Authors: Jeff Benedict,Don Yaeger
You will not find this definition in the Minnesota Vikings media guide. Rather, it comes from the
Columbia Encyclopedia,
second edition. The authors’ extensive investigation reveals, however, that this definition fits a disturbing number of the NFL’s version of the Vikings. While the Dallas Cowboys have been vilified as a lawless bunch of renegades during the 1990s, the Vikings may have been the most out-of-control team in the NFL.
Eden Prairie, Minnesota, March 3, 1997
According to police reports, it was dusk when Officer Kevin White of the Eden Prairie Police Department was dispatched to a reported car accident at the intersection of Prairie Center Drive and Valley View Road. Car parts and debris lay scattered across the area. A black Toyota Camry appeared to have rear-ended a gray Jeep Grand Cherokee.
Fifty-five-year-old Corrinne Altanette, the driver of the Cherokee, was already outside her vehicle. She reported being struck from behind by the Camry while sitting at a red light.
Another officer at the scene soon informed Officer White that the driver of the Camry was acting very strange and reeked of alcohol. As White approached the Camry’s driver’s side window, the occupant said his name was Carl Hargrave. When asked to produce his insurance papers, Hargrave started retrieving a black bag from the glove box. After twice being asked what was in the bag, Hargrave snapped, “None of your f—in’ business!” White wrote in his report that night. Hargrave then handed White an identification card and exclaimed, “This is who I am!”
The card read, “Minnesota Vikings,” and identified Hargrave as the running backs coach.
Asked to step out of the car to perform sobriety tests, Hargrave asked, “Can’t we work this out? Why don’t you just take me home?”
Asked again to step from the car, Hargrave became indignant. “You’re pissing me off,” he announced to White, prompting the officer to radio for backup.
With Hargrave detained until other officers arrived, the coach went from appeals for leniency to making threats. “He advised me that I was making a mistake, and that I should know better,” said White’s report. “I asked what he meant by that, and he said, ‘[You] should know.’”
With the arrival of backup, White and another officer asked Hargrave to step from the car so they could search the vehicle for weapons. “F--- this shit!” Hargrave said. “You’re starting to piss me off.” Once out of the car, the officers made one final attempt to administer sobriety tests. “F--- no,” responded Hargrave. “Arrest me. Arrest me, motherf---er.”
Handcuffed in the back of White’s cruiser, Hargrave continued his profanity-laced threats all the way to the police station. “I’m gonna get you, you motherf---er,” shouted Hargrave at White, one of the only black officers on the Eden Prairie force. “You don’t know who you are messing with. You know you are going on what the white lady said to you. You motherf---er.”
“Mr. Hargrave told me that ‘I’m gonna find you and kick your mother f---in’ ass,’” reported White.
Once at the station, Hargrave refused to let officers administer the implied consent advisory. He also refused to be photographed for booking and repeatedly interrupted officers’ attempts to read him his Miranda rights. The following is an excerpt from the Eden Prairie Police Department Intoxication Report Form:
OFFICER
: Do you understand these [Miranda] rights?
HARGRAVE
: No.
OFFICER
: Do you wish to talk with us at this time?
HARGRAVE
: F--- you.
OFFICER
: Have you been in an accident?
HARGRAVE
: I was in no accident.
OFFICER
: Tell me what happened—why did an officer stop you?
HARGRAVE
: I don’t know why you guys are f---in’ with me.
Officer Brent Griffith was asked to enter the booking room in hopes of de-escalating Hargrave’s belligerence. At six foot five and 275 pounds, Griffith’s arrival temporarily quieted Hargrave. But Hargrave’s sudden mood change was not due to Griffith’s imposing size. Instead, it was because Hargrave must have sensed a chance to catch a break. Griffith, a recently retired NFL lineman, had played briefly for the Vikings and was familiar to the coach. “I just told him that things would be better for everyone if he just cooperated with the lead officer,” Griffith explained in an interview for this book.
After agreeing to take the breathalyzer test, Hargrave falsely attempted to blow into the intoxilyzer. Repeatedly told that he was not blowing into the device, Hargrave reverted to asking if they could “work it out.” When Hargrave received no preferential treatment, he again turned violent. Griffith and White were forced to wrestle him to the ground, handcuff him, and escort him to the county jail. “It was an uncomfortable situation,” Griffith explained. “But it doesn’t matter who you are. We can’t start bending the rules just because of who you are. There were no favors given.”
Hargrave was charged with five criminal counts: refusal to submit to chemical testing, driving under the influence of alcohol, obstructing legal process, disorderly conduct, and careless driving.
Hargrave, the police soon discovered, had been through this drill before. In 1994, shortly after being hired by the Vikings, he had been pulled over for drunk driving and refused to take a breathalyzer. On May 20 of that year he pleaded guilty to reckless driving and had his Minnesota driving privileges revoked. As a result of the prior refusal to be tested after a DUI stop, Hargrave was now facing jail time, since under Minnesota law, a second refusal of a breathalyzer qualified as a “gross misdemeanor.”
There was a reason Hargrave didn’t understand why the Eden Prairie police, and in particular an ex-Viking-turned-cop, would not cut him a break. As the authors discovered and volumes of evidence will show, Hargrave had watched his fellow coaches and players avoid accountability for their actions time and time again, often with the help of the team’s head of security, Steve Rollins, an ex-cop-turned-Viking. In particular, Hargrave himself had been previously rescued by Rollins after Hargrave’s relentless attempts to bed a Minneapolis-area nude dancer nearly exposed a deep, dark secret: that head coach Dennis Green had already bedded the same woman, impregnated her, and paid her to have an abortion in order to save his career. More on that later. First, some history.
H
eading into the 1992 season, Vikings head coach Jerry Burns was in the final year of his contract. With management having changed hands the previous year and the recent naming of Roger Headrick as the club’s new chief executive officer, Burns knew he would be replaced at season’s end. Aware that players sensed his lame duck status, Burns took measures to insure no sordid off-the-field incidents tainted his last year.
Days before training camp opened in Mankato, Minnesota, Burns called a private meeting with Dan Endy, the Vikings’ director of operations, to come up with a strategy. Much of the following account of what took place in that meeting is based on an interview with Endy, who was fired by the Vikings in 1993. The circumstances leading up to Endy’s dismissal from the Vikings are detailed later in the chapter.
“I don’t think it is any surprise that these guys know that this is my final year,” Burns told Endy in their pre-training-camp meeting. “I don’t want the inmates to run the asylum. I don’t want one of those Dutcher things.” Jim Dutcher, ex-head coach at the University of Minnesota, was forced to resign under heavy media scrutiny after three of his players were arrested for gang-raping a woman in the team’s hotel during a road trip.
At Burns’s direction, Endy drafted a memo to team president Roger Headrick, requesting the creation of two new part-time security positions. “This is a great idea,” Headrick wrote in a response relayed to Burns through Endy. “But instead of going with two half-time guys, why don’t we go with one full-time guy.” Headrick, according to Endy, added, “It has to be a minority.”
Endy and former Vikings linebacker Scott Studwell, who had been recently hired to work in the front office, solicited the league office for potential job candidates. After being telephoned by Studwell, Charlie Jackson from the NFL’s security division forwarded the names of two former law enforcement officers from the Minnesota area who were minorities. The league has long compiled the names of minority job candidates in a variety of fields and encourages the individual teams to hire from the list.
Endy, Studwell, and Headrick interviewed both candidates and decided against hiring an ex-FBI agent, instead offering the position to Steve Rollins. A former police officer with the St. Paul Police Department, Rollins appeared the perfect fit for coach Burns’s intentions. “Burns was not a real disciplinarian,” said Endy. “Jerry’s idea of discipline to the team was ‘I don’t want to have to be a chickenshit coach. Don’t put me in a situation where I have to fine you. I’m leaving it up to you guys to behave accordingly.’
“Rollins came in with the suit. He was very formal, authoritative.”
Rollins may have looked good in a suit, but he did not look so good on paper. The Vikings, apparently, were unaware that the man recommended by the NFL had a history of misconduct that ultimately ended in him turning in his badge.
Citing “personal reasons” in his resignation notice to the police force dated August 30, 1988, Rollins was the subject of discharge proceedings due to recurring police misconduct. The chief of the St. Paul Police Department sought Rollins’s dismissal from the force after outstanding arrest warrants were issued against him for repeated motor vehicle violations in 1985, 1986, and 1987. “Aside from the obvious concern of having an officer in the Department who is in violation of the very laws he is expected to enforce,” wrote Chief McCutcheon in a December 3, 1987, letter to Rollins, “if a warrant is not taken care of, your driver’s license will be suspended and you will be unable to perform your duties as a Police Officer.”
Rollins was also facing a four-count indictment involving two felony charges of intent to escape taxes, one charge of unregistered use of a vehicle, and one charge for failure to transfer ownership of a vehicle. In a Waiver and Resignation statement signed by Rollins the day before he resigned, Rollins admitted to the following: “On August 29, 1988, I, Stephen Rollins … approached Tom Hughes, Special Prosecutor for the City of Saint Paul, and proposed a settlement of the criminal matter against me…. I suggested that the City dismiss charges against me in return for my resignation from the Police Department, and withdrawal of the appeal of my discharge.”
Internal affairs files for the City of St. Paul Police Department reveal that Rollins was reprimanded fifteen times between 1976 and 1987 for police procedure violations ranging from improper use of force to driving with a suspended license. For example, on July 27, 1983, the deputy chief of the St. Paul Police Department censured Rollins for the “improper use of physical force to restrain” a citizen.
“I cannot agree with the technique you used to resolve what could be a haven for the individuals who you are trying to keep off of your beat,” wrote the deputy chief. “Your actions came very close to false imprisonment, which is not a viable alternative for police officers to resolve conflict situations.”
The NFL declined to explain how individuals with a record such as Rollins’s ended up on their list of highly recommended job candidates.
W
ithin days of Minnesota naming Rollins head of team security, reports started surfacing within the organization regarding his past record. Rollins, according to Endy, quickly quieted the rumors with his handling of an incident that could have exposed the team to unwanted negative publicity. One evening at training camp, All-Pro defensive tackle Keith Millard crashed his Corvette while driving through a Hardee’s restaurant parking lot. The accident reportedly caused property damage to the Hardee’s and left Millard’s car undrivable. Before police arrived at Hardee’s, Millard got a ride back to the team’s residence hall with a teammate, leaving his Corvette at the accident scene.
According to Endy, who was at the Vikings’ dorm when police showed up to question Millard, Rollins successfully discouraged the senior officer, who was on friendly terms with the Vikings from previous training camps, from seeing Millard or administering a breathalyzer test. As a result, Millard was never charged in the incident.
One former Vikings player, who is both a friend of Millard’s and quite familiar with the Hardee’s incident, said that the way Rollins dealt with the situation convinced players that “this guy could cover up anything.” However it was the Vikings’ brass who were most impressed. “Steve was lauded, like, ‘Hey, this was a great thing that he had done,’” confirmed Endy, who was director of communications before being promoted to director of team operations. “Headrick was proud. Steve was his hire. And from a publicity standpoint it may have been a great thing. But from a health standpoint, we had a chemically dependent defensive tackle who needed help, and we glossed it over.”
On the surface, a simple drunk driving incident hardly seems worth the effort to cover up. However, Millard had a history of drunk driving arrests, which had been well reported in the Minneapolis press. At the time of the Hardee’s incident, he had just recently come off probation for a 1990 conviction for reckless driving, which was reduced from DUI. His 1990 arrest had touched off a firestorm of criticism in the Minneapolis press that exposed a major drunk driving problem among the Vikings players. Millard became the thirteenth Vikings player in a four-year span to be arrested for driving drunk.
Thanks in part to Rollins’s ability to minimize exposure this time, the team did not have to have their drunk driving problems resurrected on the front pages of the papers all over again. With the arrival in 1992 of head coach Dennis Green and his new staff, the Millard incident was like a preseason warm-up for the kind of public relations problems that Rollins would be asked to squelch in his capacity as director of team security.
I
n February of 1992, after being named as the Vikings’ new head coach, Dennis Green began assembling his staff. He offered Richard Solomon, an old teammate and roommate at the University of Iowa, the job as defensive backs coach. Solomon, who had no prior coaching experience at the pro level, accepted and immediately moved to the Minneapolis area. Along with a group of other new assistants who needed temporary housing until they could purchase new homes and relocate their families, Solomon moved into a hotel in Bloomington, one of a number of Minneapolis-area hotels where the Vikings maintained a business account. The hotel, which was used primarily by the team to accommodate players and coaches while in transition, used a number of representatives to personally oversee the Vikings’ account. One of Dan Endy’s responsibilities as director of team operations was to work directly with the hotel’s representatives. It was in this capacity that Endy quickly became embroiled in a controversy that would ultimately cost him his job.