Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (18 page)

Vince tried putting them on a supplement that he’d started selling—one developed by Fred Hatfield, an expert nutritionist who went by the nickname Dr. Squat. When Nelson Sweglar, the television general manager, was tempted to try one of the supplements, he asked Hatfield what was in it. “Ground antler of lactating deer,” Hatfield said nonchalantly. Sweglar passed, as did most of the lifters.

Without steroids, their bodies started to go into shock. Some couldn’t leave their homes and grew depressed looking at themselves shrinking day by day. “These guys measured everything they put in their mouth to the gram. They were unlicensed chemists,” says Jon Flora, an amateur lifter who was the marketing director for the league. “At the elite level of any sport, the amounts of drugs athletes take are unhealthy. But at the elite level of bodybuilding, it’s almost suicidal. When they had their tool taken away, they were lost.”

They grew tiny, bloated, and sullen. One experimented with a high-fat diet and simply got fat. Determined not to admit he’d made a mistake, Vince put another million into the television production, creating lavishly filmed introductions for each of his WBF
Body Stars
. But by then the whole thing was unsalvageable. All the show biz in Vegas still couldn’t turn it around. The second WBF event at the Long Beach Convention Center on June 13, 1992, aired to such a dismal reception that a Massachusetts cable company with seventy thousand wired homes reported just twenty buys.

On the flight back to Connecticut, Sweglar ran some numbers through his head. He decided that if they had paid each of the thirteen thousand people who’d bought the show $10,000 each and had never started the WBF, Vince would still be ahead of the game.

By January 4, 1993, the day New York prosecutor Sean O’Shea had his meeting with Ted Smith, Vince had finally pulled the plug on the WBF.

But neither that nor Vince’s protestations that the WWF was drug-free could persuade O’Shea that he was on the wrong course. In fact, he was more sure of his cause than ever. He’d come to see McMahon as more than just devious or even depraved. He’d come to see him as a steroid-pushing egomaniac who was peddling junk TV and lies to kids. Yet Vince kept expanding his hegemony. In fact, his newest show aired at 9
P.M.
on the Monday after O’Shea returned from Harrisburg. It was a live show that was filmed twenty minutes by subway from the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, in a theater across from Madison Square Garden called Manhattan Center.
Monday Night Raw
was an edgier show than Vince had ever done before, filled with the energy of New York City. Taking a cue from David Letterman’s early days, he opened the hour-long broadcast with live remotes from the street, where his wrestlers bounded off moving taxicabs and crowds of commuters cheered them on.

Raw
was a ratings hit almost from the start, placing in the top fifteen of cable shows nationally. But O’Shea felt it was a fraud. His thinking was reflected in a memo from early 1993, written by an FBI agent who was working with him. In the memo, the agent wrote that O’Shea “is not sure where the case is leading …. He advises at the present time it is primarily focused on steroid abuse and sexual exploitation of children within the professional wrestling industry. However, through grand jury testimony, he is attempting to determine the extent of a fraud being perpetrated on the general viewing public through misrepresentations made by professional wrestling figures. A determination should be made within the next few months as to the direction the case will take. “A later memo from the same agent shows that O’Shea was specifically interested in showing “fraud on the legitimate major suppliers of toys, vitamins, and NBC, who were unaware that the majority of talent at the WWF were steroid abusers.”

The paradox was that O’Shea was trying to save people who didn’t want to be saved. Despite all the setbacks and negative publicity, there were still few shows in television that reached kids as well as the WWF did. And the scandals did nothing to turn away advertisers such as Hasbro, Nintendo, Sega, Nestlé, Gap, or Slim Jim, which poured a combined $20 million worth of revenue into the WWF’s bottom line. As a senior vice president at Grey Advertising told
Media Week
in March 1993, “I haven’t heard anybody talking about [the sex and steroid accusations]. Once people decide to go into wrestling, they’re not going to be bothered by this stuff.”

Nor was it just corporate America that was willing to lend McMahon cover. Connecticut’s Republican governor, Lowell P. Weicker Jr., helped Vince wash the stains of the Chatterton story off his hands with an appointment to the International Special Olympics committee. (Weicker would be named a director of the renamed World Wrestling Federation Enterprises after it went public in 1999, earning an estimated $25,000 a year with options on twenty-five thousand shares of stock.)

But the Brooklyn prosecutor remained single-minded. Through the spring and summer of 1993, wrestlers were being called before his grand jury nearly every day, and employees at Titan Tower were asked to comply with subpoenas for nearly everything in their desks. Agents from the IRS were camped out full-time in the finance department as well, fishing for any evidence that the cash-rich company might be involved in money laundering.

Vince, for the most part, never let his guard down, never let his employees see him as anything but supremely confident. But in truth, he was positive he was going to jail. When a friend told him that federal agents could listen to conversations through glass using state-of-the-art microphones, he started shooing aides away from his panoramic office windows and talking to them in the middle of the room. “They’re going to nail me for something,” he whispered to one of them, looking around at ghosts. “It’s just a matter of what.” He auditioned a series of people as stand-ins for him while he was away and began setting up lines of authority so he could run the company from prison.

Paranoia was in the air and in two high-profile lawsuits as well. In the first, McMahon accused Shults, Chatterton, and Geraldo of conspiring to shake him down through the airing of the controversial
Now It Can Be Told
episode. Then he filed a defamation suit against the
New York Post
and his fiercest critic there, columnist Phil Mushnick. Vince prided himself on being able to seduce the reporters who buzzed around him, either by giving them jobs or by convincing them he was just a harmless circus master. But Mushnick was another kind of reporter, an outsider who was willing to take Vince seriously. In the winter and spring of 1992, Mushnick started writing a series of blistering columns. In one, he warned his readers that

never will you encounter a human more cold-blooded, more devoid of honor and propriety than Vince McMahon, America’s foremost TV babysitter. In your wildest, most twisted dreams, you won’t meet up with a the likes of McMahon, a miscreant so practiced in the art of deception, the half-truth and the bald-faced lie as to make the Artful Dodger appear clumsy.

Only the prosecutors know what discussions they had behind closed doors through September and October. But it stands to reason that they spent a fair amount of time and energy searching for a justification to bring a case that didn’t really belong to them. They were New Yorkers. Yet they were targeting a Connecticut company and using as a star witness a doctor whose crimes occurred in Pennsylvania. A WWF case, if one existed, would have been better suited to Pennsylvania or Connecticut. But Ted Smith already decided the evidence didn’t exist to try it in his district. And Connecticut prosecutors were clearly going to tread lightly where a friend of the governor was concerned. Nonetheless, late in the fall of 1993, Sean O’Shea decided to stake his own claim to Vince McMahon.

On November 19, Vince strode into the glass-and-steel federal courthouse in Uniondale, Long Island, to see what his accuser had come up with after nineteen months of intensive looking. The indictment contained three counts that accused McMahon of conspiring with Zahorian to distribute steroids to his wrestlers, in violation of the new Food and Drug Administration laws that criminalized distribution. The key count—the one that established jurisdiction for O’Shea—involved a packet of steroids that Vince was purported to have had delivered to Hulk Hogan for a show at the Nassau Coliseum on October 24, 1989.

Curiously, no one in the U.S. attorney’s office had bothered to check the date. Hogan wasn’t at the coliseum that night, and neither was the WWF.

The government would have other problems with its case before the trial was over in July 1994. But no one in Titan Tower knew that. And they weren’t about to underestimate the fight they had ahead ofthem to keep their boss out of jail.

It wasn’t so much the legal costs as the time that Vince was spending away from the office with his lawyers. Without the WWF’s chief visionary, scripts began to wander. The
Survivor Series
and
Royal Rumble
in November 1993 and January 1994 had the second- and third-lowest buy rates in the company’s six-year history of doing regular pay-per-views. At the same time, the company was hemorrhaging affiliates. One internal analysis showed a hundred stations had stopped buying WWF programs over the prior year, more than half of them Fox stations that needed to make room for new shows like
The X-Files
. As a result, huge holes started forming in its national patchwork, causing some advertisers who’d been promised national coverage to decline to renew their deals. There were also a lot of worried people at the USA Network. If not for
Raw
, they might have given up on wrestling altogether. As it was, Kay Koplovitz warily agreed to renew their deal for only one year.

Vince refused to show the strain in front of the Boys. “I remember when he was under indictment and they were saying they were going to close him down,” says Kevin Nash, who’d appeared as the characters Master Blaster Steel, Vinnie Vegas, and Oz in WCW before joining the WWF. “I never saw his spirits flag. I never saw him drop his chin. And I spent a lot of hours with that man.” But with bad news everywhere, Vince’s advisers suggested something that would have seemed unimaginable six months before—selling to Turner. Bill Shaw at TBS had been making quiet inquiries, wanting to know if Vince was open to a sale in which Turner would buy the WWF and put it on TBS, using it to replace the existing WCW product. The deal was win-win, they argued. Vince could claim victory under the guise of eliminating the WCW. Meanwhile, Turner could crow that he’d bought the competition. But the look on Vince’s face when his advisers suggested the idea showed that they’d misjudged their boss. As one put it, “It was a look that said he’d rather sell pencils on the street.”

SEAN O’SHEA
built his case around five people: Zahorian; Pat Patterson; Hulk Hogan; Vince’s personal secretary, Emily Feinberg; and Anita Scales, who reviewed the company’s contracts and reported to Linda McMahon.

In general, the assistant U.S. attorney was accusing McMahon of a conspiracy with Zahorian to keep the WWF awash in illegal steroids. Specifically, he was going to show that those steroids were delivered to his biggest star, Hogan, on two dates in 1989—April 13 and October 24.

O’Shea ramped up his case on Thursday, July 7, 1994, by calling the disgraced Dr. Zahorian. Having spent three years in prison, the ex-osteopath was gaunter than he’d been the last time he was in open court, and his eyes were harder. Over two days of testimony, he repeated much of what he’d said at his 1991 trial, recalling how he’d set up shop in the locker rooms of the farmer’s pavilion in Allentown, handing out steroids in brown paper bags to the Boys who’d lined up before him. There were new details, too, specifically that Vince’s secretary called him at least five times to place orders for her boss and Hogan. Yet under cross-examination, Zahorian portrayed McMahon as a distant figure. They’d spoken a half dozen times at most, he said. The first time was in early 1988, when Vince summoned him to ask if he was supplying the Boys with steroids. He told the boss that he was, but only because they’d be forced to turn to the black market if they couldn’t get their juice from him. The next time he said they spoke was a few months later, when Vince asked for his own dose. It was hardly a description of two men working in lockstep.

When Zahorian’s testimony concluded after the weekend, O’Shea turned to Rick Rude. Having been forced out of WCW by Bill Watts, Rude knew that there would be nowhere for him to go if Titan Sports went under. So he looked as bored as he could as O’Shea directed him to a night in June 1989 in Madison, Wisconsin, when Rude was still a headliner in the WWF. Rude said Vince approached him, concerned that the star was losing his chiseled looks. Rude replied that he’d stopped taking steroids because he and his wife wanted a child. Did Vince then tell you you should
go on the gas?
O’Shea asked. “Not in those words,” Rude answered. “He may have said when you’re down or sore you have to push yourself.”
²

Another wrestler, Kevin Wacholz, followed Rude to testify about the same evening, and his memory was decidedly more clear. Yes, Vince had specifically said, “I suggest you go on the gas.” And it wasn’t the first time. In January 1992, Vince had also used those words to tell the three-hundred-pounder that he should bulk up as well. When he tried to politely sidestep the issue, Wacholz testified that McMahon replied, “Well, life’s not fair. The ball’s in your court.”

As the testimony dragged into its third day, O’Shea called a witness he knew would be tricky. Pat Patterson was central to the prosecution’s conspiracy theory. He was the hatchet man who cut Zahorian loose on orders from Linda, having been told to instruct the doctor to destroy all his records of steroid shipments to wrestlers. He was also a died-in-the-wool loyalist, a man who owed his livelihood and lifestyle to the McMahon family. So O’Shea went at him hard.

“You saw wrestlers lined up to get steroids, didn’t you?” No, Patterson insisted, they were lining up to get their blood pressure taken. “You knew what he was doing was wrong?” No, Patterson said, he didn’t. “So you never heard about steroids?” No, he never even talked about it. O’Shea was sure the jury would see through Patterson’s performance. But just in case, he produced a 1989 memo from Linda McMahon to Patterson in which she warned that the Justice Department might be onto Zahorian and that they should cut their links with him fast. Patterson was nervous, and McMahon tried to calm him with his eyes. Glancing at the memo, Patterson said he’d never seen it before, nor had he ever spoken with Linda about it. He also denied something that O’Shea said he testified to before the grand jury: that he asked Zahorian to call him back from a pay phone because he was afraid of being overhead by the feds. When asked whose idea it was to warn Zahorian, Patterson fell on his sword.” It was my idea,” he said.