Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (17 page)

But if Smith’s interest in McMahon was on the wane, the colleague who drove to see him on the morning of January 4, 1993, was another story. Sean O’Shea, the head of the Business and Securities Fraud section of the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, believed McMahon was guilty of a lot more than bad taste. And he’d been calling wrestlers into a grand jury back home to prove it.

O’Shea, who was in his mid-thirties, worked for one of the leading U.S. attorney’s offices in the country, one that had distinguished itself by disassembling the mob hierarchy in New York through the convictions of John Gotti and the bosses of the Bonanno and Colombo crime families. It was also known for fearlessly attacking public corruption—winning, for instance, a fraud conviction against the speaker of the New York State Assembly. By having a grand jury investigate McMahon, O’Shea was putting him in some fairly select criminal company.

Smith opened his records to the prosecutor, showing him an accordion file thick with notes he’d accumulated. But as Smith recalled it, the conversation was one-sided. O’Shea was circumspect about the work he and his grand jury were doing. Of course, Smith had his guesses. It wasn’t hard to guess, considering all that had transpired with the World Wrestling Federation in the prior year.

HOMOSEXUALITY AND
wrestling have been bedfellows since Gorgeous George, trailed by his perfume-pumping valet, played on his audiences’ homophobia in the 1940s. Jim Barnett, one of the most influential promoters of the last fifty years, was rumored to have had a torrid affair with Rock Hudson when he was living in Louisville in the 1950s. But to be gay in wrestling was also to be wary of being too open about it. For every Gorgeous George there were thirty Cowboy Bills, men who considered homosexuality as good a reason as any to start a fight. That created a strange, often paradoxical assignment for gay men in wrestling. They understood, even nurtured, the homoeroticism of the business. But they also had to watch audiences jeer and humiliate the effeminate characters sent into the ring. By the early nineties, those jeers had become more open than ever. When a tag team called the Bushwhackers met a prissy pair called the Beverly Brothers, adolescent boys in the audience shouted “faggot” until their throats were hoarse.

One of the men who had a key role in writing those scripts was Pat Patterson, who wrestled in the 1960s under the name Pretty Pat. The Montreal native was a staple of the McMahon family’s Greenwich-Boca social axis and a constant presence at Vince’s side. Patterson, who was openly gay, went to work each day with the expectation that his private life would be treated as just that: something private. But in February 1992, he watched it made public in the most humiliating possible way. A twenty-nine-year-old announcer named Murray Hodgson filed a lawsuit that claimed he’d been fired after spurning one of Patterson’s advances. Those who’d spent time around Vince’s right-hand man regarded the charge as implausible, and the suit received little notice until an investigative reporter from San Diego who was working on a story about drugs in wrestling got wind of it. In pursuing the rumors, reporter Jeff Savage learned that another WWF employee, this one a ring boy, claimed to have been fired for spurning the advances of one of Patterson’s aides.

Ring boys are mostly fans who show up at arenas on the day of the show looking for work. In the WWF, one of the men who supervised them was a road agent and a friend of Patterson’s, Terry Garvin. Like Patterson, with whom he worked in the WWF front office, Garvin was a gay ex-wrestler from Quebec. But unlike Patterson, Garvin wasn’t discreet about his lifestyle. He used his job to arrange trysts for himself and saw no reason to be particularly secretive about it. Nelson Sweglar, then the company’s operations manager, remembers walking into a bus and seeing Garvin, whom he found likable, “hard at it”with a ring boy.

“Everyone knew what was going on, but it would have taken someone within the brotherhood to have moved on it. And none of the people who knew about it moved on it,” Sweglar says. “The general corporate culture was that there were these two worlds, the professional world of those of us who worked on the TV product, and the wrestling gang. And Vince always identified with the wrestlers. Many of them were unmarried without family, and they picked up sex here and there. After ten years of incredible success, a lot of the guys felt like they could get away with just about anything. Its people kept its own secrets. And the corporate culture said you had to be really careful about crossing that line.”

But Savage was about to expose one of the most lurid of them all. Garvin’s assistant had an address book with the names of kids around the country that he’d call on when the WWF hit their town. They were usually kids from broken homes whose parents would be only too glad to send them off to do a day’s work. One of them was a slightly built New Yorker named Tom Cole. Garvin had taken enough of an interest in the boy to offer him a full-time job.

Cole had barely started work as a warehouse clerk when Garvin asked the nineteen-year-old to join him on a quick ride to his suburban Connecticut home. As the teen remembered it, he was surprised the house was empty when they got there, with no sign of Garvin’s wife and two kids. Garvin sat Cole down in the living room and started going over the dates of upcoming shows, asking him if he wanted to go to this place or that. Then, rising, he turned on his television and pretended to be casual about the fact that an adult movie was flickering across the screen.

“Has your girlfriend sucked your dick like that?” Cole remembered him asking. “Let me suck your dick like that.”

“Look, man. I don’t want any part of this,” Cole said, rising to his feet. “I want to go now.”

But it was snowing heavily outside, and Garvin replied, “I don’t know if I can take you.” So Cole made a makeshift bed in the van parked in the driveway. The next morning he was dropped off at the warehouse, only to learn he’d been fired.

The outlines of Cole’s allegations appeared at the bottom of a lengthy story that carried Savage’s byline in the March 11, 1992, edition of the
San Diego News Tribune
. Two days later, Vince was on CNN’s
Larry King Live
, rebutting it.

“Are you thinking they’re all jumping on top of you now for some reason?” King asked. “This is all coming together? I mean, why you? Why now?”

“I have no idea. I have no idea. I mean …”

Before he could finish, King switched to a guest on the phone—a former WWF wrestler named Barry Orton who claimed that Garvin also accosted him in Texas in 1978, when he was just nineteen.

“Barry,” King asked, “why didn’t we know about this sooner? Fourteen years ago when you were accosted, why didn’t you come forward?”

Just then a third guest, Bruno Sammartino, interrupted King and Orton. “Larry, tell him who the man was,” he said. Then, realizing he’d addressed the wrong man, he hastily added, “I mean, not Larry—I beg your pardon, Barry.”

“You’re a little confused, aren’t you, Bruno,” McMahon jumped in, a trace of a smile playing around the edge of his lips. It was the kind of deflection he did masterfully, and as the night wore on he kept doing it, making his accusers look bumbling and unsure. Yet he also knew that he couldn’t have too many more nights like this one. Tom Cole needed to be muzzled.

The next Monday, Orton and McMahon met face to face, this time for an appearance on the most-watched talk show in America,
Donahue
. As he sipped warm coffee in the green room, Orton felt something fishy was going on. He and Cole spoke regularly, but he hadn’t heard from him all weekend. Backstage, Orton turned to another invited guest, the
Wrestling Observer’s
Dave Meltzer, and said, “Something’s not right. Vince is up to something.” He was dead-on. Unbeknownst to either man, Cole’s brother had hired a lawyer to strike a settlement with the WWF. The deal gave Cole a new job at the WWF and $150,000 in back pay, two thirds of which went to his lawyer. In the fold once again, Cole agreed to accompany Linda McMahon to the taping and sit with her in the fifth row of the audience as the show unfolded. After the taping ended, Lee Cole accompanied his brother down to the stage. As reporter Jeff Savage would recount in an article in
Penthouse
, Lee told the producer, “This show was bullshit. There’s only one guy here who cares and it’s that guy.”

Savage followed Cole’s pointing finger to Vince McMahon.
¹

IN THE
daytime talk show world, one of the people who wasn’t going to be outdone when it came to reporting scandals was Geraldo Rivera. He had the ability and the manpower to leap on a story he loved. And he loved this story. What he especially loved was that his team had found the most sensational allegation yet: that McMahon was being accused of rape.

The accuser was Rita Chatterton, who’d worked for the WWF in the early years, when Vince was first taking over the company and
Tuesday
Night Titans
was still the rage. She called herself Rita Marie then and was a struggling bookkeeper with one daughter and a dead-end job at Frito-Lay. Vince turned her into one of his cheesecake girls, giving her a layout in the WWF’s pulp magazine and a job as his first female referee. Did the two also have an affair? There are harder things to believe. Around that time, he was known to be carrying on several extramarital relationships. But Chatterton didn’t allege that when she met with Geraldo’s aides. What she alleged was that Vince hoisted her on top of him in the back of his limo and sexually abused her.

Taken in conjunction with the other allegations, it was a devastating charge. So devastating that the Geraldo team hurriedly stitched it into a feature for their syndicated show,
Now It Can Be Told
. The show also featured Murray Hodgson; a ring ref who was coming forward to allege that Garvin offered him $500 for sex; and Sammartino and Orton, both of whom repeated their charges that Vince knew and turned a blind eye.

Being accused of letting subordinates run the WWF as a personal sex shop was one thing. After Garvin and Patterson both resigned under pressure, Vince could claim that he didn’t know what was going on under his roof but had acted swiftly once the details emerged. This Chatterton thing, however, was pure evil. Though the criminal statute of limitations had passed and he couldn’t be charged, picketers had started to gather in front of the office, accusing him of peddling porn. Worse, Geraldo’s people were planted by the entrance, sticking microphones under the noses of McMahon’s employees and asking for comments.

In calls to the chief counsel for Geraldo’s syndicator, Tribune Broadcasting, and a subsequent suit that alleged intentional infliction of emotional distress, the McMahons insisted that Chatterton was using them as part of a $5 million shakedown operation. (They claimed to have proof that Chatterton had been put up to the story by David Shults, the ex-wrestler who’d gained infamy by punching ABC reporter John Stossel.) Rivera was unpersuaded. On April 3, 1992, viewers of
Now It Can Be Told
heard Chatterton say, “He made me have oral sex. And he started to get really excited and I pulled away and he got really angry and said that’s worth a half million dollars a year. And when I said no, he said I better satisfy him and he pulled off my pants and he pulled me on top of him and he satisfied himself through intercourse.”

IF HAVING
Geraldo and a grand jury on his back wasn’t enough, Vince also had to deal with the fact that the World Bodybuilding Federation wasn’t turning out at all like he’d planned. A Saturday morning show on USA called
Body Stars
was supposed to make its lifters into TV-friendly fitness gurus. (Vince even tapped Matt Lauer to film a pilot but dropped him after deciding his abs weren’t up to snuff.) So was the hiring of Lou Ferrigno, who gained a measure of fame starring in the hit 1970s series
The Incredible Hulk
. But
Body Stars
only taped once a month, and the lifters had little else to do. So they stayed home, taking copious amounts of drugs to stay in shape while Vince was running around telling America his company was drug free.

As they were building to their muscular peaks for the second WBF pay-per-view in June 1992, Vince called them together at the Airport Hilton in Los Angeles. Looking over their inflated physiques, he realized what was evident to everyone in that room—that they’d be dead giveaways to anyone looking to finger him for running a steroid outfit.

Vince was businesslike and brief: With the feds sniffing around, he couldn’t afford to have them juicing. That’s why he’d brought along someone he wanted to introduce—a chemist from Canada named Mauro DiPasquale.

DiPasquale needed no introduction. All the lifters knew him. They called him the Steroid Hunter. In fact, it was DiPasquale who nailed Jim “Ultimate Warrior” Hellwig for using steroids the prior September. He began gently, saying he didn’t want to persecute anyone. He was there to help wean them off their chemical dependencies. Just the same, there would be random drug tests. If the genetic evidence from their urine samples was altered in a way that showed they were juicing, they’d be out. “This is bullshit,” Ferrigno hollered, according to one of the men there.

Like his colleagues, Ferrigno seemed to see the move in terms of dollars and cents. If the lifters wanted to stay huge in time for the second event, they had to move on to human growth hormones, which unlike steroids were undetectable because they mimicked the body’s naturally produced hormones. It wouldn’t be a contest to see who could lift the most or condition themselves the best. It would be a race to see who could get the best drugs and use them the most wisely. Ferrigno walked out and quit rather than get into that kind of race. But the others who weren’t as famous didn’t have anywhere else to go. The Weiders had blacklisted them, and there were no other events to compete in.

“We all had our connections on the streets,” said one of the lifters. “If you were smart, you could get around the test. The ones who could afford it just moved to human growth hormones taken from human cadavers, which was the latest thing. I wasn’t worried. It was my knowledge against Vince’s. But some of the guys just fell apart.”