by Glenn Stout
In his own way, Falafel wanted to be transformed too. He wanted to be healthier, more mindful, more purposeful. “My life, I just got into a situation,” he said. “Some of the hardships I endured, I did so without realizing that they were hardships. I should have a family. That is a big missing part of my own puzzle.”
Once, in an airport, Falafel sat next to a rabbi, and asked him for his thoughts about gambling. The rabbi said that it was not prohibited, but that a life of gambling was unsanctioned by God. Falafel told me, “I see religion for what it really is: just a bluff,” but he couldn’t get the interpretation out of his head. One evening, outside a casino bathroom, I saw him stop a young bearded man in a yarmulke and say, “I have a question for you: do you know what Jewish law says about gambling?” The man was taken aback. It didn’t matter—Falafel was already answering. “I think it is that you can gamble, but that you can’t earn a living from gambling. Is that it?”
At the Menger, Mr. Joseph had rented the Presidential Suite, and on Super Bowl Sunday he filled it with food and with backgammon players. By then, the tournament was over. The mood was relaxed. Falafel had lost in the semifinals, to a longtime player from Texas, and he had been upset. But now, in Mr. Joseph’s suite, the loss was easily forgotten. There was the Super Bowl to distract him—he had bet many rubles on the Baltimore Ravens. And there was his weight. He stood near an elaborate buffet that Mr. Joseph had arranged. “You can eat this,” a player from Germany said, pointing to a tin of celery. Falafel already had a stalk in his mouth. He took a few carrots and a bottle of mineral water and walked over to a couch. A plate of cheesecakes was set down in front of him. “Those pies,” Mr. Joseph said, casually. “Have one of those pies.”
“No,” Falafel said, cradling his belly. “I can’t.”
“I’ll give you 50 bucks right now to eat one of those pies,” Mr. Joseph said, pulling out a crisp bill.
“How many calories?” Falafel said.
“Thirty,” Mr. Joseph said.
“Bullshit!” The Bone said.
Falafel looked at the money and hesitated. “Jeez,” he said. “You’re giving me a 50?” But he held his ground.
It used to be that tournaments were the center of big-money side games, but these days the few players who make their living from backgammon must look in deeper waters for big fish. Before leaving the Menger, one top player told me in hushed tones that he was going to see a billionaire who puts him up in a hotel near his house so that they can play all-night games for $1,000 a point. The billionaire is so obsessive that he can play for 15 hours uninterrupted; the player told me he had to bring a friend to cover for him during bathroom breaks.
From Texas, Falafel and The Bone headed for Los Angeles, where they rented a business suite at a Manhattan Beach hotel. Word had been quietly circulating about a group of wealthy amateurs playing for enormous stakes. Not merely fish—a pod of whales. Who would they be? Ted Turner? Carl Icahn? George and Barbara Bush host a private tournament at Kennebunkport. One of the most-read books in the Bush family is Backgammon for Blood, a handbook from the 1970s. (“Unfortunately, that’s one of the worst books,” a mathematician told me. “It was written under a pseudonym, and some people say it was intentionally bad so that people reading it would play worse.”) Falafel thought he could find a way into the action from the West Coast, but he was fanatically secretive about what he knew. The money was too big—too important to his future. “This is a fantasy,” he told me, by which he meant that the games were just an ephemeral opportunity, a blinding spark.
Falafel’s hotel was a favorite of Jersey Jim’s, who had also come, with his wife, Patty. Every day, they went across the street to a gym the size of an LAX hangar. Falafel was relying on them to help him lose weight. But he did not want to lift, or run, or exert himself intensively. Instead, he decided to restrict his diet to 1,000 calories per day, and to walk. Jersey Jim and Patty worked on him until he agreed, at least, to climb the Manhattan Beach dune: a steep, 270-foot incline near an Army Reserve facility, where athletes like Kobe Bryant come to work out.
On the morning that Falafel and The Bone arrived, a lean man with bleached dreadlocks, shirtless and deeply tanned, was doing yoga on a blanket at the base of the dune. Falafel looked a little intimidated. He watched as The Bone began striding up the incline and then slowed down. “Gee,” he said. “The Bone, he’s realizing that it takes a lot of energy.”
Patty turned to Falafel. “This is how you lose weight,” she said.
“Yeah, for sure,” Falafel said. He gazed at the hill uncertainly. At his last weigh-in, he was 245 pounds. But things were looking up. He had won on the Super Bowl. He was flying back to Israel to attend a wedding, and to spend some time near his childhood home. Then he was off to Copenhagen, for the Nordic Open, to participate in a tournament known as “Denmark vs. the World.” Falafel, who was captaining “the World,” was putting together an international team, and hoped to bring in Genius and Abe the Snake. The whales seemed increasingly within reach. Squinting in the bright Los Angeles sun, Falafel pushed his feet into the hot sand. Slowly, he began to climb.
KATHY DOBIE
Raider. QB Crusher. Murderer?
FROM GQ
ON A COOL, DRIZZLY February night in 2003, at one-thirty or so in the morning, a police officer cruising down Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica spotted flames shooting horizontally out a window of the Simply Sofas furniture showroom. From overhead he could hear popping sounds as the fire leapt up to eat at the power lines in the street outside. Inside, the blaze spread quickly, engulfing upholstery and wood, roaring up through the roof and melting the metal skin right off the loading dock door.
The fire was almost immediately deemed suspicious. Firefighters reported the strong smell of gasoline, and when investigators were able to get inside the building the next day, they found three “firebombs”—five-gallon plastic water jugs cut off at the neck, stuffed with paper and filled with gasoline. The evidence was gathered and sent to the lab.
Five months later, Sergeant Robert Almada, the police investigator for Santa Monica’s Arson Squad Task Force, walked into the interview room at the police station on Main Street with every reason to believe things were going his way. He had motive—revenge—and he had the kind of physical evidence almost never left behind in a fire: 30 pieces of gasoline-soaked mail, each addressed to the suspect or his wife. (In the heat of the blaze, the firebombs had caved in on themselves, preserving the magazines and catalogs and envelopes inside.) That suspect, one Anthony Smith, six feet four inches and over 320 pounds, a 36-year-old former defensive end for the LA/Oakland Raiders, dwarfed the little table in the room.
“Okeydoke,” Almada said as he settled himself into a chair and opened his case file. Almada was blue-eyed and brown-haired, with bland, boyish good looks. His eagerness (the whole case was ready to tumble into place; it was right there at his fingertips) and the slight discomfort he felt in the presence of Smith were camouflaged by an overly casual manner. He confirmed some phone numbers he had for Smith; he asked if he preferred the interview-room door open or closed. It was all cordial enough, Almada in control . . . so how did it happen that within minutes the sergeant was floundering, struggling for a foothold while his suspect was coldly telling him his case was a pile of shit?
“You know how stupid this is. This is stupid, this is stupid,” Smith said. How would he even have the time to set a fire? “I’m a very busy man. I don’t have time for that crap.”
Who the hell was this guy? A half-hour earlier, Almada would testify, while both men were sitting in the kitchen of Smith’s condo in Marina del Rey, the sergeant had confronted him with the physical evidence and Smith had broken down and cried. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he’d said, weeping with his head in his hands. As Almada saw it, Smith was more or less confessing to the arson. (He and the store’s owner had argued over money two weeks before the fire.) When Smith’s wife, Teresa, had hurried into the kitchen, asking what was
wrong, Smith had wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her body.
Now that broken guy, whoever he was, had morphed into this deadpan, assured guy . . . whoever he was.
Almada thought he’d try a side attack. He took a paper from his file—a record of Smith’s gun ownership. “It says you own a .45 pistol, a .22 pistol, a .357 revolver, .44 revolver, .44 Desert Eagle, .44 Colt, Olympic .223, another .223 pistol from Rocky Mountain Arms, and a .22 derringer,” Almada said.
“That’s it?” Smith asked.
“What do you mean, ‘That’s it’? That’s a lot of guns for one guy.”
“You ran that list and that’s what you came up with?”
“That’s what’s listed in the Automated Firearms System, yes,” Almada said.
“I only own shotguns,” Smith stated flatly.
“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.