Читать книгу Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet - Richard Bath - Страница 11

The LA Rams defensive back was never a man to let the grass grow under his feet—well, not without wanting to sell it on. When he began to get a little fed-up with a career in American football that seemed to be more about the taking part than the winning—‘in six seasons we won just thirty-four games; losing became okay and accepted’—he decided that it was time to set up a second career for the time when his $600,000 a year salary dried up.

Being the product of an exclusive private Catholic school and UCLA university, Henley knew how to live the American dream, and also needed to prove he was a leader of men. What better way to combine the two, and to liven up life a little, than by setting up an America-wide drug-smuggling ring with himself at its head.

Things started to unravel in 1993 when Henley’s accomplice, a pretty 19-year-old former cheerleader called Tracey Ann Donaho, was arrested by the FBI carrying 12 kilos of cocaine in her luggage. The dealers for whom the coke was destined soon came after Henley, armed with malice aforethought and AK-47s. Rams administrator Jack Faulkner later testified that he saw two ‘short, chunky black males’ with guns and several kilos of bling jewellery chase Henley across the Rams parking lot before their intended mark sped off in his sportscar.

‘It was a very, very difficult time,’ Henley said later. ‘I was kidnapped one time in training camp, just thirty minutes before bed check. They forced me into their vehicle. They finally let me go at 12.30 a.m. At practice, I had the whole OJ thing. I had secret police there. Private investigators. I was picked up and taken back and forth in a bulletproof Ford.’

None of that was enough to keep him out of prison though, especially when Donaho started singing. On March 28 1995 in Santa Ana, Henley was convicted for selling 50 pounds of cocaine and was placed in the Metropolitan Detention Center to await sentencing. Henley, though, was nothing if not determined, and displaying his three salient characteristics of charm, stubbornness and extreme nastiness, he befriended warder Rodney Anderson and then used the gullible guard’s cellphone to arrange deliveries of $1m shipments of heroin from his cell.

Perverting prison warders and peddling drugs obviously didn’t take up enough time, so Henley filled up the rest of his existence by plotting to kill Donaho, who had turned State’s witness against him, and US District Judge Gary L Taylor, the Santa Ana trial judge who had found him guilty.

Unfortunately for Henley, not everybody found him as charming as his pet warder. When his tiresome boasts about being ‘Da Man’ wore thin on fellow inmates, they grassed on him. Predictably for such an inept criminal, the men on the outside with whom he was dealing turned out to be undercover FBI agents who later testified that they set up $1m of sham drug deals with Henley and the guard, adding that Henley offered then $100,000 per hit to ‘whack’ Judge Taylor and Donaho. Another outside accomplice, brother Eric, was also arrested and sentenced to five years in jail.

In March 1997, Henley received forty-one years for trafficking and plotting to kill Donaho and Taylor. ‘It is obvious that he [Henley] is even more dangerous in custody than out of custody,’ said judge Idelman at his trial. ‘If there was ever a guy who needed to be locked down twenty-four hours a day, it’s Henley. If the court was sentencing Mr Henley, the sentence would be different, I assure you. The defendant is obviously a complete and hardened criminal, so any speech to him is a waste of time.’

Henley is currently spending his time in an Illinois super-maximum-security prison alongside teflon don John Gotti and the rest of America’s most wanted. He spends twenty-three hours a day in his cell and becomes eligible for parole in 2031, when he reaches 65.