These days when N.F.L. players talk about passing, they’re referring to drug tests, not footballs. In one of the most physically dangerous games in the world, the greatest hazard is cocaine.
Modern Day Gladiators
At 210 pounds, the man with the ready smile seems heavy for five foot ten. A second look reveals that almost all of him is muscle. He moves quickly. He might be a professional football player. But that’s not possible: This young black man is bagging groceries and working as a stock-boy for $4.50 an hour at the Euro Market in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. Besides, at the time, last summer, football-training camps were already in session. So there didn’t seem to be any reason to pay special attention to the stock-boy.
But the supermarket assistant manager knew the truth, if only a very small part of it. The stock-boy was 28-year-old Stanley Wilson, a professional football player just six months before. This was Stanley “the Steamer” Wilson, the Cincinnati Bengal, the star running back out of the University of Oklahoma, with explosive strength and a speed of 4.5 seconds for the 40-yard dash that made him one of the better fullbacks in the N.F.L. In one play-off game alone, Wilson had rushed for two touchdowns-in one half, mind you, dancing exuberantly in the end zone, as he helped his team move closer to last year’s Super Bowl confrontation in Miami with the San Francisco 49ers. “I would put my legs real high in the air like this,” Wilson said, demonstrating. “And spike the ball between my legs. A scissor spike.”
Yes, it was the same Stanley Wilson who, back in the glory days, used to cruise the streets of Cincinnati or his native Los Angeles in his Jaguar sedan with one of his many women at his side. These days, Stanley the stock-boy goes home alone at night to a small quiet room when he finishes at the market. He is there because six months earlier, at Super Bowl XXIII, Wilson the Cincinnati Bengal established a new record.
He is the first and only player ever to be suspended from professional football at the Super Bowl. The night before the game, he was found fried out of his mind on cocaine, hiding behind the shower curtain in the bathroom of his hotel room. He was caught by Bengals coaches and security personnel who had begun searching for him when he missed an 8 P.M. team meeting. It happened at the Plantation, Florida, Holiday Inn, where the Bengal organization was sequestered to avoid the public and the hoopla as they made their final preparations for the game.
National Football League officials were eventually notified. And Wilson, who had been suspended from the N.F.L. before for drug abuse, was history. “You did it,” Stanley recalled thinking to himself later. “Man, you worked your ass off all your life to get to this point, and look at what you just did.”
And so Wilson missed out on what should have been the best day of his life. He had given Super Bowl tickets to his parents, Beverly and Henry Wilson, his aunt, Joanne, and his six-year-old son, Stanley Jr., as well as to other relatives and his agent, Reggie Turner. They had all flown in from L.A. Wilson had hired a limousine for $800 so that they could move around Miami in style that weekend with Stanley as the star, playing before 75, 179 people ·at Joe Robbie Stadium. More than one billion people around the world would watch the telecast.
The Super Bowl would have been a tremendous opportunity for Wilson particularly, because it had been raining all week, muddying the turf. As Bengals owner Paul Brown would say after his team lost 20-16, “Stanley was the kind of powerful, straight-ahead runner who wouldn’t have been affected by the lousy field we played on … It was like he stuck a pin in our hearts.”
“Stanley Wilson was not the only Bengal using cocaine the night before the Super Bowl… ”
Seven months after the game, the Bengals were still talking about the price they had paid for Wilson’s cocaine binge. “It hangs over our heads,” quarterback Boomer Esiason told a reporter last August. “It hounded us for the Super Bowl and for 99 percent of the off-season,” said veteran linebacker Reggie Williams. “While there were other factors,” he added, “we must concede that [losing Wilson] was a major contributing factor to the game’s outcome.”
“Why, Steamer, why, why, why?” Wilson recalls Bengals Running Back
Coach Jim Anderson shouting when he discovered the fullback that night in the hotel bathroom, a plastic shower cap with the remains of the coke clutched in his hand. “He was crying,” Wilson remembers, “and he kept saying, “Why, why? Why now?”
Doped and frozen in fear at that moment, Wilson did not reply. Of course, the cocaine was his choice, but the explanation is much more involved than that. This investigation, however, is more than an inquiry into the Byzantine circumstances of Stanley Wilson’s betrayal the night before the big game.
At the time, even Wilson did not fully realize the implications of his actions. Even now, a year later, unresolved contradictions prevent a complete answer to Anderson’s anguished “Why?”
This investigation will disclose: that the National Football League, which manages the billion-dollar enterprise called the Super Bowl, failed in its security responsibilities, as did the Bengal organization, to ensure that the players in the ·game would be drugfree-despite the N.F.L.’s reputation for having the toughest drug policy in professional sports;
that a cache of cocaine was brought down to Miami on the Bengals’ chartered jet;
that Stanley Wilson was not the only Bengal using cocaine the night before the Super Bowl, or other drugs during the week before the game;
that with the Super Bowl at stake, the Bengal organization and its security chief, as well as N.FL. security personnel, did not investigate the Wilson incident to learn whether other players were involved;
that even after the Super Bowl, official inquiries into the Wilson incident by the Cincinnati police chief, who was in charge of the Bengals’ security the night before the game, and by the N.FL. were careless and ineffective at best.
At first the explanation for Stanley Wilson’s cocaine spree seems obvious. Wilson had been a dedicated cocaine freak and pot smoker since college.
Suspended for drug abuse twice before by the N.FL., he had been barred from the last half of the 1984 season and all of the 1985 and 1987seasons. He had flunked innumerable drug tests and had spent months in rehabilitation clinics in four different states-including four tours in rehab in one year alone-all to no avail.
Yet, there is no obvious cliched excuse for Wilson’s addiction. A native of Carson, a community in Los Angeles County, Wilson was raised in a close-knit, middle-class family. His brother is a junior vice-president of a Los Angeles data-processing company. His father Henry is a warehouse supervisor and his mother Beverly an immigration officer. “They were religious,” Stanley said. “When I was growing up I was so careful about what I put in my system, my mother thought I was a heartnut.”
Wilson said he did not use drugs at L.A.’s Banning High School, where he was a football star and maintained a B average. AII I spent my time on was sports and classes. I was the guy who walked into the bathroom, smelled pot, and I would tell those guys, “You drug addicts, you dopes.”
Chris Ferragamo, Wilson’s high school coach, recalled, “Stanley was kind of quiet, always had a smile. He had pretty good grades. A nice kid, and he was a great player. Never a troublemaker, just a great kid.”
But then, as casually as “eating a hamburger” Wilson said, he began using cocaine when he was 18, while at the Orange Bowl as a starting player for the University of Oklahoma. He claimed that he could “handle it” then, nor were there drug tests in college football. But by 1983, his rookie year with the Bengals, he was an addict.
From then on nobody could stop him, including his former wife, Deborah Evans, who called Stanley “spiritually dead.” In 1984, after innumerable quarrels with him over his drug use and other habits, she packed up and returned to her Oakland home with their son.
“I am the most chemically dependent person there is,” Wilson said. “You could drop me by parachute anywhere in Los Angeles and I could find coke in 15 minutes.”
But through all of it, his team and the N.FL. supported him. The Bengals and the N.FL. paid for his treatment and the team brought him back each time. And each time Wilson would promise them, and perhaps more importantly, promise himself, that he was cured. “The Bengals gave Stanley every chance in the world,” Boomer Esiason would later tell reporters. And Wilson agreed.
When he got his last chance for the 1988 season, Wilson was being tested three times a week by the N.FL., even in the off-season. By the Super Bowl he had “tested clean” for more than a year, including a test administered on the Friday before the game.
“I mean, the last thing, the very last thing I thought would happen was that Stanley would have a relapse,” says former Bengal Gary Burley, a friend of Wilson’s who was also in Miami for the football championship that week. But Wilson did relapse. And he was caught right there, alone in his room, No. 2211, at the Holiday Inn in Plantation, Florida. A Bengal-organization official and the Bengals’ security coordinator drove Wilson back to Miami, to the Omni Hotel where the team had been staying all week, up until that night. The security coordinator’s account states that they escorted him to a room at the Omni and, while they were making arrangements for him and notifying both Bengal and N.FL. officials, Wilson walked out of the room, escaping down an interior staircase and disappearing into the night.
Remarkably, during the period that Wilson was in the custody of security personnel, nobody questioned him as to whether any other players were using cocaine that night or how he had obtained the drug. According to Wilson, during those two hours he talked briefly at various times with Jim Anderson, Head Coach Sam Wyche, who told him he “was through,” Bengals General Manager Mike Brown, and Bengals Business Manager William Connelly. “If they had asked me, I would have told them,” Wilson told Penthouse several months later.
With Wilson from the moment he was caught was Lawrence Whalen, the Cincinnati police chief and a friend of Bengals owner Paul Brown. Whalen was moonlighting that week as Bengals security coordinator. His official report states that he sat in the car with Wilson during the 32-mile drive to the Omni Hotel. “There was minimal conversation en route and he [Wilson] did remain fully awake,” Whalen wrote in a report. But the Cincinnati police chief never raised the subject of how the drugs were obtained-despite the fact that Chief Whalen observed in his report that even in the Holiday Inn hotel room shortly after Wilson was caught, “He [Wilson] appeared well oriented.”
Chief Whalen has declined numerous requests for an interview with this magazine, during which Penthouse would ask why he did not question Wilson about the involvement of other players. He’d be asked if the reason was that, with the Super Bowl coming up in less than 20 hours, the Bengal organization and the N.FL. did not want to know the answers.
In late January when Wilson reappeared in public, at a Covington, Kentucky, courthouse to answer an old disorderly-conduct charge, he was rapidly
becoming old news. Nobody appeared curious, at least not publicly, about the circumstances of the drug binge. That spring, N.FL. Director of Security Warren Welsh requested an interview with Wilson but was turned down.
By that time the word was that Wilson had suffered yet another relapse into cocaine use back home in Los Angeles and was preparing fora three-month stay at Progress Valley, a highly regarded rehabilitation clinic in Phoenix, Arizona. A job would be part of the program. As far as the public and the press were concerned, Wilson was just another of a growing number of professional athletes who had succumbed to drugs. And the books on him were closed. Or so it seemed.
In April 1989, Wilson and his agent Reggie Turner made a deal with Penthouse to tell the truth about what happened Super Bowl week-not just what was in the newspapers or what the N.FL. believed, but the whole truth. That truth was elusive, in· part because, as a cocaine addict, Stanley Wilson’s credibility is questionable.
“I am the most chemically dependent person me by parachute anywhere in Los Angeles and I could find coke in 15minutes,” Wilson said.”
What follows is the culmination of a six-month investigation of Wilson’s account that encompasses scores of interviews with players, players’ agents, league personnel, coaches, and others. It includes the report of a lengthy interrogation of Wilson by the N.FL.’s Warren Welsh and other relevant documents that were obtained.
The investigation began with Stanley Wilson’s allegation that he was not alone among the Bengals in either using cocaine that night or other drugs during Super Bowl week. Wilson also charged that drug tests given to his teammates throughout that period in Miami were unsupervised and consequently were invalid. Wilson talked about his addiction, cocaine use in professional football, and illicit payoffs made to him while he attended the University of Oklahoma. The payoffs included free airline tickets, a steady supply of free cocaine from a fan, a $1,000-per-month cash stipend, and other gifts.
And then the week of the Super Bowl. Wilson detailed how soon after the Bengals arrived in Miami on Sunday, he began talking about buying cocaine with Bengals cornerback Daryl Smith, defensive back Rickey Dixon, and several other players.
It was a risky proposition. All the players involved in the initial conversations were being tested for drug use through urine specimens that week, either because, like Wilson, they had failed previous. N.F.L. administered tests, or they had contractual agreements for testing with the team because of past allegations of drug use. Some were being tested once a week, others, like Wilson, three times a week. These players were happily shocked Monday morning, claimed Wilson, when they learned that although N.F.L. security personnel had been managing and witnessing urine collections all season, during Super Bowl week the N.FL. turned the procedure over to the individual teams, the 49ers and the Bengals.
The rationale for supervision of testing by the N.F.L. commissioner’s office is obvious: It would avoid a conflict of interest where the management of an individual team, with games at stake, would not report its own players for flunking the test. The commissioner’s office has no vested interest in a particular victory. In addition, an individual team might not monitor testing to avoid urine substitution or other symptom masking machinations by players. According to players’ and football agents interviewed, these techniques include using eyedroppers or other squeegee devices that contain “clean” urine and can easily be concealed in the hand during monitored tests, and flushing the bladder surgically. Players have been known to travel with large bottles of substitute specimens so they can use drugs but avoid suspension from games or other penalties. In addition, they time their drug use because they know that the current tests cannot detect any traces of some drugs 72 hours after use.
But the players aren’t the only ones concerned. Team owners are particularly conscious of the effect that the suspension of a star would have on their fortunes. In fact, some players have contracted bonuses of more than $100,000 for successfully passing N.FL. drug tests.
When asked why the testing procedure was suddenly turned over to the individual teams during the week of the Super Bowl, N.FL. Director of Communications Joe Browne explained, “There was a question: Do webring down the Bengals’ and 49ers’ urine collectors who had been working all year, or do we utilize new faces [collectors] just before the biggest game, ordo we go back to the 1988 procedures where the team doctor was responsible? We decided to use the 1988 procedures. In the case of the 49ers, they [the tests]were done by the team doctor. In Cincinnati’s case, the team doctor had overall responsibility, and he turned it over to [Trainer] Marv Pollins and his assistant… Pollins said he watched the collection.” And Marv Pollins signed the customary “witness” forms as well, according to the N.F.L. But Wilson declares flatly, “Marv didn’t watch and he didn’t care. You could use anybody’s urine, urine you had saved up. And when we found out, it was like, “Hey, we can get high now.”
During the week, Wilson added, several players provided their samples in stalls or other places in the locker-room complex of the Miami Dolphins’ training facility where the Bengals were practicing. Pollins handed out the specimen bottles, or players grabbed bottles and returned later with their samples.
Neither Trainer Marv Pollins, nor any other official of the Bengal organization, was available for comment on any aspect of the Penthouse investigation. Scores of telephone calls to Publicity Director Al Heim, owner Paul Brown, General Manager Mike Brown, and to other Bengal personnel were not answered or even acknowledged. And in Cincinnati, before one question was posed, this reporter was ordered to leave the premises of the Bengals’ Spinney Field training facility by Head Coach Sam Wyche.
But one person familiar with the Bengals’ drug-testing procedures during Super Bowl week verified Wilson’s account. “It’s absolutely true,” said this person. who asked that his name be withheld.
Bengals linebacker Emanuel King, since traded to the Los Angeles Raiders, confirmed Wilson’s version of the procedure as well. King was being tested that week because he had been suspended for substance abuse earlier in the season. “Marv didn’t give a shit if you went to the bathroom and got some water,” said King. He told me, “Bring me back some piss — I don’t care whose it is.” But I told him, “You watch me,” and I did it right in front of him. I didn’t want no trouble.
Despite the apparently lax testing procedures, most of the players involved in those discussions about buying cocaine planned to wait to use it until either after the last drug test on Friday morning, or after the Super Bowl itself. Wilson said that he, too, “stayed clean” during the week. But they wanted to purchase the drugs earlier because, he said, “By the weekend, it would be difficult to buy with all the commotion.”
A plan was worked out. Daryl Smith would collect the money and Bengals All-Pro wide receiver Eddie Brown, who was from Miami and had local connections, would supply the drugs. Wilson said that he and Smith planned to split an ounce of cocaine, and “on Wednesday night or Thursday,” he gave Smith about $800 for his share. There were no witnesses to the transaction because they were alone in Smith’s room at the Omni Hotel.
“There was politics involved” in the drug buy, said Wilson. Rickey Dixon told Wilson he was participating, but didn’t specify the amount of his purchase. Wilson explained that he was close friends with Smith but not with Dixon or Eddie Brown. The players didn’t particularly trust Wilson when it came to drugs, he said, adding that Daryl Smith “kept saying Eddie was gonna get it, but Eddie didn’t want me to know he was copping coke … Eddie was saying, like, “I don’t know if he [Wilson] is cool.”
Marv [Pollins] didn’t watch and he didn’t care. You could use anybody’s urine, urine you had saved up. And when we found out, it was like, “Hey, we can get high now.”
A man who has verified Wilson’s account said the “politics” were more complex than that. The man, who requested that his name be withheld, explained that several Bengals were worried that Wilson’s addiction was so strong that he would not be able to handle a measured use of cocaine and might “get in trouble and blow it” for all of them. “And there’s other stuff Stanley didn’t know,” the man continued. Apparently another group of Bengals, “a different clique,” brought cocaine on the chartered jet that took the Bengals from Cincinnati to Miami on January 15. But those players also didn’t want to share their supply with Wilson.
The man also recalled that when the word got out that Wilson was involved in a drug deal, at least one player warned both Smith and Brown, “Don’t give any to Stanley. You’re going to fuck him up — he’s been clean for months. Don’t do it.”
Wilson, however, was adamant about getting his cocaine. Later in the week, he started “checking by their rooms after practice was over… what was the progress on getting any stuff?”
On Friday afternoon he said he visited Dixon’s room. Daryl was in there, and they [Daryl Smith and Rickey Dixon] did all the coke in there while I smoked some pot. Daryl was saying, “Eddie said it’s gonna be tomorrow.” “ Wilson continued, “I saw some coke dust on the table in Rickey’s room. He had just a little bit. He [Dixon] showed me a little fold-up, a paper thing folded up. He wanted to save the rest for himself … I got in there late.”
Wilson elaborated, in Dixon’s room “Rickey and Daryl told me that they had been getting high for a couple of days. They had been doing coke and smoking weed.” Wilson was certain that Dixon had substituted “clean urine” in that last test on Friday.
The next afternoon after practice, the entire Bengal organization was bused from the Omni Hotel to the Holiday Inn. The players had had their own rooms at the Omni, but nearly all would share rooms at the Holiday Inn the last night before the game. Wilson discovered that his roommate for this last night, coincidentally, would be Eddie Brown.
Dinner was scheduled to begin at about 6 P.M., and a team meeting was scheduled for eight o’clock. Coaches told the players to watch a television broadcast on the Super Bowl scheduled to start at seven o’clock. Then they were due downstairs at the meeting.
At dinner, in a section of the hotel dining room that was cordoned off for the team, Wilson said he learned that his cocaine had finally arrived. He was sitting at a large table with other players, he continued, when “Daryl [Smith] said, ’Eddie’s got it,’ just like that.”
There was no advertisement to the other players at the table about the drugs, Wilson specified. When they finished eating, he and Smith went up to room 2211. Eddie Brown was there, Wilson recalled. Smith pulled Wilson aside. “He was telling me that Eddie didn’t want me to know… so I went into the bathroom.” About 15 seconds later, Wilson continued, “Daryl came from around the corner of the bed and he had the bag. I guess he had it in his pants, and he took it out real quick and he showed me two rocks. And I’m like, goddamn. I hadn’t done any coke in 18 months.” Coke in hand, Wilson said, he and Smith repaired to Smith’s room where they both snorted a small amount. “And I thought, this is some good shit. You don’t see shit like that in L.A.”
Pure rock cocaine. He persuaded Smith to give him some more. “An eight ball,” Wilson said, “you know, an eighth of an ounce, a little more than three grams. Daryl was telling me, ’No, no, don’t do it all, chill out.’ “ But he ignored Smith’s advice, Wilson said, and instead took his “eight ball” and returned to his room, going into the bathroom to get even more high. Room 2211 was empty then. Eddie Brown had stepped out for a while.
In the bathroom, just for an instant, Wilson remembered the team meeting set for 8 PM .. about 30 minutes away. But once he began snorting the coke, and smoking some in a cigarette, he couldn’t stop. “I was off to the races,” he said. He closed the bathroom door, .and the drug took over his schedule.
Sometime before 8 PM… he continued, Eddie Brown re-entered and Wilson heard other voices in the room. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard Emanuel King and lckey Woods, “Just talking and laughing, you know.”
And that night before the Super Bowl, in the bathroom sucking still more coke into his system, Wilson recalled that Brown shouted to him through the door to come down to the meeting, saying, “ ’C’mon Stanley, you’re fucking it up for everybody, c’mon, let’s go.’ “
But Wilson couldn’t go. He was on cocaine time. “The next thing I know, somebody knocks at the door, and I don’t care whoever’s at the door, the man in the moon. Then the door to the bathroom comes open and there’s Jim Anderson, my position coach. So he’s like, “Why, Steamer, why, why, why?”
Downstairs at the team meeting, after the players learned about the incident, they talked about almost nothing else for the rest of the night. Some wondered why Wilson’s roommate or friends didn’t bring him to the meeting. “Coaches wouldn’t have cared if he sailed down, floated down. Hell, all we wanted to do was win a football game,” said one. He added that it would have been difficult, almost impossible, to leave the meeting once it started.
Others were quietly speculating that the team, or the N.F.L., might immediately test all the players, or at least the players who had been previously suspended for drug abuse or were “on the suspicious list,” recalled a man who insisted on anonymity. They calmed down, however, once they realized that the collective-bargaining agreement between the Players Association and the league would not allow for such a mass random test. “About ten or 12” would have failed, said the man. Commenting on Wilson’s account of the incident, he added, “That’s the real go-down-Daryl collected the money and gave it to Eddie [Brown]. I’ll tell you something else Stanley and some others got a short count for the money they put up.”
But all of the players Wilson named as participants in the cocaine buy and binge uniformly and vociferously denied Wilson’s account. Asserting that Wilson was either a liar or had invented the story for profit.
Eddie Brown, who Wilson said had supplied the cocaine, told Penthouse that there was no cocaine and no conversation about it during Super Bowl week. Also contrary to Wilson’s account, Brown said there were no visitors to room 2211 between dinner and the meeting. “There wasn’t anyone there but me and Stanley,” said Brown, an all-American out of the University of Miami.
Brown explained that he finished dinner and went up to the room he was sharing with Wilson at about 6:55 PM. “He [Wilson] was already in the room. I came in, and he was sitting there. Then I stretched out on the bed waiting on the TV program, which was coming on in about five minutes.”
Was Wilson high?
“He was not high. At least, I couldn’t detect it,” said Brown.
Did he see Wilson use cocaine?
“No, none at all. I did not know anything of Stanley getting high. We was just watching television. I guess I didn’t pay any attention. We was just watching the television… and when I left out of the room [to go downstairs for the team meeting], Stanley was still sitting there … watching television.” Brown said he told Wilson that he was going to the meeting, but Wilson didn’t budge.
“A different clique” of Bengal brought cocaine on the chartered jet that took the team from Cincinnati to Miami on January 15. But they didn1t want to share their supply with Wilson.
Did he see Daryl Smith, who Wilson said had actually handed him the cocaine? “No,” Brown replied. “I didn’t see neither one of them with any cocaine.”
When asked about Wilson’s whereabouts, Brown told the Bengals’ coaches that Wilson was still upstairs in the room. The next thing he learned, Brown said, was that Wilson was having “a sort of trauma” and then, of course, that Wilson was suspended and missing.
During the interview, Brown’s agent, Jim Ferraro, produced documentation of his client’s drug tests, one taken on January 16, five days before the cocaine incident. and more importantly, from Brown’s point of view, a second test administered January 24, three days after the night in question. In both exams, Brown was tested for cocaine, cannabinoids (marijuana), and ethanol. Brown passed both times: The results of each test category read “none detected.” The second test was given because Brown was scheduled to playing the Pro Bowl the weekend after the Super Bowl. In that second test, Eddie Brown said, “They watched you piss in the bottle.”
When asked if cocaine would show up in a test given three days after the drug was taken, N.F.L. spokesman Joe Browne replied, “No way of knowing for sure. It all depends on the amount of the drug used, the physiological makeup of the person being tested, and the frequency of use.”
Later when Eddie Brown’s agent was told by Penthouse that Wilson did not allege that he had seen Brown use cocaine, but rather that Brown had supplied the drug, Ferraro replied, “Wilson is a liar. My client did not and does not use drugs, sell drugs, supply drugs, or anything like that.” In fact. according to Ferraro, his client had never failed a drug test and was only now being tested because of rumors that Brown was a cocaine user in his college-football days. “We agreed that testing would be part of his contract,” said Ferraro.
That was Brown’s version. No drugs used, seen, or sold, and no knowledge of Wilson’s use that night. All they had done in room 2211 was watch TV.
Daryl Smith, who was let go by the Bengals and picked up by the Minnesota Vikings last spring, denied Wilson’s story as well. “I didn’t use no drugs that night. I don’t use cocaine,” the soft spoken Smith said. He explained that he had been suspended earlier in the 1988 season for drug abuse, but that he hadn’t “touched drugs” since. “Nothing-no drugs during Super Bowl week,” he continued. He denied being in room 2211 or even seeing Stanley Wilson or Eddie Brown during the time in question. “After dinner, I went up to my room… I didn’t have no roommate. I watched TV, and when it was time for the meeting, I just went downstairs,” said Smith. “I didn’t see Stanley … I didn’t see Eddie, nobody. There wasn’t no drugs. I was watching the TV.” Smith had passed all his drug tests since his suspension and maintained, “I’ve been clean since.” He added that he liked Stanley Wilson, that he felt sorry for him, and that he had no idea why Wilson would tell such a story.
As for Rickey Dixon, his agent Steve Feldman denied that his client used cocaine the week in question and said, “Stanley Wilson is a liar — that’s all there is to it.” Was Dixon being tested Super Bowl week? “No comment,” said Feldman. “That’s it.”
But what about the men whose voices Wilson said he heard while he was getting high in the bathroom? As it happened, during the Penthouse inquiry, several names leaked to the press, including to The Boston Globe and The New York Times. The leak apparently did not come from Wilson or his agent, since at least one player written about then, Bengal David Fulcher, had not been mentioned, even speculatively, by Wilson.
But Wilson told Penthouse that he thought he heard two of the others who appeared in newspaper accounts, Emanuel King and lckey Woods, while he was in the bathroom.
In response, Bruce Allen, Woods’s agent, denied his client was involved in any way. Allen told Penthouse that Woods had voluntarily taken drug tests “all year” and had passed each and every one of the six. The agent added that Woods avoided drugs “totally,” having seen firsthand the damage they caused. “In Fresno, where he grew up, there are sections worse than any in Watts,” Allen said. “And he saw some of his friends destroyed by it.”
Jerry Albano, King’s agent, denied that his client was involved as well. Albano added that King had previously failed two drug tests, and he knew that a third failure might mean permanent suspension from N.FL. play under the league’s rules. “Emanuel’s a smart boy and I told him, and I keep telling him you know he’s with the [Los Angeles] Raiders now — “No, zero,no drugs,” and if you think he’d do anything Super Bowl week, you’re crazy. He’s no angel — I’m not saying that — but he’s not stupid.”
Five players were asked about Wilson’s account. and all five denied it, not only in conversations with Penthouse, but also in personal interviews with Warren Welsh, head of N.FL. security. “The players told him [Welsh] the same story as they told you,” said N.FL. Director of Communications Joe Browne. Welsh refused to be interviewed, answering questions only through the league’s publicity office. The N.F.L. would not say that Wilson’s account was false, but as of ten months after the Super Bowl, it had no substantial corroboration of his allegations.
Although there is no evidence of a cover-up, the thoroughness of the N.FL.’s “investigation” into the Wilson incidents highly questionable. For example, although the N.FL.’s inquiry was obviously hampered by Wilson’s escape the night before the game and by the fact that Wilson declined interviews with Welsh until last fall, eight months after the incident, the N.FL. knew the names of the players who Wilson claimed were involved. Yet several of these players were not interviewed by the league’s office of enforcement until more than four months after the Super Bowl was over. Among them was Eddie Brown, who was questioned by Welsh in late spring, according to Jim Ferraro. Emanuel King was interviewed in Los Angeles on July5.
As for physical evidence, N. F. L. spokesman Joe Browne said that Cincinnati Police Chief Lawrence Whalen turned “a bag” over to the N.FL. at halftime of the Super Bowl. Browne explained that the evidence consisted of a $100 bill, which Wilson said he had used to snort some of the cocaine, and some matches and other miscellaneous items. Much of that evidence tested positive for cocaine. Nothing collected indicated that other players were using the drug. Asked about other “investigative” measures taken the night of the incident. the league spokesman said that the N.FL. was not in charge of security once the Bengal moved from the Omni Hotel to the Holiday Inn on Saturday afternoon. “Whalen was in charge then,” Browne said. “It was his responsibility.”
As for the Cincinnati police chief, his actions were characterized in a “Notice of Reprimand,” dated February 3, 1989, from Scott Johnson, Cincinnati city manager, to Lawrence Whalen. In the memo, written 12days after the Super Bowl and later obtained by Penthouse, Whalen was harshly criticized.
“Coaches wouldn’t have cared if he sailed down, floated down. Hell, all we wanted to do was win a football game.”
“At no time did you communicate the possibility of a crime or deliver possible evidence to local police authorities,” Johnson’s reprimand read in part.
“While I recognize the unusual circumstances in this case and have limited my actions accordingly, I expect the chief of police to not only meet the standards expected of any law-enforcement officer, but to set an example for others to follow. Your failure to meet the minimum standards expected of a police officer discredited the Cincinnati Police Division nationally and caused me to question your ability to set an example for your own officers to follow. This is the second time I have had reason to fault your judgment. I will not tolerate a third … Permission to serve as consultant on security matters to the Cincinnati Bengals is withdrawn. Future outside work-permit requests will be denied,” Johnson concluded.
Asked by Penthouse if he had questioned Whalen as to why he hadn’t investigated more thoroughly, Johnson said, “It’s a personnel matter. The memo you have speaks for itself. That’s it.”
The police chief compounded his sloppiness throughout the night. After he escorted Wilson back to the Omni Hotel, Whalen left him alone in a room with Bengals Business Manager William Connelly. Wilson spoke briefly on the telephone with General Manager Mike Brown: “I told him, I said, “I don’t want to see nobody.” I was hoping they wouldn’t call my parents. I didn’t want to deal with none of that.” he said.
Connelly then took over the telephone and made a series of calls to others in the Bengal organization. Arrangements were being made fora doctor’s visit. Wilson remembered thinking, “So I was like, why sit in this room and hear this shit? I might as well get totally blasted so I could just forget everything.”
So Wilson left, strolling out of the room without interference. At one point. he said, Connelly called out to him “not to go.” But he walked down the hall past several security guards, through an exit door, down a staircase, past another security guard. and out another exit door where he found an elevator that took him downstairs to a hotel exit. Nobody stopped him, he said, and nobody questioned him.
“I took a cab down Biscayne Boulevard. I was trying to find some coke or something,” he continued. He bought some liquor and then, with his unerring nose for cocaine, quickly found some street dealers with a ready supply. He had plenty of money, several thousand dollars in his sock, the proceeds of scalping “a bunch” of his allotment of free Super Bowl tickets earlier in the week. “Everybody was doing it,” he said. “Eight hundred apiece between the 40-yard lines, 600 for the others.”
Sometime that night Wilson checked into a cheap hotel, a flea bag, and later ran into a low-level Cuban street dealer who was sent out periodically to buy more cocaine, a few hundred dollars worth at a time. The Cuban stayed with him for two days, serving as his butler for drugs and prostitutes. “He went out and got a chick for me, some skeezer, and some strawberries,” said Wilson, explaining that “strawberries” is Los Angeles slang for prostitutes who take payment in cocaine.
On Sunday the Cuban told him the Super Bowl was on. But Wilson, in a drug-soaked fog, refused to switch it on. The Bengals were ahead of San Francisco 16-13 with 34 seconds left in the game. But Wilson didn’t see 49er John Taylor, who had been suspended earlier in the season for failing a drug test, catch Joe Montana’s perfect ten-yard bullet pass or the faces of his Cincinnati teammates in loss: 20-16. “Couldn’t watch it,” said Stanley Wilson. “Couldn’t dare watch it.”
