Cover-up

by John Feinstein

  “Just turn right when you get off on six and go about a hundred yards,” he said, stepping out of the elevator. “It’s box twenty-four. It’ll be Meeker’s box on Sunday.”

  Stevie shuddered just a bit at the thought of walking into Don Meeker’s box. But Susan Carol boldly knocked on the door.

  “Come in!” a voice said.

  They opened the door. As promised, Eddie Brennan was waiting for them. But he wasn’t alone.

  “Come on in, guys,” Brennan said. “I want you to meet someone.”

  17: HAIL MARY!

  FOR A MOMENT, Stevie semi-panicked. Brennan was wearing a friendly smile, though, and he decided he would look like a fool if he grabbed Susan Carol and made a run for it.

  “Stevie, Susan Carol, this is Bob Arciero,” Brennan said, nodding at a man with jet-black hair, graying at the temples, and wire-rimmed glasses. He was smiling too as the four of them met in the middle of the box to shake hands. Stevie noticed that the box was spacious, but nothing like the one he had met Steve Bisciotti in a couple of days earlier. “Bob is another one of our team doctors. He’s the orthopedic surgeon who fixed my shoulder a couple years ago.”

  “Did a hell of a job too, if I say so myself,” Arciero said, laughing.

  “He’s known for his modesty,” Brennan said. At that point he stopped smiling. “And unlike Dr. Snow, he’s also known for his honesty. So when I saw him here today, I told Coach Kaplow that I needed to stay behind this afternoon so he could look at my shoulder.”

  Arciero shook his head. “I feel so bad about this. Eddie just filled me in on what’s gone on this week. What Meeker and Snow are doing is beyond inexcusable. To be honest, I’m shocked the coaches are allowing it, but I’m sure Meeker told them all they’d be fired if they opened their mouths.”

  “You mean you didn’t know anything about it?” Susan Carol said.

  Arciero shook his head emphatically. “Not until just now. Like Eddie said, I’m the orthopedic surgeon. So I’m not around every day. But now that I do know, I’m not going to sit idly by and allow this to happen.”

  “What can you do?” Stevie said.

  “I can get you the results of the drug tests,” Arciero said calmly.

  Stevie and Susan Carol looked at each other.

  “I should have gone to Bob with this sooner,” Brennan said. “I wasn’t thinking straight until Darin filled me in on the details of what Snow did to you two. Then I got mad.”

  “How,” Susan Carol said to Arciero, “can you get the drug tests?”

  “The test results should be on file at the team’s training facility. One of the other doctors in my practice is still in L.A. and can go over there this afternoon and pull the records.”

  “They’ll just let him walk in and do that?”

  “Of course. We all have access to the medical files of all our players. They probably won’t even ask him why he needs to get into the files, but if they do, he’ll just say he needs to pull some information on game-day meds that I need.”

  “And the drug tests will be in the files?” Stevie said.

  “I suspect that’s the only place they’ll be. If they’re trying to hide them, they’d get someone to ‘lose’ the results at the lab, where they don’t know who has access to files and who doesn’t. But at the training facility, the only people who have access to the files are the team’s medical staff. Gus, that’s my partner, can fax them to me today and then bring hard copies with him when he flies in tomorrow.”

  Stevie looked at Susan Carol. “That would be perfect,” she said. “If we’ve got the documents, you don’t need to go on record, Eddie.”

  Brennan nodded. “Which, to be honest, is important. If the other players knew I was involved in this, I might not survive the game on Sunday.”

  Arciero agreed. “That’s for sure,” he said. “Cheaters aren’t the bad guys in professional sports; the ones who expose the cheating are.”

  “But if we write the story to run on Sunday, what do you think will happen?” Stevie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Brennan said. “I doubt the league will suspend the guys on the day of the Super Bowl. It will be a bombshell, but I think we’ll still play the game.”

  “How will you feel if you win?” Susan Carol said.

  “I’m not sure,” Brennan said. “I mean, I want to play. I want to win. But all I’ve been able to think about this week are the drugs that I didn’t even take! I feel like I’ve got to help you to clear my own head. I couldn’t do nothing. But I can’t go on record….”

  “Because your teammates would hate you?” asked Stevie.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “But how do you feel about them? Your teammates who tested positive?” Stevie asked.

  “I’m torn,” Brennan said. “They’re my friends. I like them all. I even understand why guys feel like HGH could help their careers. The chance to make big money in this sport doesn’t usually last long. But I can’t condone this. I just can’t.”

  They were all silent for a moment. “If we’re going to do this,” Arciero said, “I should call Gus right away.”

  Stevie and Susan Carol looked at Brennan.

  “Make the call,” he said.

  Arciero pulled out his cell phone and started dialing.

  In the end, they decided faxing the reports was a bad idea. The fax would have to go to the hotel, and it was too dangerous to have some hotel employee looking at the test results and deciding he had important information that should be shared with, say, ESPN or USTV.

  Arciero agreed to have his partner take a red-eye out of Los Angeles. He would land in Chicago early Saturday morning and be in Indianapolis in time for breakfast. That would give Arciero plenty of time to get the documents to Stevie and Susan Carol and allow them to write something for Sunday’s paper.

  “I will drive downtown with the documents myself,” Arciero said.

  They were all shaking hands when Stevie’s cell phone started ringing. Seeing the number, he smiled. “Whoops. Forgot to call Bobby.”

  He could hear Susan Carol explaining their deal with Kelleher to Brennan and Arciero while he talked. “We’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said. “Everything is okay.”

  But even still, Stevie caught himself looking over his shoulder a couple times as they circled back around the Dome.

  “What are you looking for?” Susan Carol asked.

  “Not sure,” Stevie said. “Mike and Moe? Snow? Anyone? I just keep thinking something is bound to happen.”

  “I know what you mean,” Susan Carol said. “Look, we’re still a long way from getting this done. Even if we do get those documents, you can bet the lawyers at the Herald are going to have a lot of questions.”

  “Lawyers?” he said. “Why would a newspaper have lawyers?”

  She gave him the “you are too stupid to live” look. “Every newspaper has lawyers,” she said. “The TV networks do too. You can’t just print a story accusing someone of something like this without being a hundred percent sure you’ve got it right. Newspapers don’t like getting sued. There’s an old saying in the newspaper business that if you lose a lawsuit, you might lose a printing press.”

  “How do you know everything about everything?”

  She smiled. “I think it’s called reading? You may have heard of it while you were watching Daily News Live, once upon a time.”

  “Now you sound like my mother.”

  “Remarkably smart woman, your mother.”

  A minute later, they walked into the Marriott and found Kelleher and Mearns waiting for them. They sat down in the lounge and Stevie and Susan Carol filled them in.

  “Brennan is really out on a limb here,” Kelleher commented. “Anyone finds out he’s involved in this, his career could be over.”

  “But why?” Susan Carol said. “He’s doing the right thing.”

  “According to you and me and most reasonable people,” Bobby said. “But in the culture of the locker room, he’d be n
othing but a snitch.”

  “The drug-test results will come out eventually anyway,” Stevie said. “He’s not turning his teammates in as much as he’s exposing Meeker’s cover-up.”

  “You’re being logical, Stevie,” Tamara said. “You can’t apply logic in situations like these.”

  They had to figure out a plan to get a story written the next day when the documents were in hand, and decide where the story should run. There was no way the Post and the Herald were going to agree to run the same story written by the same writers. “My editors won’t be at all happy with this story breaking in the Herald,” Tamara said. “But Stevie’s here for the Herald and Susan Carol isn’t here for the Post. You should write it for the Herald.”

  “What’s going to happen when the story breaks?” Stevie asked.

  Kelleher sat back in his seat. “Honestly? I don’t know,” he said. “All hell will break loose, that much I guarantee. The league will have to decide whether to try to suspend the players for the game. They probably can’t, really, since the rules require a second test to be positive too.”

  “True,” Tamara said. “But the league can’t just sit back and do nothing. An owner has manipulated the rules—completely ignored them, actually. There’s no way Goodell will want to hand the Lombardi Trophy to Meeker on Sunday night after this story breaks on Sunday morning.”

  Susan Carol, who had been staring at a TV screen over Kelleher’s shoulder, snapped back into the conversation. “You want to know the truth?” she said. “At this point, I don’t care what the league does on Sunday. I don’t know what the solution is. But I know what the problem is, and I want everyone else to know too so something—anything—can be done.”

  Tamara smiled. “Remember when I told you a few months ago you weren’t cut out for TV?” she said. “This is why. You have the heart and soul of a reporter. You’re not an entertainer. You’re a reporter.”

  “Well,” Susan Carol said, “I’m ready to do some serious reporting tomorrow.”

  The rest of the afternoon was spent doing background research. One statistic Kelleher came up with was fascinating: the five accused linemen had started the season weighing an average of fifteen pounds more than when they first came into the league.

  Susan Carol had no USTV obligations until after the game on Sunday. The network would devote Saturday to coverage of the Hall of Fame announcement and endless analysis of the game, so Kid-Sports was off the hook and off the air until after the game.

  Stevie and CBS were another story. Stevie called Andy Kaplan to find out if he was expected to do anything for the pregame show. “Right now I think the answer’s no,” Kaplan said. “It isn’t because they didn’t love what you did, but because we have so many people down here jockeying for airtime. Sean’s got to try to keep his stars happy.”

  Stevie wasn’t disappointed to hear that news. He wondered if he owed CBS any kind of tip-off. After all, they had been very good to him, and this story would certainly affect their game coverage—not to mention the pregame show. But he doubted they’d believe him without proof, and they didn’t have that yet, so he told Kaplan nothing at all.

  They ate dinner at St. Elmo again because it was easy—thanks to Mike D’Angelo. Stevie didn’t think it was possible, but there were more stars in the place than on the previous nights.

  “City is really starting to get crowded,” Kelleher commented as a wave of security people led Matt Damon to a private room. A few minutes later, Stevie saw another wave of security people coming: Dan Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins, was coming in along with Tom Cruise.

  “Place is really crawling with celebs tonight,” Mearns said.

  “Ever since Snyder signed that deal with Cruise, he trots him out every chance he gets,” Kelleher said. “He must be pretty sick of the whole thing.”

  “Sick of it?” Mearns said. “Look at him—he’s wearing sunglasses indoors in February. The guy’s nuts anyway.”

  “I liked Mission: Impossible,” Stevie said.

  “Oh please,” Susan Carol said. “The last good movie he was in was Rain Man, and Dustin Hoffman was the reason that worked.”

  Stevie had never seen Rain Man, so he decided not to argue.

  They dropped Susan Carol off at the Canterbury after dinner and walked back to the Marriott. Stevie was crashing after his ridiculously eventful day and passed on the chance to hang out in the media hospitality room. Normally, spending time with writers was both entertaining and educational for him. But now he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

  Unlike the night before, tonight he had no trouble sleeping. It seemed like only minutes later when the phone woke him. Thinking it was Susan Carol, he rolled over and picked it up, saying, “What possible reason can there be to wake me up?”

  “It’s Bob Arciero,” was the answer he got.

  “Oh my God. Sorry, doctor. I thought you were—”

  Arciero cut him off. “Gus just got here. I’ve got what you need. I’ll be at the Marriott in twenty minutes. Can you and Susan Carol meet me there?”

  “I’ll call her right now.”

  He was tingling as he dialed the phone. Susan Carol was right. What happened after they wrote the story didn’t really matter. Their job was to get it written and get it out there.

  18: ALL-OUT BLITZ

  KELLEHER HAD POINTED OUT at dinner that Saturday was usually the longest and most boring day of Super Bowl week. Other than the announcement of the Hall of Fame vote, which wouldn’t come until two o’clock, there was nothing going on. There was no access at all to the teams, who would be moving to different hotels that day to ensure that no one would know where they were or bother them the night before the game. For most reporters, there wasn’t much doing, so the Marriott lobby was still pretty empty at 7 a.m. Which meant Stevie could pace without attracting too much attention.

  Susan Carol arrived about five minutes before Dr. Arciero.

  If Arciero was nervous, he didn’t show it.

  “We need to go someplace private so I can walk you guys through what’s in here,” he said, holding up a thick manila envelope. “You’re going to need to take some notes.”

  “My room is a mess, but it’s quiet,” Stevie said.

  “That works,” Arciero said.

  Once they were in the room, Arciero opened the envelope. Stevie cleared off the desk where his computer had been, and Arciero spread out the documents.

  “I haven’t even looked at these myself,” he said. “I just took them from Gus, sent him to bed, and called you. Give me a minute.”

  As it turned out, Gus Mazzocca had brought the test results from all twenty-three players who had been tested after the conference championship game. Arciero walked them through how to read the reports. “Here, look at Eddie’s,” he said. “See the notation that he has traces of allopurinol in his system? He has a tendency to run high levels of uric acid, and allopurinol controls that. He’s registered with the league as taking it for medical reasons. So when it shows up in his system, the league looks at it, sees he’s been cleared to take it, and he’s fine.

  “Okay, now we get to the serious stuff. Here’s Bill Bryant. Look at the notes at the bottom: ‘Clear traces of HGH appear in patient’s blood work. Hormone level is raised. Testosterone levels raised synthetically.’”

  “What exactly does that mean?” Susan Carol asked.

  “Different men have different levels of testosterone. Some are naturally higher than others. What the tester is saying here is that Bryant’s raised testosterone level isn’t caused naturally, that it is the result of something he put in his body.”

  “HGH,” Stevie said.

  “Based on this—yeah,” Arciero said.

  They went through the remaining reports. The five starting offensive linemen were almost identical. Only Steve Sanders, the left tackle, had a notation saying his high testosterone level might be natural, based on prior testing. “Looks like he might have suspected they’d be tested again and w
as trying to get off the stuff,” Arciero said. “His levels are lower than the others.”

  “But he was still taking it?” Susan Carol said. “We don’t want to accuse anyone unfairly.”

  “He was taking—see, it says so right there. It just appears he may have stopped at some point. The others apparently didn’t.”

  He shut the files with a disgusted look on his face. “Idiots,” he said. “Even if you put aside the fact that they’re cheating and breaking the rules, they’re probably killing themselves.”

  “You know that for sure?” Stevie said.

  “We don’t know anything for sure,” Arciero said. “But the more we know about steroids, the more dangerous they appear to be. That’s why you’re starting to see players from the 1970s and ’80s suddenly die in their forties and fifties.”

  “Scary,” Susan Carol said.

  “Not scary enough, apparently,” Arciero answered.

  He stood to go. “I hate being a part of this,” he said as he walked to the door. “I’d rather you not use my name in the story, but if you have questions during the day, you can reach me on my cell.”

  They thanked him at the door and watched him walk down the hall.

  “He’s a brave man,” Susan Carol said. “Deep down, he has to know he’ll be fingered as a source and that the team will come after him.”

  “What about Eddie?”

  She sighed. “They’ll probably figure that out too. They know we both know Eddie—you wrote about Eddie and Darin, interviewed them both on CBS. And it was Darin who came to our rescue yesterday. Maybe Snow didn’t recognize him, but…”

  Stevie hoped she was wrong. Problem was, she was almost always right.

  They woke Kelleher and Mearns soon after to tell them about Arciero’s visit.

  “We need a quiet, private place to work on this,” Kelleher said. “Let’s meet in the media workroom.”

  “Won’t there be people in there?”

  “Not at this hour,” he said. “I’ll bet we can even order room service and just charge it to one of our rooms.”