The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (48 page)

Nine months later.

The downtown tour had started north on Ninth Street just as Progressive Field, home of the Indians, came into view. “That’s our building there,” said DiGeronimo from behind the wheel of his Escalade. Early-evening traffic was light. The SUV rolled past the PNC Center, Superior Square, the old Medical Mutual building and the Justice Center. Independence Excavating had dug the holes for every single one of those jobs. Several more landmark buildings were proudly pointed out—the Quicken Loans Arena, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Science Center, the casino. Buildings imploded, dirt dug, removed, reused or sold; it was a commodity, like corn or wheat. Big jobs. DiGeronimo looped around the biggest job, Browns Stadium. Demolition, excavation, plus a ton of site work.

“Forty million dollars,” said Bobby D.

Dirt had been in the DiGeronimo family for more than sixty years. Ever since Bobby’s wild, ball-busting dad had arrived from Italy at about sixteen, worked in a factory, then opened a small general contracting business around 1950. The family operation was now spread across six privately held businesses—excavation, asbestos abatement, car wash, light materials division, a recycling center in Florida and communications. It employed more than a thousand people, four hundred with Independence Excavating alone. Over the last twenty years the DiGeronimos had helped reshape downtown Cleveland, rebuild it from below the ground up. The kids ran things now. Nine boys, some on the business side, others involved in field work or project management, and Bobby’s daughter Lisa, who was in charge of human resources. Nieces and nephews all over the place. At sixty-five,
Bobby was construction director emeritus, the big boss who stopped by every morning for coffee with the guys, checked out the jobs downtown and made a call or two when needed. The DiGeronimo Companies had grossed more than $200 million in 2012.

“We’ve been very lucky, very blessed,” said Bobby D.

DiGeronimo’s association with Ohio State athletics, his entry into the world of boosters, began back in the late 1970s when the head basketball coach, Eldon Miller, heard about him through the Columbus construction grapevine and called him up.

“Would you employ one of our players?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” said Bobby D.

According to the university, from about 1988 until 2011 DiGeronimo had donated approximately $72,000 to Ohio State athletics—an average of about $3,000 a year—and purchased a number of season tickets for both basketball and football. One year, in honor of John Cooper’s famed “Silver Bullet” defense, somebody asked Bobby D. if he could come up with sixty silver chains and bullets to give to the kids as keepsakes. Sure, he said.

“They would always ask when they needed something,” said Bobby D. “Not that I was keeping score.”

A day with Bobby D. began on a slate-gray Saturday in November 2012 in what looked to be a lodge but was actually the DiGeronimo home. It was three days before the presidential election. President Obama was making one last swing through the crucial battleground state. Daughter Christi and her husband, Mark, lived down and around a wooded lane near one edge of the forty-three-acre family compound. Brother Vic was in back with a stunning Italian job that would have fit in nicely next to George Clooney’s place on Lake Como.

At Bobby D.’s house, where the clocks chimed, talk turned to Jim Tressel. DiGeronimo wasted no time.

“He’s been a phony since I’ve known him in the eighties. He’s always been that way,” he said. “When someone says to me, ‘Jim Tressel, he’s a great guy,’ if he’s someone I know, I say, ‘You know what? I know a different Jim Tressel. You don’t know the Jim Tressel I know.’ ”

In the early days of The Senator’s term in Columbus, all was good with Bobby D. His personal pizza and pasta delivery service to the coaches and players made regular runs between Cleveland and Columbus. The Buckeyes went undefeated (14-0) in 2002, and Tressel gave Bobby a championship ring, a classy show of thanks.

As it always does, the national title in 2002 altered the football universe
at Ohio State; expectations and outside scrutiny increased. Then came the messy matter of Maurice Clarett. The program needed even tighter controls. Tressel cracked down on access. Gene Smith arrived from Arizona State. By the fall of 2005 the joke was you needed a CIA badge to get into practice; media and other access to players was restricted. On game day all non–Ohio State personnel had to be out of the locker room six minutes before the team took the field. The program was cleaning up its act. But DiGeronimo laughed at the notion that somehow he had been swept out the door.

“That’s all BS,” he said. “First off, I [had] field passes where it says I have access to the locker room. If I was pushed out of the locker room, I would have never come back. I’m on the field in 2006.

“One of the most baffling things to me was when he said he caught me hiding in the locker room with another guy [before a game]. If I was hiding in the locker in 2001, why did you still have me on the field in 2006? It doesn’t make any sense.”

In fact, in May 2005, Tressel sent DiGeronimo a note pointing out how hard the staff was working to be in “absolute compliance” with NCAA rules. In the note Tressel praised DiGeronimo as “one of the greatest friends to Ohio State Athletics.” He closed with this line: “Thanks, Bobby! You are the best!”

But by the spring of 2007, Tressel no longer had any use for Bobby D. To this day DiGeronimo said he had no idea what triggered it. The first inkling of trouble came in April at Ted Ginn Jr.’s pro-day workout at the Woody Hayes indoor practice facility, which DiGeronimo had raised $100,000 to help build.

A month before, DiGeronimo had walked right in with Cooper for the Buckeyes’ pro day. Not this time.

“Bobby, you can’t go in there,” said an OSU assistant coach.

“Okay,” said DiGeronimo. “Is there a problem?”

“Coach doesn’t want you in there.”

DiGeronimo’s phone rang. It was Ted Ginn Sr., Glenville High’s head football coach. He had set up the workout at the facility for his son.

“I can’t get in there,” DiGeronimo told Ginn.

“What are you talking about?”

Bobby D. explained.

“Wait a minute,” said Ginn.

As DiGeronimo and his son Kevin finally, thanks to Ginn senior’s intervention, made their way in, Tressel came into view. DiGeronimo said Tressel saw him and walked the other way.

They stayed forty-five minutes and left.

Two months later at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes function, Tressel walked up to former Browns head coach Sam Rutigliano. DiGeronimo was at the table as well, but Tressel didn’t say a word to Bobby D.

“Invisible,” he said.

Two more months passed. This time the Cavs were in the NBA Finals. DiGeronimo had a grand suite in the Quicken Loans Arena. Tressel was in the arena walking around with NFL legend Jim Brown when the head coach saw DiGeronimo and stuck out his hand.

“Bobby D., how you doing?” Tressel said, according to DiGeronimo.

“Hi, Coach,” said Bobby D. and walked right by.

“Now you’re in Cleveland, you’re on my turf, you’re
my
friend,” he said. “From that time on there was no sense of me being around a phony.”

DiGeronimo stopped going to games. “Maybe two football games in the last four years,” he said.

As the afternoon wore on, the conversation shifted to Gene Smith. DiGeronimo was told that in forty pages of transcript he went from a man Smith barely knew to a “hanger on” to a “bad actor” who “at the end of the day operated outside of the system and went stealth.”

DiGeronimo’s eyes were closed, his dark head of hair leaning back against the couch.

“Wow. Bad actor,” he whispered. “Gene Smith is saying that?

“You know, it’s funny,” DiGeronimo said as he opened his eyes. “I’m reading this book called
Surrender
, and [it says] if you don’t do this and that … you’re going to hell. And you can’t hate anybody. You got to pray for the people. You know what? I never hated Gene Smith. I don’t respect him. You have to pray for people you don’t like. So you know what, I said a prayer for him.”

DiGeronimo categorically denied receiving any warnings from Smith to stay away from student-athletes or the program.

“Never,” said DiGeronimo. “Never called me. Never called me one time. Never.

“Never any meeting. Never any voice mail. Everything he says is a lie. Everything.”

DiGeronimo said he had seen or talked to Smith just twice in his life—the last time in the summer or fall of 2011 when Smith asked him to cooperate in the NCAA tattoo/memorabilia mess. The first time, he said, was a
twenty-second encounter in 2006 after a lunch with former head football coach Cooper in Columbus.

“You know what he should have said, ‘Hey, Bobby, you know what? I need to talk to you because I’m hearing some stuff’? He said nothing. By ’06 he should have known who I was, heard the name. He should have said, ‘Some things are bothering me. Can we talk?’ I would have said, ‘Sure, Gene, tell me what’s the problem.’ But he never did that.”

DiGeronimo was reminded that Smith told the NCAA he spoke with DiGeronimo “at least four times” after Ohio State had been informed of what the NCAA called “supplemental violations” and that Smith told the NCAA he had hit Bobby D. “pretty hard on [cooperating], particularly the last three calls.”

“One time,” Bobby D. said. “He asked me if I would meet with the NCAA, and I said yes. That’s it.”

Internal Ohio State documents revealed that between at least 2002 and 2008 Independence Excavating had filled out and returned to Bob Tucker, OSU’s director of football operations, the proper forms for employing student-athletes. DiGeronimo claimed he had also returned—but not copied—the same student-athlete employee paperwork to Tucker or his assistant Larry Romanoff through 2010. (The authors of this book made a Freedom of Information Act request to Ohio State for all student-athlete employment forms for the years 2009–11. Multiple word searches of the heavily redacted records for either “Bobby DiGeronimo” or “Independence Excavating” failed to find a single mention.)

“They won’t give [the work forms] to you,” said DiGeronimo, “because they don’t want to incriminate themselves any more, because I filled [the proper paperwork] out. They’re lying. They knew what I was doing. The point is … if I was really on their radar, wouldn’t you say, ‘Hey, Bobby, you have four or five kids working, what are they doing?’

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “The kids worked two weeks out of the year. We’d given them a hand check instead of putting them on the payroll. If it was two months, it’s a different story. When the kids say, ‘We didn’t know what we were making,’ it was true. I don’t know, you might be making $12 [an hour], might be making $15. But there is a time card being put in by the superintendent on the job, but they don’t know that. So they get a check, and most of them pay forty hours at $15 per hour or thirty-two hours at $15 per hour.”

A request was made to the Ohio State athletic department to interview Smith about DiGeronimo and charges raised about the authenticity of
Smith’s statements to the NCAA. Through a senior associate athletic director at Ohio State, Smith respectfully declined.