Cover-up (18 page)

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 was 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.”

He was right. There was no one in the huge room when Stevie and Susan Carol arrived. They showed the documents to Bobby and Tamara and showed them the parts Arciero had pointed out as being crucial. By lunchtime, they had written close to 2,000 words explaining the saga. Their lede was direct:

“Five members of the California Dreams tested positive for human growth hormone (HGH) after the Dreams' victory over the Washington Redskins in the NFC Championship game, according to medical documents acquired by the
Washington Herald.

“Although the positive tests should have triggered a second set of confirming tests, Dreams owner Donald Meeker engaged in a widespread cover-up to ensure that the players—all of them starting offensive linemen—would not face suspension for tonight's Super Bowl game. Under league rules, players are automatically suspended from their next game if both an A and B blood sample test positive for HGH. But because of the cover-up, second samples were not taken from the players in question.

“Asked what the chances were that the second samples would
not
have come back positive, one doctor familiar with the tests said, “about 100-to-1 against. The players union has tried to portray this test as having a high false-positive rate, but I've found it to be almost completely accurate. It's pretty clear these guys were taking HGH. The second test isn't much more than a formality.”

They talked about whether that quote—from Arciero—would unmask him as a source. Not necessarily, they decided, since they could have showed the results to any doctor familiar with HGH and he would have drawn the same conclusion.

“The issue is going to be who gave you the test results,” Kelleher said, “not what a doctor thinks looking at them.”

The rest of the story laid out the backstory of the new NFL drug-testing system and why the league had felt it necessary to adopt it, and how it had played out during this first season. They worked in a quote from the commissioner from his press conference, but stated clearly that the league hadn't anticipated the potential for manipulation of the tests. Then they went into what might happen and the penalties the players, the team, and Meeker might face.

Kelleher and Mearns went through the story in detail and rewrote a number of paragraphs. It was almost one o'clock. People were starting to trickle into the room.

“Okay, our room should be clean by now and it's pretty big,” Kelleher said. “Let's go up there and get this to the paper and the lawyers in Washington. Then we'll decide when we're going to call Goodell and when we're going to call Meeker.”

“Call Goodell and Meeker?” Stevie said. “What for?”

Kelleher smiled. “Story like this, you have to give people a chance to comment. Goodell will express shock and say the league will investigate—that's about all he can say. Meeker may hang up on us or may curse at us—who knows? But you have to give him a chance to say something.”

“But won't the story get out once we call them for comment?” Susan Carol asked.

“Absolutely. The
Herald
will post a bulletin online this evening, and the story will be in our first edition, which hits the streets about nine o'clock tonight. Sunday's news really breaks Saturday night.

“One other thing,” Kelleher said.

“What's that?” Stevie said.

“You guys need to call your parents. They need to hear about this from you.”

“Oh God,” Susan Carol said. “Not again.”

Kelleher smiled. “Yes, Susan Carol,” he said. “Again.”

The session with the lawyer was both serious and funny at the same time. Kelleher put her on the speakerphone in the room, and she began asking questions.

“This shouldn't take more than an hour,” said the lawyer, whose name was Heather Matlock.

“An hour?” Kelleher said. “This is a newspaper story, not a book.”

“A very controversial news story with all sorts of legal implications,” Matlock said.

She had a point. Many of her questions were understandable. Without asking for names, she wanted to know how reliable the sources quoted in the story were. There were also questions that were borderline silly: “Are you sure this doctor is a doctor?” she asked about Arciero at one point.

“If he's not, all the people he's done surgery on are in for quite a shock,” Kelleher said.

Heather Matlock didn't even giggle.

She also asked at one point if Stevie and Susan Carol had actually seen the test results.

“Heather, the story says ‘according to documents obtained by the
Washington Herald,
'” Kelleher said.

“Oh, that's a reference to the test results?” Matlock said.

Stevie could see Kelleher biting his lip. He knew he was thinking the same thing:
No,
it's a reference to today's
Indianapolis Star.
Kelleher resisted. “Yes, that's what that is.”

Matlock proved to be right. The session took a little more than an hour. As if to prove she was somehow in charge, she concluded by saying, “I'm going to sign off on this on the condition that you get responses from the owner—what's his name, Meeker?—and from the commissioner.”

Kelleher sighed. “Heather, I've been doing this a few years now. I know how to be a reporter.”

“Your name isn't on the story, Bobby,” Matlock replied. “We're running a story about a major scandal written by a couple of fourteen-year-olds. If I'm not cautious, I'm not doing my job.”

“Yeah, I hear you, Heather. But they've got this nailed, I promise.”

They signed off with Heather Matlock. Tamara had gone downstairs to cover the Hall of Fame press conference.

“When do we talk to Goodell and Meeker?” Susan Carol asked.

“When the press conference is over, Tamara is going to tell Goodell's main PR guy that it's going to be vitally important we talk to the commissioner at around six o'clock. After we talk to him, we'll call Meeker on that cell phone number you got, Susan Carol. Deadline is six-thirty, so we'll phone the quotes in fast. There will be a bulletin about the story on our Web site at eight o'clock and the full story will be out there at nine. Then the bullets will start flying.”

Stevie shuddered a bit. In the other stories he and Susan Carol had broken, the bad guys had all been caught before the papers hit the stands. To him, the writing of a story like this should mean the adventure was over, that the bad guys were out of circulation. But this time the bad guys would still be out there. And they would be very, very angry.