“Newport Beach was probably his downfall,” Thaer Mustafa told a reporter.
“In terms of?”
“Everything. That’s what screwed him up,” Thaer said. “His partying. He had an unlimited number of worthless friends who would go drink with him.”
“Parties every night?”
“Oh, yeah. Any time he went out, he’d bring a party home.”
“What was a typical day like?”
“Drinkin’. Drinkin’ every single fucking day. Every single fucking day,” Thaer said. “Not one day off. If he was awake, the guy was drinking.”
“He even stopped going to the gym, which is strange for him,” Thaer continued. “He wasn’t going to the gym at all. All he was doing was drinking.”
I was still playing for the Bulls when I bought the Newport Beach duplex in 1996 for $800,000 and change. It was a long way from the Dallas projects. The pink stucco, 3,500 square-foot house faced what the Visitor’s Bureau likes to call “pristine beaches,” had a patio jutting out into the sand, and royal blue awnings shading windows upstairs and down. Nothing but sunshine and surf.
Why California? Why Newport Beach? My agent at the time, Dwight Manley, had both his office and home in Orange County. At first I thought of the duplex as a vacation home, a place to hang out and party when I was in California. I lived in the upstairs unit and converted the whole downstairs into a full-blown night club, even incorporated the garage. I added a full bar just like you’d find in a commercial club, a dance floor complete with one of those rotating mirrored balls, tables and chairs, and hung up a couple of signs: “Club 4809,” on the gate out back, as in “4809 Seashore Drive,” and a neon “OPEN,” sign on the beach-side, second-floor balcony. The only difference between my house and an actual club was that everything was free, courtesy of the owner, one Dennis Rodman. That and the zoning. The house was in a residential area.
Early on, there weren’t that many problems because I was on the road playing basketball most of the time. The real trouble began after I signed on with the Lakers in 1999 and decided to settle in Newport Beach permanently. Before that I really didn’t have a home. I was basically a hotel person—a hotel junkie.
Newport Beach, the home of John Wayne until his death in 1979, was a traditional town with a bunch of old money, and in the early days I was seen as a breath of fresh air. That shit didn’t last. Within months I was on a first-name basis with half the cops in town. Before I moved to Newport Beach, I had been a moving target: drunk in Vegas one day, L.A. the next. The cops would give me a break here, give me a break there, because I was “Dennis Rodman.” But now I was in one place with one police force and way, way, way too much time on my hands. During my playing days, whenever I had a break I would be partying full time. Now I was on one continuous break with one continuous party. Women, sex, rock ‘n’ roll, you name it. When you showed up at Club 4809, better count on an all-night party. It was all good, or at least I thought so at the time.
Soon the cops started getting noise complaints from my neighbors. So the cops would show up, ask me to hold it down, and I was like, “Fuck you!”
They let it slide for as long as they could, then they went, “You know, Dennis, we can’t take this anymore. Keep it up, and we’re gonna have to do something.”
“Have at it!” I said.
So we had this world-class pissing contest going on. “The Battle of Newport Beach,” I called it. It was mostly skirmishes. We’d crank up a party, the cops would arrive and issue some kind of citation. That happened a lot—about 80 times in the eight years I lived there, if you believe the newspapers.
“Somebody is calling us,” a police spokesman told the Associated Press. “We’re not just going out there and finding it. People are complaining.”
Then the cops started shadowing my ass. It was like, “You see that car? He drives that car. Watch him. Watch him.” It got to the point where I was watched all the time.
I got my first DUI on December 22, 1999. I was hard to miss in what the AP described as a “bright yellow Volkswagen with blue flames shaped like naked women.”
“We know his vehicle, and we can’t just let him go,” a cop told the wire service. “He’s not above the law.”
I pleaded guilty to that one, telling the AP, “the police were just doing their job.” They fined me around $2,000 and suspended my license.
From the tone of some of the newspaper stories written at the time, you would think there was some kind of one-man crime wave going on. But actual arrests were rare. They hauled me in a couple of times for public drunkenness, once in L.A., once at the local Hooters, where I sprayed the patrons with a fire extinguisher. But with all the drinking I was doing, the real issue was never public drunkenness or driving under the influence, but noise, noise, and more noise.
In early 2001, the AP quoted from a letter one of my neighbors sent to the cops.
“I have a right to peace and quiet,” the letter said. “And I would hope that the city as well as the police department can accommodate its loyal tenants, rather than appease a disgraced athlete who has nothing better to do than throw parties.”
So the cops drag me into court on all these noise complaints. Sometimes I won. Sometimes they won. But all in all, nobody won. Meanwhile, my parties grew bigger and bigger, and the neighbors got madder and madder. The Newport Beach City Council took up the challenge, trying to toughen up the noise ordinances. I threatened to run for city council. The Guardian, a British newspaper, would report sightings of “Let Dennis Have Fun!” T-shirts. Turned out I couldn’t run because I wasn’t a registered voter.
The height of the Battle of Newport Beach came with the “in-your-face party” I threw to celebrate my 40th birthday. It was the biggest spectacle seen in Newport harbor since 1917, when they filmed silent film star Theda Bara in the barge scene for Cleopatra.
As for the birthday party, I was thinking, “You want noise? I’ll give you fucking noise!” So I hired not one, but two rock bands, and at two in the afternoon on May 13, 2001, I made my grand entrance to the “B-DAY BASH,” as the invitation billed it, in a helicopter that circled a a few times before landing on the beach. I was greeted by 200-300 people. Party time!
I hopped off dressed in a “red baseball cap, white shirt with orange sleeves, and baggy yellow velvet shorts,” according to the Los Angeles Times. So did I get to enjoy my party? Nope. A couple of dozen cops showed up, some in riot gear, responding to “50 complaints from irate neighbors,” as a police spokesman told the Times.
“They have to have permits to have live music,” the spokesman told the newspaper, adding they weren’t real thrilled with the helicopter landing, either. So I jawed with the cops off and on for what seemed like hours.
“We were trying to get him to obey the law without an unfortunate confrontation,” Lieutenant Rich Long told the Times.
After the cops threatened to arrest my ass and charged me with some shit (the Times reported it was “three counts of disturbing the peace and one count of playing live music without a permit”), I agreed to move the party to my restaurant, Josh Slocum’s, which was only a couple of miles away.
If you believe the media, up to that point the cops had been to my house more than four dozen times in the previous six years. They would make 20 more visits in the next eight months. Not for anything as spectacular as the B-DAY BASH, but enough to keep the pot boiling.
Reality Check: If you’re spending more time with the cops than your kids, there could be a problem.
Lieutenant Rich Long from the police department talked to me a couple of times about my antics. “Dennis,” he said, “you have to quit doing these things, because it’s gonna get you in trouble and mess your life up.” He was right. Nobody’s going to get a life sentence for cranking up some window-rattling rock ‘n’ roll at two o’clock in the morning. But when you’re partying so hard you absolutely don’t give a fuck, shit can happen. Stuff comes up missing. People get into fights. Druggies appear. Trouble can come from even the most unexpected places.
Take the “librarian.”
I was sleeping with this girl, this nice clean girl, and she wasn’t really a librarian, she just looked like one. She kept coming around, coming around, and after a while she wanted more than I was willing to give.
So I was in my bedroom at the beach house one night doing what I do, and a couple of my friends spot her coming up the stairs armed with this huge steak knife. They tackled her and took the knife away. I came out to see what all the ruckus was about, and they were like, “Dennis, stop sleeping with this girl, you’re making her crazy.” I don’t know about that, but something was making her ass crazy. Booze likely. Whatever.
That’s the kind of stuff that happens when everybody is fucked up all the time. Crazy shit. I was lucky to walk away from that one unscathed and, like Lieutenant Long said, without getting in trouble and messing up my life. I mean, what if the librarian stabs me, gets stabbed herself, kills one of my friends? Life can turn on a dime.
In early 2000, I was not just having trouble with the law in Newport Beach. It was more widespread than that. I had seven lawsuits pending in Las Vegas alone and three more in Los Angeles. In Vegas, four of the incidents happened at the Hilton Hotel, two on the same hell-raising night, April 19, 1998. In the first, I was said to have “sexually assaulted” this “adult entertainer” by “grabbing her breast and shaking it,” according to court records quoted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In the second, I was accused of getting way too friendly with a Hilton cocktail waitress.
“He came up behind me with a bear hug and picked me up,” the waitress told the Review-Journal.That caused her to spill the tray of drinks she was carrying. While picking her up, I was said to have placed my “hands on the sides of both her breasts.”
As for the five other Vegas suits: two more women claimed I grabbed their breasts, and a third said I attacked her after she tried to take my picture in the lobby of the MGM Grand. Then there was the cashier at Caesar’s Palace who claimed I “pushed-punched him,” and a craps dealer at The Mirage who accused me of rubbing my dice on his bald head and privates for luck.
In L.A., two of the three lawsuits resulted from a single stay at the Argyle Hotel in October of 1998. In the first, according to court records, I was accused of “jamming a hundred-dollar bill and [my] hand down the front of [a cocktail waitress’s] blouse.” The second, according to the Associated Press, involved some kind of “sexual assault” on a woman who came to my hotel room expecting a party and found me alone. In the third L.A. lawsuit, also according to AP, I was accused of chest-butting this 23-year-old guy at the Fat Burger.
While these three incidents and all but one of the seven in Vegas had happened two, sometimes even three years before, they were still keeping my lawyers busy in 2000 sorting out who did what, when. Was I guilty? With a few exceptions, who knows? Since I was usually drunk, I simply didn’t remember. That made it hard to come up with any kind of defense. It was their word against whomever we could round up who was sober on the night in question. Meanwhile the meter was running.
So I ended up reaching “confidential” settlements for most of the lawsuits, meaning I cut a large check that opposing lawyers couldn’t talk about other than to say their client was “very pleased,” “very happy” as the Las Vegas Review-Journal phrased it for a couple of cases. I made the whole thing worse one night when I decided to get cute on the Tonight Show.
“Me and my accountant decided we’re gonna have, like, a $50,000 rule,” I told Jay Leno.
And he was like, “What’s that?”
“That’s when basically if I screw up with a girl or they think I’m screwin’ up, then rather than going to court, I’ll just give ’em $50,000,” I said.
Bad move. I figure that one cost me about $200,000. Even so, it was not a bad idea. Just one I shouldn’t have been announcing on national television. It’s almost always better to settle. I learned that lesson from a cheerleader.
In 1995, this NBA cheerleader I had slept with here and there for several years sued me for infecting her with herpes. Wanted me to pay her a million and a half dollars. There was just one little problem. I don’t have herpes. End of story, right? Wrong. I did win the first round. My lawyers managed to convince the jury the case had nothing to do with herpes (or money, for that matter) and had everything to do with a woman being scorned. In her mind there had been some kind of serious relationship going on. Not. So the jury sided with me. Her lawyers appealed, arguing in court documents that “evidence of her prior sexual history, employment as a nude dancer, and breast augmentation surgery should have been excluded under Rule 412,” whatever the fuck that is. It took several years, but I finally walked away with a victory, if you’d call it that. Legal fees for my “win” added up to about a quarter of a million dollars.
When dealing with lawsuits, it’s hard to sort out the people who have good reason to be pissed at Dennis Rodman from the leeches who are just looking for a paycheck. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Unless they really, really, really piss me off, I just cut their ass a check and get on with my life.
I’m not going to say how much I’ve pissed away on lawsuits over the years, but let’s just say if I’d thrown that money into the stock market, my early retirement prospects would be greatly improved. Just another price to pay for partying, partying, partying, booze, booze, and more booze.
When I first moved to Newport Beach, I thought one of the great things about having a permanent home, living in one place, would be the opportunity to make real friends, people who would always be around. It didn’t work out that way. The good and bad news about me is I don’t discriminate. Everybody’s welcome: rich, poor; gay, straight; scumbag and model citizen. And when the big neon “Open” sign hissed on at Club 4809, that could make for an interesting collection of folk.
“The hardest thing about working with Dennis Rodman is not working with Dennis Rodman. It’s dealing with the entourage,” my bodyguard,Wendell, told a reporter. “Dennis himself is laid back. It’s dealing with the knuckleheads that he had chosen at that time to surround himself with.”
Looking back, I can see there were several categories of people always in generous supply on a given night in Newport Beach:
“Drunks,” who were happy to start drinking with me at ten in the morning and stay steady at it until dawn the next day or the day after, for that matter;
“Hangers-on,” whose job was to get drunk with me, laugh at my jokes, and sleep with as many women as possible, while making sure I paid for everything;
“Strays,” who would hop on the Dennis Rodman party train on a given night of carousing and ride it for all it was worth;
“Sluts,” who you know about.
“I can’t tell you, man, how many times we came in the house at five, six o’clock in the morning, totally wasted, me having to carry him upstairs,” Wendell told a reporter. “We have to stop at the Fat Burger and get a Fat Burger, him and his buddies, knocked out, with food all over them. Just food all over the place, just totally fucking wasted.”
Then there were the women.
“The lifestyle he was living, that’s an empty life, man,” Wendell continued. “I walk in his bedroom and literally have to pick some chick up and take her home, who he didn’t even know. And she didn’t even know him. But then when he woke up, he’d be alone again.”
Somebody once asked me, “How did partying affect your personal life in those days?”
I replied, “Bro, partying was my personal life.”
And what was personal would soon start spilling over into my professional life.
Now I admit there were times when I was playing ball when partying would get in the way: I’d be hung over at practice or go missing, this, that. But in those days there was never any question about what came first. But after I moved to Newport Beach, the work-party balance flip-flopped. It was like, “We now interrupt this party for work,” and not even Magic Johnson could change that.