How to Keep an NFL Team Out of Jail
10/02/2016
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF

Here’s an interesting article in the Washington Post by Kent Babb about the NFL Dallas Cowboys’ team fixer, a big black ex-cop and ex-bail bondsman who is on friendly terms with everybody who works at the courthouse in Dallas. He gets paid by the Cowboys to make drunk driving and domestic violence arrests of Cowboy football players disappear before they get into the newspapers.

He is, like the “Pulp Fiction” character Winston Wolf [played by Harvey Keitel], a fixer who exists on the margins and functions without ceremony. He considers the angles, contemplates the ifs, solves the most complicated problems. No wonder the Cowboys, known for acquiring players on their second or third chances, have come to trust Wells implicitly with their most valuable and unpredictable assets. Whatever route a player is trying to find through the system — from simple help with a driver’s license to thorny entanglements involving criminal charges — there’s always one more option to help find a way: Call in the Wolf.

“I haven’t had a question that Dave couldn’t answer, I can tell you that,” said Adam “Pacman” Jones, the Bengals cornerback.

“Whenever something is messed up and you need to go outside the lines a little bit,” former Kaufman County, Tex., district attorney Rick Harrison said, “he’s your guy.”

“A tremendous asset to the franchise,” Jerry Jones said. “. . . I won’t get into detail of the kinds of things [Wells does], because he does everything.” …

Said longtime attorney Anthony Lyons: “There are going to be times that David comes up with a result that you’re just not going to ask him about.” …

Almost nothing is as valuable to an NFL front office as discretion, nothing as threatening to a season or brand as a “distraction.” Forbes says the Cowboys are worth $4.2 billion, a value that in part depends on the team’s ability to keep star players on the field, contend for championships and maintain its global popularity. For every incident that generates a negative headline, Wells said, 10 are handled without the public’s knowledge.

Considering how many scandals involving football players wind up in the press, the notion that another order of magnitude incidents actually happen is, well, eye-opening.

[Comment at Unz.com]
Print Friendly and PDF