Authors: Jeff Benedict,Don Yaeger
40 for other public safety crimes, including illegal use or possession of a weapon and trespassing. (Note: Trespassing was included only when connected to a domestic violence complaint or an incident involving multiple defendants where someone was charged with a more serious offense.)
As astonishing as these numbers are, it may well be only the tip of the iceberg, albeit an iceberg of
Titanic
proportions. Challenges posed by restrictive public access laws, a near-complete block-out of juvenile criminal records, and the transient nature of NFL players made it impossible to have a complete accounting of all NFL players’ criminal histories.
For example, Oakland Raiders running back Derrick Fenner, who is among the 509 players whose history was checked by the authors, was charged with murder in 1987 in Washington, D.C. (He was ultimately exonerated.) This arrest does not show up in the authors’ statistics because the District of Columbia is not among the jurisdictions that provided criminal history records to the authors.
In all, the authors discovered over fifty additional players whose criminal histories
as adults
included serious crimes. But these players were
not
included in the authors’ statistics because their crimes were discovered by methods that failed to meet the strict standard set for inclusion in the database, as explained in the Authors’ Note. (In other words, records checks were done in only one state or in a state where the players resided for less than five years.)
Put simply, the number of crimes (264) and criminals (109) recorded here are conservative.
H
ave you done a study asking how many serious crimes are committed by a group of 1,700 lawyers or 1,700 plumbers?” asked Aiello, when contacted by the authors for this book. “How are you supposed to know if this [21 percent of the players formally charged with serious crimes] is unusual?”
Yes, all this data begs the question: Are professional athletes in general or NFL players in particular more prone to criminal behavior than the general population? The answer depends on who you compare them to. If you compare them to their ethnic, demographic, and economic “peers”—adult males under thirty-two who have completed college and earn at least six-figure salaries (of the 509 players in the survey, all earn over $150,000 per year—the minimum salary in the NFL—and most earn considerably more, and virtually all attended four years of college)—NFL players would clearly be overrepresented. Typically, college-educated, high-income earners do not commit violent crime.
However, it is somewhat misleading to compare professional football players to others who complete college and earn salaries comparable to those of NFL players. Why? First, unlike NFL players, individuals earning six-and seven-figure salaries are generally not employed to engage in violence for a living. Second, very few people who obtain college degrees and earn NFL-like salaries come from backgrounds similar to those of many NFL players. For starters, 78 percent of the 509 players in the authors’ survey are black. (This figure is consistent with the overall percentage of blacks in the NFL, which was 67 percent during the 1996–97 season.) The research revealed that a fair number of these players come from disadvantaged backgrounds (For a more comprehensive discussion on race, see Chapter 11).
Yet, some point out that it is inappropriate to compare NFL players to men from disadvantaged backgrounds. Most people who grow up in “disadvantaged” circumstances are not given the opportunity to receive a free college education, earn millions of dollars, and become celebrated citizens. Given that NFL players have extraordinary earning opportunities, conventional wisdom suggests they would be less inclined to turn to crime in college for fear of risking all those potential millions as pros. Further, logic dictates that once they enter the NFL, pros would be even less likely to commit crimes because they have so much at stake were they to be convicted.
Neither of these theories were supported by the authors’ findings. Of the 109 players who had been charged with a serious crime, thirty-two were arrested
before
entering the NFL, sixty-one were arrested
after
entering the NFL, and sixteen had been arrested both
before and after
joining the NFL.
The reason, it seems, for this break from conventional wisdom is simple. Virtually every other profession that pays employees NFL-like salaries would hardly recruit criminals. Even fewer would retain workers who commit serious crimes after being hired. And those who earn six-and seven-figure salaries are, at least in part, discouraged from participating in serious crime by the knowledge that to act in that manner would jeopardize the wealth and freedom they enjoy.
But nothing in the data suggests that criminal activity puts an NFL player’s career in jeopardy. Why worry about breaking the law if there is no real risk of losing your millions? The old saying “Crime doesn’t pay” reads a little differently for NFL players. “If you can
play
, you don’t have to pay.”
T
he NFL may continue to argue that there is no scientific study proving that its players are disproportionately involved in crime. This posture, however, is slouching under the weight of recurring arrests of players. And this fact remains: at least 21 percent of the men from the most visible class of role models in America have been charged with a serious crime—an average of nearly two and half times per arrested player. To ask for statistical proof that they are worse than the other criminals in society as a prerequisite for doing something about it is to ask the wrong question.
“That should not be the context or basis by which you make your policy,” explained former U.S. Education Secretary and Drug Czar William Bennett in an interview for this book. “You make your policy based on the laws of the land, on the expectation you have for your athletes, on the recognition that they are role models for young people—whether we like it or not. It’s natural for boys, in particular, to look up to these big, fast, strong men. They have a larger place in a child’s imagination and aspirations than the posse of heroes from other categories. They dominate the stage. They are who kids are looking at most. So what they do is critical. They have the possibility for encouraging or discouraging responsible behavior.
“As a result, the expectation of standards ought to be higher for professional athletes,” Bennett continued, “because of the public nature of their profession—the high salaries, public exposure, and adulation. With all the benefits comes responsibility. The fact that some of these criminals are getting a waiver because they are athletes not only corrupts sports, it corrupts the legal system. So, ask the right questions and look in the right places.”
Besides, focusing on whether athletes are any worse than other criminals really misses the more noteworthy point—that professional football players are rarely held accountable for their crimes or stigmatized for their actions due to their athleticism. Simply put, the NFL’s criminal players are treated differently than virtually every other criminal who commits similar crimes.
I
n March of 1998, after playing through the entire 1997-98 season while under indictment for assault with a deadly weapon, Ryan Tucker walked into a Fort Worth courtroom with his high-priced lawyer beside him. Tucker pleaded no contest to aggravated assault in connection with his role in the beating of Bryan Boyd.
*
Tucker was sentenced to 180 days in jail. A Fort Worth judge, however, agreed to suspend the jail sentence on the condition that Tucker successfully complete his community service obligation. He was also put on probation for five years and fined $5,000. As a result, his career with the Rams went uninterrupted and he is free to compete for a starting position in 1998.
Crimes and Punishments
At 10:00
A.M.
on Thursday February 26, 1998, Atlanta Falcons head coach Dan Reeves left his office to drive to the Atlanta airport. On the way, Reeves spoke via car phone to the authors about how he handles players who commit crimes. Coincidentally, as the interview began, Falcons starting linebacker Cornelius Bennett stood in a Buffalo, New York, courtroom being sentenced to two months in jail for sexually assaulting a woman in May of 1997.
Before taking over in Atlanta, Reeves coached the New York Giants from 1993 through 1996. In his last draft as coach of the Giants, Reeves objected to picking Nebraska’s star defensive lineman Christian Peter on account of his storied history of criminal allegations involving women. “My philosophy is that you don’t need to bring someone in who already has a problem,” Reeves told the authors. “That’s the reason I was against drafting Peter. Now, I believe in giving people a second chance, don’t get me wrong. But unless it’s an unusual circumstance, I don’t see why you would want to start out with a problem.”
For a guy who doesn’t like starting out with problems, Reeves’s first couple of months on the job in Atlanta could not have been worse. Hired on January 27, 1997, he barely got used to his new desk before police reports were on top of it detailing crimes far worse than anything for which Christian Peter was ever convicted. On March 19, Fulton County police arrested Falcons defensive back Patrick Bates and charged him with simple battery. Reeves soon discovered, however, that the battery wasn’t so simple. The victim, Bates’s girlfriend, Sophia Billan, was nine months pregnant at the time of the alleged assault. According to the police report, “Mr. Bates pulled her out of bed by her hair and dragged her around the apartment.” The police also documented that Billan was bruised and claimed to have been beaten by Bates previously.
Although not at all pleased with the news, Reeves decided to give Bates one more chance. Not drafting criminal players is one thing, but cutting loose criminally accused players who are under contract is another. Don’t they count against the salary cap? “Once you have someone who becomes part of your organization, to me they are just like family,” Reeves told the authors. “If they’ve got a problem, you have to, just like you would your own children, try to get them help. You have to work with them. I talked to Patrick after his arrest and told him that we could not have those situations.”
Coach to player like parent to child?
Maybe in the Lombardiera. But not today. Not with players whose pasts are a tangled web of crime, violence, family breakdown, and, in some cases, poverty. Patrick Bates allegedly was a combination of all these things. A source close to Bates told the authors that as one of three children, Bates grew up amidst poverty in Galveston, Texas. His father abandoned him. Bates, the authors were told, later witnessed the killing of his only brother. The authors confirmed that at age nineteen Bates entered the criminal justice system. According to records obtained from the Galveston County Courthouse, he was charged with assault causing bodily injury and criminal trespass in 1989. Both charges were later dropped by prosecutors. He went on to play football at Texas A&M. In 1993, after his junior season, he left school and became the Raiders’ first-round pick (twelfth overall). In his rookie year in Los Angeles, he met Billan and got her pregnant. Bates declined through his agent to be interviewed for this book.
Bates and other players whose tough upbringing has hardened them are hardly prime candidates for the fatherly approach from coaches. Reeves himself admitted that the league and the players are different today. “Some of the problems we face today with our young people are things that we never thought about years ago,” said Reeves. “I think the game has changed because young people’s lives have changed.”
B
y the end of March, Billan had given birth to a baby boy, Jarius Bates. Patrick, at that point, had moved into his own apartment. On April 16, three weeks after coming home from the hospital, Billan was nursing her baby at 12:30
A.M.
when Bates showed up unannounced. According to police reports obtained by the authors, Bates used a keypad to enter the apartment through the garage. Once inside the garage, he kicked in the door separating the garage from the apartment. Bates then yanked three-week-old Jarius from Billan’s arms before pulling out a handgun. Threatening to kill her, the baby, and himself, Bates proceeded to beat Billan about the head with the gun. “He also advised that if she called the police then he would get in a shoot-out with police and kill them too,” the report states.
Bates did not break into Billan’s apartment alone, but brought with him another female, Amanda Marr. He called Marr into the bedroom and instructed her to pack the baby’s things and then take the baby to the car. Meanwhile, he continued to hit Billan over the head with the gun, “saying he was going to soften her head so that she would suffer brain damage.” The police report noted officers’ observations that Billan had bruises and lacerations to her head, hands, legs, and feet.
Before forcing Billan out of the apartment and into the back seat of the Mitsubishi Montero that he and Marr had driven, Bates pushed Billan into the shower at gunpoint and ordered her to rinse the blood off herself. Once inside the vehicle, Marr drove while Bates sat in the back seat with Billan and their baby son. According to the police report, he held the gun alternately to the head of Billan and the baby, threatening to shoot. Billan later told police that as Marr drove toward Bates’s apartment in nearby Duluth, Patrick smashed a glass object over Billan’s head. Officers later recovered glass fragments from a broken drinking glass in the rear seat.
After arriving at Bates’s apartment, Bates, according to the report, “advised Amanda she could leave, that she didn’t have to be a party to this.” But Marr said she wanted to stay with Bates. And she ignored Billan’s pleas for her to call the police.
Bates then tied Billan’s hands and feet with shoelaces and ordered her to lie on his bed. Billan told authorities that at that point, Bates took a knife, cut the laces, and threatened to stab her. But their crying baby, who was being held by Marr, distracted him momentarily. Bates took the baby from Marr, told the infant that he loved him, and then ordered Billan to lie down on the bed. “He told the victim he was going to have to kill the baby, the victim, and himself,” the report indicates.