Chris & Nancy (19 page)

At McMahon's trial, McDevitt co-counseled with celebrated defense attorney Laura Brevetti (who reportedly had been on President Clinton's short list when he was seeking a woman for attorney general). Months after the not-guilty verdict at McMahon's trial, New York's
Village Voice
exposed the extracurricular razzle-dazzle of Brevetti's husband, Martin Bergman, a vaguely employed television producer and purported “fixer.” Bergman had introduced himself to one of the government's star witnesses, Emily Feinberg, a former
Playboy
model. Feinberg had been McMahon's secretary and had one of his many liaisons with the hired help. In the process, the
Voice
reported, Bergman secured advance knowledge of the details of Feinberg's testimony, and the defense team was equipped for more effective cross-examination
^[1]
.

The period of the trial was the ebb of
WWF
fortunes. In
1998
, after a several-year-long slump, the company rebounded. Indeed, driven by a new star, Steve Austin, and then by The Rock (now movie star Dwayne Johnson),
WWF
live attendance,
TV
ratings, pay-per-view subscriptions, and merchandise sales reached levels unseen even in the Hogan days. Once and for all, McMahon shook off the threat of Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting (whose mismanaged
WCW
would go into a shockingly rapid descent and, in
2001
, close its doors). Going with the flow like any smart booker, but taking the principle to extremes, McMahon had turned himself into his own troupe's leading
TV
heel.

In the fall of
1999
,
WWF
went public on the
NASDAQ
stock exchange, making McMahon an instant near-billionaire on paper. During the swirl of hype before the initial stock offering, he found it advantageous to put out the story not only that the federal government had persecuted him five years earlier, but also that he had been
convicted
on one of the counts of conspiracy to distribute steroids. This gave his persona a little more swagger, or something; that it happened to be untrue was . . . just wrestling. Why McMahon felt it fit the profile of an imminent Wall Street tycoon was yet another exhibit of his inside-outlaw path to fame and fortune
^[2]
.

***

After Zahorian, the best-known mark doctor in the
1990
s was Joel Hackett of Indianapolis, known among
WWF
wrestlers as “Dr. Feelgood.” Hackett supported the addictions of Brian Pillman, who jumped to
WWF
from
WCW
in the midst of extremely eccentric behavior, most of it contrived, which earned him the nickname “the Loose Cannon.” Pillman liked to joke, “I've got to get back to my hotel room and call my doctor 'cause I just can't ‘hack-ett' any more.” When he died, empty containers of painkillers with Hackett's name on the prescription labels lay next to Pillman.

Four months later, in February
1998
, another
WWF
wrestler, twenty-seven-year-old Louis Mucciolo (“Louie Spicolli,” a stage name inspired by Sean Penn's character in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
), mixing alcohol with huge quantities of Soma, died in a pool of his own vomit. Alongside were an empty vial of testosterone and a Hackett-prescribed supply of Xanax.

Other prominent Hackett “patients” included Jim Hellwig (“The Ultimate Warrior”), Tony Norris (“Ahmed Johnson” in
WWF
, “Big T” in
WCW
), and Del Wilkes (“The Patriot”). The latter, one of Hackett's distributors among the boys, was arrested
20
times for forging prescriptions and in
2002
served a nine-month prison sentence.

More so than Zahorian — a poster child for steroid-pushing even though he also had a broader prescription palette — Hackett symbolized the overall lifestyle issues associated with wrestling. The same doctors who prescribed anabolic enhancers, with or without a sincere interest in the well-being of their patients, also processed bottomless demands for painkillers, sleeping pills, antidepressants, the whole nine yards. On the road, wrestlers swapped pharmaceuticals as freely as they did the anecdotes of their compound effects, mixing and matching whatever felt good and did the trick of getting them through interminable one-night stands.

Marc Mero was “Johnny B. Badd” in
WCW
and “Wildman Marc Mero” in
WWE
. “There is no off-season in wrestling — and I mean
no off-season
,” said Mero, who wrestled Benoit in
WCW
. Mero now owns a gym near Orlando and runs a program spreading anti-drug messages to high schoolers. “You would do
WrestleMania
, the biggest show of the year, on a Sunday night, then turn right around and do the
Raw
shoot on Monday to set up the next batch of issues and feuds. That's the equivalent of playing the Super Bowl one day and the first game of the next football season the very next day.”

Mero said Benoit was not unique in his easy access to drugs of all kinds: “You name it, you could get it. There was always a doctor hanging around, or another wrestler who knew a doctor who could cover you with a script.” In
TV
interviews during the Benoit media frenzy and in his anti-drug lectures, Mero held up ever-growing lists of the dozens of his direct wrestling colleagues who had died young. He said no other occupation, not even military service in Iraq, could make such a dubious boast. (Mero didn't shrug off Benoit's concussions, either. He said, “I personally had matches where I didn't even remember how I got through them.”)
^[3]

Mindful of the Zahorian nightmare,
WWF
took no chances with Hackett, who would try to get to the wrestlers at events in Indiana but was barred from the dressing rooms. After Muccioli's death, the company actively fed the regional
DEA
office information on Hackett's shady practices. In
1999
, when the Indiana Medical Board suspended Hackett's license,
WWF
issued a press release lauding the action and pointing out that the state attorney general's complaint “did not name any performers connected with the
WWF
.” (The complaint did cite Hackett for illegally prescribing drugs “to at least
11
professional wrestlers.”) In
2001
the feds busted Hackett on twenty-four counts of making false statements and prescriptions, and twenty-four additional counts of controlled substance fraud and deceit.

***

Chris Benoit's growth hormone from China's Gene-Science Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. put him at the cutting edge — or maybe just the mainstream — of another phenomenon: the gray market in steroids sold across national boundaries via the Internet.

Four months after the murder-suicide, the
DEA
coordinated an international investigation, code-named “Operation Raw Deal,” a series of raids on the underground 'roid network that marked the largest crackdown to date. With the assistance of other American agencies and their counterparts in Canada, Mexico, China, Belgium, Australia, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Thailand,
124
arrests and seizures were made at fifty-six labs across the U.S. The scorecard on seized items included seventy-one weapons, twenty-seven pill presses, twenty-five vehicles, and three boats. The total stockpile of
11
.
4
million doses of steroids (based on
0
.
5
milliliter per dose) amounted to
570
,
000
ten-milliliter vials, with a street value exceeding $
50
million. That was not even including Human Growth Hormone, Insulin Growth Factor, cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy, painkillers, anti-anxiety medications, or, of course, Viagra. Federal agents told Josh Peter of Yahoo Sports that China, where more than thirty-five drug wholesalers flourished, had emerged as the leading supplier of illicit steroids and
HGH
since the
DEA
began targeting Mexican suppliers in
2005
. Chinese companies stepped immediately into the breach and kept the traffic flowing
^[4]
.

Domestically, the highest-profile prosecutions busted putative “pharmacies” in Florida. The geography was a clue to how the marketing of designer anabolics had simultaneously and shrewdly melded three constituencies: elite athletes, wannabes at every level — and everyone in the whole wide world after the same thing Ponce de Leon once sought. That steroids were not really fountains of youth did not matter to either the sellers or the buyers. As Billy Crystal's Fernando used to say on
Saturday Night Live
, it is more important to
look
marvelous than to
feel
marvelous.

In February
2007
, fourteen people running seven Internet drug dealers out of Florida were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of selling drugs to clients without their having visited a doctor. Prosecutors operating out of the district attorney's office in Albany, New York, arrested fifteen others on similar charges, and with the additional intriguing detail that many of the virtual patients were well-known professional athletes. The ringleader was the Orlando-based Signature Pharmacy, accused of selling $
40
million worth of drugs in
2006
. The leading associated sources of customers for Signature were the Palm Beach Rejuvenation Center and the website for the supplement marketer MedXlife. Signature's owners, Greg Trotta and Brian Schafler, generated phony prescriptions through a physician named Gary Brandwein
^[5]
.

On June
27, 2007
, Albany
DA
David Soares issued a statement confirming that Chris Benoit was a Signature customer:

Obtaining illegal steroids has become effortless. What was once only available in gyms and through underground distribution channels is now available in the living rooms and bedrooms of anyone with access to the internet. All one must do is perform a quick search for their drug of choice and shop for the lowest cost distributor.

Steroids are dangerous, can cause violent side effects and more needs to be done to ensure these drugs and other controlled substances are regulated, and do not end up in the hands of anyone, adults or children, without a valid prescription.

After learning about the tragic deaths over the weekend, we were able to confirm that professional wrestler Christopher Benoit received packages from Signature Pharmacy and “wellness clinic” MedXlife.

Our thoughts are with the friends and loved ones of the Benoit family. . . .

The news of Benoit and Signature came at the same time
WWE
attorney McDevitt was insisting to the media, “There's no question [that] none of these drugs came from Internet pharmacies.”

The Benoit-Signature connection also lessened the shock when, in August, names of other
WWE
stars surfaced on Albany
DA
lists of the pharmacy's customers. The most frequently cited list of
WWE
people was
Sports Illustrated
's, which included Benoit; the others were Chavo Guerrero, John Hennigan (“Johnny Nitro”), Ken Anderson (“Mr. Kennedy”), Shoichi Funaki, Brian Adams (retired and soon dead), Charlie Haas, Eddie Fatu (“Umaga”), Adam Copeland (“Edge”), and Sylvain Grenier. Another list, in the
New York Daily News
, added six more: Randy Orton, Robert Huffman (“Booker T”), Shane Helms, Mike Bucci, Anthony Carelli (“Santino Marella”), and Darren Matthews (“William Regal”). (The Signature list also included, in much smaller numbers, baseball and football players, boxers, and entertainers.)

In an August
30
statement,
WWE
said that based on “independent information” from Albany investigators, “
WWE
has today, under the penalty provisions of its wellness policy, issued suspension notices to ten of its performers for violations. It has been
WWE
's practice not to release the names of those who have been suspended, but notice has been sent to all
WWE
performers that names of anyone who is suspended under the wellness policy as of November
1
will be made public.”

It was left to the obsessive students of
TV
story lines to match up the identities of the suspended wrestlers with those named in the press reports. The most curious case was Orton, a star of the very top tier who had a history of disciplinary issues and suspensions. His
TV
“push” continued unabated, so it was obvious he was not being suspended, and within weeks he headlined a pay-per-view show and recaptured a championship. If any of the earlier Orton suspensions had been for violations of the wellness policy, rather than general misbehavior, then the policy would have called for an escalating punishment for a second “strike” or termination for a third. Since
WWE
wasn't commenting on individual cases, the guess was that the company ruled that the publication of his name on the Signature lists was for an earlier violation for which he had already been punished. Another guess was just that
WWE
applied the wellness policy with blatant, self-serving inconsistency.

If Orton constituted a head-scratcher, the finger pointed at Mr. Kennedy — who
was
part of the August
30
group of suspensions — had to be marked hilarious. During the Benoit media frenzy, Kennedy/Anderson had been one of the most vociferous defenders of
WWE
on his blog and in televised interviews. In particular, he ridiculed the credentials of former
WWF
star Mero, saying Mero was unqualified to comment on conditions in wrestling in
2007
. (Like Kennedy, Matthews/Regal and Guerrero also had lied during that period by maintaining they were clean, but neither was as obnoxious as Kennedy or as aggressive toward critics such as Mero.) Little more than a month later, Kennedy was shown to have been ordering anastrozole, among other drugs, through Signature. The certified use for anastrozole is for women fighting breast cancer. The “off-label” use for men is combating gynecomastia or enlarged mammaries — or, as they call it in the gyms, “bitch tits.”
^[6]