By the summer of 2007, the rug had been pulled out so hard from under me that the floorboards and support beams and foundation went with it. I felt like I had nothing to stand on.
I moved back into the big house on Willadel Drive up in Clearwater and put the Miami house on the market. So at least I was home—but even my home didn’t seem the same.
My body wasn’t the same, either. I was just too old. I was just too tired. I was just in too much pain. I felt like I was dragging myself out of bed every morning. The pain in my lower back was so bad I had to sit in a chair to just brush my teeth. I knew it was all just downhill from there. Some days I wondered why I even bothered getting out of bed in the first place.
After the mess of the last season, and the mess that my family was in, there wasn’t a chance in hell that we’d land a fifth season of Hogan Knows Best. So for the first time in my life I felt unemployed. At the age of fifty-three to suddenly not have a job to look forward to left me wondering, just a little bit, what on earth I was good for anymore.
I tried not to focus on that. I tried to spend my days focused on my kids’ careers instead. Even that wasn’t easy. Brooke was spending more and more time with her mother in L.A. and was looking for an apartment in Miami. The one good upshot of the Hogan Knows Best fiasco season was that Brooke was in the process of getting her own spin-off show, but it kept her so busy she just wasn’t around very much.
Even Nick seemed to be a little bit tired of having his old man around all the time, which I thought was just typical sixteen-year-old behavior. He was seriously into motor sports now, and spending lots of time with the buddies who made up his racing team: John Graziano, Barry Lawrence, and Danny Jacobs.
One of the best things about that was they were all spending lots of time at the big house. John, who grew up just north of Clearwater, in Dunedin, Florida, was pretty much living with us that whole summer. I loved having all of that young energy around. It wasn’t what I so desperately wanted—the sound of a home filled up by my happy family—but at least I wasn’t alone.
I just don’t do well alone.
John Graziano first came into Nick’s life because of their mutual fascination with Toyota Supras. They actually met at one of those Supra meets that Nick and I went to before he got his license—one of those events where enthusiasts get together in a parking lot to talk about the cars, and look at the cars, and show off their cars.
John was about five years older than Nick, but that common bond seemed to erase the years, and it wasn’t long before they became best friends.
When Nick finally got his license, he was constantly at the track. He was out there before the track even opened and would stay until they kicked him off at night. He was changing his own tires and getting behind the wheel taking turn after turn to get the feel of it down. He loved drifting—the form of precision racing in which drivers slide their cars sideways around the corners—and I would be there as much as I could to help Nick push the cars on and off the track. John was usually right there with us.
When they showed Nick racing on Hogan Knows Best, they made it seem like a celebrity thing—like he got a couple of quick lessons and was racing all of a sudden. It wasn’t like that. He was as dedicated as any professional athlete to becoming a driver. He took it real seriously. John was like his right-hand man, pushing him and supporting him when he needed it. I loved the fact that my son had a friend like John to bond with, given everything else that was happening in our lives. In some ways it was like watching me and Brutus in the early days—just bonding over mutual interests, and knowing someone’s got your back, is so important in life.
John started sleeping over at the house a lot so he’d be there first thing in the morning to head to the track—or to catch a workout with me. He seemed to get a kick out of working out with Hulk Hogan in the morning, and unlike my own kids, who liked to sleep in, he was right there pushing me at like 7:00 A.M.
So John became a real fixture in our house. Even in Miami. He was around so much, the editors had a tough time cutting around him on Hogan Knows Best—because he’d always wind up in the shots and was never miked.
Nick really looked up to John. He viewed him almost like an older brother. Because of that bond, Brooke sort of treated him like a brother, too. Things were real bad in the Graziano household. Real bad. His father, Ed, allegedly tried to beat John with a baseball bat one time. Another time John told the police that his father came after him with a screwdriver. John’s mother, Debbie, even got a protective order against Ed after he allegedly beat her up. It’s all in the police reports and court documents. “Domestic” reports were the norm in that family.
I’ll tell you more about that whole situation a little bit later, but the gist of it was that John was absolutely convinced Ed was going to kill him. That’s one of the main reasons he found peace hanging out at our house. He felt safe with us.
It’s hard to explain, but John seemed real lost at times. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. When he joined the marines in 2005, I got real scared for him. While he was over in Iraq in 2006, he would always manage to get to a phone somehow. I thought it was amazing that he would trek out to make a call under those awful conditions, and when he did, he would call us. We loved hearing from him. He said his own parents wouldn’t accept collect calls, so he just called us instead.
We were so happy when he got back safe and sound in the spring of 2007, we took him into our home pretty much full-time. He really was a part of our family.
But John was real uneasy when he got back. He seemed more lost than ever in some ways. He had seen some pretty rough stuff in Iraq. He was in a transportation unit and in charge of driving vehicles over there, and at one point a roadside bomb had gone off right in front of the vehicle he was driving. Members of his company died. I can’t imagine going through something like that, and how much that must mess with your head. Especially at twenty-one years old.
From the moment he returned, John kept talking about death. He kept saying he was sure he was gonna die. It freaked me out. The rest of the family, too. Even with all the chaos we had with Linda, we all tried to support him and be there for him. He jumped right back into Nick’s racing team, and I just thought he’d work through whatever issues he had right there in Florida.
Then he did something unexpected. Just a month or so after he got back, John reenlisted with the marines. That summer, we got word that he would ship out to Iraq again that December.
Part of me wanted to find a way to stop him from doing it. I was just so scared about what might happen to him if he went back over there. But there was no stopping John. He was an adult. He made his own decisions. For some reason, he had made up his mind that going back to a war zone would be better than the situation he faced at home.
August 26 started out like a typical Sunday. I went out to the gym that morning, came back, and decided I wanted to go out on the boat—this offshore cigarette boat we kept docked right off the backyard. Any day on the water was a good day as far as I was concerned. I really needed a good day, too.
I thought I’d take that boat out for a good run, maybe thirty miles, head down the beach, stop by and see who was around, maybe pick up some of my buddies and just cruise. Your basic Florida Sunday. I figured I’d bring a few six-packs with me for anyone who came along to enjoy, but we were completely out of beer, which was really strange, because there are like ten refrigerators in the big house: Sub-Zeros in the kitchen and the pantry off to the side of the kitchen; a smaller refrigerator in the wine room; a refrigerator up in our bedroom; a refrigerator in my gym, in the guest house, in the boathouse. All those refrigerators and no beer. Once every couple of months our caretaker, George, would do a run and stock all the refrigerators. I guess he forgot.
I was hungry, and so were Nick and his pals. So we all piled into my four-door yellow pickup that morning, and we grabbed breakfast at the little restaurant we always went to. As we were leaving, I said, “Guys, I gotta pick up some beer.” So we stopped by the Albertson’s liquor store.
While Nick and Barry waited in the truck, I went in with John and Danny—who were both of legal drinking age. I was buying, of course, and I knew I’d be buying a lot, because John drank like a fish. I mean, when we were on the road with Nick’s team, one of the things John would brag about was “I can’t get drunk.”
I remember one night I went out to a bar with John and Danny, and John must have bought eight, nine, ten shots in a row. I drank one or two of them before saying, “That’s it for me, man. I’m not really good with drinking shots.” He wouldn’t have it: “No, no, man!” In the gym, John was always giving me shit—he loved that back-and-forth of trying to push each other to the next level—and this was that same sort of thing. John was bragging that night, “I can’t get drunk.” You could see he was drunk off his ass!
He just wouldn’t admit it. He had that mentality. He was a hard-core, hard-living marine. I don’t mean anything bad by it, but at that point in his life, that’s just the way he was.
So I go into Albertson’s liquor store that day and buy four or five cases of Miller Light, which is just about the only beer I ever drink, and some wine just to keep in the house. Then John said, “Hey, look at this Miller beer with lime in it!” and I told him to throw it in the cart. Danny picked something out, too—so we probably walked out of there with ten, twelve cases of beer. As soon as I got back, I started stocking all the refrigerators.
Finally I was ready to head out on the boat, and I threw two or three six-packs in a cooler. By that point Nick and his buddies had all decided they wanted to go out on the boat with me, so John and Danny each threw a six-pack into the cooler on top of mine.
All of a sudden Nick came to me and said, “Oh, Dad, there’s these people from L.A. that want to do a reality show on drifting, and they were planning to meet with me today. Can they just go on the boat with us, too?”
“Sure.” So now we’ve got this big group going on the boat, including these two reality TV execs whom I’ve never met.
It seems like right after we all got on the boat these huge thunderheads started rolling in. “Shit.” I ran south about four or five miles to avoid the rain, and all of a sudden another thunderhead moves in.
John insisted he knew this island where we could hang out, so we ran really hard to escape the rain, like seventy, eighty miles an hour, and we pulled up to this island. It was deserted, and it would have been a nice place to hang out, but the rain clouds started pushing in again. So we went running back and decided to pull into Shephard’s.
Shephard’s is where I had that problem with Linda during the wrap party for the first season of Hogan Knows Best. It’s kind of the hot place to be in Clearwater, although Linda never wanted to hang out there any other time. At least not with me.
So I backed the boat in and anchored, and we all slid off the back. For some reason, that spot stayed sunny. So I just stood in the shallow water there talking to these TV guys for over an hour while Nick, John, and Danny went up on the docks.
They’re real strict at Shephard’s, and I knew the security guards wouldn’t let Nick inside. Even so, I kept checking up on where Nick was, and it turned out he was further down the dock with his boys, talking to some girls. Of course.
When the rain clouds started moving over Shephard’s, I decided to reel it in. We gathered everyone up and zipped across the Intracoastal Waterway to the big house, which you can actually see from those docks.
Once we were there, the TV guys decided to head back to their hotel and everybody else decided to catch a shower. That’s when Nick said, “Let’s go out for dinner.”
“What do we want?”
Someone suggested Arigato.
Decision made, we all headed for different bathrooms in the house to get ready.
As usual, I’m a little slower than everyone else. So just as I was getting out of the shower, Nick yelled to me. “Dad, we’re gonna go ahead and get a table.”
“All right. I’ll be right behind you.”
Three or four minutes later, I was dressed and in my Mercedes—never imagining for a moment that my whole world was about to change.
There’s been a lot of talk about what happened that day. You have to understand that when you live under the microscope of media attention like I do, you get used to people talking trash about you. You live with the fact that half of everything that’s out there is wrong, and there are days when the tabloids or some radio show will go wild and almost everything that’s said about you is just plain false. It’s no big deal. Most of it’s laughable. Most of it has no impact on your life. But when this car accident happened, it was like somebody lifted the floodgates. Suddenly everybody was out to take potshots at me and my family. Especially here in Tampa.
In many ways, Tampa’s just a small town with big buildings. It’s got that small-town mentality, where everybody seems to know everybody’s business, and because I grew up here and made it big, Linda and I were kind of like local royalty. The problem is, when something goes wrong in the royal family, the wolves outside the castle start salivating.
I don’t want to recount everything that’s been said, but let’s just say that a lot of people wanted to blame me for what happened to Nick and John that night. Those that didn’t want to blame me directly wanted to blame me and Linda for letting our son pursue an interest in racing cars.
Forgive me if I wanted to help my kids pursue their dreams, whatever those dreams were. Just because Nick wanted to race cars doesn’t mean that I let him off the hook when it came to being a responsible driver. Whenever Nick tried to take his need for speed off the track, he was punished. Big-time. After his second speeding ticket, I took away every electronic he had: computer, cell phone, iPods, the works. You know how big a deal that is to a kid in today’s world. I even took his keys and grounded him. What else can a parent do?
Nick knew I wouldn’t tolerate reckless driving, and in fact it was just the opposite of the discipline he was learning in the precision-driving world.
Based on everything I know, Nick wasn’t driving recklessly that night. Was he revving the engine? Was he making jackrabbit starts when the light turned green? Maybe, but that typical teen-driver stuff is a long way from driving dangerously. Remember, this accident happened less than two miles from our house. It’s not like Nick and his pals were out carousing and driving wild all over town. They had just left!
Besides, none of the rumors and false reports out there even matter, because I’ve done the research. I’ve hired forensic experts. I had my lawyers subpoena the security tapes from businesses up and down Court Street that show Nick driving that yellow Supra, and his pal Danny driving my silver Viper. Those tapes show clearly that they were not drag racing or driving wild that night the way some people have reported.
It’s not that I didn’t believe my son when he told me he wasn’t racing or being crazy that night. I did believe him, but if it ever came down to going to criminal court, or even for the civil suit from John Graziano’s family, I had to assume that no one would take our word for it. That’s just one of the many costs of celebrity, and I accept that.
But when someone out there started telling the media that I’d walked into a store with Nick at my side that Sunday in August and bought beer for him? Come on. I even had my lawyers subpoena the security tapes from Albertson’s, just to prove a point, and they clearly show that Nick waited in my truck. So the supposed “eyewitnesses” to Nick’s liquor-store run are just plain wrong—just like the supposed eyewitnesses who claimed that the boys were street racing that night. Ask any lawyer or police officer in any town or city in America and they’ll tell you: Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. Why someone would talk about things they don’t know, or just plain lie to add insult to an already painful situation, is beyond me.
There would be plenty more lies to come.
On August 26, I didn’t know what had happened. All I knew was I had to deal with the second-by-second unfolding of the events at hand. The horror of driving up on that mangled yellow wreck. The pain of seeing John’s bleeding head and motionless body. The chaos of saws and helicopters. The phone calls to Linda and Brooke. It all unfolded so fast that night. In the back of that police car on the way to the hospital, as I prayed for John and Nick, everything else that was happening in my life just seemed to drift into the background somewhere.
Suddenly my mind started to focus in on John and Nick. John and Nick. They were all I wanted to think about. All I could think about.
When I arrived at the hospital that night, the scene was almost as chaotic as the accident scene. That police officer drove so fast, we actually beat the helicopters, so I was there when Nick and John arrived.
Doctors and nurses were buzzing everywhere. So were the cops. This one particular Pinellas County sheriff’s officer clearly had orders to get a blood test on Nick, and he would not let it go. He was arguing with the nurses who were trying to get Nick into X-ray to make sure there was no internal bleeding, but this cop would not let up. For some reason he kept screwing up and having a hard time finding a good vein in Nick’s arm.
The fact is, there was no legal indication whatsoever that Nick might have been drinking. My attorneys have showed me the police and EMS reports. The first thing they do at any car accident is look for signs of intoxication, and in the report, the cops said Nick’s eyes were clear. They got really close to Nick’s face when they talked to him. They couldn’t smell any alcohol on him. His speech wasn’t slurred; he looked alert and fine. That was in the police report. The EMS report? Same thing: no signs of alcohol, no signs of intoxication.
Now, I don’t know if it’s standard procedure when there’s that type of accident or if it’s because Nick happens to be my son, but why was that sheriff’s officer so hell-bent on getting blood from Nick before they even set his broken wrist?
They had already taken John in a whole different direction, since he had the more serious injuries. They were treating him. They wouldn’t let me see him, but that’s certainly what I was being told—’cause I kept asking about him, over and over. It was making me crazy that I couldn’t see him.
Instead of the doctors getting to fix my son, though, he had to sit around and wait for this cop to administer this blood-alcohol test. I heard later that the way this test was issued was not proper procedure at all. The guy had to order a second kit because he screwed the first one up entirely.
From what I understand, the nurses had wiped down the area on Nick’s arm where the needle goes in with alcohol. Their concern was his health. They were testing him for drugs or conditions that could have interfered with medications or anesthetics if he wound up needing them. Alcohol was not their concern. I’ve since learned that you’re not supposed to wipe the area with alcohol when you’re testing someone for a blood-alcohol level. That spot’s supposed to be wiped with Betadine so you don’t get a false reading. Yet that’s the same spot where this cop was drawing Nick’s blood.
Was it an honest mistake? Maybe so. Like I said, it was pretty chaotic in there. But there’s a real possibility that an improper procedure could have shown a false positive on my son. Heck, messing up the procedure would show a false positive on someone who’d never swallowed a drop of alcohol in their whole life, the way I understand it.
Of course, we’d never have a chance to refute that blood test in court, and when the cops released their findings, showing Nick had a .055 blood alcohol level, everyone just assumed the worst despite all the evidence to the contrary. “Guilty until proven innocent” seemed to be the way this whole thing would go down for my son. The fact is, this wasn’t a DUI case at all. The legal limit in Florida is .08. So impairment wasn’t the issue. All the release of that finding did, in my opinion, was give the prosecutors extra support as they went after Nick with a reckless driving charge. Because all the media reports saying it was a “high-speed crash” were wrong, too. Speed wasn’t much of a factor at all. Like I said, I’ve hired forensic experts to go back and figure out what happened. So have the police. All of those reports, including the police reports, show that Nick was driving somewhere between 40 and 60 mph—at the most—on a stretch of road where the speed limit is 40.
If you saw the photos from the scene, I know what you’re thinking—because it’s the same thing I was thinking when I drove up on that crash: It looked like that car hit the palm tree going 300 mph. But you have to remember, this wasn’t a normal car. It was a wide-body Supra with a fiberglass shell and the widest tires you can buy. It was a street-legal version of a precision racing vehicle. It was lightweight and built for speed and handling, not durability. So when Nick changed lanes, from the left lane to the right—again, this is what forensic experts have told me—he hit a deep puddle, hydroplaned and completely spun around. By the time the rear end of the Supra hit that palm tree, it was only doing about 30 mph.
Thirty. It seems crazy, right? The car looked mangled. But you also have to remember that the photos that showed up all over the news and the Internet were taken after the rescue workers hit that car with a saw and the Jaws of Life to make sure they had a clear path to get John out of his seat.
Even then, if you look at the cockpit of the car, the driver and passenger seats are intact. The rest of the car looks like an aluminum soda can that I just laid a leg drop on, but I know in my heart that if John had been wearing a seat belt, he might have walked away just like Nick.
I just wish I could go back and find out why. What was John thinking? Why wasn’t he thinking? The sad thing is, until a miracle happens and John’s completely healed, that’s a question I’ll never get answered.
It’s these kinds of questions that have rattled around in my brain every day since that horrible day. Every day. Nonstop. I can’t stop thinking about it.