by Ian O'Connor
When Mangini tried to clean out his office, he found that his boss had already put his key card for entry on the inactive list. Crennel and Weis had left Foxborough without this kind of hostility, but they’d been in place as coordinators for years and had helped Belichick win three titles. Besides, they’d started out as Parcells guys. Mangini was the ultimate Belichick guy, a Wesleyan noseguard, and he was leaving after one season as a coordinator—a 10-6 season followed by a divisional playoff loss to Denver—to join another Belichick guy (Tannenbaum) who worked for a franchise Belichick hated so much that, more than a decade later, when rattling off his shared résumé with Crennel, he’d call the Jets “another team” rather than actually speak their name.
Belichick did all he could to avoid speaking Mangini’s name to the press after he took over the Jets. The border war that Parcells had declared over after the Jets agreed to trade Belichick to the Patriots in 2000 was suddenly back on. Shots were fired when New England filed tampering charges against the Jets in September 2006, after Belichick and Pioli had given training-camp holdout Deion Branch permission to talk contract terms (but not potential trade terms) with other teams. The Jets, who had offered a second-round pick, were cleared of the charges more than four months after Branch was dealt to Seattle. In a statement, after declaring that they were pleased that the commissioner had found New England’s allegations to be “completely unfounded,” the Jets said they’d remain competitive with the Patriots on the field “and partners off the field, working together to advance the interests of the league and its fans.”
The Jets had a much better chance of winning four of the next five Super Bowls than they did of remaining cooperative business partners with the Patriots. Over the course of a 2006 season that saw the teams meet three times, Belichick set the juvenile tone for the Mangini handshake follies. To put more pressure on Mangini, he intentionally exaggerated the Jets’ talent level and reminded everyone that their previous coach, Herm Edwards, had the 2004 team a field goal away from the AFC Championship Game.
In 2006, the Jets shut down a New England staffer who was trying to film from an unauthorized Giants Stadium position, but they didn’t report the apparent infraction to the league. In Foxborough, Patriots security confronted and removed a Jets videographer who was shooting from the mezzanine level of Gillette Stadium—a place the home team said he wasn’t allowed to be. The Jets countered that they did have New England’s permission to film from the location in question—“For a double end-zone shot,” a team official said—and that they regularly allowed opponents to film from two end-zone positions in Giants Stadium if they so desired. “It was bullshit,” the official said of the Patriots’ allegation.
Mangini decided the following season that he needed to warn Belichick of potential consequences for illegal videotaping, and he assumed that was that. The league had sent all 32 teams a letter the previous September that read, in part, “Videotaping of any type, including but not limited to taping of an opponent’s offensive or defensive signals, is prohibited on the sidelines.” The NFL had warned teams again before the start of the 2007 season, though it was believed that the second memo was specifically aimed at New England.
The NFL’s game operations manual specifically stated that video-recording devices couldn’t be used in the coaches’ booth, on the field, or in the locker room during a game. In 2006, the Patriots had been caught trying to illegally film not just the Jets, but the Green Bay Packers, the Detroit Lions, and at least one other team. At Lambeau Field, Packers security confronted and removed a Patriots staffer who was filming without proper credentials. “From what I can remember,” Packers president Bob Harlan told ESPN.com, “he had quite a fit when we took him out. We had gotten word before the game that they did this sort of thing, so we were looking for it.”
Mangini was looking for it because he had lived it in Foxborough. His good friend Tannenbaum had hired him in part because he thought Mangini could relate well to people from different backgrounds. (The GM based this belief on the fact that Mangini had attended a Hartford, Connecticut, high school, Bulkeley, that was only 10 percent white.) The Jets were also buying a piece of the Patriots’ puzzle, a piece of Belichick, the coach who had walked out on them and erected a dynasty. Mangini acted like Belichick in his press conferences, where he dodged everything, and in the locker room, where he implored his players to follow his robotic, say-nothing lead. He hammered home the notion that no detail was too small in preparing for a game. He was so much like his old boss that his quarterback, Pennington, was moved to say, “I thought his name was Eric Belichick sometimes, not Eric Mangini. That was what Eric saw succeed. He believed in establishing that culture with us.”
What else did he learn from Belichick? Mangini had brought in a couple of recently released Patriots right before playing New England in 2007, including Reche Caldwell, just to discover a bit more about Belichick’s latest adjustments. Meanwhile, Belichick brought in former Jets receiver Tim Dwight to conduct his own little reconnaissance of how Mangini was running his program in New Jersey. Former mentor and former protégé were still one and the same.
Special teams coach Mike Westhoff, who’d joined the Jets in 2001, had applied for the head coaching job that went to Mangini, and he stayed on as an assistant who one day was moved to explain his scouting methods to the new boss. “And I said, ‘This is how I do things,’” Westhoff recalled. “I explained it to him, and I was telling him about my scouting report. And I thought it was as good as I’ve ever seen. I really liked it. I’d seen others, and I thought there was none better than mine . . . And Eric said, ‘Yeah, I know, I’ve seen it before.’ I said, ‘What did you say?’ He said, ‘I’ve seen it.’ Now, this was when he was first there . . . I didn’t ask him exactly how it happened, but I was so mad. Did that mean someone had shipped it up to him before a game? I don’t know. I never accused anyone, and he never told me. All I know is that was his exact quote. He looked me right in the face and said, ‘I know, Mike. It is good. I’ve seen it before.’ . . . It didn’t come across to me as being innocent.”
Early in New England’s blowout of the Jets in the 2007 opener at Giants Stadium, this much was clear: Nothing looked innocent. Steve Yarnell, the Jets’ vice president and director of security and a former FBI special agent, spotted a 26-year-old Patriots video assistant, wearing a photographer’s vest, illegally filming the home team’s coaches from the sideline. Square-jawed and built like an icebox, Yarnell, who played football for West Point during Bill Parcells’s days as an Army assistant, notified NFL security and then moved in on Matt Estrella, a New Bedford, Massachusetts, native and Fitchburg State graduate with a degree in communications and media and a concentration in video production. Estrella was the same staffer who had been caught by Packers security shooting from an unauthorized field location the year before at Lambeau. He had started with the Patriots as an intern in June 2004 before being upgraded to full-time in July 2005, and he was about to get the scare of his young football life.
Yarnell confiscated Estrella’s camera and tape, and soon enough he joined Jets senior vice president Bob Parente and Patriots security chief Mark Briggs in the Giants Stadium office of Pat Aramini, a longtime state trooper and an official with the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority who lorded over Meadowlands security. They were joined by FBI agent Bob Bukowski, who’d started working Meadowlands football and basketball games and horse races after the 9/11 attacks; Jim Crann, also a longtime state trooper and now a unit supervisor for the sports complex; and Rodney Davis, a former FBI special agent who’d become the NFL’s security rep for Jets games. For about a half hour, these men talked, argued, debated, and fought for control of the camera and tape that were sitting on a credenza behind Aramini, who sat at his desk and played lead referee in a game with much higher stakes than the one being played on the field.
Briggs had one job in that meeting, and that was to persuade the men in the room to return to him Estrella’s camera and
tape. As a decorated British Army veteran who had been stationed in Northern Ireland and the Falklands and had run security at Wembley Stadium and at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, Briggs was a formidable spokesman for his cause. He had an engaging British accent, and Meadowlands security officials were comfortable with him. On game day, the NFL holds what’s known as the 100-minute meeting, which takes place 100 minutes before kickoff and involves the referee and league, club, and stadium security and safety officials going over procedures in the event of an emergency or a stadium-ordered evacuation. Briggs participated in these meetings when the Patriots were in town, and Aramini, Crann, and Bukowski found him to be cooperative and reasonable.
Only Briggs was an infantryman for a reason: He had a certain bald-guy toughness about him, a hawkish look in his eye, that Aramini and others recognized as a force to be dealt with. As New England’s head of stadium security since the spring of 2001, Briggs had pissed off more than a few people around the league. He could be ultra-aggressive with photographers and camera operators in clearing a path for Belichick on the way to a postgame handshake on the field—not that the coach needed the help.
As the meeting began, Aramini recalled, “Briggs was trying to say that it was theft, that we were keeping the Patriots’ property. I said, ‘No, if it’s filmed at an NFL game, it’s NFL property, and I’m keeping it.’” Aramini had never had any problems with the Patriots in all his years at Giants Stadium, and he considered Robert Kraft “a class act.” But at one point in the meeting, according to Aramini, Briggs suggested that perhaps Aramini should be arrested. “He never asked for an arrest to be made,” Crann countered. “He made suggestions there were criminal activities going on prior to us taking the camera. We didn’t take the camera. We secured the camera so it couldn’t be tampered with while the discussion was going on.”
Meanwhile, the Jets’ reps in the room—Yarnell and Parente—were furious that a Patriots official, of all people, could be claiming that his franchise was being wronged. “There were cross allegations being made,” Crann said. “Steve was obviously aware that something was being done [by New England] that was inappropriate. Steve was mentioning things along the lines of corporate espionage, and I’m standing there going, Hold on a second. Corporate espionage? We called the NFL rep [Davis] in as well, because from where I was sitting . . . this was an NFL issue, not a criminal issue. We didn’t want to make it a criminal issue regardless of what was being said by opposing sides.”
Bukowski recalled that the neutral parties in the room were trying to determine whether the confiscated camera had been transmitting a signal to another location. “I think everything was being put out there to see if we’d get involved, and what was going to be done, and there were a lot of accusations going back and forth,” Bukowski said. “[The Patriots] knew what was on it, and they wanted it back. They were trying any reason, but there was no way.”
People in the room said that Davis, the NFL rep, allowed the discussion to unfold without taking a hard stand on the league’s behalf. None of the parties had dealt with a case quite like this. Giants Stadium security officials were used to dealing with drunkenness, disorderly fans who needed to be ejected, and, in the wake of 9/11, the occasional threat on the building and the occasional plane from Newark or Teterboro Airport that flew a little too close to the packed house for comfort.
“We needed to get back to the business of handling 78,000 people,” said Crann, who thought at the time that the fight for control of the camera and tape was “a Mickey Mouse thing” and “small potatoes.”
As the only man in the room protecting New England’s interests, Briggs seemed to know otherwise. He kept pressing for the return of Estrella’s equipment, and if he was trying to intimidate the mediators, Aramini said, “he had the wrong three guys in the room.”
Crann was a no-nonsense Irishman raised on a no-nonsense side of Newark, a trooper who did bomb squad and underwater recovery work and who was part of the Ground Zero rescue operations after the Twin Towers fell. Bukowski had been an FBI agent in Florida, New York, and New Jersey who had investigated the 9/11 terrorists and two Paterson, New Jersey, men with alleged ties to the hijackers. And the 56-year-old Aramini, raised poor in the projects of Frank Sinatra’s hometown, Hoboken, was a walking Hollywood script.
Aramini’s old man worked three jobs to support a wife and six kids before he saved up enough pennies to buy a shot-and-a-beer place called the Seven Seas. Before he spent his entire adult life around cops and killers, Aramini spent years around the longshoremen and railroad workers who drank at his father’s bar on Hudson and Third, where more than a few of the regulars would’ve eaten Mark Briggs for lunch. As a state trooper, Aramini worked undercover to infiltrate the Genovese crime family and to bring dirty cops to justice. He wore a wire for more than 300 hours, and he was in countless situations where armed wiseguys and corrupt police officers could’ve shot him dead on the spot. He feared for his life 24/7, and never more so than the night the recording device attached to his leg ran out of tape after three hours and began making a noise that somehow wasn’t detected by the mobsters in his midst.
So Briggs, New England’s security man, was up against a tough crowd. “I’m a street kid,” Aramini thought to himself at the time. “You’re not getting over on me.” So Briggs didn’t get over on him, or any of the other law enforcement men in Aramini’s civilian security office, near the state police office on the east side of the building. The Jets insisted that Aramini keep the camera and tape, and Aramini reminded Briggs that possession is nine-tenths of the law. If Briggs wanted New England’s property, he was going to have to run an all-out blitz to retrieve it. “He’d have to tackle me across the desk to get it from me,” Aramini said, “and that wasn’t happening.”
Briggs wouldn’t relent. “He continued to say, ‘You’re stealing the camera that’s being taken from me,’” Crann said, “and it’s like ‘No, no, that’s not what’s being done here.’” Crann advised Briggs that it was time to secure the device and hand it over to the NFL.
Bukowski placed the camera in a box and sealed it up. “We signed it across the tape and said, ‘We’re going to treat this just like evidence,’” the FBI man said. “And then we handed it right to the NFL.” The half-hour meeting was over, and Davis drove the sealed box to the league’s Park Avenue headquarters that night, according to the mediators.
Despite being warned by Mangini and the league memo both, Belichick appeared to have done the unthinkable and ordered Estrella to proceed with his standard game-day operations. Dan Leberfeld, of Scout.com, was the first to report on New England’s alleged wrongdoing, and on his weekly Monday radio appearance with Boston’s WEEI, Belichick said he’d been informed at the game about the incident and refused to comment on the particulars. “It’s a league thing,” he said. “Whatever the deal is, which I don’t really know the details of it, a lot of it, we’ll comply.”
Greg Aiello, NFL spokesman, released a statement confirming a league investigation into the Patriots and informing readers and fans that all teams “have been specifically reminded in the past that the videotaping of an opponent’s offensive or defensive signals on the sideline is prohibited.” Players and coaches around the league started weighing in. Kerry Rhodes, Jets safety, offered that Tom Brady “seemed like he knew what we were doing.” In San Diego, LaDainian Tomlinson said he thought the Patriots “actually live by the saying ‘If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.’”
Was Belichick really arrogant enough to think he could get away with illegal spying on the Jets, even though they were on to him and prepared to act? Roger Goodell would answer that question in short order. Meanwhile, many longtime NFL people were left shaking their heads or laughing, or doing a little bit of both. They knew that pro football had a long history of gamesmanship and outright cheating, and that Bill Belichick was guilty of his fair share of both.
Steve Belichick and Ted Marchibroda, football mentors to Bi
ll Belichick, were fine gentlemen greatly influenced by Hall of Famers Paul Brown (Steve Belichick) and George Allen (Marchibroda). The sport’s most accomplished innovator, Brown was forever seeking an edge as he introduced playbooks, written aptitude tests, film grading, and taxi squads to the game. In 1956, he made his Cleveland Browns quarterback, George Ratterman, the first NFL player to wear a radio device in his helmet, and he later warned the New York Giants that they’d be fined by the Federal Communications Commission if they jammed the signal. (The Giants had earlier intercepted the Browns’ signal by using a high-powered receiver on their sideline.) After fielding complaints from teams that thought the gadget gave Cleveland an unfair advantage, the league outlawed coach-to-quarterback radio communication.
In his years with the Los Angeles Rams and the Washington Redskins, Allen built a reputation as a coaching rogue without peer. He was once rebuked by the league for trading the same draft picks to different franchises in different deals, an outrageous form of double-dipping that Allen said had merely been the result of an oversight in his hectic workday. Allen was famous for planting a spying scout in a hotel room overlooking the Dallas Cowboys’ practice field, and for obsessing over the possibility that enemy operatives were bugging his locker room or sitting in nearby trees and spying on Redskins workouts.
George “Papa Bear” Halas, patriarch and coach of the Chicago Bears, was said to have had itching powder applied to the opponents’ soap bars and to have had a trained dog at the ready to run onto the field in the event that the Bears needed an extra timeout. Halas worried about Allen’s spying, and Brown was concerned enough about Halas potentially taping his conversations in the visitors’ locker room in Chicago that he talked to his quarterback in the showers. (Brown also checked the windows at his practice facility to make certain nobody was shooting unauthorized film.) Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers fretted over the possibility that Halas spied on his practices; Lombardi had his players switch jerseys in an attempt to deceive the deceivers. In 1934, Halas’s 13-0 Bears lost the NFL championship and an 18-game winning streak because the New York Giants put on sneakers at halftime—courtesy of the Manhattan College basketball team—to give themselves a huge advantage over a visiting team that might as well have been wearing skates on the frozen Polo Grounds field.