Pros and Cons (17 page)

“When I walked into the hallway after I got off the elevator, I saw two males [Jordan and Williams] standing having a verbal conversation with both Ms. Wilson and Mr. Holloway,” McCarthy testified at Jordan’s preliminary hearing on September 27. “They were approached by those two males, and they were encouraged just to leave court and drop the whole incident …. The defendant in the attempted murder case [Williams] offered $500 to the victims if they would leave court.”

McCarthy testified that when the witnesses rejected the hush money, Jordan issued his threats. “At that point,” said McCarthy, “Charles Jordan made the statement, ‘Then it is your life that you’re messing with.’ At that point, the victim, Holloway, said, ‘Mr. Jordan, is that some kind of threat?’ Mr. Jordan responded by saying, ‘No, that’s a promise.’”

The threat worked. Williams and Holloway ultimately left the courthouse without testifying that day. The sheriff’s attempts to bring them back at a later date were unsuccessful. “I have been told by Mr. Holloway’s family that he has moved out, that he is afraid to testify and that they don’t know where he has moved,” McCarthy testified at a subsequent hearing. “I have contacted Warrena Wilson’s family, and I was told that she has moved to San Bernardino and that they don’t know where.”

On October 11, Jordan was indicted on two felony counts of dissuading a witness by force or threat. (He later pleaded guilty on March 8, 1991, and received probation.) Then on October 31, Jordan was finally arrested and charged with the murder of Kenny Jones. He was jailed and denied bail. Two other Swan Blood gang members, Maurice Stevens and John Davis, were also jailed and charged in the murder.

Jordan’s stay in the Los Angeles County Jail, however, was far shorter than that of Stevens and Davis. On January 25, 1991, Jordan was released and the murder charges against him were dropped. Just days before Jordan’s release, Tyrone Jordan and Glen Jones, who were originally spotted driving away from the murder scene with Jordan, testified at Jordan’s pretrial hearing. In their testimony, they exonerated Jordan and implicated another man, John Davis.

“These witnesses kind of changed the way they thought about things to where Charles Jordan … was no longer involved,” said Davis’s court-appointed attorney, Matthew Kaestner, in court documents. Kaestner suggested in court that Jordan may have placed collect calls from the county jail and told Tyrone and Glen Jones what to say at his pretrial hearing. “They’re involved in a conspiracy, number one, to put these two men [Stevens and Davis] away,” Kaestner suggested to Judge Clarence Stromwall. “The second conspiracy was to get Charles Jordan out of jail. This was a three-defendant case. The man who failed the polygraph is the shooter. He gets dismissed out at preliminary hearing. That’s Charles Jordan. He’s the leader of this gang. He puts out orders to these two witnesses, this is what you are to say at preliminary hearing.”

Kaestner’s theory was that his client (Davis) and Stevens were taking the fall for Jordan. “I want to know, is there anything in the group dynamic of this gang that when someone has to go down on a shooting, a couple people get pointed out and they do the time and go away because they were lower in the pecking order,” Kaest-ern said to Judge Stromwall in his attempt to get a court order giving him access to the jail’s pay phone records. The judge did not appear to be buying Kaestner’s argument.

On January 9, 1992, the murder charges against Maurice Stevens were also dropped, leaving only Davis in jail. Witnesses had told police that he was seen with a handgun at the scene. On January 17, Davis pleaded no contest to reduced charges of voluntary manslaughter in the death of Kenney Jones and was sentenced to three years in prison. It was Jordan, however, who insisted during a December 1997 interview with ESPN that he was the one who had willfully taken the rap for another gang member by sitting in jail for nearly four months. He added that he would do the same thing again for a fellow gangster if the opportunity arose. Jordan declined to be interviewed for this book.

A
ccording to the authors’ research, Jordan’s life as a gang member before entering the NFL involved a wide range of other run-ins with the law. The following list was compiled from the criminal court docket at the Los Angeles Superior Court:

• August 3, 1988, charged with taking a vehicle without owner’s consent. Pleaded no contest to theft of property and sentenced to thirty days in jail.

• August 21, 1988, charged with felony robbery and jailed. Bail was set at $16,000. The case was later dismissed.

• January 1, 1989, charged with illegal gambling. [No disposition records were available.]

• February 20, 1992, charged with reckless driving and driving with a suspended license. Pleaded no contest and was placed on probation and sentenced to either pay a fine or serve ten days in jail. He was also ordered to attend alcohol education classes. On January 1, 1993, he was found in violation of his probation and sentenced to serve five days in jail.

• Jordan was also charged on three separate occasions with possession of a controlled substance and in 1990 he was indicted for kidnapping.

Although he said he is no longer actively involved with the Bloods, Jordan nonetheless still considers himself a part of his gang family. “I may not be active, but I still consider myself as one,” he told ESPN. Further, Jordan continues to give proceeds from his Dolphins paycheck to the Swan Bloods in Los Angeles. “Once I give it to them, it’s theirs. I don’t really ask what it’s about. I just hand it to them.”

T
he Dolphins’ willingness to employ a gang affiliate is not extraordinary. In a groundbreaking 1997 report, ESPN’s
Outside the Lines
chronicled the climb of numerous NFL stars who made the transition from the Bloods and Crips to the gridiron. Redskins defensive end Chris Mims, Bengals running back Eric Bieniemy, Jaguars defensive back Deon Figures, and Bills running back Darick Holmes discussed their early exposure as teens to street gangs. Holmes, whose brother is on death row for three gang-related homicides, said he owned his first gun at age thirteen.

How many former gang-bangers play in the NFL? Chris Mims estimated “dozens.”

“The basic conclusion was that professional athletes are increasingly coming from the inner city, and the inner city is where gangs predominate,” explained Matt Morantz, who produced the ESPN report on gangs. Morantz spent four months researching the connection between professional sports and gangs. In the process, he interviewed approximately 300 people, among them gang experts, law enforcement officials, and NFL players. “The consensus of the players was that you can’t grow up in that environment without having your life touched in some way by gangs,” he explained in an interview for this book.

G
iven Jordan’s track record, it is little wonder that Jimmy Johnson would embrace Lawrence Phillips when no other NFL teams were as eager to do the same. Phillips had not been implicated in murder cases. Nor had he confessed on national television to supplying financial support to a violent street gang. Domestic violence was the biggest mark against Phillips, which hardly distinguished him from his new mates. Miami’s other running back, Irving Spikes, pleaded no contest to battery for beating his wife in 1996. And wide receiver Lamar Thomas had been arrested multiple times for domestic violence during 1996 and 1997. A closer examination of the Thomas case reveals why it is no surprise that Johnson would give Phillips another chance.

On October 13, 1997, one day after the Dolphins defeated the Jets at Giants Stadium, Jimmy Johnson cut veteran wide receiver Fred Barnett. Lamar Thomas, who caught five passes against the Jets for seventy-five yards—including a crucial reception on the team’s game-clinching drive—took Barnett’s position in the lineup. “Fred does everything you ask,” Johnson told reporters. “But had I not made the release I would not have been fair to our team as a whole.”

A consummate veteran with a favorable off-the-field reputation, Barnett was replaced by the younger, faster, and criminal Thomas, whose domestic violence record was more prolific than his pass-catching statistics. “The bottom line is production,” Johnson said candidly days before making the formal announcement. Indeed, production was the priority when Miami signed Thomas the year before on the heels of a vicious series of domestic violence attacks.

Much of the following account is based on court records and police reports obtained by the authors from the Office of the State Attorney in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

On July 4, 1996, Thomas, then a member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and his pregnant fiancÉe Ebony Cooksey attended a private pool party and barbecue at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Edmund Darroux in Plantation, Florida. At the time, Thomas was living in Tampa and Cooksey was still in Miami. She was completing her last year of college at the University of Miami, where the two met while both were on athletic scholarships.

The two were spending the week together in the Miami area before Thomas had to go north for training camp. The Darrouxes’ son Richard, a friend of Lamar’s and Ebony’s, invited the couple to his family’s Fourth of July celebration. Shortly after arriving, however, Thomas left the party briefly to visit his uncle in nearby Fort Lauderdale. When he returned, Thomas brought a cousin with him, and immediately insisted that Cooksey, who was relaxing in the pool, get out so he could introduce them.

“Lamar’s very impatient,” Cooksey would later say to a police officer in her attempt to reconstruct the sequence of events leading up to her assault at the hands of Thomas later that day. “I was trying to dry off and he kept say[ing] ‘come over here, come over here.’ It went from asking me to demanding me to come over.”

Tired as a result of her pregnancy, Cooksey left the pool area altogether shortly after meeting Thomas’s cousin. Inside the Darrouxes’ house preparing to take a shower, Cooksey was fully undressed when Thomas barged into the bathroom unannounced to urinate. Despite the availability of other bathrooms in the house, Thomas insisted on using the one occupied by Cooksey. Wrapped only in a towel, she waited in the hallway for Thomas to finish before reentering the bathroom, locking the door behind her this time.

Minutes after Cooksey began showering, Thomas realized that she locked the door and began knocking, demanding that she let him in.

“Look, I’ll be out,” Cooksey responded from the shower.

Dissatisfied with Cooksey’s response, Thomas located a clothes hanger and picked the lock.

Cooksey was unaware that Thomas had entered the bathroom until he jumped into the shower fully clothed and attacked her.

“He was enraged and demanded to know why I wouldn’t let him in,” Cooksey said in her police statement. “He opened the shower door and began strangling me and … I guess for about five seconds I couldn’t breathe.”

Dripping wet, Thomas stepped back out of the shower, leaving his pregnant fiancÉe cowering and crying. However, he wasn’t finished.

“The next time I knock, you better f---ing answer it, you know,” he shouted as he sprang back into the shower. “It doesn’t make sense for you not to answer.” He then grabbed Cooksey’s head and began slamming it into the shower wall.

“The glimpse that I did catch in his eye,” Cooksey later recalled to police, “it was like nobody was there.” The violent assault was finally interrupted when a female guest at the barbecue entered the bathroom after hearing the commotion. Thomas again climbed out of the tub, his clothes now drenched. He ran out of the house still wet, jumped in his truck and drove off.

Naked, wet, bleeding, and battered, Cooksey was aided by the female who interrupted the assault. When barbecue host Mrs. Darroux learned what took place, she brought Cooksey upstairs to her bedroom so she could rest. A cup of coffee was brought up, along with Cooksey’s clothing.

“Some domestic batterers don’t have the social and psychological makeup to create other vents for their emotions,” explained former Miami Dolphins offensive lineman Ed Newman, who is now a domestic violence judge in Dade County, in an interview for this book. “They don’t know how to take time out or channel emotions elsewhere, how to obtain solutions. They act without thinking. This is a dysfunction. These batterers are a wellspring of emotions. This leads to impulsive actions, and the actions are totally inappropriate.”

Approximately thirty minutes after being attacked in the shower, Cooksey looked out Mrs. Darroux’s second-story window only to see that Thomas had returned. His truck parked in front of the house, Thomas was standing outside talking to Richard Darroux. Scared, Cooksey decided to place a call to her father, and asked Mrs. Darroux to escort her downstairs to the library where there was a phone.

While Cooksey talked by telephone to her father, Thomas entered the library. With both Mrs. Darroux and Richard in the room, Cooksey was confident that Thomas would not harm her.

Suddenly, while Cooksey was in mid-sentence with her father, Thomas snatched the receiver from her hands and hung up the phone.

“I’m talking to my father,” she pleaded.

“Shut up,” Thomas demanded.

“Why are you acting like this?” Mrs. Darroux interjected. “Come on, Lamar. Sit down.”

With all eyes on him, Thomas paused, sat down, and insisted to those in the room that Cooksey’s fear of him was not sincere, but rather an act. Then, as Cooksey attempted to exit the room, Thomas leaped lightning quick to his feet. “At that point I knew I wasn’t gonna get out of that room because he’s Lamar and she’s [Mrs. Darroux] who she is,” said Cooksey, who quickly retreated behind a large desk for protection.

Meanwhile, Richard and his father, who had just entered the room, gingerly approached Thomas while Mrs. Darroux positioned herself between Thomas and the desk. None of this, however, deterred Thomas.

“He came toward me [as] if I was an offensive lineman and pushed me towards the window,” Cooksey said. “And the window shattered on the lower right hand side. I feared for my life because I was imagining my head or something going through the window. And it was a thick window.”