The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (55 page)

“Who bought all these guns?”

“You go back into your records and you'll see.”

“These aren't my records,” Almada said. “This is the Department of Justice.”

“I couldn't care less whose records they are,” Smith retorted. “You go back and you check those records and you will find I was charged with domestic violence. You know when you are charged with domestic violence, you can't own any guns. I got rid of 'em . . . Don't own the guns. What I do every year, I go every year to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile to go shoot. I'm a wing shooter. That's it. Don't need pistols. I don't own guns like that. I sold my guns.”

“Okay, great,” Almada said briskly. “Now back to the fire.”

“Not a problem.” And it really wasn't, as time would tell.

 

From a prosecutor's point of view, Anthony Smith is a dangerous, lucky person. Mesmerizing, seemingly untouchable. Absorbing and self-absorbed. He can do wrecking ball; he can do teddy bear. He's a man with a temper who believes in his own victimhood. And he's smart . . . enough. Any slipups, and there have been some whoppers, are countered by mind-numbing obfuscation during police interviews and charismatic appearances on the witness stand. (“He's a pretty good witness,” one judge remarked. “The DA didn't shake him. He is able to handle pressure, possibly from playing sports.”) To friends and family, he's sociable and generous, a family man with a dazzling smile and a loving heart. A man whose talent bought him a dream life—multimillion-dollar NFL contract, mansion on a hill, marriage to Denise Matthews, aka Vanity, the former lead singer of Prince's eponymous all-girl group—that somehow bled into the nightmare he now faces: a looming trial for the brutal murders of four men.

Certainly, Smith has always been ready to bewilder. During one of the many police searches done on his vehicles and residences over the years, detectives found badges and numerous identification cards—two were for Anthony Smith, “Intelligence Officer,” one for Anthony Smith of “The Organized Crime Bureau,” and the fourth was an American Press Association ID with Smith's address but bearing the slightly ridiculous name “Wayne Peartree,” suggesting how he felt about reporters. Early on in his career, Smith told sportswriters incredible stories about his childhood. He said he'd been raised in New York and belonged to a street gang called the Black Spades. When he was eight, he said, he and three friends stole a car and crashed it, killing two of them. When it came to drug use, he really piled it on, telling a reporter that he'd started using heroin, cocaine, PCP, LSD, and speed when he was nine years old and that his brother had died of a heroin overdose.

In fact, Anthony was raised in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, a small coastal and river town surrounded by farm- and swampland, a place with the comforting or claustrophobic feel of everyone knowing you and your cousin's cousin. His mother, Naomi—a beautiful woman who drank too much, according to the old men in the neighborhood—died when he was about three years old. It's not clear who his father was. Naomi was living with a man named James Gallop at the time, who has been referred to as either his father or his stepfather. Gallop was a mean man, says a close family friend who has known Anthony since childhood; “he'd smile at you and cut you at the same time.” (The family friend has requested anonymity; we will call him Bryan.) Once, when Gallop thought Naomi was stepping out on him, Bryan says, he decided to brand her by picking her up and setting her down on her wood-burning stove.

When Naomi died (they say her liver gave out), Anthony's much older half-brother Donald took over his care—after kicking James Gallop out of the house. Donald was in his early twenties at the time, so it says something about the will of the man, the cold hard certainty of him, that he could kick his mother's partner, and a violent man, to the curb. Hot-tempered and ill-humored, Donald was also industrious and respectable, Bryan says. He worked for UPS. He became a deputy sheriff, then a magistrate. Years later, Anthony told a friend that Donald used to hit him, but as Bryan puts it, they all did back then.

“That whole generation of men, they were all angry,” he says. “For them, it was better to be mad than happy. They couldn't communicate, and they didn't know how to fix problems in a simple, civilized way. Oh, they liked to shine on each other, that's what we call it down south, acting like the good guy, like everything in their life was going well, even if they were coming home and beating their kids, which they were.” Shining was an art, and one Anthony was learning at home.

Anthony's ticket out was football, though it took him a while to see it. He was the biggest kid at Northeastern High, but he wore glasses and was a bit of a nerd, and it was almost funny, the way he ran around with the other boys, eager to be just like them, Bryan says, not even aware that he was 10 times more athletic than anyone else, whether he was wrestling or shooting hoops or playing football. He had no ego. He wasn't even that interested in football until his junior year, when he began to work out obsessively. Anthony was always fast, but now the coaches watched him get bigger and stronger and finally committed to playing.

All of his high school coaches use the same words to describe Anthony: enthusiastic, courteous, earnest, voluble. “I don't want to say the wrong thing. He was a super good guy,” says David Brinson, his defensive line coach. “He just did things a little differently. He did things Anthony Smith's way.” He didn't really have any close friends, Brinson adds, but “I don't remember him not getting along with anyone. I mean, he'd walk up to you and start talking to you about anything. He just . . . he liked to be where he was.”

And that seemed to be it, really, the standout quality about Anthony Smith at that point in his life—he was just glad to
be there
, out from under Donald's heavy hand and whatever loneliness lay at home. Anthony once told
Sports Illustrated
that his brother Donald “had his own life to live, but what I needed was to be a son to somebody.” (Donald could not be reached for an interview.)

He found that figure in Alabama head coach Ray Perkins, who recruited Anthony to join the Crimson Tide. He kept mostly to himself at Alabama, not hanging around much with other players. He had better manners than the average 18-year-old, teammate and friend John Cassimus remembers, but some of the other guys found him intimidating, and it was hard to put a finger on exactly why. “If you looked at him, there was just something which didn't click right,” Cassimus says. He would crack one of his dark little jokes that only a couple of guys found funny, and then he would fall silent. “He would create a significant amount of angst just sitting there and not saying anything. It was like going up to a dog and the dog is super beautiful, sweet-looking, wagging its tail, and it's acting really friendly, but there's something about that dog . . . You worry one day he's gonna bite your hand.”

When Perkins left to coach the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after Anthony's junior year, Anthony transferred to the University of Arizona. He majored in social and behavioral sciences, won first-team All-Pac-10 honors, and was an unexpected first-round draft pick of the Los Angeles Raiders. Anthony was surprised to be taken so early, but not that he went to the Raiders. “The team fits my personality and fits my style of play,” he said. “I like sort of roaming around in the field like a free spirit, sort of with a hard-core hell-bent-for-leather attitude.”

It was 1990, the height of gangsta rap and crack cocaine, and the Raiders had become the beloved team of N.W.A and Ice Cube (who would later make an ESPN documentary on the team,
Straight Outta L.A.
) and every Blood and Crip who claimed the City of Angelz as his own. Anthony landed in LA as a kind of minor deity—to rich white sports fans and gangbangers alike—and still with everything to prove.

 

At first he seemed to thrive, despite missing his entire rookie year because of knee surgery. He spent some time volunteering for a mentors program with the mayor's office, heading into South Central LA, often staying overnight in Compton. “I was lonely, away from home, didn't have anybody to look after me,” he told
Sports Illustrated.
“So maybe if I'm tired or don't feel well, I stay the night with a kid's family. Next day, I wake up, my car's washed . . . and my laundry's done.”

Over the next three seasons, he missed only one game, racking up 36 sacks, and in 1994 the Raiders rewarded him with a four-year $7.6 million contract. He'd been enjoying his paychecks since the moment he entered the league, but now the money was really flowing. He bought Donald a new Corvette every year, according to Bryan; he bought several houses for himself, including a five-bedroom white-brick palace on a hill overlooking the Pacific in Playa del Rey. But something angry and aggrieved had started ticking in his brain. “The way I've seen people react to me, Anthony Smith the Raider, has been sickening,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
, going on to complain about the women who loved his money and his fame, not him, and the friends who always had their hands out.

“He used to talk about his family asking for $30,000 like it was $300,” says former running back Harvey Williams, Anthony's teammate and close friend. “Anthony always said he didn't want to be broke after football. He'd say, ‘When I'm done, I want to be able to relax and chill for the rest of my life.'”

After reading an article about the young Raider, Denise Matthews, aka Vanity, now a born-again Christian, arranged a meeting with Anthony, eight years her junior. Three days later she proposed to him, and one month after they met, he made her his second wife. (He'd had a brief marriage to a young actress a few years earlier.) But this new marriage too quickly turned to dust, recalls Dwayne Simon, a friend of Anthony's from that time. Dwayne remembers one uncomfortable team-family breakfast before a Raiders game when Denise said or did something that made Anthony furious. “He grabbed her by the arm, made her sit down,” says Dwayne, a producer with the L.A. Posse and Def Jam who arranged music for Raiders games. “She tried to get up, but he snatched her back down: ‘Get down!' I was really scared for Vanity. I thought he was going to break her friggin' arm.”

At the same time, Smith was telling one of his rich-white-businessman friends that he had helped Denise get a kidney. (Her body was hard hit from years of drug use before she swore off that life and turned to God.) What a good guy. What an angry one. Was one of those Anthonys more true than the other? Or had he just become a violent man who knew how to shine?

A year and a half after they married, Anthony and Denise were done. (Shortly after they separated, in 1997, Anthony was arrested for domestic violence involving another woman and sentenced to anger management classes.) Finally, sometime in 1997 or '98, he started a relationship that would last. His third and current wife, Teresa Obello White, is a graduate of Stanford University and Pepperdine law school. She was working for a personal-injury firm when they met, and he told friends she would make a wonderful mother to their children.

He brought her to Elizabeth City to introduce her to his family, Bryan recalls. But what started as a Fourth of July barbecue quickly turned into a confrontation between Donald and Anthony, according to Bryan, with Donald becoming threatening enough that Anthony grabbed Teresa and they left for the airport. Anthony and Donald never talked again. “Anthony felt abandoned,” Bryan says. “And that's his biggest issue.”

After a mediocre 1997 season, he parted ways with the Raiders, spinning him into a panic until he signed with the Broncos in July 1998. But then, abruptly, he let it all go. While at training camp in Denver that August, Anthony called his personal assistant back in LA. “Get the Hummer and come get me,” he said. He had decided he was done with football. On the way back home, they stopped in Las Vegas, where Anthony and Teresa tied the knot.

So at 31 years old, Anthony Smith was retired. He had busted-up fingers and bad knees. He was newly married for the third time, but this time he felt he'd found the right woman. Soon he would be a father. There was plenty of adoration and goodwill out there still, though a lot less money. He stood at that cliff's edge familiar to every newly retired pro athlete.

When an athlete leaves the game, he goes from always being told what to do to free-falling through a world without structure. Now he has to find a way to survive. How does he put food on the table? His athletic talent, his pro experience, is not translatable to the civilian world. It's a terrifying moment. How does he find a new skill? Learning one takes time, patience, faith. For those who are used to making things happen by sheer will and force and power . . . how do they channel their frustration at this slower, craftier world? Those short on patience might object to starting at the bottom of the learning curve; they might start to look for shortcuts.

Soon after retiring from football, Anthony invested in at least one shady business—an online medical-billing scam that was later investigated by the Federal Trade Commission—and started spending more and more time with gangbangers and thugs. “He was bringing the edge around, and I didn't like it,” Bryan says. When he asked Anthony why, Anthony told him, “These guys care about me. They're genuine dudes.”

“I couldn't understand it,” Bryan says. “You're married to a lawyer. You're living in Playa del Rey. Why would you be involved with these kinds of people?” He began to back away, unhappily, because he felt like now
he
was abandoning Anthony too. Dwayne Simon didn't like Anthony's new friends either. “That's when I stopped hanging around,” he says. “That's when he started to change. He got that scowl, that ugly look.”

 

By March of 2003, Anthony had become the prime suspect in the Simply Sofas arson. After speaking to Marilyn Nelson, the owner of the store, Sergeant Almada discovered that two weeks before the fire, she and Anthony had argued over some items he had left on consignment. Anthony had come to the store to pick up a check for the items that had sold and to retrieve a few unsold things, including some framed swords and a marble obelisk. When Anthony noticed that the stand on the obelisk was broken, he insisted Marilyn pay for it. They argued a bit (she believed it was broken when he brought it in), but he was adamant: “You are going to pay for it.” After years of dealing with customers, Marilyn knew when to hang tough, and this didn't seem like one of those times, so she agreed. She'd already given Anthony a $615 check for the items that had sold. He said he'd come back to pick up the unsold items and told her she should have another check ready for the broken obelisk.