The Wecht news was an earthquake. WECHT INDICTED BY GRAND JURY, read the headline in the January 21, 2006, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
After a yearlong investigation, a federal grand jury yesterday indicted nationally renowned Allegheny County Medical Examiner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht on charges that he misused his public office for private gain.
The 84-count indictment…outlines charges of mail and wire fraud. The government also alleged that…Dr. Wecht asked employees of the coroner’s office to perform personal errands for him on county time, including dog-walking, picking up personal mail, purchasing sporting goods and hauling away trash.
Dog-walking? Bennet thought. Trash? He was just returning from the wedding in Nigeria, and the headlines were making him sick. Eighty-four felony counts of piddly shit. Who cares about this piddly shit? Sending personal faxes, misusing mileage vouchers and office stationery. So, he was sloppy. So? It seemed crazy to presume that a guy whose private practice took in more than a million dollars a year would resort to stealing office supplies. But it didn’t matter how crazy it seemed. It was all there, in a forty-five-page indictment.
Wecht resigned from the Allegheny County coroner’s office the same day the indictment came, the end of an era. A guilty verdict on any of the counts could ruin him completely. He’d lose his license and his private practice and his TV appearances and his heroic headlines. A guilty verdict on the more serious counts could mean a twenty-year prison term.
Most people in a situation like that roll over, make a deal. Ninety-five percent of people who are accused of federal white-collar crimes in the United States plead guilty, reach a settlement. But this was Wecht. He would fight. He would spend $8 million defending his name. The FBI would take two years preparing for the trial; they wanted to talk to Bennet about testifying, along with about two hundred fifty other witnesses. Bennet already knew what he was going to say to the FBI. This was his American father. This was the first person in the world to give him a voice. Get the fuck out of here you goddamned motherfucking cocksucking pieces of motherfucking shit. That’s what he would say to them.
Dr. Shakir, Bennet’s senior colleague, was named acting director of the morgue while the county bigwigs sought Wecht’s permanent replacement. Father Carmen, who knew nothing about county politics, said, “Hey, Bennet, maybe they’ll promote you; you can be the new Dr. Wecht!” Bennet said, “I can’t think about that right now,” but the more he thought about it, the more he thought, Sure, why not? and started to want it. He had no idea that people would laugh at him for even wanting it; the county bigwigs had a plan and it certainly did not include the guy from Nigeria.
The ground was shaking even as Bennet and Prema were committing to a future in Pittsburgh. They imagined a secure position for Bennet one way or another at the coroner’s office, and Prema, with her nursing degrees, in a hospital; and if and when Wecht survived the trial, Bennet could continue working on private cases with him, maybe even become his legitimate partner in the business, make enough money to continue to fund his brain research, continue with Bailes and Fitzsimmons to study CTE, to maybe find a cure for it, oh my gosh, how about a vaccine! He felt his career was on solid footing in Pittsburgh, so he and Prema decided to buy a house. They found a beautiful redbrick colonial in Sewickley, an ivy-covered old-money neighborhood on the banks of the Ohio River, and they put a down payment on it. The next day, the real estate agent called. “I’m sorry,” she said. “No deal.”
No deal?
“They don’t want black people living in that neighborhood,” Bennet said to Prema. “That is why they refused our money.” Prema would never accept that explanation. But the agent provided none of her own. Bennet turned into a bulldozer after they refused his money. Well, then I will build my own fucking house. I will build the biggest, most beautiful house in the world. This is America! He bought a one-acre plot in Moon Township, in a neighborhood where brand-new McMansions were going up. A place for him and Prema and the baby that Prema was making in her belly to live out their happily ever after. So much was happening. So much was happening so fast.
Increasingly, Bennet came to view his CTE research as the urgent work of angels, partly because he is a person inclined to see angels, and partly because these angels were so active. The spirit of Mike Webster calling him, and then the spirit of Terry Long endorsing him: “Yes, you are correct; please proceed.” And then Bailes, out of nowhere, believing him. He, too, was an angel. And now there were more.
In November 2006, the same month Bennet’s second CTE paper appeared in Neurosurgery, there was another dead football player.
This one was in Tampa. This one had shot himself in the mouth. His name was Andre Waters but they called him Dirty Waters because he hit so hard, so hard he had put one guy out of the league permanently. He played ten seasons for the Philadelphia Eagles. He once hit a guy so hard the NFL came up with a rule—nicknamed the Andre Waters rule—that prohibited defensive players from hitting quarterbacks below the waist while they were still in the pocket. The focus was always the other guy, how bad the other guy got hurt. Never Andre Waters, his aching head. He had a seizure on the plane once; they said it was cramps and he was back on the field the next week. He got fifteen diagnosed concussions, then stopped counting. Bone-jarring hits. Such awesome hits! He felt them in his head. All in his head. Everything packed in tight, tighter, no release. After he retired he bought a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson and he sat on his back deck in his Tampa home and he put it into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was forty-four.
Bennet had never heard of Tampa and he did not know what a Philadelphia Eagle was. The Andre Waters news came to him via yet another angel, a man who identified himself as Chris Nowinski.
Prema was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, Bennet. Stop! Please, stop with the angels! “You must pause. You must pause and be rational.” As if angels understood rational.
“How do you know this Nowinski guy is legit?” Prema said. “It could be a trick!”
Prema was becoming increasingly fearful. She didn’t like any of this NFL business. She didn’t like her husband poking into this hornet’s nest with a stick like this. She reminded Bennet of the reporter who had showed up that one day and said, “Get these out of your house! Someone could come in and kill you and steal these brains! Do you know what you’re dealing with?”
“This guy Nowinski,” she said. “Be careful.” She had a book in her lap and a pen behind her ear and she was sipping a Coke. “I don’t trust any of these people, Bennet. We should no longer answer the phone.”
Bennet took his shoes off and parked them neatly at his feet. “It’s not a trick,” he said. “This new guy has his heart in the right place. I feel sorry for him.”
A heart being in the right place doesn’t tell the whole story of a person’s motives, Prema thought. But she agreed; it was easy to feel sorry for Chris Nowinski.
He was neither a doctor nor a scientist. He was a guy from Boston with his own very bad headache who had become a self-appointed brain advocate. He was a former WWE wrestler who had wrestled under the stage name Chris Harvard—the only Harvard-educated wrestler in the WWE, he would point out. He had played football in college, but it was the head bashing as a wrestler that did him in, especially that last bash, at the Pepsi Arena in Albany, when a Dudley Death Drop (“3D”) engineered by the Dudley Boyz sent poor Chris Harvard’s head smashing through a table to the cheers of thousands. Vision loss, ferocious migraines, loss of balance, memory problems; he was twenty-four years old and feeling like a feeble old man. He went to eight doctors before anyone really listened to him and took the time to tell him what was going on. Those were concussions. All those times. Not just the times he had become unconscious, but all those times, perhaps one hundred of them, that he saw stars, suffered a “ding”—any loss of brain function induced by trauma was a concussion, and all of them were serious, all of them were brain injuries, all of them required attention, not the least of which was the time to heal before suffering another one. No one had ever told him that. No one had ever told him that the job he returned to each day was potentially brain damaging. No one, that is, until Nowinski met Dr. Robert Cantu, a Boston-based concussion expert, and then Nowinski quit the WWE, started sniffing around the shady world of concussion in sports, and decided to write a book about it. He had read Bennet’s paper about Webster, and now he wanted to talk to him about what he had just heard on the news.
He told Bennet about Andre Waters’s suicide; he said he wondered if perhaps Andre Waters, too, had CTE.
“I wonder,” Bennet said.
Nowinski said, Let’s look. He said, I’ll talk to the family and get permission, and you look at the brain, okay?
Deal. That was the deal Nowinski hoped he and Bennet could build a partnership around. Nowinski would help Bennet get more dead NFL player brains, and Bennet would study them.
The brain was sent on December 19, 2006, by overnight delivery. Several cut pieces of Andre Waters’s archival brain fixed in formalin. Very tiny pieces. Upon receipt, I examined the brain first on my balcony, in fact, my wife again took pictures of me examining the brain. When I could not stand the cold any longer, and when I needed a rigid platform/table to cut, carve, and shave the brain tissues, I took it to my kitchen counter. I had to do these examinations in silence, in the quiet oblivion of my condominium, since at this time I was becoming very weary, if not paranoid, of everyone, especially the NFL. I perceived that I was being treated as an outsider who should not be trusted, like a persona non grata, a nonentity, a person of no consequence, possibly because of my heritage. I did not want anyone to know what I was doing. I was afraid of becoming crushed, and my efforts to unravel CTE quashed. I sent the tissues to the same brain laboratory where I had sent Mike Webster’s and Terry Long’s brain tissues. Jonette, the technician, was especially enthused since she was becoming part of history. At this juncture, I knew my CTE stuff. I had read thousands of papers. Honestly, at that time, I may have been the most knowledgeable person on CTE.
In January I went to the lab to pick up the slides to examine them. Unlike Mike Webster’s case, I was eager to find out the results. Epidemiologically, a third case of CTE would make it a case series and would move it up in the hierarchy of medical evidence from statistical aberration to mounting evidentiary epidemiological trend. I had asked Jonette to expedite the tissue analysis and she did. The day I picked up the slides, I immediately came home and looked at them and called Mr. Nowinski and told him about the results. He was ecstatic. He was yelling on the phone and asking me if I knew what this meant. He said this was big, very big! In my naïveté, I did not foresee what he was referring to; little did I suspect his motives or plans. That was the beginning of my regrettable quagmire.
Chris Nowinski knew a guy, a journalist who freelanced for The New York Times. Alan Schwarz was admittedly an accidental journalist—he was a mathematician who liked to write about baseball stats. But he was interested in Nowinski’s story. Here was an unlikely folk hero on a personal mission to uncover the truth about concussions in the NFL. Nowinski was pushy. He had told Schwarz he was going to have some big news soon. He had told him about Andre Waters’s brain before the results were in. In a few days, he said, we will know. So of course when Bennet called Nowinski with the results, of course Nowinski was ecstatic, and he ran to tell his friend, who said “Wow,” and who said that Waters’s diagnosis was exactly the kind of peg that would make for a great feature story.
A feature story about Chris Nowinski.
Bennet had no idea this was going on. All he knew was that shortly after he found CTE in Andre Waters’s brain, someone from The New York Times was calling him. Such a strange call, seeing as he had not yet had a chance to tell anyone but Nowinski about Andre Waters’s brain. The Times wanted a photo, and some quotes. When the story came out the next morning there were two pictures, Nowinski on top and Bennet underneath. Bennet was not sure he was ready for all of this, no, he was not at all sure, and he did not like the feeling of losing control of information about his own research.
EXPERT TIES EX-PLAYER’S SUICIDE TO BRAIN DAMAGE was the headline that ran on the front page of The New York Times on January 18, 2007. Bennet had not figured on anything like that when he examined Andre Waters’s brain. Bennet had figured on a far more sober “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player: Part III” in Neurosurgery.
At that point, Bennet did not understand that the angels were unruly. He did not realize that the hornet’s nest he had stepped into when he first started looking at NFL player brains would attract more hornets. It would take him years to understand and untangle all that. At that point, he still trusted Nowinski. He thought Nowinski was simply a loud and brash angel. He admired loud and brash angels. He figured he and Nowinski were alike in that way, outcasts fighting for legitimacy and finally finding some.
The Times story shot the issue of the NFL’s concussion troubles into public awareness. Specifically, “the NFL’s tobacco-industry-like refusal to acknowledge the depths of the problem.”
The NFL was like Big Tobacco! A corporate cover-up! People were starting to say things like that. They were saying outright that people were dying because of what the NFL had done for so long, hiding the truth, not telling their own players what was happening to their brains. That was a narrative the news media could get its head around. That was the story, and that was juicy.
But the Times story also began a quieter narrative, a subtext: this was Chris Nowinski’s heroic journey. “He chose Dr. Omalu,” the Times article said. “He chose Dr. Omalu both for his expertise in the field of neuropathology and for his rare experience in the football industry. Because he was coincidentally situated in Pittsburgh, he had examined the brains of two former Pittsburgh Steelers players who were discovered to have had postconcussive brain dysfunction.”
He chose Dr. Omalu. Chris Nowinski chose Dr. Omalu? Because Dr. Omalu was “coincidentally situated.” In two sentences Bennet’s contribution to CTE was reduced to that of a minion, his five years of research little more than a fluke.
What happens in stories is what happens in stories: the telling and retelling simplify and reduce. History gets written in the wind that keeps blowing; if it’s not too strong you don’t even notice it. The lights are bright and there’s so much shouting and scrambling. A war is starting, and it doesn’t matter if you never wanted to fight, you wake up one day and you’re somebody’s soldier.
As for the NFL, its MTBI committee scientists responded to the New York Times story with more denials.
“Preposterous,” they said, about the Andre Waters finding.
“Not appropriate science.”
“Purely speculative.”
The NFL was on defense, the media had picked up the offense, and Bennet was scrambling to do what was beginning to feel like Nowinski’s bidding.
Schwarz got a full-time job at The New York Times after his story about Andre Waters’s brain was published, and he started digging, pumping out more stories challenging the NFL—groundbreaking stories that unpacked and challenged the work of the MTBI committee. He rarely mentioned Bennet Omalu again. If there was a hero of the narrative, it was Chris Nowinski.
NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue retired at sixty-five in September 2006. His successor, Roger Goodell, had risen in the ranks, had started his career in the NFL as an intern right out of college. Perhaps things would change under his tenure as commissioner. He was not even fifty, part of a generation more attuned to the issue. Perhaps he would bring a fresh perspective. Perhaps he would straighten out the mess?
No.
The situation only got messier the more the news media dug. Pellman, the chairman of the MTBI committee, the rheumatologist, was found to have significantly embellished his own bio. No, in fact he didn’t have a medical degree from SUNY; in fact he had attended med school at Universidad Autónama de Guadalajara, and no, he wasn’t exactly a professor teaching at Albert Einstein College of Medicine as he had said, but he had, like, an honorary position there, but, well, no, he didn’t technically teach there, no. But anyway, his secretary screwed up. It was all her fault.
Goodell got rid of Pellman as chair of the MTBI committee and appointed two cochairs from within the committee: Dr. Ira Casson, the committee’s lone neurologist, and Dr. David Viano, a self-described “biomechanics consultant.” Casson would now lead the charge in speaking to the press. He was, by all accounts, an accomplished neurologist. He knew brains. He had found brain damage in Muhammad Ali’s CT scans back in the 1980s; he had published a landmark study about boxer brains and chronic brain damage in 1984. The link to football was hardly far from his mind: Casson was the one who had urged Al Toon to retire back in 1992, the dawn of the NFL’s “Season of Concussion.”
But there was something bewildering about Casson. He was a knot of contradictions. Now that he was leading the MTBI committee, he denied that the NFL had any concussion problem at all.
“No,” he said on a 2007 HBO Real Sports special, when the interviewer asked him if repeated football-related concussions could result in brain damage, dementia, or depression.
“No,” he said a second time when the interviewer rephrased the question.
The blatant denial was problematic on a number of levels. Even the courts had ruled, by this point, that concussions among NFL athletes could lead to brain damage. That happened in Mike Webster’s disability case. Fitzsimmons finally had his verdict. On December 13, 2006, eight years after the initial filing and four years after Webster’s death, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the ruling that Webster had been totally and permanently disabled as a result of brain injuries from playing professional football. The ruling, a 3–0 decision, resulted in an award of more than $1.5 million to Webster’s four children and former wife. It was the first time the NFL had been successfully sued by an individual.
“No,” Casson said on the HBO special after a third, a fourth, and a fifth attempt to rephrase the question about the possibility of football causing debilitating brain damage.
“Is there any evidence, as of today, that links multiple head injuries with any long-term problem like that?” the interviewer asked, finally.
“No.”
People started calling him “Dr. No.”
The NFL was on defense, the media was on offense, and Bennet was a reluctant soldier.
The public attacks on Bennet enraged some of his friends, most notably Jason Luckasevic. He was the younger brother of Todd, the med student at the morgue whose family would host Bennet for Thanksgiving dinners. Todd and Jason would take Bennet to hockey games and out for beers. Now Jason was fresh out of law school, working with a small firm in Pittsburgh, and he was brimming with the same kind of do-gooder optimism that drove Bennet. He had hired Bennet to testify in a few of his asbestos cases, and Bennet had hit them out of the park, so he kept bringing him back for more. The two were becoming close, meeting in Jason’s office a few blocks from the morgue.
“What are you going to do about this?” Jason said one day. He said Bennet needed to protect his reputation. He said the NFL was making a mockery of his work and he couldn’t stand listening to it.
Bennet made the point that his reputation was hardly the issue. “The question is, how many more guys with CTE?” he said. “Think about how many more there must be, Jason. Even Dr. Bailes said it’s probably every guy playing the game.
“Someone needs to sue the bastards,” Bennet said. He put his chin down, gave Luckasevic a sideways glance, signifying “Somebody?”
Luckasevic laughed. First of all, Bob Fitzsimmons had already done that, on behalf of Mike Webster. He had taken his disability claim all the way to the appellate court and won $1.5 million.
“Small potatoes,” Bennet said.
“Bennet—”
“This could go way beyond disability claims,” Bennet said.
Luckasevic let out a good long sigh, tossed his pen on his desk, leaned back in his chair. He set his gaze on his bookshelf, rows and rows of law books, red, blue, brown, and green. “Well, there is fraud,” he said, finally. “You know, what they’ve done to these guys is fraudulent. Lying to them about what football could do to their brains.”
“Now you’re talking,” Bennet said. “Thousands of players. Billions of dollars! That’s what the NFL owes these guys.”
Luckasevic looked at Bennet, blinked, caught himself. This was getting silly. He was thirty years old, a lowly associate making $40,000 at a small firm catering to blue-collar guys in Pittsburgh with asbestos problems.
“Yeah, I’ll sue the NFL, Bennet,” he said. “I’ll get right on that.”
“I’m serious,” Bennet said. “What’s your hang-up?”
For God’s sake. “Well, to file a lawsuit you need a client with a complaint first,” he pointed out.
“You can find thousands of clients,” Bennet said. “Football is a very popular game and there are many professional players!”
“Right.”
“Well, you’re the lawyer,” Bennet said. “You’ll figure something out.”
Luckasevic had to admit it was fun imagining something like that. Like a young Bill Gates and his pals tinkering in his garage. Like a young Steve Jobs doodling on a napkin. Ideas have to be born somewhere.
To compile a case history on Andre Waters for his next scientific paper—“Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player: Part III”—Bennet decided to travel to Tampa to visit Andre Waters’s family. Nowinski said he would come, too; they would meet at the airport and drive together.
It was the first time they ever met face-to-face, which was weird, considering their recently shared history making front page news in The New York Times.
“You’re much younger looking than I expected,” Nowinski said, smiling. Bennet’s photo in the Times had him looking so…professional in his white lab coat with his name embroidered in blue cursive on the pocket. This live version of Bennet, all the quirks and the cackle-laugh, was not what Nowinski was expecting.
“And you are very tall!” Bennet said. He thought Nowinski was the picture of TV-commercial America. Towering, blond, boyish, clean-cut, charming.
They drove out into the flat, marshy landscape of south Florida. They joked together, traded skepticism about the guys on the MTBI committee. Nowinski told Bennet about his headaches, and Bennet told Nowinski about Wecht, about Prema and the baby coming, and about how frustrated he was that the NFL was discounting his research. Nowinski made the point that Bennet did have a “believability problem.” Maybe if he was an old gray-haired guy in his seventies, with a name like O’Malu, with a resume replete with Ivy League stamps and badges, maybe people would have believed him about CTE.
I began to feel that I had been deemed an outsider. I did not think people took me seriously, and since they did not take me seriously, my message was not taken seriously. The problem was not the message, but the messenger, and if the messenger is not liked, trusted, or respected, the message is null and void, no matter how true the message is.
It was a good point. And as they drove together, Bennet talked about the partnership he was forming with Bailes and Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons had been talking about doing the legal work, was going to put up the $10,000 seed money. Nowinski said he also had been thinking about a partnership with Cantu, the doctor who had first shown him the light about what was happening in his own bashed head.
In the car, Bennet and Nowinski discussed the idea of their joining forces. They even came up with a name, the Sports Legacy Institute. Bennet liked it because it had a good acronym: SLI.
They would collect brains and study CTE. They would challenge the NFL’s repeated denials. They would help the families of former players. It would be an unbeatable power team. Bailes and Cantu had the medical clout, years of concussion research behind them, and Bailes had the inside track on the NFL. Bennet had the discovery and the encyclopedic knowledge of the science. Nowinski had the face, the smile, the unbeatable schmooze. Nowinski had in spades what none of the others had or understood or cared to acquire. He had the missing ingredient. Nobody understands showmanship better than a former WWE wrestler.
When he got home, Bennet told Bailes and Fitzsimmons about the idea of an expanded partnership with Nowinski, and they agreed.
“I think I have another case,” Bailes said. “There’s another brain we should get.”