Williams sat there, on the losing team.
This was the guy who became Bennet’s new boss at the Allegheny County coroner’s office. Here was the dawn of a new day at the morgue, a place that had been raided by the FBI, scrutinized by investigators, and put in the spotlight by media beginning to suspect literal skeletons in the closets. Williams was the man appointed to clean up the mess. If he had followed any of Bennet’s career after that trial, what he heard had done nothing to improve his opinion of the guy from Nigeria.
—
For three months in the office I don’t think Dr. Williams ever said one word to me.
Then he sent the slides of Webster and Long to somebody I did not know.
Then he began to send my work to be reviewed by other pathologists. I think he was looking for some type of mistake so that he would have a reason to fire me. He did not find any mistakes.
I moved swiftly and obtained signed consents from Webster’s family and Long’s wife for the brains which were fixing in formalin in my office. Still Dr. Williams refused to release the brains to me.
It was only after Long’s wife got involved that Dr. Williams released the brains to me, without the slides. He said the slides were not available so I told him to keep them, as long as I had the brains, I did not want to be bothered with him.
To this day, I do not know what he did with those slides.
I moved the brains to the coat closet in my condominium, so at some point I had Webster’s brain, Long’s brain, Waters’s brain, and then a wrestler, Chris Benoit’s, brain in my coat closet at home. The work environment at the medical examiner’s office was becoming threatening, antagonistic, and hostile. I was treated with ignominy and I was beginning to be painted and branded as a troublemaker. I was referred to with all types of adjectives and nouns, and suspected that many called me the N word behind closed doors.
One Sunday morning in March of 2007 I received a call from my former professor and teacher at Pitt, Dr. Wiley, asking that I should come see him first thing on Monday morning. I asked why. He wanted to help me. He said he did not want me, his former student, to be professionally incapacitated at such a young phase of my career. First thing on Monday morning I went to his office. I met with him and Dr. Hamilton. Dr. Wiley suggested I should leave the medical examiner’s office, and possibly leave Pittsburgh.
I wept in his office and asked him what I had done to deserve this. He looked at me and said he did not know. I got home that day, still with tears in my eyes, knelt down and wept to my God. I resigned my job at the office that week. I was now also in trouble with my immigration status, since at that time my immigration status was based on my employment. I went back into a state of acute depression, and I started seeing a psychiatrist, an older guy who was in his seventies and semiretired. I saw him every Wednesday morning at eleven o’clock. I saw him for about six months and built such a wonderful friendship with him. While all these things were happening, my wife did not know anything. She was pregnant with our first child, Ashly, and I did not want her to worry. I was out of a job for six months, and she did not even know. I had savings, so our standard of living was not affected. I began a nationwide search for a new job. Every morning I would pretend that I was going to work, and I would go to the library or to church and work on my private consultation cases and CTE.
—
To feel that you’re running away. To feel marginalized. To feel you don’t belong. Once again, here he was. And the builder was calling about the house in Moon Township. The drywall was up and where did he want the flatscreen in the bedroom? Could he come out and look at the size of the pantry in the kitchen? Because it could be bigger if they took off a foot or two from the powder room; there was still time. He answered the builder’s queries and drove with Prema out to the house. She held up paint chips for the baby’s room and swatches for living room drapes. She began to regard that house as her own loving creation, her work of art, and Bennet could not allow that to be taken away from her. He prayed for a miracle, stood in the backyard and imagined a swing set and prayed for a miracle.
So Bailes going to Chicago with his research, with his PowerPoint presentation, to stand up for him, to be his voice, that was a significant moment in Bennet’s life. That was a kind of rescue.
But, honestly, at that point Bennet needed so much more rescue. Wecht wouldn’t talk to him. The FBI was after him to testify. His precious slides had vanished. He’d lost his job. His American dream was collapsing. It felt like monsters were growing out of the earth, pushing up from under his feet, pushing up and toppling him over and getting ready to swallow him.
—
The meeting was in an amphitheater in Chicago’s Westin O’Hare. Maybe two hundred guys in suits holding awesome folders with the NFL’s awesome logo on them. Inside the folder, like a prize in a box of Cracker Jack, was a CD holding all the journal articles about concussions that the MTBI committee had produced. Goodell got up and thanked the MTBI committee for such important work.
Pellman was there.
Casson was there.
Maroon was there.
Apuzzo, the editor of the journal Neurosurgery, was there, too. He had not accepted Bennet’s paper about Andre Waters’s brain, “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player: Part III” for publication in the journal. He had accepted the first two, but this one he had turned down without explanation. He was on the NFL payroll. He had served as a consultant for the Giants since at least 1997.
It was awesome to be affiliated with the NFL.
It was standing room only in the amphitheater, mostly white guys in suits, and the morning session started off politely enough. Members of the MTBI committee were praised for their hard work as guys showed slides and other guys clapped, and there was much doodling on notepads. Then a former New York Jets neuropsychologist, Bill Barr, cut through the crap and all but accused the MTBI committee of fraud. He told everyone in the room that the committee had excluded available data—his own data—from its studies, thereby skewing results and promoting a false narrative. He went after the committee, and committee members fired back, and by the time they broke for lunch the tone of the summit had turned dark.
Bailes spoke after lunch. “Does Concussion Lead to Pugilistic Dementia and Alzheimer’s?” was what he titled the talk, going straight for the heart of Bennet’s work. He figured the science would elevate the discussion, move it forward, enable the group to think about building on Bennet’s work. Not that Bennet’s work was news to them. By now they all knew about it, as reported in The New York Times. Bailes figured just saying it out loud, showing the slides, would wake everyone up. At a minimum, it would make the statement that, hey, guys, there’s work to be done here, there’s a whole lot more research we need to do. Because look at this: it’s scientific proof that the kind of concussions sustained in football can lead to debilitating brain damage.
Bailes clicked through the slides, told the stories. This was personal. Webster, Long, Waters. And Bennet, too. He thought about how Bennet was as pure a scientist as anyone could bring into this equation—no government and no institution funding him, doing no one’s bidding but his own.
Bailes stood up there and he showed pictures of the tau tangles, the sludge that did Webster in. He showed it in Long’s brain and in Waters’s brain, too. He was solemn, his heart heavy. The game he loved so much, had played in high school and college, had felt privileged to be part of as a sideline doctor with the Steelers, he was telling all those like-minded men that their beloved game was causing brain damage.
He saw a guy near the front, smiling. Except, no: it was more of a smirk. He saw Casson, the infamous Dr. No. The guy with the smirk was looking at Casson. The guy was looking at Casson because Casson was rolling his eyes. Like, Here we go again. Like, Can you believe this bullshit? Like, What a fucking idiot.
They were mocking him.
Bailes had never before been mocked. Certainly not in his professional l
ife.
“And I’m thinking, ‘This is a new disease in America’s most popular sport, and how are its leaders responding? By laughing at the guy presenting it. Alienating the scientist who found it. Refusing to accept the science coming from him.’ ”
Bailes felt a burning inside him, a volcano.
At a press briefing afterward, Bennet’s name kept coming up—this was Bennet Omalu’s research—and so Casson made a statement about that stupid Nigerian’s work: “The only scientifically valid evidence of chronic encephalopathy in athletes is in boxers and in some steeplechase jockeys. It’s never been scientifically, validly documented in any other athletes.”
A total dismissal of Bennet’s work.
“I’m a man of science,” Casson said, implying that Bennet Omalu was not.
As for the commissioner, Roger Goodell, he said: “I’m not a doctor.”
—
One final thing happened in 2007 that turned Bennet’s world sour. Maybe he suspected it would happen, the way you can feel a storm coming even before the wind blows. There’s a stillness in the air. There’s that feeling on your skin. Something was not right.
Nowinski was on the phone. It was a conference call. Nowinski, Bennet, Bailes, and Fitzsimmons. The four would gather for regular weekly calls about SLI, planning research, discussing how to move forward to promote concussion awareness and how to pierce the wall of NFL denials.
Nowinski was talking and he was saying he needed money. He said he deserved to be paid for his efforts to bring CTE to the public’s awareness.
“What do you mean, money?” Fitzsimmons said.
A salary, Nowinski said. He said he wanted to make at least $110,000, and he wanted it paid retroactively, starting from the day SLI was formed.
Fitzsimmons made the point that the group had no money, that it was a nonprofit, that he himself had already put $10,000 of his own into it, to say nothing of all Bennet’s personal assets that had gone into the research, the foundation upon which SLI was built. They would of course need to seek funding to continue the research, but that was a long way off.
“There’s no money,” Bailes chimed in.
“Nobody’s getting any money,” Bennet said.
Nowinski did not back down. Maybe he didn’t even need them; that’s the way he was talking. He could go solo. He didn’t need the scientist who discovered the disease. He didn’t need the brain surgeon who had been studying the subject for decades and knew his way around the NFL. He didn’t need the one attorney in the world who had ever successfully sued the NFL for disability claims.
In fact, maybe he had all he needed: The New York Times. And he’d been talking to other people. Better people. He didn’t say anything about that then. He just said he needed to be paid, and the others said they couldn’t pay him, and the conversation got heated and Fitzsimmons couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The wrestler wants money? For what?
Fitzsimmons had never felt good about Nowinski joining the group. He found him bossy and impertinent and he believed he was trying to turn Bennet’s science into the Chris Nowinski Show. Using Bennet to make himself famous. “Why should we put up with this?” Fitzsimmons would say to Bennet and Bailes. What did Nowinski even bring to the table? And now he was asking for money. And now on the conference call, Bailes and Nowinski were fighting. A power struggle. A battle for turf. Nowinski wanted SLI headquartered in Boston, where he and Cantu were based. Bailes thought it belonged in West Virginia, where he and Fitzsimmons were based. The argument got heated, and then the money issue came up again, and Fitzsimmons just couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’m resigning,” he said. “Good luck to you guys.” He hung up.
Bailes couldn’t take it anymore, either. He hung up.
It was just Nowinski and Bennet left. “Who do you think you are?” Bennet said, his voice high and angry. Who?
They both hung up without resolution. Bennet would remember Nowinski calling him a few days later, calling to tell him that his brain analysis services were no longer needed for SLI.
Nowinski wouldn’t remember it that way; he would say he wanted out all along. He would say his request for money was just a ruse, an exit strategy, and it worked. Whatever it was, and whoever was right and whoever was wrong, the fact was that the alliance was over. Nowinski took off. He had an idea for a different neuropathologist to be the face of CTE. A better face. And a better whole team of people who would maybe behave. And he had The New York Times.
Bailes and Fitzsimmons and Bennet still gathered each week for their conference calls. They gathered in collective wonderment.
What just happened?
CHAPTER 12
COMFORT ZONE
The witness box is an almost perfect square, heavy oak coated again and again in shiny shellac, so thick you can dig your fingernails into it. On his second day of testimony at the Wecht trial in Pittsburgh in 2008, Bennet is resisting the urge.
I’m sorry, Dr. Wecht. You have to know I am not here by my own choosing.
Wecht won’t even look up, his arms crossed, biting his thumbnail, staring at nothing.
The jurors are settling in, shifting, trying to get comfortable in their seats, and a few of the alert ones exchange glances: Is this Nigerian dude going to talk slower today?
Bennet just wants to go home. California—that’s where he lives now. That’s where he does his CTE work now. In his garage. After being unemployed in Pittsburgh for six months, never telling Prema a thing about it, faking it, thinking fast on his feet so she wouldn’t find out, he landed the medical examiner job in San Joaquin, and he and Prema bought a house in the sleepy town of Lodi, and it’s wonderful, really. Living in obscurity is wonderful. On the outskirts! That’s where he belongs. Just like when he was a kid. Watching the other kids. Not getting into the fray, sitting on the edges of the action, dreaming about becoming an airline pilot and soaring forever away. And then in med school, not fitting in. Seattle, New York, never fitting in. No, of course, sitting on the edges of life was not wonderful back then. It was depressing as hell. But he’s a man now, and he understands that God placed him on the outskirts like that for a reason, to gain strength, to get used to it, because that’s where he belongs. The outskirts. With dead people.
If he had to point to a single reason why he chose to spend his life with dead people, he would point to this trial in Pittsburgh in 2008. Living people are messy. Dead people are clean. There is no politics with dead people. His retreat from the real world—his necessary retreat—enabled him to be right where a guy like Mike Webster needed him to be. It was his retreat that enabled him to find CTE in Mike Webster’s brain. That worked out just fine.
But this mess here, this is not working out fine. Stuck in a witness box in a pair of too-tight cap-toe oxfords, dreading what’s to come.
“Good morning, Doctor,” the defense attorney says. He’s a dapper enough guy, properly attired in a sharp blue suit; he has a bushy mustache and a flap of gray hair sitting on his head like a doily on an old lady’s coffee table, but otherwise he’s completely put together.
“Good morning, sir.”
“We have not spoken before, have we, sir?” he says to Bennet.
“Sir?”
“We have never spoken?”
“No, no, this is the first time I’m meeting you.”
Today it’s the defense attorney’s turn to question Bennet about the eighty-four counts of piddly shit, now reduced to forty-one counts of piddly shit, that threaten Wecht’s livelihood and future.
The defense attorney wants to know, truthfully: Was Bennet hoping to become a famous pathologist just like his former boss, the defendant sitting before us today, Dr. Cyril Wecht?
“No,” Bennet says, answering way too fast, as if to squelch the part of him that thinks: Yes! Of course, yes. There is so much of Wecht he wanted to be like. Of course. Oh my gosh, yes! Are you kidding me? All those things he learned from Wecht. Slamming down the phone, motherfucking cocksuck
ing ass-kissing bastard. How to dress, where to buy the best car, how to think about race, prejudice, being a black guy, being a Jewish guy, one of those gays. How to stay centered and confident even when the world around you treats you like shit. But that is not the stuff the defense attorney is referring to.
“Now, you were kind of a bargain for Dr. Wecht, weren’t you?” the attorney asks.
“If you say so.”
“Doctor, do you recall, sir, how much you were paid as an employee of the coroner’s office when you were a full-time pathologist?”
Oh, geez. Relevance, Your Honor? This could get embarrassing. “I was started at a low level of ninety thousand dollars,” Bennet says. “Why I say low, is comparatively, compared to what people of my education and level were paid, ninety thousand dollars for a board-certified forensic pathologist, neuropathologist was…low.”
“Did you ever go, Dr. Omalu, to Dr. Wecht to express your concern about your salary and to discuss it with him?”
“Yes. Many times I went up to Dr. Wecht, and I brought it up. In my mind, it wasn’t good.”
“Do you remember what you said to him, how you engaged him on the topic of your salary?”
“Many times he would tell me, ‘Bennet, there is nothing we can do,’ ” he says. “ ‘It is not up to me. It’s up to the county.’ I recall there was once we were talking and he said to me, ‘Sit down, Bennet, and let me explain something to you. If you’re paid a competitive salary at this county, administrators will be monitoring you, looking across your shoulders to see what you do. But if your salary is low, you have greater liberty to do what you want to do. So choose being paid a lower salary, and we are free to do whatever we want to do.’ ”
“Did you get a raise?”
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