was rough him up.

  Whatever went down in that industrial park, Hernandez’s motive remains unclear. Had Lloyd, one of the few people Hernandez hung with who wasn’t mobbed up or in the drug game, done something else that night to set him off? Did Hernandez mistake Lloyd’s West Indian cousins for some of the Cape Verdeans he’d come to blows with? Or did the argument begin as one thing and end as another, broadening into a beef over drugs and money, as was widely conjectured?

  “Don’t matter what it’s about: Aaron’s out of his mind,” says one friend of the family. “He’s been twisted on dust now for more than a year, which is when all of this crazy shit started.”

  The friend has an intimate knowledge of the player’s family and his thug-life cohorts from Bristol. He also knows plenty about angel dust, or phencyclidine, the scourge of the 1970s. Before crack came along in the mid-’80s, dust was the madman’s drug of choice. First marketed in the ’50s as a surgical anesthetic, it was banned for its psych-ward side effects: mania, delirium, violent hallucinations. Cops shake their heads in awe at the crazy-making powers of dust: “Kids fighting four of us and running naked down the street because their body temp is going through the roof,” says Morrell, the Bristol detective. For his department, alas, dust isn’t a dead letter; it’s still one of the drugs of abuse in Hernandez’s hometown. “We have been experiencing a resurgence in the use of angel dust. We deal with it all the time.”

  As befits a crime studded with gross stupidities—killing Lloyd minutes from Hernandez’s house, drawing a bread-crumb trail of texts and calls to the victim’s cell, then leaving that phone on the dead man’s body for the cops to find—the story ends with an idiot run by Wallace and Ortiz. They would lead cops back to Uncle Tito’s house in Bristol—the very place from which Hernandez’s life vectored off course—leaving evidence out for the cops to bag up. Ortiz was
picked up a week later, while Wallace had the sense to leave the state, at least, fleeing to Georgia, then Miramar, Florida, where he was arrested; Tanya Cummings-Singleton bought him a bus ride with her credit card. She, meanwhile, sits in jail for contempt and accessory charges, having refused to testify to the grand jury weighing murder charges against Hernandez. Her husband, T. L., was being sought by cops in connection with the double killing of the Cape Verdean men last July. But before detectives could come to take him in for questioning, he hopped into his car and took off with a former girlfriend sitting beside him. Hitting a curve at high speed, T. L. made no attempt to brake; he jumped the curb and flew 100 feet into a wall of a country club. The woman survived, but T. L. was killed on impact—a loose end neatly knotted; an accomplice who’d never flip.

  And so here we are now, a year out from trial, and the open-and-shut case against Aaron Hernandez probably won’t be as easy to prosecute as it seems. Without the gun used in the shooting, a persuasive motive, or a witness to the crime and its planning, the state’s chances of winning a conviction on murder in the first will depend entirely on circumstantial evidence. There’s no shortage of that, of course, and much of it is compelling: the security tape seems to show Hernandez with the black .45 the night of the crime; the videotapes that track his car’s movements, from the time he picked up Lloyd at his house in Boston to the second they entered the industrial park before the shooting; the shell casing recovered from the rental car that matched the ones found beside Lloyd.

  To undercut the damning evidence, Hernandez may have to take the stand and provide an explanation, says Gerry Leone, the former district attorney of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, who convicted Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, among other high-profile cases. “You put him on if your defense case hinges on something that can only come from him”—for instance, the claim that he always carried a gun when leaving the house, protection from the gangsters who wanted him dead, and that it was Ortiz, not Hernandez, who pulled the trigger after a botched attempt to scare Lloyd. “If he says he was shocked by the shooting and only agreed to scare him, that might get him off,” says renowned Boston attorney Anthony Cardinale, who repped John Gotti and other mobsters and has taught at Harvard Law School. “It’s not a crime to be there if you had no reason to expect that someone would be shot.”

  A bigger problem for the prosecution is the all-or-nothing charge they’ve levied against Hernandez. In deciding to try him for murder in the first, they’ll be asking jurors to send a young man to prison for the rest of his life, no parole. “In these cases, juries think that reasonable doubt means no doubt at all,” says Cardinale. “If the defense can create even the slightest crack, he may walk like George Zimmerman walked—probably guilty, but the DA overcharged.”

  So call him stupid or sloppy or a menace to society, Hernandez keeps catching the breaks. He’s gotten rich running to daylight after being hemmed in, shedding tacklers and accusers to escape. If he eludes pursuit again, there will be blame to go around, but no one can claim they didn’t see it coming. He’s been getting away with murder, figuratively, if not literally, his whole life.

  DAVID MERRILL

  The One-Legged Wrestler Who Conquered His Sport, Then Left It Behind

  FROM DEADSPIN.COM

  THE FIRST MATCH of the last tournament of Anthony Robles’s wrestling career began with his dropping to the mat in a tripod—two hands and a knee. There was no other limb to use; Robles had been born without a right leg, and now the bottom of his maroon-and-gold Arizona State University singlet hung shriveled and slack on that side. His opponent in the 125-pound weight class, a Virginia sophomore named Matt Snyder, loomed over him, twice his height, even in a wrestler’s crouch.

  It was March 2011, and Robles was in Philadelphia for the NCAA Division I championships, college wrestling’s preeminent tournament. As a sophomore, he had finished an auspicious fourth; the next year, he had slipped to seventh. Now, as a senior, he was the top seed—a first for a one-legged wrestler. His remarkable achievement had drawn a throng of reporters to the pre-tournament press conference, where, to widespread bewilderment, Robles had announced that he would retire from wrestling at the end of the championships. He would not compete internationally. He would not try out for the London Olympics. He would become a motivational speaker, he had told the baffled reporters and fans before him, and turn his back on wrestling at the moment he had come to dominate it.

  Snyder circled. Robles pawed his opponent’s head, then shot forward, viperlike, at Snyder’s legs. There was no time to sprawl away. In an instant, Robles took Snyder down and began shifting side to side, looking for an opportunity to lever him onto his back. Seconds later, he found it. Securing Snyder’s hands and hips, Robles rolled across his own back, creating such torque that Snyder was forced to give up his position or risk serious injury. Snyder yielded, and Robles flipped him.

  The crowd erupted as Robles held his man inverted, watching the referee count off points. Robles let Snyder right himself, then turned him again. And again and again and again. In the second period, with the score 17–1, the ref waved off the match—a technical fall, like a TKO in boxing, saving the loser needless pain and humiliation.

  “He just completely dominated me,” Snyder said later. “I was like, ‘This isn’t fair.’”

  Something amazing would unfold over the next few days: a one-legged man would climb to the pinnacle of a sport that selects for such anatomical homogeneity that competitors of different weight classes frequently look like Russian nesting dolls of one another. What Robles accomplished that weekend in Philadelphia was unprecedented in his sport, perhaps in any sport. But what he planned to do afterward left everyone just as dumbstruck. Why was he walking away?

  The first time I met Anthony Robles—and nearly every time after—he was intercepted by a fan. We had arranged an interview at a Sheraton in St. Louis, where he was in town to provide color commentary for ESPN during the 2012 Division I championships. Robles loped into the hotel lobby on a pair of aluminum crutches—powerfully built with a handsome, gap-toothed grin that faintly recalled a young Mike Tyson.

  I turned to greet him, and as I did an enormous man stepped between us. Four-time Super Bowl champion linebacker Matt Millen wanted to introduce himself to Robles and, not surprisingly, I couldn’t get around him. Fifteen minutes passed. At last, Robles looked over to his agent, Gary Lewis, who maneuvered me between his client and Millen. Each man, the wrestler and the linebacker, extended a beefy hand in my direction.

  It was a daunting decision. Wrestlers are known for their prodigious hand strength. Oklahoma alumnus Danny Hodge can still crush an apple in one hand at the age of 80. But Robles’s grip is fearsome even by wrestling standards. Opponents have rarely been able to pry it off with one hand, and only sometimes with two. Many have ended up surrendering to his hold and have focused instead on limiting the damage he could do with it. “I couldn’t even think of breaking his lock,” one candid victim told me.

  I opted for the evil I didn’t know and tentatively placed my hand in Millen’s massive paw. He squeezed it, hard, and when he finally returned it to me intact, I felt as if I had gotten away with something splendid and improbable, like a deer bolting free of an anaconda’s coil. Then I turned to Robles, whose handshake turned out to be restrained, even gentle. I wondered at this as we ducked into the hotel’s sticky-floored lounge, which was not due to open for several hours, and where I imagined his fans wouldn’t find us.

  Twenty minutes later, a middle-aged man with a Negro League baseball jersey peered into the darkened banquette where I was interviewing Robles. He was missing a number of teeth, and he looked like he hadn’t been eating well. “Man! Man!” he cried out when he discovered the person he had come looking for, and fell sobbing into Robles’s arms. “You’re a good brother! You’re a good brother!” the man said, over and over again. Robles held him, and they talked for what seemed like a long time.

  After the man left, blubber
ing an apology for interrupting, I asked Robles if he knew who he was. Robles said no. I asked if that kind of thing had happened before. Robles looked at me evenly. “It happens a lot,” he said.

  Later that day, while Robles, Lewis, and I were walking the concession-stand loop of the stadium, a staffer stopped Lewis to ask if he needed a wheelchair for—pointing at Robles, on his crutches—“that one.” Robles demurred so generously that the staffer smiled with the satisfaction of someone who has just discharged an important civic duty.

  Wrestling has barely changed since it was practiced in ancient Babylon, and one of the axiomatic truths of the sport is (or was) that success depends on a pair of strong, flexible legs. From my own high school experience, I learned that a wrestler can compensate for minor physical idiosyncrasies—a torso that is too long, say, or arms that don’t straighten all the way. But to excel at the Division I level, you need legs like a Clydesdale’s.