Paging Dr. Joseph Maroon, Medical Director for Senate Candidate Linda McMahon’s WWE

We still haven’t heard back from Dr. Joseph Maroon of Pittsburgh – the medical director for World Wrestling Entertainment – for comment on the reports here that WWE played fast and loose with the truth in a statement to ESPN about its knowledge of a West Virginia brain institute’s research on the long-term effects of concussions sustained by dead wrestlers Chris Benoit and Andrew “Test” Martin.

(See “EXCLUSIVE: Linda McMahon’s WWE Medical Director Met With Chris Benoit Brain Experts in 2008,” December 14, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/exclusive-linda-mcmahons-wwe-medical-director-met-with-chris-benoit-brain-experts-in-2008/, and “Senate Candidate Linda McMahon’s WWE Lies to ESPN (Part 2),” December 16, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/senate-candidate-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wwe-lies-to-espn-part-2/.)

Here’s why this matters.

Two thousand nine was the year the story of concussions in the National Football League finally broke through the consciousness of the sports media and public. It took a lot of persistence by a lot of people, most notably Dr. Bennet Omalu. And it took the embarrassment of public Congressional hearings, in this case by the House Judiciary Committee. The NFL has fired the people who ran its internal study of the issue, to give it less of a see-no-evil orientation, and it has changed the standards for recovery and return to action of concussed players. It would be a mistake not to acknowledge these as major steps (just as it would be a mistake not to realize that the pressures of money and a hyper-macho culture make such steps difficult to take).

Dr. Joseph Maroon, a neurologist for the Pittsburgh Steelers, has long been one of the NFL’s leading consultants on brain trauma. (He is also the personal physician of retired pro wrestling great Bruno Sammartino.) So when WWE appointed Maroon as its medical director in 2008 — tasked with overseeing a program of baseline neurological testing of talent and supervising the work of doctors now sent out on the road with wrestlers — the link between the legitimacy of the NFL and the seriousness of WWE in tackling the problem was apparent.

But there may be another link between Maroon’s work for the two organizations, and its interpretation is not kind to the doctor or to WWE’s credibility, especially in light of the dissembling to ESPN.

After our posts two weeks ago, a journalist who has covered the NFL for a quarter of a century emailed me: “WWE’s response to the Andrew Martin story did strike me as similar to the NFL’s early denials of Dr. Omalu’s work.”

Read that clearly: The insider is suggesting that WWE right now is where the NFL was years ago in the concussion-denial cycle.

I, for one, would like to pick up the pace a little bit, since Dr. Maroon, at least, obviously knows better. He also should know better than to allow his good name to be exploited by WWE for political cover in stalling on further measures to protect the health and safety of its talent.

Before 2010 breaks – another year in which, if trends hold, we’ll be getting out the shovels and burying some more young wrestlers – I have an important question for Dr. Maroon. Sir, do you work for the welfare of the athletes you treat? Or for the PR needs of the corporations that pay your bills?

Inquiring minds want to know. And, I suspect, so do the voters in next year’s U.S. Senate Republican primary and general election in Connecticut.


Irv Muchnick

Great Moments in Email, Part 3

“DiRT” (email address “dirt@dirtmound.com”) writes:

“U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon’s husband Vince” Really? Did you go to the Geraldo school of journalism?”

I’ve got to admit that DiRT has really nailed me here. How irresponsible of me not to have noted that:

* Linda McMahon is running for county dogcatcher, not United States senator;

* her $50 million campaign war chest is underwritten by accumulated interest from U.S. Savings Bonds, not by her history as co-founder and CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment; and

* her secret spouse and business partner is the manager of a homeless shelter.


Irv Muchnick

Muchnick Interview Wednesday on SportsTalkNetwork.com

Irvin Muchnick, author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, will be interviewed Wednesday, December 30, on The FDH Lounge on Sports Talk Network.com (http://sportstalknetwork.com). The interview with host Rick Morris will begin around 9 p.m. Eastern time (6 p.m. Pacific).

Reviews of CHRIS & NANCY can be viewed at these links:

“Great read for anyone who cares about wrestling or is interested in true crime.” – Eric Lyden, Bookgasm.com, http://www.bookgasm.com/reviews/non-fiction/chris-nancy/

“Muchnick provides a great public service in exposing what he describes as the WWE’s ‘Cocktail of Death.’ Now its up to wrestling fans to demand action, or else continue seeing their heroes die early from avoidable deaths, often ending up destitute after enriching the McMahons.” – Randy Shaw, Beyond Chron, http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/_Book_Exposes_Pro_Wrestling_s_Cocktail_of_Death_7522.html

“The latest from Irv Muchnick, who has already authored one of wrestling’s All Time Top Five books with Wrestling Babylon, is hands down the most important wrestling book in years.” — Critic Derek Burgan, http://gumgod.blogspot.com/2009/12/five-wrestling-books-that-you-should.html

“Incredibly well researched ... an incredibly valuable resource.” – David Bixenspan, SLAM! Wrestling, http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/Benoit/2009/10/22/11493831.html

“Very few books are ‘good’ and even fewer are ‘important’ – but this book is both.” – Author and blogger Anthony Roberts, http://www.anthonyroberts.co.za/?p=3651

“Muchnick goes where few others care to go.” – Mark Hanzlik, Sacramento News & Review, http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content?oid=1317548

“Incredible retelling of the tragic story, with all its odd twists and bizarre turns.” – Rich Tate, GeorgiaWrestlingHistory.com, http://gwhforum.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=news&thread=8210

“Muchnick is hell-bent on discovering the essence of the cover-ups.” – Joe Babinsack, WrestlingObserver.com, http://www.f4wonline.com/content/view/10962/

Why Linda McMahon's WWE Wrestlers Won't Unionize: The Bret Hart Story

Last night, on USA cable’s Monday Night Raw, Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon’s husband Vince – the chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment – announced that Bret “The Hitman” Hart would be the guest host of Raw next Monday.

Hart is a retired wrestling legend, and his falling out with the McMahons was about as thorough as it gets. He departed bitterly in 1997. A year and a half later his younger brother, Owen Hart, was killed when his harness failed during a stunt entrance from the rafters at the start of a pay-per-view show. Brother-in-law Davey Boy Smith (“The British Bulldog”), one of the worst of the many steroid abusers in the business, went into cardiac arrest and died in 2002 at age 39, becoming yet another wrestling statistic.

Chris Benoit, of 2007 double murder/suicide infamy, had been trained by patriarch Stu Hart and begun his career with Stampede Wrestling in Western Canada, the Hart family promotion.

Bret Hart retired from wrestling because of the lingering effects of a concussion suffered after he jumped to rival World Championship Wrestling. He later fought back from a paralyzing stroke. He also wrote a rather brilliant autobiography, which became a bestseller in Canada (my review is at http://muchnick.net/hitmanreview.pdf).

In retirement, like so many others, Hart said repeatedly that wrestlers need a union. But he never did much labor organizing when he was a main event star for WWE, which then was an oligopoly and today essentially is a monopoly. And now he’s back, exploiting and being exploited yet again, as part of an “angle.”

I tell Bret Hart’s story not to mock him, but to make the point that what the McMahons’ version of “sports entertainment” needs is not the pipe dream of a union, which will never happen, but toothful regulation by an independent government authority.

On June 29, 2007, Bret Hart and I were both panelists on CNN’s Nancy Grace, talking about the Benoit horror. Hart said steroids had nothing to do with it. I said not so fast. I also said Hart was a “one-man Zelig of death in wrestling.” (The clip is viewable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXmw7Fmhwgg.)

Not long afterward, Benoit’s toxicology report was released. It showed a testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio of 59-to-1. Folks, that’s 59 times normal and more than ten times outside the boundaries of most mainstream sports steroid testing.

WWE’s assurance that Benoit had “passed” his Wellness Policy drug tests turned out to be another one of its dodges. In fact, his tests had come up positive – obviously – but they were excused by a “therapeutic use exemption.” The logic was as circular as it was self-serving. Benoit’s system had been so messed up by decades of anabolic steroid abuse that he was no longer producing enough male hormones on his own, and was being prescribed off-the-charts quantities of injectable testosterone. And this just so happened to allow him to maintain the cartoon physique his job demanded.


Irv Muchnick

Hartford Courant Blog Picks Up 'Vince Fought the Law' Series

Hartford Courant “CT Confidential” blogger Rick Green just posted an item headlined “SMACKDOWN? Muchnick v. Vince and Linda McMahon.” See http://blogs.courant.com/rick_green/2009/12/smackdown-muchnick-v-vince-and.html.

Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (complete text as a single post)

“Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost,” published in seven installments December 21-27, became the most-viewed story in the history of the Wrestling Babylon / Chris & Nancy blog. The complete text of the series is reproduced below as a single article.

Irvin Muchnick


DR. GEORGE ZAHORIAN

In 1994 World Wrestling Entertainment chairman Vince McMahon – husband of Linda McMahon, current Senate candidate in Connecticut and former CEO of WWE – was acquitted of federal steroid trafficking and conspiracy charges in a sensational trial on Long Island. This seven-part blog series chronicles that episode and surrounding events.

The story begins in 1991, when George Zahorian, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, physician, became the first doctor convicted under the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which prohibited the prescription of steroids for non-therapeutic purposes.

Throughout the 1980s, Zahorian was the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission-appointed ringside doctor at pro wrestling events in his region of the state. In the early part of the decade, this included the Allentown and Hamburg syndicated television tapings of what was then called the World Wrestling Federation. Zahorian was even fed on-camera roles in several TV story lines (known in wrestling as “angles”).

Dozens of steroid-abusing wrestlers utilized Zahorian, an easy-touch, heavy-duty connection. As the wrestlers lined up for their blood-pressure tests before Zahorian-administered shows in Pennsylvania, they and the doctor openly exchanged cash for bags of drugs. Federal investigators produced voluminous FedEx records of shipments from Zahorian’s office to WWF performers. At the trial, several of these wrestlers confirmed that their shipments had included steroids.

Two key recipients of Zahorian packages who did not testify at the trial were Hulk Hogan, WWF’s most famous wrestler, and Vince McMahon, who, in addition to being the kingpin of the industry, is an obsessed amateur bodybuilder.

Hogan was subpoenaed, but lawyer Jerry McDevitt succeeded in getting the judge to quash the subpoena on the grounds that it invaded Hogan’s privacy and harmed his business interests. Appearing on Arsenio Hall’s TV talk show right after the trial, Hogan denied that he had ever abused steroids – a contention so laughable that it would open the floodgates for accusers to go on record over the next year on a range of internal WWF scandals.

Unlike Hogan and the other wrestlers, Vince McMahon was not subpoenaed for the Zahorian trial. After the doctor was convicted and sentenced to federal prison, McMahon instituted a steroid-testing program for WWF talent. In the course of announcing the program at a news conference, McMahon conceded that he personally had “experimented” with the anabolic steroid Deca-Durabulin.


***


1992 DRUG AND SEX SCANDALS

In 1992 some of Hulk Hogan’s former wrestling colleagues exposed him as an abuser of both steroids and recreational drugs, in a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times and in an article in People magazine. As a West Coast stringer for People, I reported the latter piece, which was collected in my 2007 book, WRESTLING BABYLON: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal.

Revelations of WWF drug abuse – spurred by the federal conviction of wrestlers’ steroid connection Dr. George Zahorian, and by Hogan’s lies about his relationship with Zahorian – were soon followed by allegations of both heterosexual and homosexual harassment of company talent and employees. In the latter category, two former wrestlers and key front-office employees, Terry Garvin and Pat Patterson, were implicated.

Another man, Mel Phillips – who supervised setting up the rings at WWF arena shows and also served as a backup ring announcer – was exposed as a pedophile who habitually used his position to exploit hangers-on from broken homes.

Collectively, the WWF scandals had one persistent media forum: the sports and media columns of Phil Mushnick of the New York Post. Thanks to Mushnick’s reporting, a federal grand jury began investigating WWF.

(I am not related to Phil Mushnick, a friend of many years’ standing who wrote the foreword to my recently published book, CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death. In 1993 Vince McMahon sued Mushnick and the Post for libel, and McMahon’s lawyers served me with a subpoena. Citing California’s journalist shield law, my attorney got the subpoena dropped. Later the libel suit itself was dropped.)

The most disturbing allegations against Garvin, Patterson, and Phillips were leveled by a former teenage ring attendant, Tom Cole. When Cole sued WWF, and Mushnick and others reported the allegations, all three named WWF figures were separated from the company.

Just before the filming of an episode of the Phil Donahue Show focusing on the scandals, Cole settled his lawsuit. Under the terms, Cole was given back his old WWF job. A short time later he wound up leaving WWF again and for good, claiming that the company had reneged on commitments to him. The last time I spoke to Cole, in 2000, he was married and owned a small business.

Patterson, McMahon’s right-hand man for matchmaking and story lines, had quietly returned to his job as a creative eminence grise just a few weeks after his 1993 resignation. Patterson, now retired, still consults for WWE.


***


1994 DRUG TRIAL

Following the conviction of ringside doctor George Zahorian in 1991, and the serial drug and sex scandals which roiled the then-World Wrestling Federation in 1992, a federal grand jury investigated. In 1993 Vince McMahon was indicted on steroid trafficking and conspiracy charges. The trial was held on Long Island the following July.

Two pieces of wrestling-style theatrics marked the proceedings. Just before the trial, McMahon had surgery to repair a neck injury. He came into the courtroom wearing a neck brace, and some observers speculated that he had timed the procedure in order to give himself a prop that would make him look more sympathetic before the jury.

Also, at one point during the trial, the bailiff told Judge Jacob Mishler that someone in the spectators’ gallery was talking to the jurors and seemingly trying to intimidate or influence them. That spectator was Afa Anoa’i, a 300-plus-pound retired Samoan wrestler who now trained WWF wannabes and rookies in Pennsylvania. Anoa’i had been seen sitting near the jury box, staring at jurors and softly mouthing the words “not guilty … not guilty.” Judge Mishler told Anoa’i to stop it.

(Anoa’i happens to be an uncle of Eddie “Umaga” Fatu, the WWE wrestler who died recently at age 36. Fatu had been fired by WWE in June for refusing to go into drug rehabilitation, but he was set to return to the company when he suffered his fatal heart attack.)

In the trial itself, the prosecution never succeeded in directly attaching McMahon to a coordinated effort around illegal steroid distribution. In the absence of such evidence, the conspiracy allegations fell apart. He was acquitted of all charges.

The testimony of a former WWF front-office employee, Anita Scales, suggested that McMahon’s defense was aided by a tip that had led the company to drop Zahorian just as the doctor was about to be busted.

Before the passage of 1987 deregulatory legislation in Pennsylvania, pro wrestling ringside physicians were appointed by the state athletic commission; thereafter they were hired by the promoters. Scales, who handled these logistics for WWF, testified at McMahon’s trial that she had wanted to cut off Zahorian, but was overruled by McMahon aide Pat Patterson. “The boys need their candy,” Patterson explained to Scales.

However, Vince and Linda McMahon then learned through social contacts that Zahorian was drawing heat from the feds, and the company stopped using him. Some think that decision made the difference in Vince’s own later acquittal. Others cite the holes in a weak government case, regardless of the resolution of Zahorian’s relationship with the WWF.


***


THE DEFENSE LAWYER, THE “FIXER,” AND THE PLAYBOY MODEL

At his 1994 trial on Long Island of federal drug trafficking and conspiracy charges, Vince McMahon’s defense team included Jerry McDevitt, his long-time trusted lawyer and troubleshooter. Another defense attorney was the prominent trial lawyer Laura Brevetti. In 1992-93, when President Clinton was looking to appoint a female attorney general, Brevetti’s name appeared on several published “short lists” of prospects. (This year she joined the New York office of the law firm K&L Gates, where McDevitt has long been a Pittsburgh-based partner.)

Brevetti’s husband, Martin Bergman, was a freelance television producer. (His brother, Lowell Bergman, was the investigative producer for 60 Minutes who would be portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider, the movie about tobacco industry corruption.)

An important government witness at McMahon’s trial was his former secretary Emily Feinberg. She was also a former Playboy magazine model. Additionally, her husband was a WWF TV script writer.

During her WWF employment, Vince McMahon and Emily Feinberg were rumored to have had an affair. Vince and Linda McMahon have not talked about this in specifics, but their narrative includes the general acknowledgment that Vince cheated on her more than once while indulging in what he has termed the “party atmosphere” of the 1980s.

A year after McMahon’s trial acquittal, New York’s Village Voice published a long investigative story about Martin Bergman, who was described as a well-known “fixer.” The Voice article said that before Emily Feinberg’s trial testimony, Bergman contacted her under the guise of being a producer for a tabloid TV show. The suggestion was that, through his conversations with Feinberg, Bergman corrupted her direct testimony and aided the discrediting of it during cross-examination.


***


AFTERMATH

In the mid- and late 1990s, WWF lost millions of dollars and significant pro wrestling market share in fierce competition with Ted Turner’s Atlanta-based World Championship Wrestling. Vince McMahon turned the tide of the war in his favor with a series of creative decisions that made major crossover stars out of wrestlers Steve Austin and, later, “The Rock” (now movie actor Dwayne Johnson).

In one of those decisions, McMahon turned himself from a “babyface” (good guy) to a “heel” (bad guy). Previously he had been known on camera only as a sympathetic TV announcer. Now he was pushed as “Mr. McMahon,” a greedy and manipulative corporate boss. The impetus for the big switch was McMahon’s set of dealings with his champion wrestler of the time, Bret Hart, before Hart left WWF for WCW. The scenario culminated in a November 1997 in-ring double-cross of Hart known as the “Montreal screwjob.”

In 1999 WWF broke attendance and profit records, and Vince and Linda McMahon decided to take their closely held company, TitanSports Inc., public. (World Wrestling Federation Entertainment, Inc., was originally traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange. In the settlement of a trademark dispute with the World Wildlife Fund, the company would be renamed World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. WWE stock is now traded on the New York Stock Exchange.)

In media accounts hyping the October 1999 initial public stock offering, Vince McMahon played up both his status as a cartoon villain and the perceived link to his real-life persona. McMahon ridiculed his federal prosecution five years earlier and even added a dose of fiction, falsely stating that he had been convicted of one of the charges.

To remind himself of this last talking point, McMahon kept a note about it on the cuff of his shirt.


***


WAXMAN COMMITTEE INTERVIEW

Following the June 2007 double-murder/suicide of World Wrestling Entertainment star wrestler Chris Benoit, two committees of the U.S. House of Representatives explored holding public hearings on the health and safety standards of the professional wrestling industry.

One was the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, then headed by Henry Waxman of California. Late in the year committee staff investigators interviewed Vince and Linda McMahon and other WWE officials, including contract administrators and doctors of the company’s talent wellness policy. This program – the third and most recent regime of the drug-testing of wrestlers of WWE and its predecessor WWF – had been instituted after another star wrestler, Eddie Guerrero, died suddenly in November 2005.

The transcripts of the Waxman Committee interviews, and even their existence, would not be released publicly until January 2009 – long after the calls for hearings on pro wrestling had died down. (There have been no such hearings by either that committee or the other that had expressed interest: the House Energy Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, chaired by Bobby Rush of Illinois.)

Vince McMahon’s interview with the Waxman staff took place on December 14, 2007.

When McMahon was told that anonymous sources had advised the committee that WWE’s “business model” relied on the talent’s use of “steroids or illegal drugs,” McMahon’s lawyer, Jerry McDevitt, interjected: “Vince, don’t even take these baits. You don’t have to answer those kind of questions.”

McMahon also was asked if he, himself, were subject to the wellness policy. McMahon replied that he was not. He explained that he performed inside the ring only a few times a year. Besides, he added, “I’m 62 [years old], not 26.”

McMahon then was asked if he had taken steroids since his 1992 admission after the Dr. George Zahorian trial.

Calling the question unfair and “bullshit,” McDevitt objected. “I’m not going to allow you to harass this man,” he said.

McMahon confirmed to the committee: “I’m refusing to answer the question.”


***


CONCLUSION

At his 1994 trial on steroid trafficking and conspiracy charges, I believe the jury of Vince McMahon’s peers got it right. In other words, the federal government failed to prove its case.

More broadly, I don’t jump to conclusions about McMahon’s criminal accountability for the outcomes of his peculiar industry – even if they stem, as they unquestionably do, from standards he personally created or enabled.

The best analogy, though it’s a weak one, is the role of owners in other, more legitimate sports. In 1998 Mark McGwire shattered major league baseball’s single-season home run record and was part of a manufactured feel-good narrative. Subsequently, the public has become aware that the explosion of baseball power-hitting, and the accompanying attendance records, were supported by steroid and Human Growth Hormone abuse. McGwire’s own links to this culture date all the way back to an FBI investigation in Michigan in the early 1990s. Yet no one has seriously contended that Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, should be tried in court for his vicariously profitable relationship to these misdeeds. (However, I am among those of the strong opinion that Selig does deserves all the ridicule and shame he has received, and then some.)

Linda and Vince McMahon’s story is a complex one of a stewardship whose excesses were far worse than baseball’s. Depending on your perspective, the fact that pro wrestling is a pseudo-sport makes what has happened there either more or less excusable: more excusable because “that’s entertainment”; less excusable because the consequence has been a public health problem – a pandemic of dozens upon dozens of avoidable deaths.

This blog series is a recognition that the McMahon family’s business success – the source of the wealth underwriting a campaign for the U.S. Senate – has been both complex and dramatic. World Wrestling Entertainment, at the pinnacle of an immensely profitable industry with carnival roots, has a horrible record of health and safety standards, of which death by drugs is but one aspect. The 2007 Chris Benoit murder-suicide ratcheted to a new level the urgency of a full and transparent history of these events. Linda McMahon’s candidacy for high elected office offers a useful platform for further scrutiny.


###

Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 7 – Conclusion)

Monday – Part 1, Dr. George Zahorian

Tuesday – Part 2, 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals

Wednesday – Part 3, 1994 Drug Trial

Thursday – Part 4, The Defense Lawyer, the “Fixer,” and the Playboy Model

Friday – Part 5, Aftermath

Saturday – Part 6, Waxman Committee Interview

TODAY – Part 7, Conclusion


At his 1994 trial on steroid trafficking and conspiracy charges, I believe the jury of Vince McMahon’s peers got it right. In other words, the federal government failed to prove its case.

More broadly, I don’t jump to conclusions about McMahon’s criminal accountability for the outcomes of his peculiar industry – even if they stem, as they unquestionably do, from standards he personally created or enabled.

The best analogy, though it’s a weak one, is the role of owners in other, more legitimate sports. In 1998 Mark McGwire shattered major league baseball’s single-season home run record and was part of a manufactured feel-good narrative. Subsequently, the public has become aware that the explosion of baseball power-hitting, and the accompanying attendance records, were supported by steroid and Human Growth Hormone abuse. McGwire’s own links to this culture date all the way back to an FBI investigation in Michigan in the early 1990s. Yet no one has seriously contended that Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, should be tried in court for his vicariously profitable relationship to these misdeeds. (However, I am among those of the strong opinion that Selig does deserves all the ridicule and shame he has received, and then some.)

Linda and Vince McMahon’s story is a complex one of a stewardship whose excesses were far worse than baseball’s. Depending on your perspective, the fact that pro wrestling is a pseudo-sport makes what has happened there either more or less excusable: more excusable because “that’s entertainment”; less excusable because the consequence has been a public health problem – a pandemic of dozens upon dozens of avoidable deaths.

This blog series is a recognition that the McMahon family’s business success – the source of the wealth underwriting a campaign for the U.S. Senate – has been both complex and dramatic. World Wrestling Entertainment, at the pinnacle of an immensely profitable industry with carnival roots, has a horrible record of health and safety standards, of which death by drugs is but one aspect. The 2007 Chris Benoit murder-suicide ratcheted to a new level the urgency of a full and transparent history of these events. Linda McMahon’s candidacy for high elected office offers a useful platform for further scrutiny.


Irvin Muchnick

http://benoitbook.com

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com

http://twitter.com/irvmuch

END OF SERIES

Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 6 – Waxman Committee Interview)

Monday – Part 1, Dr. George Zahorian

Tuesday – Part 2, 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals

Wednesday – Part 3, 1994 Drug Trial

Thursday – Part 4, The Defense Lawyer, the “Fixer,” and the Playboy Model

Friday – Part 5, Aftermath

TODAY – Part 6, Waxman Committee Interview

Sunday – Part 7, Conclusion


Following the June 2007 double-murder/suicide of World Wrestling Entertainment star wrestler Chris Benoit, two committees of the U.S. House of Representatives explored holding public hearings on the health and safety standards of the professional wrestling industry.

One was the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, then headed by Henry Waxman of California. Late in the year committee staff investigators interviewed Vince and Linda McMahon and other WWE officials, including contract administrators and doctors of the company’s talent wellness policy. This program – the third and most recent regime of the drug-testing of wrestlers of WWE and its predecessor WWF – had been instituted after another star wrestler, Eddie Guerrero, died suddenly in November 2005.

The transcripts of the Waxman Committee interviews, and even their existence, would not be released publicly until January 2009 – long after the calls for hearings on pro wrestling had died down. (There have been no such hearings by either that committee or the other that had expressed interest: the House Energy Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, chaired by Bobby Rush of Illinois.)

Vince McMahon’s interview with the Waxman staff took place on December 14, 2007.

When McMahon was told that anonymous sources had advised the committee that WWE’s “business model” relied on the talent’s use of “steroids or illegal drugs,” McMahon’s lawyer, Jerry McDevitt, interjected: “Vince, don’t even take these baits. You don’t have to answer those kind of questions.”

McMahon also was asked if he, himself, were subject to the wellness policy. McMahon replied that he was not. He explained that he performed inside the ring only a few times a year. Besides, he added, “I’m 62 [years old], not 26.”

McMahon then was asked if he had taken steroids since his 1992 admission after the Dr. George Zahorian trial.

Calling the question unfair and “bullshit,” McDevitt objected. “I’m not going to allow you to harass this man,” he said.

McMahon confirmed to the committee: “I’m refusing to answer the question.”


Irvin Muchnick

http://benoitbook.com

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com

http://twitter.com/irvmuch

NEXT: Part 7, Conclusion

Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 5 – Aftermath)

Monday – Part 1, Dr. George Zahorian

Tuesday – Part 2, 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals

Wednesday – Part 3, 1994 Drug Trial

Thursday – Part 4, The Defense Lawyer, the “Fixer,” and the Playboy Model

TODAY – Part 5, Aftermath

Saturday – Part 6, Waxman Committee Interview

Sunday – Part 7, Conclusion


In the mid- and late 1990s, WWF lost millions of dollars and significant pro wrestling market share in fierce competition with Ted Turner’s Atlanta-based World Championship Wrestling. Vince McMahon turned the tide of the war in his favor with a series of creative decisions that made major crossover stars out of wrestlers Steve Austin and, later, “The Rock” (now movie actor Dwayne Johnson).

In one of those decisions, McMahon turned himself from a “babyface” (good guy) to a “heel” (bad guy). Previously he had been known on camera only as a sympathetic TV announcer. Now he was pushed as “Mr. McMahon,” a greedy and manipulative corporate boss. The impetus for the big switch was McMahon’s set of dealings with his champion wrestler of the time, Bret Hart, before Hart left WWF for WCW. The scenario culminated in a November 1997 in-ring double-cross of Hart known as the “Montreal screwjob.”

In 1999 WWF broke attendance and profit records, and Vince and Linda McMahon decided to take their closely held company, TitanSports Inc., public. (World Wrestling Federation Entertainment, Inc., was originally traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange. In the settlement of a trademark dispute with the World Wildlife Fund, the company would be renamed World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. WWE stock is now traded on the New York Stock Exchange.)

In media accounts hyping the October 1999 initial public stock offering, Vince McMahon played up both his status as a cartoon villain and the perceived link to his real-life persona. McMahon ridiculed his federal prosecution five years earlier and even added a dose of fiction, falsely stating that he had been convicted of one of the charges.

To remind himself of this last talking point, McMahon kept a note about it on the cuff of his shirt.


Irvin Muchnick

http://benoitbook.com

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com

http://.twitter.com/irvmuch


NEXT: Part 6, Waxman Committee Interview

George Michael (r.i.p.) and Pro Wrestling

Allow me to add my condolences to the family and friends of George Michael, the retired sports anchor at WRC (Channel 4) in Washington, D.C. I did not know Michael, but he was, like myself, a native of St. Louis. He also had an interesting relationship with modern pro wrestling history.

Michael had one of the first long-form Sunday night sports highlight shows, the “Sports Machine,” which was nationally syndicated in the 1980s. The Sports Machine was nothing more than a goofy set of outsized mock reel-to-reel tape players with a bank of monitors. After introducing a game highlight or segment, Michael hit a button and said, “Through the use of the Sports Machine …” It was a cheesy variation on “Let’s go to the videotape,” the line of another TV sports guy who first hit it big in Washington: Warner Wolf.

Two years ago, when the station laid off members of his staff during cutbacks, Michael did something that a less secure man could never have done: he left with them. Perhaps he was already battling cancer, as well, but I was struck by the note of decency in a cutthroat industry.

What I most want to memorialize about Michael was that, when World Wrestling Entertainment went national in 1984, he came off as something of an old-fashioned “mark.” That is, he seemed to buy the stuff as real. I doubt that he really did, but then again I never talked to his hairdresser (and TV news people, unlike bloggers — or at least obviously unlike this one — spend a lot of time with their hairdressers).

I especially remember when Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka had to go on sabbatical for drug rehab at a moment when he was on fire as WWF’s second-biggest-drawing “babyface” or good guy. That left a big void in the shows where Snuka was working at or near the top of the card with Rowdy Roddy Piper. WWF rushed out a Snuka “cousin” to take his place. He was Sam Fatu, billed as “The Tonga Kid.” (Sam Fatu is the brother of Eddie “Umaga” Fatu, the WWE wrestler who died recently.)

The “George Michael Sports Machine” ran a feature on the Kid, complete with a video package of his high-flying Snuka-esque dives off the top rope. (Sam Fatu was a much leaner package in those days than the 300-pound Samoan bad guy he evolved into.) And there was Michael with that delivery of his, an inviting half-deadpan, friendly smile.

Not smirking. Just starstruck like a fan — a perfect bridge from the old school and its clunky technology, to the new marketing.


Irv Muchnick

Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 4 – The Defense Lawyer, the ‘Fixer,’ and the Playboy Model)

Monday – Part 1, Dr. George Zahorian

Tuesday – Part 2, 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals

Wednesday – Part 3, 1994 Drug Trial

TODAY – Part 4, The Defense Lawyer, the “Fixer,” and the Playboy Model

Friday – Part 5, Aftermath

Saturday – Part 6, Waxman Committee Interview

Sunday – Part 7, Conclusion


At his 1994 trial on Long Island of federal drug trafficking and conspiracy charges, Vince McMahon’s defense team included Jerry McDevitt, his long-time trusted lawyer and troubleshooter. Another defense attorney was the prominent trial lawyer Laura Brevetti. In 1992-93, when President Clinton was looking to appoint a female attorney general, Brevetti’s name appeared on several published “short lists” of prospects. (This year she joined the New York office of the law firm K&L Gates, where McDevitt has long been a Pittsburgh-based partner.)

Brevetti’s husband, Martin Bergman, was a freelance television producer. (His brother, Lowell Bergman, was the investigative producer for 60 Minutes who would be portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider, the movie about tobacco industry corruption.)

An important government witness at McMahon’s trial was his former secretary Emily Feinberg. She was also a former Playboy magazine model. Additionally, her husband was a WWF TV script writer.

During her WWF employment, Vince McMahon and Emily Feinberg were rumored to have had an affair. Vince and Linda McMahon have not talked about this in specifics, but their narrative includes the general acknowledgment that Vince cheated on her more than once while indulging in what he has termed the “party atmosphere” of the 1980s.

A year after McMahon’s trial acquittal, New York’s Village Voice published a long investigative story about Martin Bergman, who was described as a well-known “fixer.” The Voice article said that before Emily Feinberg’s trial testimony, Bergman contacted her under the guise of being a producer for a tabloid TV show. The suggestion was that, through his conversations with Feinberg, Bergman corrupted her direct testimony and aided the discrediting of it during cross-examination.


Irvin Muchnick

http://benoitbook.com

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com

http://.twitter.com/irvmuch

NEXT: Part 5, Aftermath

Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 3 — 1994 Drug Trial)

Monday – Part 1, Dr. George Zahorian

Tuesday – Part 2, 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals

TODAY – Part 3, 1994 Drug Trial

Thursday – Part 4, The Defense Lawyer, the “Fixer,” and the Playboy Model

Friday – Part 5, Aftermath

Saturday – Part 6, Waxman Committee Interview

Sunday – Part 7, Conclusion


Following the conviction of ringside doctor George Zahorian in 1991, and the serial drug and sex scandals which roiled the then-World Wrestling Federation in 1992, a federal grand jury investigated. In 1993 Vince McMahon was indicted on steroid trafficking and conspiracy charges. The trial was held on Long Island the following July.

Two pieces of wrestling-style theatrics marked the proceedings. Just before the trial, McMahon had surgery to repair a neck injury. He came into the courtroom wearing a neck brace, and some observers speculated that he had timed the procedure in order to give himself a prop that would make him look more sympathetic before the jury.

Also, at one point during the trial, the bailiff told Judge Jacob Mishler that someone in the spectators’ gallery was talking to the jurors and seemingly trying to intimidate or influence them. That spectator was Afa Anoa’i, a 300-plus-pound retired Samoan wrestler who now trained WWF wannabes and rookies in Pennsylvania. Anoa’i had been seen sitting near the jury box, staring at jurors and softly mouthing the words “not guilty … not guilty.” Judge Mishler told Anoa’i to stop it.

(Anoa’i happens to be an uncle of Eddie “Umaga” Fatu, the WWE wrestler who died recently at age 36. Fatu had been fired by WWE in June for refusing to go into drug rehabilitation, but he was set to return to the company when he suffered his fatal heart attack.)

In the trial itself, the prosecution never succeeded in directly attaching McMahon to a coordinated effort around illegal steroid distribution. In the absence of such evidence, the conspiracy allegations fell apart. He was acquitted of all charges.

The testimony of a former WWF front-office employee, Anita Scales, suggested that McMahon’s defense was aided by a tip that had led the company to drop Zahorian just as the doctor was about to be busted.

Before the passage of 1987 deregulatory legislation in Pennsylvania, pro wrestling ringside physicians were appointed by the state athletic commission; thereafter they were hired by the promoters. Scales, who handled these logistics for WWF, testified at McMahon’s trial that she had wanted to cut off Zahorian, but was overruled by McMahon aide Pat Patterson. “The boys need their candy,” Patterson explained to Scales.

However, Vince and Linda McMahon then learned through social contacts that Zahorian was drawing heat from the feds, and the company stopped using him. Some think that decision made the difference in Vince’s own later acquittal. Others cite the holes in a weak government case, regardless of the resolution of Zahorian’s relationship with the WWF.


Irvin Muchnick


http://benoitbook.com

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com

http://twitter.com/irvmuch

NEXT: Part 4, The Defense Lawyer, the “Fixer,” and the Playboy Model

Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 2 — 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals)

Monday – Part 1, Dr. George Zahorian

TODAY – Part 2, 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals

Wednesday – Part 3, 1994 Drug Trial

Thursday – Part 4, The Defense Lawyer, the “Fixer,” and the Playboy Model

Friday – Part 5, Aftermath

Saturday – Part 6, Waxman Committee Interview

Sunday – Part 7, Conclusion


In 1992 some of Hulk Hogan’s former wrestling colleagues exposed him as an abuser of both steroids and recreational drugs, in a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times and in an article in People magazine. As a West Coast stringer for People, I reported the latter piece, which was collected in my 2007 book, WRESTLING BABYLON: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal.

Revelations of WWF drug abuse – spurred by the federal conviction of wrestlers’ steroid connection Dr. George Zahorian, and by Hogan’s lies about his relationship with Zahorian – were soon followed by allegations of both heterosexual and homosexual harassment of company talent and employees. In the latter category, two former wrestlers and key front-office employees, Terry Garvin and Pat Patterson, were implicated.

Another man, Mel Phillips – who supervised setting up the rings at WWF arena shows and also served as a backup ring announcer – was exposed as a pedophile who habitually used his position to exploit hangers-on from broken homes.

Collectively, the WWF scandals had one persistent media forum: the sports and media columns of Phil Mushnick of the New York Post. Thanks to Mushnick’s reporting, a federal grand jury began investigating WWF.

(I am not related to Phil Mushnick, a friend of many years’ standing who wrote the foreword to my recently published book, CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death. In 1993 Vince McMahon sued Mushnick and the Post for libel, and McMahon’s lawyers served me with a subpoena. Citing California’s journalist shield law, my attorney got the subpoena dropped. Later the libel suit itself was dropped.)

The most disturbing allegations against Garvin, Patterson, and Phillips were leveled by a former teenage ring attendant, Tom Cole. When Cole sued WWF, and Mushnick and others reported the allegations, all three named WWF figures were separated from the company.

Just before the filming of an episode of the Phil Donahue Show focusing on the scandals, Cole settled his lawsuit. Under the terms, Cole was given back his old WWF job. A short time later he wound up leaving WWF again and for good, claiming that the company had reneged on commitments to him. The last time I spoke to Cole, in 2000, he was married and owned a small business.

Patterson, McMahon’s right-hand man for matchmaking and story lines, had quietly returned to his job as a creative eminence grise just a few weeks after his 1993 resignation. Patterson, now retired, still consults for WWE.


Irvin Muchnick


http://benoitbook.com

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com

http://twitter.com/irvmuch

NEXT: Part 3, 1994 Drug Trial

Obama’s Shame – ‘Christmas Gift’ to WWE’s GOP Senate Candidate Linda McMahon (full text)

[originally published at Beyond Chron, December 17, http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Obama_s_Shame_Christmas_Gift_to_WWE_s_GOP_Senate_Candidate_Linda_M]


by Irvin Muchnick

Fresh off the contorted Oslo speech in which he accepted his richly unearned Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of wars he inherited and had just announced he would intensify, our Laureate-in-Chief is making an appearance Saturday night on NBC’s “Tribute to the Troops” special – featuring World Wrestling Entertainment performers providing escapism for our men and women in uniform.

There’s a lot to say about this latest example of President Obama’s seemingly bottomless capacity to pander to the right. For starters: Does this guy ever know how to say “no” to a TV camera? He makes Bill Clinton, the gold standard for media whores, look like a shrinking violet.

On the substance, I can’t help remembering that John F. Kennedy used to refuse to wear silly hats as props, even on the campaign trail, because he felt it undermined the gravitas of the presidential message.

Sadly, I’m not surprised that Obama is doing this WWE gig. Or should I say, latest WWE gig. Last year he, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain took turns looking like asses on WWE’s flagship cable show, “Raw.”

It is stipulated that attention-hungry politicians are the last to make distinctions among “Laugh-In,” “Saturday Night Live,” and pro wrestling. To them, these are all are just lumpenproletariat photo ops, ways to humanize and laugh at themselves.

But this one is different. Linda McMahon – the wife of WWE chairman Vince McMahon, and until recently the company’s CEO – is running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut currently held by Chris Dodd. Pledging to spend an ungodly $50 million of her personal fortune (reaped in part thanks to her industry’s unbelievable pandemic of drugs and untimely death), Linda McMahon is one of two remaining candidates in the Republican field. The other is a former congressman, Rob Simmons.

If the election were held today, rather than in November 2010, polls suggest that either Simmons or McMahon would trounce Dodd, who is reeling with the end of the Obama honeymoon. That makes the president’s immensely stupid WWE guest shot doubly so.

The McMahons are your basic money-grubbing bipartisan non-ideologues; the databases show past campaign contributions by both of them to Democrats as well as Republicans. This has required some explaining away by Linda McMahon, for primary fights typically play to the party base. With his appearance on “Tribute to the Troops,” Obama now has injected himself into an internal state political fight – and he has done so in a way that gives perverse cover to a candidate of the opposite party.

In Connecticut, insiders are calling this gambit “Obama’s Christmas gift to Linda McMahon.” And I think that’s about right.

Shame on you, Mr. President. I didn’t know the title of your book was The Audacity of Hoax.

Regular Beyond Chron contributor Irvin Muchnick is the author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death (http://benoitbook.com). Instead of waiting to read Irv’s blogs when they get linked at the Connecticut political site Capitol Report, follow him directly at http://twitter.com/irvmuch.

Linda McMahon's Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost (Part 1 -- Dr. George Zahorian)

TODAY – Part 1, Dr. George Zahorian

Tuesday – Part 2, 1992 Drug and Sex Scandals

Wednesday – Part 3, 1994 Drug Trial

Thursday – Part 4, The Defense Lawyer, the “Fixer,” and the Playboy Model

Friday – Part 5, Aftermath

Saturday – Part 6, Waxman Committee Interview

Sunday – Part 7, Conclusion


In 1994 World Wrestling Entertainment chairman Vince McMahon – husband of Linda McMahon, current Senate candidate in Connecticut and former CEO of WWE – was acquitted of federal steroid trafficking and conspiracy charges in a sensational trial on Long Island. This blog series, currently scheduled for seven parts (see post titles listed above), chronicles that episode and surrounding events.

The story begins in 1991, when George Zahorian, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, physician, became the first doctor convicted under the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which prohibited the prescription of steroids for non-therapeutic purposes.

Throughout the 1980s, Zahorian was the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission-appointed ringside doctor at pro wrestling events in his region of the state. In the early part of the decade, this included the Allentown and Hamburg syndicated television tapings of what was then called the World Wrestling Federation. Zahorian was even fed on-camera roles in several TV story lines (known in wrestling as “angles”).

Dozens of steroid-abusing wrestlers utilized Zahorian, an easy-touch, heavy-duty connection. As the wrestlers lined up for their blood-pressure tests before Zahorian-administered shows in Pennsylvania, they and the doctor openly exchanged cash for bags of drugs. Federal investigators produced voluminous FedEx records of shipments from Zahorian’s office to WWF performers. At the trial, several of these wrestlers confirmed that their shipments had included steroids.

Two key recipients of Zahorian packages who did not testify at the trial were Hulk Hogan, WWF’s most famous wrestler, and Vince McMahon, who, in addition to being the kingpin of the industry, is an obsessed amateur bodybuilder.

Hogan was subpoenaed, but lawyer Jerry McDevitt succeeded in getting the judge to quash the subpoena on the grounds that it invaded Hogan’s privacy and harmed his business interests. Appearing on Arsenio Hall’s TV talk show right after the trial, Hogan denied that he had ever abused steroids – a contention so laughable that it would open the floodgates for accusers to go on record over the next year on a range of internal WWF scandals.

Unlike Hogan and the other wrestlers, Vince McMahon was not subpoenaed for the Zahorian trial. After the doctor was convicted and sentenced to federal prison, McMahon instituted a steroid-testing program for WWF talent. In the course of announcing the program at a news conference, McMahon conceded that he personally had “experimented” with the anabolic steroid Deca-Durabulin.


Irvin Muchnick

http://benoitbook.com

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com

http://twitter.com/irvmuch

NEXT: Part 2, Drug and Sex Scandals

'Linda McMahon: Can She Shake the WWE Image?'

The headline over this post is the headline over the other major Linda McMahon story in today’s Connecticut newspapers: a long reflection on her U.S. Senate candidacy in the Connecticut Post, the Stamford Advocate, and others.

Reporter Neil Vigdor (who, admirably, earlier did the most aggressive examination of the implications for McMahon of the death of WWE wrestler Eddie “Umaga” Fatu) does not undertake the more comprehensive biography found in the Hartford Courant. It’s more of a rat-a-tat against the values of WWE television content, with the quotes of state Democratic party chair Nancy DiNardo and the controversy over the disappearance from YouTube of clips of racy skits at the forefront.

The link is http://www.connpost.com/ci_14037699.


Irv Muchnick

Linda McMahon Profile in Hartford Courant

The Sunday Hartford Courant has a lengthy profile of Linda McMahon, which is viewable at http://www.courant.com/news/nation-world/hc-linda-mcmahon-1220.artdec20,0,4608486,full.story.

(The Stamford Advocate also has a McMahon piece scheduled for today, and I will post the link when I see it.)

The Courant’s Daniela Altimari has done a superb job of introducing this political newcomer to readers who know Linda McMahon only as the wife of her more flamboyant and public husband, Vince McMahon, with whom she founded World Wrestling Entertainment. Without rubbing it in or disrespecting their accomplishments, the story makes the unassailable point that the McMahons are a package deal, and also that WWE’s record inevitably will color Linda’s campaign.

Of course, I’ll have a lot more to say about aspects of McMahon and WWE history that this article only lightly covers, or doesn’t cover at all. (For that matter, I suspect this is not the Courant’s last word, either.)

The political and clinical open question on the McMahon candidacy is whether it will prove to be a bridge too far for the WWE brand. The McMahons have rather brilliantly, if diabolically, built a global business and entertainment empire. They have also shown a tendency to stumble spectacularly with brand extensions that were outside, though often in close proximity, to their core expertise. The failed World Bodybuilding Federation was one example. The disastrous XFL football league was a second.

But, hey, the XFL only resulted in a $100 million loss. Linda McMahon’s $50 million investment in trying to become a United States senator is only half that. Whether that’s for good or ill, I don’t doubt that she’s playing for keeps or that the people of Connecticut will have the real last word.


Irv Muchnick

Review Reset: What the Critics Are Saying About Irvin Muchnick's 'CHRIS & NANCY'

“Great read for anyone who cares about wrestling or is interested in true crime.” – Eric Lyden, Bookgasm.com, http://www.bookgasm.com/reviews/non-fiction/chris-nancy/

“Muchnick provides a great public service in exposing what he describes as the WWE’s ‘Cocktail of Death.’ Now its up to wrestling fans to demand action, or else continue seeing their heroes die early from avoidable deaths, often ending up destitute after enriching the McMahons.” – Randy Shaw, Beyond Chron, http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/_Book_Exposes_Pro_Wrestling_s_Cocktail_of_Death_7522.html

“The latest from Irv Muchnick, who has already authored one of wrestling’s All Time Top Five books with Wrestling Babylon, is hands down the most important wrestling book in years.” — Critic Derek Burgan, http://gumgod.blogspot.com/2009/12/five-wrestling-books-that-you-should.html

“Incredibly well researched ... an incredibly valuable resource.” – David Bixenspan, SLAM! Wrestling, http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/Benoit/2009/10/22/11493831.html

“Very few books are ‘good’ and even fewer are ‘important’ – but this book is both.” – Author and blogger Anthony Roberts, http://www.anthonyroberts.co.za/?p=3651

“Muchnick goes where few others care to go.” – Mark Hanzlik, Sacramento News & Review, http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content?oid=1317548

“Incredible retelling of the tragic story, with all its odd twists and bizarre turns.” – Rich Tate, GeorgiaWrestlingHistory.com, http://gwhforum.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=news&thread=8210

“Muchnick is hell-bent on discovering the essence of the cover-ups.” – Joe Babinsack, WrestlingObserver.com, http://www.f4wonline.com/content/view/10962/

First Brain-Trauma Syndrome Reported in Hockey

Reggie Fleming, a former National Hockey League player who died earlier this year at 73, is the first deceased athlete in that sport to have Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) diagnosed in post-mortem brain studies.

Fleming’s brain was examined as part of a program spearheaded by the Sports Legacy Institute (http://sportslegacy.org). The institute was started by a World Wrestling Entertainment performer, Chris Nowinski, after the effects of repeated untreated concussions forced him to retire.

The New York Times article about Reggie Fleming is at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/sports/hockey/18concussion.html.


Irv Muchnick

Linda McMahon Campaign Enters its Post-Obama Phase

President Obama’s latest round of grandstanding on World Wrestling Entertainment TV programs — which has done great damage to serious public debate — will soon be out of the way. At that point perhaps Obama can be persuaded to butt out of the Republican Senate primary in Connecticut and allow the focus of coverage of Linda McMahon’s campaign to go where it belongs: on the pandemic of death in the industry her WWE controls.

Since the president’s salary is $400,000 a year, and Federal Election Commission filings show that McMahon’s campaign manager is scraping by on a mere $280,000, that can probably be arranged.

A few bullets from the new issue of Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter:

* If the only problem were WWE’s tacit encouragement of vast quantities of steroids, combined with dangerous performing stunts, “all to line Ms. McMahon’s pockets,” that wouldn’t be much of a story.

* However, Eddie “Umaga” Fatu is the latest of more than 60 wrestlers who have died in their 30s and 40s over a 12-year period. THAT’s a story.

* In the first steroid testing of the WWE “wellness policy” (which was 2006, following the death of wrestler Eddie Guerrero), 40 percent of the talent came up positive.

* With none of the wrestlers receiving any health-care benefits under their “independent contractor” deals, this phenomenon “becomes inexcusable,” in Meltzer’s words. He concludes:

“When the former CEO of the WWE runs for Senate with an anti-health care reform message as part of her platform, that is something that deserves much more recognition than it is getting, especially since it is the main part of the grievances against the WWE by the very wrestlers who put their lives on the line for Ms. McMahon and have nothing but a lifetime of health problems and no way to pay for proper treatment to show for it.”


Irv Muchnick

'Most important wrestling book in years' ... critic Derek Burgan

Full text of wrestling media critic Derek Burgan’s review of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death is viewable at this link:

http://gumgod.blogspot.com/2009/12/five-wrestling-books-that-you-should.html

Obama and the Linda McMahon Troops Tribute: Dumb and Dumber

In the wake of the following statement, just issued by World Wrestling Entertainment, I don’t believe the White House has a substantive defense of President Obama’s shot on the “WWE Tribute to the Troops” show Saturday night on NBC.

Our Commander in Chief, a chic-seeking kitsch king, has allowed his office to be used in a political campaign in Connecticut, and on behalf of a candidate of the opposition party. Dumb and dumber.

The full text of the WWE statement is below.

Irv Muchnick

=====

World Wrestling Entertainment would like to thank both President Obama and General Petraeus for providing the WWE(R) with taped, non-partisan holiday messages to the men and women in the US Armed Forces to be included in our annual special, “Tribute to the Troops,” this Saturday on NBC at 9 PM ET. This marks the second year that the Commander in Chief has provided a special message for the troops.

For the last seven years, WWE has traveled to the Middle East to entertain troops serving overseas in appreciation for their service to our country. WWE would also like to thank all those responsible in the White House, First Lady’s office and the US Central Command for making this happen.

The request process for the President’s video began in April 2009, when WWE met with Trooper Sanders, Deputy Director of Policy and Projects for the First Lady. WWE continued these discussions after Labor Day as requested. In November, WWE was pleased to receive confirmation from Matt Flavin, Director of Veterans and Wounded Warrior Policy at the White House, that a Presidential message would be supplied for “Tribute to the Troops.” WWE supplied background information, as well as our production and deadline needs. We received onfirmation on Monday that President Obama’s message had been taped, and it was delivered on Tuesday morning.

We are hopeful that everyone, especially the service men and women of the Armed Forces and their families, enjoy “Tribute to the Troops.

'Obama's Shame' in the Linda McMahon Fiasco ... today at Beyond Chron

Obama’s Shame – “Christmas Gift” to WWE’s GOP Senate Candidate Linda McMahon

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Obama_s_Shame_Christmas_Gift_to_WWE_s_GOP_Senate_Candidate_Linda_M

A Sucker Born Every Minute: Obama Falls for Linda McMahon's 'Geraldine Ferraro Statue of Liberty Play'

I am not here to join the pack making the obvious point that President Obama’s shot on “WWE Tribute to the Troops,” Saturday night on NBC, is both an embarrassing affair of state and an immensely stupid political move.

I am here, rather, to get you to join me in full-tilt holiday mirth. This particular Obama pratfall does not call for a chuckle or a guffaw. Give it a gigantic belly laugh.

For it seems that our Nobel Laureate-in-Chief has fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book: what I call the McMahon family’s Geraldine Ferraro Statue of Liberty Play. Without further ado, let’s get to today’s history lesson.

The White House is trying to soften the context of Obama’s “Tribute to the Troops” remarks. A spokesman said the segment was not taped exclusively for the wrestling promotion whose profits have given license to its former CEO, Linda McMahon, to spend up to $50 million on her candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut.

Backpedaling like a basketball point guard charged with fast-break containment, the president’s line is that he recorded a general season’s greetings to the American troops in Asia, which were intended for use by any media outlet that wanted it. But whatever the original intent, WWE snapped it up and edited it into its NBC show – in the process, laying claim to the White House imprimatur for its brand.

(And Linda, none too subtly, gets the rub. Note the emphasis in WWE tub-thumping on its support of literacy programs, one of the do-gooder line items in the candidate’s ever-evolving curriculum vitae.)

Now, let’s rewind the tape to December 1984.

It was the year of the “rock and wrestling connection,” as pop star Cyndi Lauper crossed over for an extended shtick with what was then called the World Wrestling Federation. Lauper’s video of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” – starring the guiding light and manager of tag-team champions, the late great Captain Lou Albano – had become an early anthem of MTV. She was named one of Ms. magazine’s women of the year. Another awardee was Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, fresh from her experience as Walter Mondale’s failed vice presidential running mate.

At the Ms. awards banquet, a WWF TV recording crew was on board. Captain Lou and Hulk Hogan were there, too.

A producer stuck a microphone in front of Gloria Steinem, the founding editor of Ms., and asked her to recite the words, “Rowdy Roddy Piper, I don’t think much of a man who wears a skirt.” Steinem dutifully complied. Not being familiar with Steinem’s viewing habits, I have no idea whether she knew that Roddy Piper was Hulk Hogan’s No. 1 antagonist of the season, and that one of the ways Piper “drew heat” was to enter the ring clad in Scottish kilts. The ringside hecklers called the kilts a “skirt.”

Next, the producer turned to Geraldine Ferraro and fed her this line: “Why don’t you fight like a man, Piper?” Well, whatever, Ferraro must have thought.

Two months later Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper met at Madison Square Garden in the “War to Settle the Score.” The show aired live on MTV and drew record ratings. At the beginning of the broadcast, a montage of celebrities including Andy Warhol (who, uniquely, may actually have been in the building that night) spoke on camera, creating the illusion that the “wrestling resurgence” that was then the rage of the tongue-in-chic crowd reached all the way to the Upper East Side.

Steinem’s and Ferraro’s clips from the Ms. banquet night were part of the montage. The gossip columnists clucked. The very unvicepresidential-looking Ferraro was aghast. She told the gossip columnists she’d been duped.

Apparently, something similar has happened to the president of the United States. P.T. Barnum, Linda McMahon’s forebear in Connecticut chicanery, was supposed to have said that there’s a sucker born every minute. What Obama has proven is that, even for those so born, in this great country anyone can still some day find himself occupying the Oval Office.


Irv Muchnick

Senate Candidate Linda McMahon’s WWE Lies to ESPN (Part 2)

This blog reported two days ago that World Wrestling Entertainment told either a soft or hard lie when it maintained to ESPN: “WWE has been asking to see the research and test results in the case of Mr. Benoit for years and has not been supplied with them.”

(See “EXCLUSIVE: Linda McMahon’s WWE Medical Director Met With Chris Benoit Brain Experts in 2008,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/exclusive-linda-mcmahons-wwe-medical-director-met-with-chris-benoit-brain-experts-in-2008/.)

Now let’s turn to the first part of the WWE statement: “WWE is unaware of the veracity of any of these tests, be it for Chris Benoit or Andrew Martin….”

Here I come to the charitable conclusion that WWE engaged in cookie-cutter corporate-speak. WWE is “unaware of the veracity” of the test of Andrew Martin’s brain only because it went out of its way to avoid seeing it.

Heaven help the citizens of Connecticut if U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon should prove “unaware of the veracity” of the legislation and business before that body for the same reason.

Mike Benoit, Chris’s father, told me today that as the Brain Injury Research Institute prepared to release the Martin findings to ESPN.com reporter Greg Garber, Benoit contacted WWE with a heads-up and a specific proposal from the institute to meet with Drs. Julian Bailes and Bennet Omalu. (Garrett Webster, the son of the late Pittsburgh Steelers great Mike Webster, is on the staff of the brain institute. Though Benoit is not, he has been an activist on the brain-trauma issue in the wake of his son’s double murder-suicide in June 2007.)

Specifically, Benoit said he called Dean Malenko on October 19. Malenko, a retired wrestler, was one of Chris Benoit’s best friends. Malenko now works in WWE management.

“In our conversation, I asked Dean to talk to Vince McMahon [WWE chairman; Linda’s husband] and tell him about this new development,” Mike Benoit said. “I told him that the doctors wanted to share these findings on another wrestler — I did not name the wrestler — as part of their effort to get WWE to support their research and act on it. Dean promised to deliver the message and call me back. But he never called back.”

Meanwhile, I’ve now left two emails and one voicemail message for Dr. Joseph Maroon, WWE’s medical director, inviting his comments.

Oh, and one more thing: I deeply apologize for implying that Linda McMahon should be associated with any of the sleaze of the company she co-founded with her husband, and for which she served as CEO before resigning to run for the Senate. What was I thinking?

Yesterday, in what I’m sure was a completely spontaneous act, a reader by the name of “Laurel” posted this comment: “What is wrong with you people, WWE is not involved in her Senate Campaign. Why can’t people understand that and leave it out of articles and just read about the wonderful woman she is. I am tired of it.”


Irv Muchnick

Barack Obama Meets Milan Kundera

Our commander-in-chief caps off his Nobel Prize week with an appearance Saturday night on WWE's Tribute to the Troops on NBC.

The bill outlawing college football's Bowl Championship Series wends its way through the two great deliberative bodies on Capitol Hill, with the president's endorsement.

The unbearable lightness of Obama.


Irv Muchnick

Teflon Linda McMahon 'Defines Deviancy Down'

Had he not worn a bow tie, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan probably wouldn’t have uttered his famous phrase about “defining deviancy down.” Instead, he would have said we were lowering the bar. Or that we were in a race to the bottom.

Choose your cliché. They all fit Linda McMahon, the ex-CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment who is giving the people of Connecticut 50 million good reasons – the number of dollars from her own sleazily accumulated fortune – to elect her to the United States Senate.

Connecticut insiders tell me that McMahon is a decent “retail” politician; she knows how to work a room (perhaps especially when it’s filled with fellow fat cats). I don’t doubt it. Successful electoral candidates come in all sizes and shapes. Not all of them are larger-than-life figures like Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger – or like Linda’s husband Vince.

As an outsider who has been watching the quarter-century-long stranglehold of the McMahon family on American popular culture, I have felt from the beginning that one thing, and one thing only, could derail her candidacy. And that one thing isn’t the wholesale distribution of YouTube clips in which the McMahons make asses of themselves. On the matter of taste – for which, as they say, there’s no accounting – Linda has airtight, postmodernist inoculation. If there’s anyone who understands how to turn populist victimization in her favor, she’s the one. Politicos who fail to appreciate this first principle of political jiu-jitsu should be assigned to read their Edward Gibbon before returning to campaign coverage.

The McMahons’ Achilles heel is their history of presiding over a mega-profitable industry, oiled by their political connections, with a statistically, actuarially impossible recurrence of death among its tightly-controlled talent. The body count has spiked on WWE’s watch. The death pandemic has been enabled, if not stoked, by WWE’s business model.

Whether such fundamentals are grasped and executed by the Connecticut chattering class – currently caught up in the conventional metrics of the horse race between McMahon and Rob Simmons for the Republican nomination – remains an open question. So far the in-state stories that I’ve seen have mostly focused on dueling heel/babyface interviews between the carnies who no longer like the McMahons, and the WWE legal pot who calls the kettle black.

Last week ESPN.com had a report on the new study of the brain of WWE wrestler Andrew “Test” Martin, who died at 33 in March in a drugged-out stupor. Predictably, WWE discredited the research of the Brain Injury Research Institute in West Virginia.

Not quite as predictably – as this blog revealed yesterday – WWE lied in the process. According to the company’s statement to ESPN, it had been asking for the test results of the case of another wrestler, Chris Benoit (double murder-suicide, June 2007) “for years and has not been supplied with them.”

In fact, WWE’s medical director, Dr. Joseph Maroon, had an in-depth meeting with the directors of the brain institute and their lawyer, at their headquarters, on October 1, 2008. So far not a single mainstream outlet has picked up this story.

Not to worry. Between today and the key dates of the 2010 election season, another performer associated with WWE will almost certainly croak in his 20s, 30s, or 40s, and the McMahon machine will proceed either to ignore it or to put out more misleading information about it. Though we don’t know who and we don’t know when, experience suggests that you can practically set your watch by the phenomenon.

Over time, we’ll find out how the most crucial factor in the success of the Linda McMahon candidacy plays out. That factor, quite simply, is how aggressively the Connecticut media step up to the plate or, alternatively, participate in gift-wrapping the packaging of Teflon Linda.


Irv Muchnick

EXCLUSIVE: Linda McMahon’s WWE Medical Director Met With Chris Benoit Brain Experts in 2008

In a December 9 article at ESPN.com about the brain damage of yet another dead pro wrestler, Andrew “Test” Martin (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=4724912), World Wrestling Entertainment – the company of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon – stated in part:

“WWE is unaware of the veracity of any of these tests, be it for Chris Benoit or Andrew Martin…. WWE has been asking to see the research and test results in the case of Mr. Benoit for years and has not been supplied with them.”

The second sentence is a grossly, and characteristically, misleading statement by the McMahon death mill. The following background reveals that “lie” may not be too strong a word.

Here’s the full chronology.

In June 2007 WWE star Chris Benoit murdered his wife and their son, and killed himself. Chris Nowinski, a former pro wrestler who had been forced to retire because of the cumulative effects of in-ring concussions, had started a research and advocacy group, and Nowinski prevailed upon Chris Benoit’s father, Mike Benoit, to donate his son’s brain for studies by Dr. Bennet Omalu, a pioneering researcher of what is being called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Later in the year Nowinski and Mike Benoit widely publicized Omalu’s research.

In March 2008 WWE began baseline neurological testing for its performers, using an emerging system of sports-medicine protocols called ImPACT. WWE itself did not announce this change. However, in an April 11, 2008, news release, Sports Legacy Institute’s Nowinski, citing “anonymous wrestlers,” reported: “WWE management has instituted a concussion management program. At a mandatory meeting for all performers in early March WWE performers took a computerized neuropsychological testing protocol, which evaluates such things as memory, cognitive skills, and reaction time. They will be re-tested aggressively every 6 months to look for long term health issues, as well as re-tested after suspected concussions to help determine when it is safe to return to in-ring action.”

According to Dave Meltzer, publisher of the authoritative Wrestling Observer Newsletter, March 2008 corresponds with when Dr. Joseph Maroon was hired to coordinate WWE’s ImPACT program and supervise the work of two doctors who henceforth traveled to all WWE shows.

On October 1, 2008, Dr. Maroon visited the Brain Injury Research Institute in Morgantown, West Virginia. The institute is co-directed by Dr. Julian Bailes, chair of the neurosurgery department at West Virginia University, and Dr. Omalu, a medical professor and coroner now based in California. Also present at the meeting were the brain institute’s general counsel, Bob Fitzsimmons, and Peter Davies, a professor of pathology and neuroscience at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

On the phone with me this morning, Omalu was hopping mad about the WWE statement to ESPN. “Dr. Maroon was there with us and he was shown all our research information, slides, and specimens – on Chris Benoit and all the athletes’ brains we studied,” Omalu said.

The only possible confusion about any of this would be painfully hairsplitting. But that’s WWE’s m.o.

Maroon also has long been a team physician for the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers, and a familiar NFL consultant throughout the public debate in recent years – culminating in hearings earlier this year before the House Judiciary Committee – over football concussions. An impossibly tortured rationalization could be offered to the effect that when Maroon was in West Virginia, he was representing the NFL but not also WWE.

The WWE corporate website prominently calls Maroon the company “medical director.” Maroon’s own website and bio at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center say he became WWE medical director “in 2008,” though not the month. Again, March 2008 was when the company hired Maroon with a brain-injury portfolio, whether or not the title at the time was “medical director.”

Omalu pointed out that there is a lot more to how this story relates to the slow and grudging acceptance of his research by the NFL as well as by WWE. The October 2008 meeting was his third with Maroon dating back to 2006. Like WWE, the NFL started with a bureaucratic Alphonse-and-Gaston act of pretending to ignore Omalu or discredit his research. More on all that another day.

For now, the story is that WWE’s medical director was given full access to Chris Benoit brain studies, in person, 14 months before WWE told ESPN that the company “has been asking to see the research and tests results in the case of Mr. Benoit for years and has not been supplied with them.”

This morning I emailed and left a voicemail message for Dr. Maroon in Pittsburgh. If he, or WWE or the McMahon family’s litigious attack dog Jerry McDevitt, has anything to add to our understanding of this scenario, I will post it immediately.

The next question is whether the Connecticut media will make this latest tale of WWE death and deception stick to Linda McMahon, who was merely CEO of the company and is the wife of chairman Vince McMahon.

Or will this be treated as just another political fun-and-games story from the wacky world of wrestling?


Irv Muchnick

Muchnick's CBC 'Daybreak Alberta' Interview in Podcast Form

CHRIS & NANCY author Irvin Muchnick’s interview on Sunday, December 13 edition of CBC’s Daybreak Alberta with Russell Bowers can be downloaded at the program’s archive page, http://www.cbc.ca/daybreakalberta/archives.html#sunday. The interview was recorded in October.

The segment also can be downloaded at http://muchnick.net/daybreakalberta.ram.

Jerry McDevitt Wild Card: How Does the McMahon Family’s Favorite Legal Attack Dog Play in Plainfield?

Jerry McDevitt, a partner in the Pittsburgh office of the K&L Gates law firm, is one of the top criminal defense lawyers in the country, and he has been a trusted counsel to Vince and Linda McMahon for many years. McDevitt is very good at what he does. In 1991 Hulk Hogan was among the many wrestlers of the then-World Wrestling Federation who were subpoenaed to testify at the trial of Dr. George Zahorian – a ringside doctor at wrestling shows in Pennsylvania who was the first physician indicted and convicted under the 1990 federal law criminalizing the prescription of steroids for non-therapeutic purposes. McDevitt succeeded in getting Hogan’s subpoena quashed.

In 1994 Vince McMahon himself was tried in federal court on drug-conspiracy charges. McDevitt was part of the defense team that secured McMahon’s acquittal.

During Linda McMahon’s campaign against Rob Simmons for the 2010 Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Chris Dodd, McDevitt is assuming a role long familiar to people in the wrestling world. McDevitt is the guy quoted with putdowns of the former McMahon employees (or, excuse me, independent contractors) who no longer talk in favorable terms about the most powerful promoters in their industry. With some of these characters, McDevitt has a pretty easy job, but again, he does it well. Above all, Vince and Linda like nothing more than news stories featuring their lawyer in debate with a bunch of carnies. The first family of wrestling has more important things to do – such as making money or, in this particular silly season, accruing political power to accompany their financial might and their absurd and pernicious influence on popular culture.

In this post I want to ask a more complicated question: How does the McDevitt factor play for Linda McMahon, at a technical level, in Connecticut Republican politics?

I call the question complicated for two reasons. Linda McMahon, like a lot of rich business people without firm ideological roots, has spread her wealth around more or less apolitically and agnostically. McDevitt’s own record illustrates this.

Further, we outsiders can’t help observing that the great state of Connecticut, the cradle of figures ranging from Phineas Taylor Barnum to Joseph Isadore Lieberman, is, shall we say, unique political turf.

Right now former Congressman Simmons, playing to the conservative primary base, is working to downplay his moderate voting record in the House of Representatives on certain issues, and has recast himself as a dead-red “tea party” Republican. For her part, McMahon is living down a history of campaign contributions to Democrats as well as Republicans. (Readers interested in how the subject was handled on this blog, long before I knew McMahon herself might some day herself run for office, should check out “Vince McMahon & Joe Lieberman: Morality-Play Tag-Team Partners,” October 30, 2007, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/archive-103007-vince-mcmahon-joe-lieberman-morality-play-tag-team-partners/.)

Like the McMahons’, McDevitt’s scorecard in this area is mixed. The generous explanation is that he’s a switch hitter. The ungenerous one is that he’s a mercenary, a hired gun.

In the late 1980s, when the McMahons were seeking to deregulate pro wrestling in Pennsylvania, McDevitt worked with a young lawyer at his firm, then known as Kirkpatrick & Lockhart. That WWF lobbyist, Rick Santorum, went on to get elected to two terms in the U.S. Senate and to gain a reputation as, arguably, that body’s most right-wing member. (See “Senate Candidate Linda McMahon, Former Senator Rick Santorum, and Pro Wrestling Deregulation,” December 9, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/senate-candidate-linda-mcmahon-former-senator-rick-santorum-and-pro-wrestling-deregulation/).

Of course, in 2006 Santorum got trounced, by an historic margin, in his bid for a third term. But I have no idea if he’s a dirty word these days in Connecticut Republican circles. Or in any case, any dirtier than, say, Joe Lieberman.

Back to McDevitt. As explained in the previous post, in 2008-09 he spearheaded the exoneration of Dr. Cyril Wecht, a rather idiosyncratic Pennsylvania coroner who was indicted on vague federal corruption charges. Along with former Republican Pennsylvania Governor and U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh (now of counsel at McDevitt’s firm), McDevitt successfully argued that the charges against Wecht, a Democrat, were politically motivated. The Wecht prosecution was widely considered a leading exhibit of the Bush Justice Department scandals involving numerous U.S. attorneys’ offices.

Does all this make McDevitt a squishy Republican? Or just another exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the American Way? As one who has sparred with ole Jerry’s ultra-litigious side, discretion calls for me to cast my vote for the latter. (For the full background of McDevitt’s legal threats to me during the research of my book CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, see the archives of this blog and my Twitter feed, as well as the book itself and the companion DVD.)

The only firm conclusions you can draw are that politics do, indeed, make strange bedfellows, and that the political arena is a heck of a lot like the wrestling arena. In that respect, without a doubt, the McMahons are on to something.


Irv Muchnick

Chris Benoit’s Dad to Author Muchnick, Part 2: WWE/McMahon Lawyer McDevitt and the Pennsylvania Coroner

Mike Benoit, father of the late Chris Benoit, has resumed his email correspondence with me. As recounted in the “Notes on Sources” in CHRIS & NANCY, Mike had stopped talking to me in the spring of 2008, in the middle of my research for the book.

“Both you and [WWE lawyer Jerry] McDevitt are not on my Christmas card list, believe me,” Mike wryly noted today.

But far more important is the substance of Mike’s new message to me:

Shortly after my son’s tragedy I traveled to Atlanta to meet with my lawyers. While in Atlanta I wanted to visit Dr Kris Sperry. Dr Sperry is the chief ME for Fayette County and was responsible for helping me make a decision to allow my son’s brain tissue to be examined. During my visit with Dr Sperry he told me about a call he received back in June 2007 from another ME. At the time the caller asked numerous questions about the tragedy and suggested to Dr Sperry that there was a very high probability that Daniel died first. Sperry dismissed the suggestion as he believed and shared with me at that time that Nancy died first then Daniel and then Chris. The ME at the time also encouraged Dr Sperry to test for fragile X in Daniel.

Fast forward February 2008 Dr Omalu is being questioned on the witness stand in the trial of Dr Cyril H. Wecht. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Dr Wecht was charged with 41 counts including mail fraud and theft from an organization receiving Federal funds. During Dr Omalu’s testimony he is asked by Dr Wecht’s lawyer if he was the doctor that had examined Chris Benoit’s brain. Dr Omalu thought at the time “where is this going”. Dr Wecht was acquitted on all charges.

As Paul Harvey used to say “and now the rest of the story.”

It turns out, according to my lawyers, that the ME that called Dr Sperry back in June 2007 was Dr Cyril Wecht. The lawyer that defended Dr Wecht in his 2008 trial was Jerry McDevitt. Do you think that Jerry would have asked Dr Wecht to make that call back in June of 2007? Would that be considered an attempt to obstruct justice? Jerry McDevitt is a smart man and I am sure he would not do that. The fact of the matter is that the ME in Fayette County never officially confirmed the sequence of death between Daniel and Nancy. That could also raise some interesting questions and it is likely where Dr Wecht was going.


***

My analysis begins with minor corrections: Dr. Kris Sperry is chief medical examiner for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Dr. Cyril Wecht’s 2008 trial resulted in a hung jury, not acquittal.

Wecht, former coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is a story of his own. The prosecution of him was extremely controversial and included speculation that Wecht, a Democrat, had been targeted in a purely partisan fashion by U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan. Indeed, Buchanan became a poster child for widespread charges that the Bush Justice Department was politicized. After the hung-jury mistrial, Buchanan originally sought to retry Wecht, but she finally dropped the charges in June of this year after losing a key procedural ruling on evidence.

Jerry McDevitt was, indeed, Wecht’s defense lawyer. It gets better than that. In January 2008, Congressman Bobby Rush’s House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection held hearings on steroids in sports and sports entertainment. Every single invited head of a sports league or union or entertainment entity testified, with one exception: Vince McMahon of WWE (husband of WWE chief executive and current Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon). McMahon explained that he was declining the invitation because McDevitt was unavailable to accompany him. And that was because McDevitt was preparing for the start of Dr. Wecht’s trial.


Irv Muchnick