Authors: Jeff Benedict,Don Yaeger
“And when I got bored, when I lost the love for the game, I started listening to people I never listened to before. That was my mistake. I started looking for something else to excite me. And that always leads to trouble.”
A
s bad as life for Henley was on the field, it didn’t begin to unravel off it until July 1993, when FBI agents pulled an attractive nineteen-year-old waitress named Tracy Ann Donaho from a line of passengers arriving at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport. Donaho, who had drawn attention by purchasing her ticket to Atlanta with cash, was asked about a suitcase labeled as hers. Unbeknownst to her, agents had discovered twelve kilos of cocaine in the case, a load that would fetch $250,000 on the street. Donaho said the suitcase belonged to a friend and she couldn’t open it because she didn’t have the key. Agents kept the case, but let her leave. Several hours later, when she and Henley returned to the airport to retrieve it, police swept in and arrested her. As Donaho was being placed in handcuffs, Henley “expressed shock,” according to police, and made a point of telling them he was a professional football player who spoke out against drug use. The result: Donaho was taken to jail, Henley got in his car and drove home.
Within hours, Darryl Henley’s life was in freefall. Donaho, a Rams cheerleader, kept quiet the first day after police arrested her. But she would eventually say it was Henley who had arranged for her to carry the suitcase, telling her it contained cash to be delivered to a friend. She said Henley, whom she had dated, paid her $1,000 to deliver one suitcase to a friend in Memphis, then more to shepherd the case to Atlanta a month later. In exchange for reducing charges against her, Donaho agreed to become a government witness against Henley. Investigators chose not to arrest Henley, but did begin a full-blown inquiry into his life.
When he learned that Donaho had fingered him, Henley immediately called coach Chuck Knox, who gathered the team’s brass for an impromptu meeting. “They said we had to put together a team,” Henley said. “I needed a lawyer, an investigator, experts, the whole O.J. thing. And they said we had to keep this quiet.”
The federal government, peeling through his life like the skins of an onion, lawyers calculating his every off-the-field move, and coaches waiting for their quiet deal to break, Henley surprised everyone in the Rams organization by coming out at the start of the 1993 season and posting near All-Pro numbers through the first five games. Then the secret became public and by December he was indicted, named as the kingpin in a national cocaine trafficking ring. He was charged with conspiracy to deliver narcotics along with four others, including his uncle and a childhood friend.
No one knew what should happen next. The NFL wanted to suspend Henley based on the sheer seriousness of the charge. Henley’s lawyers argued against suspension, claiming that to cut Henley would be a presumption of his guilt. The Rams were left in the middle. But when the controversy became a distraction for an already distracted team, Henley voluntarily took a leave of absence. “I wasn’t forced to take the leave,” he said. “In fact the Rams paid me my full salary [$600,000] that year, that was the deal. It was just better for everyone that I step away.”
The next summer, his trial delayed until January 1995, the Rams announced they were bringing Henley back for the 1994 season. A deal between Henley, the Rams, and the court allowed Henley to travel with the team after posting a $1 million bond and agreeing to pay the cost of a court officer to accompany him on road trips. Despite those restrictions, Henley again amazed coaches and critics by leading the team in interceptions. During a November game with Denver, he recorded a career-high eleven solo tackles as the Rams held John Elway to forty yards passing in the first half. For his play, Henley was given the defensive game ball. Though the Denver game was one of the best in his career, Henley consistently played so well that coaches openly marveled at his concentration, his ability to block out the distractions and be the team’s rock in the defensive backfield.
Henley and the Rams ignored questions about the propriety of paying an accused major drug trafficker to play in the National Football League. This was definitely not a United Way commercial waiting to happen. The Rams, some said, were selling their soul. If so, the team, which finished 4-12, got little for the sale.
In late January, Henley’s new team—a band of lawyers and investigators led by future CNN television legal anchor Roger Cossack—opened his defense in federal court.
During the trial, the government detailed an elaborate scheme to move drugs nationwide. Cossack attempted to reduce the case to one of a conspiracy to sully the name of a professional football player.
“I was always surrounded by groups of people,” Henley said. “And those people were always telling me not to worry, ‘Okay, man, we’re going to get out of this.’ Everybody tells you, ‘Man, just watch, just wait, it’ll be over soon.’”
Henley, who was rarely beaten as a defensive back, believed all those hangers-on. Confident to the point of appearing cocky, Henley stood when the jury foreman prepared to announce the verdict eight weeks later. To his surprise, the foreman’s response was only one word, not two. “As I heard the word—guilty—my knees buckled,” Henley said. He was immediately sent to the federal detention facility in Los Angeles to await sentencing.
Though Henley’s attorneys announced an appeal immediately after the conviction, the Rams finally acknowledged they may lose the service of one of their best defensive players. A week after the guilty verdict, the Rams signed Anthony Parker to replace Henley in the lineup.
Then came a twist so bizarre even the hardened cynics were left scratching their heads. According to prosecutors, while in the federal jail, Henley befriended a guard who provided Henley with a cellular phone. Using that phone, Henley arranged for a $1 million heroin shipment to be sent to Detroit and for cocaine to be moved around Southern California. With the profit he earned from those transactions, Henley offered to pay for the murder of Donaho and U.S. District Judge Gary Taylor, who had presided in the case and would be determining his sentence.
What Henley didn’t know was that federal marshals were on to his scheme. An inmate whom Henley had asked to help plan the murders turned out to be a jailhouse informant. The voice on the other end of Henley’s cell phone when he ordered the judge’s murder belonged to a federal undercover agent. The conversations, he would later learn, were all being recorded.
Within days, Henley and a whole new group of defendants were brought before a new federal judge, charged not only with drug trafficking, but with attempted murder. This time, those charged included Henley’s brother Eric, along with Henley’s girlfriend and the mother of his child. The whole family, it seemed, was going down with Darryl. Henley’s own parents, in fact, lost their home in foreclosure after they spent $100,000—including $83,000 from their retirement funds—on their sons’ legal defense funds.
Before the murder-for-hire case could go to trial, Henley and his brother both pleaded guilty to trafficking charges and to Henley’s part in plotting the murders.
I
n one day, March 10, 1997, Henley appeared in back-to-back hearings where federal judges ordered him to spend the next forty-one years of his life in prison—not just any prison, but the United States prison in Marion, Illinois, one of two “super-maximum-security” prisons in the United States. Where once Henley had proudly proclaimed his inclusion in one of America’s most select fraternities—the 1,600 players in the NFL—he now was in even more select company: only 700 inmates in America are housed in the nation’s two super-max federal prisons.
“You screwed up your life, didn’t you?” U.S. District Judge Manuel Real asked before announcing a twenty-one-year sentence for drug trafficking. Head bowed, Henley said nothing until his attorney whispered in his ear.
“Yes,” the once flamboyant athlete said after the prompt.
Down the hall in the federal courthouse, Judge James M. Ideman added another twenty years for the murder plot. “It is obvious he’s even more dangerous in custody than out of custody,” Ideman said. “Any speeches [to Henley] would be a waste of time. If ever there’s a guy that deserves to be in Marion, it is you.”
In April 1997, marshals escorted Henley past the twenty-foot-high fences of razor-sharp concertina wire and down the iron-gated halls of America’s toughest prison. His social time—once spent with politicians and world-class athletes—now would be shared with the likes of John Gotti, mass murderers, and those convicted of blowing up the World Trade Center. His closet of flashy suits would be replaced by a bright red prison jump suit and white flannel long Johns for the cold days. The Rolex watch gave way to shiny silver handcuffs. His entourage now consisted of two guards, nightsticks in hand, who stay with him step for step every time he leaves his cell. Where once he looked up to see thousands of fans yelling his name, now the same view included towers and snipers.
W
alking into Marion was only the second time in my life—the other was when the jury said I was guilty—that I could barely walk,” Henley said a year later. “My knees shook. This was real.
“Why do most people want to play professional football? Money. Fame. Women. Cars. Houses. But there are only so many cars you can buy,” Henley said, searching for the beginnings of his end. “There are only so many women that you can have a night. There is only so much money can buy. Really. I had everything you could want and I still wasn’t happy. I don’t know if this is part, of the message because it’s really directed at the athletes—the guys who want to become athletes. Everyone likes to say ‘Football is not my life.’ That’s not true. To many players, it is their life. It shouldn’t be your life, but it is. You should have some other interest—family, to turn to when things aren’t working out on the field. I didn’t have those interests. That’s what made me the perfect guy to get caught up in these situations. When you allow yourself to become bored, you start looking at other ways to pique your interest. Sometimes you find some things that are totally, totally different from anything that you have ever experienced or done. You’re on a plane and you are gung ho, you’re enjoying what you do. You’re enjoying life. Someone comes to you and they slide up under you and they give you a sales pitch and it’s not too strong, but you can see the mystique and danger and you know you should say, ‘No, I’m cool. Thanks anyway.’ Maybe it’s a friend. An old friend. We’re just talking and kicking back. A sales pitch. An approach. You’re comfortable now, with your lifestyle. You go to the left, I go to the right.
“But when you’re not comfortable with yourself, the sales pitch works. And it works immediately when you don’t turn and run. The minute you say, ‘What was that? Say that again?’ he’s got you.
“My problems were with me. It was within me. It didn’t have anything to do with anybody else. It was Darryl Henley. I lost interest in football and started listening to other opportunities, dangerous and mysterious opportunities.
“From there, from just listening, things snowballed. Next thing, I was in with people I knew I shouldn’t be in with. Then when things started coming down around me, I was willing to do whatever might get me out of that situation, even crazy stuff, stuff I can’t believe today I even thought about. That’s when bad went to worse. Suddenly, all I wanted was to be back on the football field. But I was too caught up in saving my ass to get there.
“The problem is that everyone believes it can’t happen to them, they’ll never get caught. And they look at the guys like me who get caught and assume it must be because I had a background that was worse than theirs, or wasn’t as smart as they are, or something. But to say that, you’ve got to know who I am.
“All I ask is that before people sit in judgment of me, they need to understand that I’m not some undereducated black guy who came from the ghetto and was banging and shooting people in junior high school. I’m not a ‘failure of the system’ or a ‘product of a bad environment.’ Every member of my family, as of November of ‘97, has a college degree. My father migrated to Los Angeles from the South. He worked his butt off for Western Union. He packed my brother and I, packed us both on his back while he delivered packages because we couldn’t afford baby-sitters and all that. He worked hard enough to allow us to move to the suburbs and that took everything he had. They spent everything they ever had to get us out of that environment. My father volunteered at [the local public] Duarte High School—he was a proctor there. He saw what was going on. He didn’t want it for us and he moved us away. He enrolled us in a private Catholic school—a great school. Damien High School. We did well there. My older brother, Thomas, became the first black athlete to get a scholarship out of there. He went to Stanford University and started on the football team as a freshman. My younger brother went to Rice on scholarship. We all graduated. Every one of us graduated.
“We didn’t have crack in our family. Never had handcuffs on. Never been in jail. Never had a problem. I didn’t drink my first beer until I graduated from high school. Never had anything like that. It wasn’t attractive to me. Never smoked a joint. I remember when I was leaving college some friends and I got together and went to the mountains—it was a girl, she invited me, and her friends and that type of thing. Me and one of my teammates were there and I just did the drug testing thing for the NFL Combine. I knew that the draft was coming up and then you’ve got to report for mini-camp. I was upstairs and I knew they were smoking dope downstairs and I panicked. I’m like, ‘Ya’ll wet some towels and put it all under the door.’ I was like, ‘Secondhand smoke. I ain’t trying to get none of that stuff.’ That was my attitude. That was my response.”
W
ith twenty-three hours a day alone in a six-foot by nine-foot cell, Henley has a lot of time to think through how his fall from grace began. As a result, he gets fighting mad when he reads about another athlete headed down the same path that landed him in Marion.