Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (19 page)

By Tuesday morning, the fifth day of testimony, O’Shea needed a strong—not to mention friendly—witness, and he got one in Anita Scales. Scales was a no-nonsense clerical expert, taciturn and jaded. As she sat in the witness box, she explained that a change in Pennsylvania law in July 1988 meant that Athletic Commission doctors were no longer required to be at ringside during wrestling matches. Once the law changed, Scales told Zahorian he was no longer needed because she was finding someone else. But the doctor called several times, begging to be kept on. “The Boys need their candies,” he pleaded.

“Well,” she recalled answering him, “the Boys can get their damn candies somewhere else.”

Nonetheless, Zahorian showed up at the WWF studio in Pennsylvania for the taping in late August on his own, ignoring the fact that a new doctor had been hired, and continued to lobby to keep his job. A month later, Scales became so disgusted that she went straight to Linda, fuming. “I’ve heard bad things, and I don’t want him there,” she warned. But Linda waved her away and told her to follow the wishes of Patterson, who wanted Zahorian retained. So, she said, she returned to her office to mail the osteopath a letter informing him that he could work at the December tapings, too.

Not long after that letter was sent, Scales was summoned back to Linda’s suite. Between the two visits, Scales was told that Linda had received a call from an unnamed source in Washington, D.C., who’d told her that Zahorian was too hot to be in Eastern Pennsylvania. At that point, Scales said she was ordered to write a new letter, this time retracting the invitation to Zahorian that she’d just reluctantly made.

As Scales finished her story, O’Shea stepped back, hoping the jury would see this as the smoking gun. But there was another, more equivocal interpretation. By having Scales withdraw the offer to let Zahorian work in Pennsylvania, the WWF’s lawyers could argue that he never really worked for the World Wrestling Federation. He’d only been to the matches as a legal appointee of the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission.

With two days of testimony left, O’Shea turned from the conspiracy to the distribution charges, calling his star witness, Emily Feinberg.

Feinberg had been hired as a secretary to one of Vince’s aides when, on a lark, she modeled for
Playboy
and was chosen to be one of its playmates. Not long after that, Vince asked her to be his personal gatekeeper, the figure at the desk in the anteroom of his office. In the haze of the late eighties—when the WWF was still a tiny company awash in money, drugs, and interoffice intrigues—Feinberg became close to her boss, perhaps too close. Now she was paying the price for being seduced by the wrestling world on trial.

As she entered wearing a demure skirt and suit jacket, Vince couldn’t look up. And for good reason. These two people, who’d once gone on boat trips and vacationed with their families, were now locked on opposite sides of an impossible divide. The future husband of one of Vince’s lawyers had even approached her, posing as a producer for a tabloid television talk show who was willing to pay big bucks for her story. (The government would later argue that approach came perilously close to obstruction of justice by attempting to set Feinberg up so that the defense could claim she was trying to profit by selling her story.) In the end, she didn’t fall for the offer. But she also didn’t do the damage that O’Shea was hoping for.

She started her testimony by recalling the summer of 1987, when she first began to work at the company. She recalled that roid rage was a frequently discussed topic in Titan Tower, especially when the bills arrived from hotels that the Boys tore up while on the road. “Everyone talked about it,” she said softly. One day she was filling a minifridge in Vince’s office with soda when she noticed a small vial of steroids. Now O’Shea was approaching the critical pass. Feinberg testified that on a half dozen occasions Zahorian used Federal Express to make a steroid shipment to Titan Tower. Vince would open it, separating out some vials for himself and some for Hogan. Then he’d ask his limousine driver to deliver them to Hogan wherever he was appearing. The first of these occasions was when they were filming
No Holds Barred
in Atlanta, but there were other times when he received them at the Nassau Coliseum, the Garden, or the Meadow-lands in New Jersey.

As her testimony ended, O’Shea returned to his seat, sure that he’d now given the jury something to chew over. But under McDevitt’s hostile, even insulting questioning, Feinberg’s memory went hazy at the critical moment—when she was asked about the April 13 shipment to Hogan that was part of the indictment. Did Vince open the package in her presence? “I don’t know,” she said quietly. Were any of the contents delivered to Hogan? “I can’t say for sure.” Did the limousine driver deliver it to Hogan? “I don’t know if it was one of those times.” Did she send it to him via FedEx? “I don’t recall.” How about the October 24 shipment? McDevitt asked, referring to the second element of the distribution charge. O’Shea leaned forward. The prosecutor needed his witness to say that the limousine driver delivered the steroids to the Nassau Coliseum. Without that linkage, his jurisdictional raison d’être would evaporate. But at this critical moment, Feinberg looked into the distance, caught the sight of Linda fighting back tears, and replied, “I can’t recall.”

After McDevitt pointed out that the only WWF show at the coliseum was on October 20—and that the steroid shipment of October 24 couldn’t possibly have reached Hogan that night—O’Shea let out a long, slow breath.

And so the stage was set for the last day of testimony, when the prosecution would call Terry Bollea to talk about his days as Hulk Hogan.

Hogan’s last run with the WWF had come in June 1993 and was widely considered a flop within the industry. It had little impact on arena event business, and the buy rate of the
King of the Ring
pay-per-view had been below that of
Summer Slam
two months later, when Lex Luger replaced Hogan as the company’s top act. Since then, Hogan had moved into television with a syndicated action show called
Thunder in Paradise
.

In court, Hogan knew he’d be pilloried for lying to the nation in his saccharine
Arsenio
appearance in 1992, so he quickly admitted that he used steroids as early as the mid-seventies and was equally forthright about the way he got them in the WWF. Testifying with immunity, he figured that he’d received steroids by mail ten times from Titan Tower and that he usually called Feinberg from the road, asking her to place his orders with Zahorian.

If this advanced O’Shea’s case at all, the victory was short lived. That was because as the WWF’s hired gun of a lawyer, a decorated former federal drug prosecutor named Laura Brevetti, supplanted O’Shea in the well, Hogan’s memory deserted him completely, just as Feinberg’s had the day before. He couldn’t remember picking up steroids in April 1989, nor did he have any memory of Vince’s limousine driver delivering a package to him at an arena. O’Shea tried to look unfazed, but the government investigator sitting beside him wasn’t as unflappable. He threw his hands in the air, using the universal sign of the double cross.

O’Shea quickly leaped up, trying to salvage the day. “Was Emily Feinberg or Vince McMahon a doctor?” the prosecutor demanded.

“No.”

“But you got steroids from both.”

“Yes.”

“You got to be Hulk Hogan in part because of steroids!”

“In part.”

“Like your twenty-two-inch arms?”

“Yes, thereabouts.”

The damage was done. After Hogan was excused, one of the reporters who would plaster his confessions across the next day’s news pages approached him with a roll of paper towels that measured twenty-two-inches across. As he held it to Hogan’s arms, it was clear they’d shrunk to a fraction of their onetime size. Like so much else about wrestling, Hogan’s famous physique had become another cynical illusion that belonged to yesterday.

When Brevetti rose inside the courtroom and asked the judge to dismiss the distribution counts against Vince McMahon for lack of evidence, O’Shea and his team had to wonder if they’d been deceived by the con men of wrestling. Had all the Boys who’d encouraged them to go after Vince played them for suckers? In the end, neither Feinberg nor Hogan had established that Vince had tried to distribute any steroids in the Eastern District’s jurisdiction. As a result, the trial judge had no choice but to dismiss those charges. The only thing left for the jury would be a single count of conspiracy.

O’Shea and his team were determined to make it stick. In a closing argument on a hot July morning, the prosecutor let his rage spill out. He called McMahon a “corporate drug pusher” who ran a business with a “corrupt underbelly.” He glared at him when he raged, “We’re not talking about the paltry profit Zahorian made. We’re talking about the millions in profits that
they
made.” Summoning the image of Pat Patterson asking Zahorian to call him back on a pay phone, he seethed, “That’s what drug pushers do.” All day Wednesday and into Thursday, O’Shea hammered the point. “This is a corporation of drug pushers trying to blame the little guy,” he said, looking squarely at the jury. “This hugely successful money machine mixed up chemical cocktails to get wrestlers pumped up and keep them going. It’s shameful and it’s illegal.”

Shameful? Maybe. Illegal? Well, said McDevitt, stalking the same floor, that was another story. The government couldn’t prove its conspiracy, couldn’t prove much more than a single conversation between Vince and the dirty doc. Certainly, it couldn’t prove that Pat Patterson ordered Anita Scales to keep the osteopath on the WWF’s payroll. Then, pulling out their ace in the hole, McDevitt said that the WWF didn’t even hire Zahorian after Pennsylvania changed its law. And where’s the cover-up? Zahorian destroyed no records. “As a cover-up,” McDevitt scoffed, “this was a lousy cover-up. Every single piece of evidence is still sitting there …. This conspiracy idea is trying to create a crime when there wasn’t one. They have the burden of proof. They didn’t prove it. They didn’t come close.”

After being instructed on the definition of conspiracy, twelve federal jurors received the case late in the afternoon, eager to work past the dinner hour. They broke for the night just before ten o’clock, reconvening at nine o’clock the next morning. As the day wore on, they asked for read backs of three witnesses whose testimony was, at least in parts, damaging to Vince. And the strain showed on his face. As he sat with Linda and his kids, he prepared for the very real possibility he’d have to do time.

After this, no one could ever humiliate the McMahons again. No one could insult them. No one could criticize their tastes and make them care. After hearing what O’Shea had said about their father, no television critic or newspaper columnist would come close to mattering to Shane or Stephanie. Linda would become ice.

At four in the afternoon, the jury came back again, this time with a verdict. As Vince stood beside his attorneys, he kept his eyes down, his hands clasped. The foreman read it slowly, forcefully.

Not guilty.

1.
Any good feelings didn’t last long. Within a year, Cole found himself released from the WWF once again. When he went to collect unemployment, he says the WWF fought the request, with Linda personally attending the seventh and final hearing in which he finally received benefits.

2.
This quote was part of an exhaustive chronicle of the trial published by Dave Meltzer in the August 1, 1994, edition of the
Wrestling Observer
.

NINE

THE PRESS HAD A
field day attacking Hogan during his appearance at McMahon’s trial. A tabloid television show,
A Current Affair
, breathlessly reported on a letter that O’Shea had written to the trial judge, accusing Vince of ordering an employee to substitute his own blood for Hogan’s during an HIV test. But the story didn’t have legs. The public was already tired of it. The man known to the public as Hulk Hogan hadn’t wrestled domestically in more than a year. He was well into his transformation as a TV action star.

His latest vehicle,
Thunder in Paradise
, was a run-through-the-blender mix of
Baywatch
and
Knight Rider
, with Hogan starring as R. J. “Hurricane” Spencer, a former Navy SEAL who spent most of the hour catching waves, bad guys, and looks at his costar, the supermodel Carol Alt. Hogan couldn’t have been happier. He was being paid handsomely and didn’t have to travel to a different town every night. The show was shot on a beachside set at Disney World in Orlando, about an hour from the twelve-thousand-square-foot French-style country estate he was building out of the bricks of demolished European castles.

The set was also a few blocks away from MGM Studios, which Eric Bischoff, the thirty-seven-year-old new leader of WCW, was scouting as the new location to film his television shows.

A black belt martial artist with high cheekbones and fashionably long hair, Bischoff was a handsome up-and-comer in the Turner Broadcasting orbit. Unlike most of those around him, he dressed in khakis and sneakers instead of jeans and work boots and carried himself with an air of corporate worldliness. He came to WCW from Verne Gagne’s American Wrestling Association, where he’d parlayed a job as a salesman into an on-air role as Gagne’s right-hand man. From there, he’d tried to get a job at the WWF but was given short shrift, so he sent an audition tape to WCW and was hired as an announcer for its low-rated Sunday night show. In the year and a half that he’d been in Atlanta, he’d sized up the competition and realized that he had as much to offer as any of the candidates vying to replace Cowboy Bill Watts. So he presented himself as the person who could wipe the southern yolk off WCW and make it a national entertainment company. After he came to an interview with illustrated storyboards showing his vision for a new, futuristic look, Bill Shaw was impressed enough to vault the newcomer over the more senior candidates who wanted the job of executive producer.