Shaq Uncut: My Story (22 page)

The rope was taken down. The SWAT team dream was crossed off the list. The NBA superstar continued on with his chosen profession of dunking basketballs, but the disappointment lingered.

For the first time in his life, Shaquille O’Neal discovered there were some things a big man simply
cannot do.

M
Y FATHER’S VOICE FOLLOWS ME. SOMETIMES, I REALLY
don’t want to hear it, but I know I should listen. One of the things Sarge always told me was, “What if you break your knee? What if you can’t play anymore? You better have a backup
plan.”

One of my aspirations when I was done playing was to be a sheriff somewhere. Sometimes when you are a big-name star and you cross over to another entity, people think that whatever you want is just going to be handed to you.

So, in order to be a sheriff, I had to learn what the police force already knew. Rather than just being Shaq, basketball hero, the star of a couple of terrible movies
and best-selling rap artist, I needed to gain some credibility in law enforcement.

I enrolled in the Police Academy in Los Angeles, and it took me three years to get through. In LA the definition of a reserve police officer is you have another job. Level 4 gives you security guard status. Level 3 gives you minor police status, which means you can ride around with the police but you can’t carry
a gun. Level 2 means now you are a real police officer but you always have to be accompanied by a cop. Level 1 means you are a full-time police officer on the force.

I was reaching for Level 1, but it took me a while. After practice I’d put on my uniform and go straight to the Academy. I did that because I wanted the respect of the troops. People used to offer me badges all the time. “Hey, come
to our precinct, be chief for the day.” That was not what I was after.

I wanted those other officers to respect me, not to look at me as just Shaq the basketball player. So that meant I had to go to the Academy and get tased and maced like everyone else.

I went to Sheriff Lee Baca in LA County and asked him if he’d sign off on my training. He was kind of skeptical at first because he had given
gun permits to a couple of other celebrities who had been irresponsible. He didn’t tell me their names, but it took me almost four years to get a permit because of Baca’s concerns of celebrities carrying guns. He wouldn’t let me enroll in his Academy, so I went around asking some of the smaller outfits if they would take me.

I found this little department, the Los Angeles Port Police. I used
to wind up at Jerry’s Deli at around 2:00 a.m. after almost every game. Every night I was there I saw this black guy with a bulge in his jacket. He’d look at me and I’d look at him and finally one night I went up to him nicely and said, “Are you a gangster or a cop?” He was a cop and his name was Duane Davis. I asked him if he could hook me up at the Academy. So now I had a sponsor, and I went to
the LA Port Police Academy, and Sheriff Baca found out and tried to shut it down.

My sense was that Sheriff Baca just wanted me to be a trophy piece. I kept telling him I wasn’t interested in some DARE campaign. I wanted to be a real cop.

I’d have my uniform hanging in my locker, and after practice I’d wait for everyone to leave before I put it on, but Kobe was always there, watching me. He
said to me, “Why do you want to be a policeman?” and I said, “I don’t. I want to be a sheriff.”

Because I had grown up in a military home, some of the stuff they required was second nature to me. My boots had to be clean, my lines had to be straight, there were a lot of salutes and “Yes sirs” and “No sirs.” No problem. That was my childhood.

If I screwed up or got yelled at I had to write these
essays. One time my belt line was off, so the sergeant made me write something about appearance. I had to write a little paper about strength and honor and representing yourself in the proper manner.

The cops went out of their way to treat me like shit with their
abuse and their orders and shouting in my ear, but since I grew up like that, it was nothing for me.

When they got all tough with
me and yelled, “Drop and give me twenty push-ups!” inside I was laughing because I was thinking, “My father would have made me do a hundred.”

I had to go through basic training, but it was a special program because I was in the middle of basketball season. I didn’t have to go to the Academy on game days or when I was on the road. Let’s say I was in town Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The Lakers
would practice from ten to noon. I’d eat lunch at the practice facility, then go to the Academy from 1:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. There was a lot to learn. I needed to be an expert on the law, arrest tactics, civil rights.

It was a lot of work, but I absolutely loved it. Anyone who has been through the Academy understands the commitment.

Once they realized I was serious about what I was doing and
once I met the necessary requirements, they let me go along on some raids and some busts.

I had a patrol where I was pulling over about a hundred people for speeding. I was handing out tickets, and they decided it was too dangerous for me to be in uniform in public and getting out of my vehicle, so they moved me to a specialized unit. It was a stolen car unit.

We’d go into the office and they’d
give us a piece of paper with a list of all the cars that had been stolen and we’d patrol the area looking for them. There were about fifteen of us, and we called ourselves the Cargo Cats because we also went out looking for stolen cargo.

So one night we get a call about a car that was on our list, but we had to notify the homicide detectives because there were two dead bodies in the car. I’m
riding with Duane and he asks me if I’ve ever seen a dead body. I told him, “Of course. I’m from New Jersey.”

We get over there and we rope everything off, and this is a big test for me. Anyone who comes in after that has to be recorded. It’s called a chain of custody, and you have to keep track of who comes in just
in case any evidence is missing. The forensic guys come in and take pictures.

We get to the car and there’s a guy, about nineteen or twenty years old, with a piece of his head blown off. It was gang related. He still had a shotgun sitting in his lap, but a good chunk of his head was gone. I wish I could tell you I’ve never seen anything like it, but I have.

One day I was in the house in Newark on punishment, and it was raining really hard. I went to the bathroom and I opened
the window because it was hot, and I see these two guys fighting. One of the guys pulls out a gun and shoots the other one right in the face—
boom!
Only the guy that gets shot doesn’t die. He gets up and he’s bleeding all over the place and I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I’m just a kid and I’m on punishment and I’m a compulsive liar because of what my mother called my “active imagination,” so
I’m all worked up and I run to get one of my cousins and yell, “Someone just got shot!”

My cousin runs to the window and he doesn’t see anybody so he said, “Screw you, Shaquille. Get back in your room.” No one believes me. After a while even I’m wondering if I made the whole thing up, but then about three days later some of the gang guys from the neighborhood come by and tell my cousin, “Yeah,
our boy got shot in the face.”

Most of the time when I was working with the Cargo Cats, we’d be tailing stolen cars. Sometimes they’d pull over and get arrested peacefully. Other times we’d have to chase them down. You had to be careful where you did that because you didn’t want to go after a car at high speeds with lots of people around. The trick was to wait until they got on a highway. We’d
be coordinating with a couple of other cars, and we’d chase them down and pull our guns. I did that countless times without anyone knowing about it, but one time people found out about it because I had my Shaq sneakers on instead of my boots.

One of the most memorable busts for me was in Baton Rouge, somewhere around 1998 or 1999. It was a drug bust and nobody was
supposed to see me. We were
wearing masks, and we went into the house with a warrant and we’re asking questions and we’ve got our guns drawn. This guy looks over at his refrigerator, which has a picture of me from LSU on it, and then back at me. He says, “You’re not a cop, you’re Shaq!” But he was really drunk, so I said, “You’re crazy. Shut up and put your hands behind your back.”

I’ve assisted in more than five hundred
arrests. Some go smoother than others. I was in Virginia working with a federal task force—the ICAC, which stands for Internet Crimes Against Children. We had to go up there for training. It was a three-day course, sixteen hours each day, and then we graduated.

The US Marshals and the FBI were conducting a child porn raid and invited me to assist. The street address was something like 1336, but
this house had those little numbers that you hammer in with a little nail and when the nail comes out, the nine flips over and becomes a six. So we ended up going to the wrong house.

And this was no little bust. We had helicopters overhead, the whole thing. So we hit the house and it’s a big spectacle because we’ve got the wrong place, so I get across the street and I take off my mask and someone
recognizes me, so of course the story comes out that Shaq was on a raid and he crashed the wrong house. Give me a break. It wasn’t even my bust!

I learned a lot about law enforcement and the tendencies of criminals. I saw a lot of horrible things, some disgusting crimes against children that still makes my stomach turn every time I think about it. It was a six-week course and they show you all
the horrible things you can’t possibly imagine anyone would be sick enough to do. I had to take a step back from that kind of work because I love children, and those kinds of crimes really fill you with rage.

What you realize when you get involved in police training is you don’t really know people. You think you do, but you don’t. The innocent couple walking their baby up and down the street
could be embezzling millions of dollars for all you know.

We all have secrets.

And, as we all found out in the summer of 2003, that included Kobe.

I’ll be honest with you. I thought the kid was a geek. He got a perfect score on his SATs or something, so I figured he was always in his room studying or reading.

That’s why I was so shocked when the Colorado thing happened. It was the summer of
2003, and Jerome came in and said, “You aren’t going to believe what I just heard.” He told me a nineteen-year-old girl had accused Kobe of raping her in a hotel. I couldn’t believe it. I kept saying, “For real? Are you busting me, Jerome?” because I just never figured Kobe would ever be involved in something like that.

The most amazing thing about the entire incident was that when Kobe finally
walked into camp, it was like nothing had happened. He just showed up with an extra bodyguard or two and played a little harder. He’s the type who never shows his cards. He has a serious poker face.

As soon as I heard the news, I got a message to Kobe through Jerome that he was welcome to stay in our gated house with his family if he needed to get away from all the media attention. I told Jerome,
“See what he needs. See what we can do.” Jerome put in a couple of calls, but we never heard anything back.

When Kobe showed up at the practice facility, I didn’t say anything to him. Maybe I should have. In truth, I was waiting on him. I was trying to respect his privacy. I was told later on that he was unhappy I didn’t offer him more support. I thought at some point he’d fill me in on what
happened, what he was going through, but he never did. So I left it alone.

Publicly I didn’t say much. It was a serious charge, and without any knowledge of what went on I made a decision not to get in the middle of it. I didn’t need every women’s group in the country coming after me. I had already experienced my share of special interest groups gunning for me. Let me explain.

One time I did
a commercial for Taco Bell with Jerry West. The idea was that I loved Taco Bell tacos and I’d crane my neck to eat the
taco. I did it so many times my neck was stuck sideways. Next thing you know, people with a certain neck syndrome are picketing the game with a picture of the commercial stuck on the sign. What the hell? I didn’t know there was such a thing as a “neck syndrome.”

Another time
I did a Taco Bell commercial where I bit into the taco and my body was on fire. Next thing you know, burn victims come to the game and they’re picketing.

And, of course, I always had PETA on my case because of my fur coats and the stuffed wild game I had displayed in my house.

The last thing I needed was to have the women’s groups on my case. They can be tough. So when reporters asked me about
Kobe, I tried a “no comment.” They kept pushing so I finally said, “I’m a big believer in the process of the law and hopefully he’s exonerated of all charges.”

That didn’t work for him, I guess. All those years of the little nitpicky stuff we’d been trading back and forth started escalating. For the first time, there seemed to be real animosity between us. It didn’t help that I heard that Kobe
mentioned me in his statements. According to the newspapers, he had told the cops that when I got myself in trouble, I just bought people off to stay quiet. That was curious to me. First of all, what trouble? Second of all, how would you know, Kobe? You never ran with me—ever.