This was not the way to make a good impression. Cooke was a formal man with formal tastes. If he wanted sand dabs, dammit, everyone was eating sand dabs. In this particular case, however, Hearn—one of the few men who had the owner’s ear—intervened. “The guy’s only nineteen,” he said. “The only thing he knows is hamburger and pizza.” A resigned Cooke sighed, then yelled toward the kitchen, “Can we have a hamburger?”
Nothing.
“A hamburger!” he screamed. “Get the man one!”
Within minutes, Earvin Johnson was gripping a burger. The accompanying smile was that of an eight-year-old securing a Happy Meal. “You know,” West later said to Johnson, “nobody has ever done what you just did to Jack Kent Cooke.”
Beginning with that very moment, staring at a peppy teenager biting some meat, Hearn knew something about Johnson sparkled. As impressive as he was on tape, soaring past defenders, connecting on impossible no-look passes, spinning left, driving right, he was significantly more dazzling in person. At 6-foot-9 and 215 pounds, Johnson was a mountain of a man, the biggest, most powerful point guard anyone had ever seen. Yet it was his charisma, especially at his precocious age, that floored people. At the time, the face of the Lakers was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a moody soul who brooded a hundred times for every forced smile. If the center was best known for his unblockable skyhook, he was equally famous for blowing off autograph seekers of all ages, creeds and ilk. Johnson, on the other hand, was a ray of sunshine. He looked people in the eye, shook hands, talked about basketball as if he were describing a beautiful woman. Oh, and that smile—that blinding, all-glowing smile. “He was just a magnet,” said Claire Rothman. “You wanted to be around him. You wanted to see him smile. You wanted to have lunch with him. Earvin Johnson was perfectly nicknamed. He had . . . it.”
Cooke, however, wasn’t one to be swayed easily. Though he and Buss had already agreed in principle to the sale, Cooke insisted—without much argument from the soon-to-be owner—that the first pick in the 1979 draft be his call.
As he watched Johnson munch on his burger, Cooke asked what the kid was seeking as compensation. Aware that Abdul-Jabbar, arguably the NBA’s best player, was making $650,000 annually, Johnson confidently uttered, “Somewhere around $600,000 would be ideal—plus, I need an education allowance so I can finish at Michigan State.”
Cooke was not amused. “Let’s get one thing straight right off,” he said. “I’m not paying for your education. I put myself through school, and if I could do it, you certainly can. Now, we can offer you $400,000. It’s not what you’re asking for, but it’s a hell of a lot of money. And let me remind you that the Lakers have made the playoffs seventeen times in the last nineteen years. We’d love to have you, Earvin, and I hope you’ll play here. But the team has done just fine without you.”
The one thing Johnson didn’t know at the time (and wouldn’t know until more than two decades later) was that, in Cooke’s mind, he was merely another good college player in an ocean of good college players. Why, immediately after the draft, Cooke told those within his small circle of confidants that the team could have gone with Sidney Moncrief, the high-scoring guard from the University of Arkansas. That was the advice presented to him by Jerry West, the outgoing coach, who wasn’t fully convinced a 6-foot-9 point guard would function in the fast-paced NBA. Of all the ex-basketball players working for the Lakers, West was the one Cooke trusted most. “West wanted Moncrief, and he made it very clear to Jack Kent Cooke,” said Rich Levin, who covered the team for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. “There was a strong belief, for a brief time at least, that Moncrief, not Magic, would wind up a Laker.”
Cooke, though, was far from a dummy. Even if he weren’t the smartest basketball man around, he understood that sports were as much about salesmanship as on-court success. Despite winning 47 games and reaching the playoffs in 1978–79, the Lakers sold out only once, and averaged 11,771 fans in an arena that seated 17,505. The kid sitting before him was a 100,000-foot-high neon sign screaming SEE THE LAKERS! His roster, on the other hand, was composed of standout players who seemed either indifferent (point guard Norm Nixon), shy (forward Jamaal Wilkes) or downright offensive (Abdul-Jabbar). Cooke had waited a long time for Abdul-Jabbar to turn on the charm. He now seemed to realize it would never happen. “Jack believed in star power,” said Rothman. “He deserves credit for that.”
So, when Johnson met Cooke’s rebuff with an even stronger one—“I guess I’ll be going back to school”—the owner cracked. He invited Johnson and his entourage to stay the night in Los Angeles and return to the Trophy Room the following morning. On the drive to the hotel that evening, Earvin Sr. lit into his son. He was a man who’d spent years working multiple blue-collar jobs, struggling alongside his wife, Christine, a school cafeteria worker, to feed their ten children. Now his nineteen-year-old son was insulting sand dabs? “I’ve worked in a factory my whole life for what he’s offering you for one year!” Earvin Sr. said. “And for something you love doing! Don’t be greedy, son.”
The next day, Cooke and Johnson negotiated back and forth until, finally, a deal was reached. The $500,000 contract made Johnson the highest-paid rookie in league history.* With smiles all around, Cooke let his new superstar choose lunch.
“Pizza!” Johnson said. “Let’s order pizza.”
Cooke agreed, and before long, one of America’s richest men was munching on his first-ever slice of pepperoni. “This stuff,” he said, “is pretty good.”
• • •
In the weeks that followed, Cooke and Buss communicated regularly. They chatted via the phone several times per day, lunched frequently, discussed personnel and facilities and the right way to move a franchise forward.
For all his shortcomings, this was one of the beauties of Jack Kent Cooke. Yes, he wanted to sell the Los Angeles Lakers. But he wanted to do so the right way. In his mind, this meant helping Buss as much as possible.
This also meant taking part in the search for the team’s next coach.
Over the previous three years, the man working the sidelines for the Lakers had been Jerry West, a Hall of Fame guard so revered that the NBA’s logo, designed in 1968, was his silhouette. West was, by all accounts, one of the smartest men to ever step on the court. He was perceptive, instinctive and forward thinking.
He also loathed coaching.
“Oh, it was awful,” said West. “Coaching wasn’t something I was really capable of doing. As a coach I was a screamer and a yeller, which I hated. When Jerry Buss came in, I knew it was my time to stop coaching once and for all. It would have been unfair to myself to keep doing a job I hated, and it would have been unfair for Jerry to have a coach who wasn’t that good at his job.”
Two years earlier, Cooke had offered Jerry Tarkanian, the coach at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the chance to take over for West. At the time, Tarkanian had just led the Runnin’ Rebels to the Final Four, and was one of the nation’s hottest basketball names. After strong consideration, Tarkanian rejected Cooke’s overtures. The salary ($70,000 per year, with a $2,500 raise every year) barely exceeded what he had made in Nevada. “It wasn’t worth it,” Tarkanian says. “Not for me or my family.”
By 1979, the timing had changed.
• • •
The car was parked on the second level of a garage alongside the Sheraton Universal Hotel in North Hollywood. Because this was La-La Land, where celebrities and big spenders came to peacock, there was little unusual about this particular make of car in this particular location. Oh, the maroon-and-white 1977 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II was a dandy, what with its innovative high-pressure hydraulic system and its Turbo-Hydramatic 400 transmission. But considering the roll call of Mercedes and BMWs and Jaguars situated nearby, really, what was the big deal? The Rolls was merely another fancy car belonging, no doubt, to merely another high roller.
With one difference.
There was somethin
g inside the trunk.
Hidden.
Locked.
Stashed away.
The Sheraton parking lot attendant took notice early on the morning of June 17, 1979. He was doing his rounds, the same mindless stroll he’d taken hundreds of times before, when the two-tone paint job—a rich maroon on the top, blinding white on the bottom—caught his eye. Hadn’t authorities been looking for a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II? A maroon-and-white one with a gold interior?
Before long, several members of the Los Angeles Police force arrived. Leroy Orozco, a veteran LAPD detective, matched the license plate with the missing vehicle. He proceeded to check the paint for fingerprints, pop the lock and open the trunk.
The smell shot up into the air, like a ghost set free from its crypt. There’s nothing quite like that stench—rotting flesh, confined in a small space.
The decaying corpse was that of a white man, only the remaining skin, decomposed beyond recognition, had turned a shade of blackish purple. The body, wrapped in a yellow blanket, was trussed neck to waist to feet with its hands tied behind its back. A bullet hole shattered the rear of the skull, and another one penetrated the right temple. When an officer reached into the body’s pants pockets, neither a wallet nor a driver’s license was found. A security television monitor directly above the space where the Rolls was parked had been tampered with.
Still, no confirmation was needed.
This was Victor Weiss.
A mere three days earlier, on the evening of June 14, Weiss had seemed to be the happiest man on the planet. A fifty-one-year-old sports promoter who served as Jerry Tarkanian’s representative, he had bounded out the front entrance of the Beverly-Comstock Hotel, euphoric in the knowledge that his client was about to be named the new coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. Those were the words Cooke and Buss had just used during their meeting—“We’re excited to have Jerry as the new coach of the Lakers.”
When, two months earlier, Los Angeles had again contacted Tarkanian about jumping to the NBA, the coach seemed less than enthused. He now viewed himself as strictly a college guy, wrapped up in the oomph and rah-rah of the amateur level. Was Tark, as most people called him, a pillar of moral fortitude? Hardly. At the time, he was in the midst of fighting the NCAA over alleged recruiting violations. Was he a Dean Smith–esque master of Xs and Os? No. But few white men were better at understanding and empathizing with the young African-American basketball player. Tarkanian possessed a gift, and it was walking into the projects of Detroit or Gary, Indiana, or Newark, New Jersey, and leaving two hours later with the commitment of a 6-foot-5 kid who could jump from here to Pluto.
Tarkanian had no interest in leaving a position he cherished for one where he would be forced to serve as a glorified babysitter for a bunch of halfhearted, coked-out millionaires in a league that’d been damned by mediocre ratings, poor attendance and drug addiction. “I loved Las Vegas, my family loved Las Vegas,” Tarkanian said. “When the Lakers reached out, I immediately said to my wife, ‘I can’t take the job, right? I just can’t.’”
Still, to be polite, Tarkanian returned Cooke’s call, explaining that, even if he were interested in moving to California, it’d have to be for, ohhhhh . . . a helluva lot more than the $70,000 offered last time.
“Like what?” Cooke said.
“Well,” said Tarkanian. “It’d have to be double the $350,000 I make right now.”
“That’s fine,” Cooke said.
“What?” said Tarkanian.
“That’s fine,” Cooke repeated. “We can do that.”
So here was Vic Weiss, moments after concluding with Cooke and Buss, briefcase in hand, approaching the valet parking station at the Comstock, happy as could be. Not only were the Lakers willing to make Tarkanian the NBA’s all-time highest-paid coach, they also ceded to his demands: a pair of season tickets for every home game, three luxury automobiles—one for Jerry, one for his wife, Lois, one for Pamela, their oldest daughter. “Everything was set,” Tarkanian said. “I was the new coach of the Los Angeles Lakers.”
Around the same time Weiss was wrapping things up, Jerry and Lois drove north from San Diego, where they had been vacationing, to the Balboa Bay Resort in Newport Beach. In the coming days, Tarkanian presumed he would sit down with Cooke and Buss, sign the five-year contract and be introduced to the Los Angeles media as the Lakers’ tenth head coach.
“I’ll meet you and Lois tomorrow morning at the resort,” Weiss told Tarkanian. “This is a really exciting time for you.”
• • •
The phone inside the Balboa Bay Resort rang, and Jerry Tarkanian answered. It was one o’clock in the morning of June 15. On the other end of the line was Rose Weiss, Vic’s wife of nearly twenty years. She was calling from her home in nearby Encino. “Have you seen my husband?” she asked. “We were supposed to have dinner last night. He never came.”
Tarkanian hadn’t.
One day turned into two days. Two days turned into three. A sense of confusion morphed into a sense of dread. Finally, when police were able to match the fingerprints from the decayed body with those of Vic Weiss, the phone inside the Tarkanians’ hotel room rang again. “It was devastating news,” Lois said. “This was not just someone Jerry was friends with for a long time. It was someone he loved. I can’t tell you how badly that hurt us.”
Many of those who knew Weiss acknowledged a slipperiness to the man. Weiss’s business holdings were hardly of the up-and-up genre. He apparently owned three car dealerships (Rolls-Royce, Ford and Fiat) and managed a handful of so-so boxers. Weiss always carried around a thick wad of cash (he had $38,000 in his pocket for the meeting with Buss and Cooke), and rarely left home minus his ostentatious solid gold wristwatch and matching diamond ring (purchased from Anthony Starr, a Canadian jewel thief who routinely sold Weiss hot goods). It was far from unusual to see Weiss standing ringside, talking shop with known mobsters.
What detectives later learned was that Weiss, the ultimate showman, had little to show. Though he told people he possessed the three car dealerships, he actually was merely a paid consultant. His Encino home was owned by an associate, and his car—the maroon-and-white Rolls-Royce—was leased. Weiss had run up more than $60,000 in gambling debts and—at the time of his death—was flying back and forth from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to deliver bundles of laundered cash. According to one of his colleagues, Weiss skimmed money off the top of the transactions. He had been warned repeatedly to stop and, police suspected, was killed when he didn’t.
• • •
Despite it all—the murder and the suspicions and the lingering questions—Jerry Tarkanian was still the next head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. He would be designing plays for Kareem down low, would be figuring out how to blend the talents of Norm Nixon, the incumbent All-Star point guard, with Johnson, the rookie point guard. He would have to incorporate Jamaal Wilkes, the smooth small forward, into the offensive mix, and find an answer to the long-standing void at power forward. “He was so excited to coach Magic,” Lois said. “He had all these ideas about how to use him.”
A week after Weiss was murdered, Jerry and Lois flew to Las Vegas, where they dined with Buss. “I know this whole tragedy has been very hard on you,” Buss said. “Take as much time as you need. The offer is on the table, and it’s not going anywhere. You’re our coach.”
Vic Weiss’s murder, though, had changed things. With the death came the news (hidden until this point) of the coaching transaction. The people of Las Vegas reached out. Please don’t leave. We need you. You need us. You are Las Vegas. The Tarkanians had four children, none of whom wanted to depart. Maybe, just maybe, money wasn’t everything. Maybe $700,000 wasn’t worth giving up the job he loved most.
“I don’t think Jerry ever got past Vic’s death,” said Lois. “He just didn’t get past it.”
When Tarkanian called Buss to tell him he had de
cided to remain in Las Vegas, the new Lakers owner held no grudge. “I understand,” he said. “Some things just aren’t meant to be.”
• • •
In the craziest of days, when Magic Johnson agreed to leave college and become a Laker, and Jerry Tarkanian was preparing to jump to the NBA, and Vic Weiss’s remains were being found in the trunk of a Rolls-Royce, it was easy to forget that, for all the “inevitable” talk about the NBA approving Jerry Buss’s bid to buy the team, there was little inevitable about it.
In fact, with each passing day, as the June 22 vote among NBA owners approached, Buss’s anointment seemed to become increasingly imperiled. “There were many questions about whether he would be allowed to buy the team,” said Roy Johnson, who covered the NBA for The New York Times. “This was in the day when the NBA was sort of like a company picnic . . . just not that big of a deal. And the other owners didn’t exactly hide their suspicions over Jerry Buss.”
Back in the 1970s, there was an expectation among the NBA’s ruling class that, to earn the status as owner, one had to either be a large corporation (the Knicks, for example, were owned by Gulf+Western) or an individual who fit a certain profile. Namely: male, über-rich and reputable.
To be “reputable,” the owner needed to fit a certain description.* Jim Fitzgerald, owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, was a straitlaced businessman who made a fortune in real estate development and cable television. Harry T. Manguarian Jr., owner of the Boston Celtics, was a straitlaced businessman who made a fortune in retail furniture and, later, as the owner of Southeastern Jet Corporation and Drexel Investments. William Davidson, owner of the Detroit Pistons, was a straitlaced businessman who made a fortune in architectural and automotive glass. Though it went unstated to the public, NBA owners—more than those of any other league—viewed themselves as better than the players they employed. Not merely wealthier but less, well, black. And street. And, for lack of a better word, common.
Which made Jerry Buss quite the odd fit.
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 3