Ex-Athletes Being Recruited for a Deadlier Game

At 6 feet tall and 250 pounds, former Cal State Northridge football player Tracy Anderson, a Pacoima native known as “Tank,” was viewed as a prime recruiting prospect.

The recruiters weren’t from the National Football League, though, but from a drug ring that controls the rock cocaine market of the northeast San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles police say.

Increasingly, that scenario is becoming true for other former high school and college football players in the northeast Valley as well, detectives said.

Some of the same attributes that made Anderson and other athletes successful on the playing field have brought notice from drug leaders: They are big. They are loyal. Football teaches them to be good soldiers. And they don’t poison their bodies with drugs, so they can be trusted not to squander the goods.

Anderson is dead now, gunned down at age 24 on Sept. 25 after what police believe was a falling out with the so-called “Bryant organization,” which introduced him to the drug trade in Pacoima. Police investigating the shooting said they found Anderson to be a paradox, someone who used wholesome values instilled in the locker room to carry out the missions of narcotics bosses.

And he was not the only one, they found.

Police estimate that at least 25 former athletes from the northeast Valley had joined the area’s drug scene, lured into it by the promise of fast and easy money. The recent slaying of Anderson--along with that of another former CSUN player, Douglas Henegan, on July 31--have since sent many of them into hiding.

Henegan, 21, of Panorama City also was believed to be a victim of the Bryant organization, a loosely knit group of up to 200 people who have controlled cocaine sales in the northeast Valley since the early 1980s, police said. The group gets its name from its suspected ringleader, whom police identify as Jeffrey A. Bryant, 37, of Pacoima, now serving a 4-year prison sentence for a 1986 drug conviction.

Some of the former football players that detectives said got involved with the drug business were actually recruited by Anderson, who split with the Bryant group and started his own operation before the larger organization retaliated.

They are young men who once played football at any of several high schools in the northeast Valley and for CSUN, said Detective David Lambert of the Valley narcotics unit. Most faced few prospects for success once their playing days ended and they graduated.

“I could say as many as 25 to 30 former athletes are involved, from recent graduates to about 25 years old,” Lambert said. “A lot of these young men were athletes . . . that couldn’t get into college. They were put out into the work environment and it didn’t work for them. They decided to go for the fastest and most money. They took the easy way.”

They were considered trustworthy in part because they were health-conscious and unlikely to use narcotics, Lambert said.

“Your athletes are your healthy people. You don’t want users because users can’t be trusted,” he said. “I know of only a few athletes that jumped into the pipe--started using. They were cut out of the organization.”

The former players often are held in high esteem by their peers and neighborhood youths, which works to their advantage, Lambert said. “They are kind of halfway heroes and they get into a neighborhood and people look up to them.”

Area high school coaches were not surprised that police had spotted the trend, although they insisted such recruitment occurs only after the players graduate. They agreed that the former athletes are being wooed for some of the same qualities that made them good team members.

“Gangs no longer are drafting scumballs,” said Steve Landress, football coach at Cleveland High School in Reseda. “They don’t trust them so they’re drafting kids with a pretty good success rate.

“Athletes are physical. They can get things done. . . . They’re used to following orders and being on time. And once they commit to a team they’re used to going all-out,” he said.

Just this month, Landress said, two former players asked him to write letters vouching for them and attesting to their better sides. The youths were facing court hearings on drug charges for selling cocaine for the Bryant organization. The coach agreed to the requests, but not before extracting a promise that they would leave the drug scene behind.

Sylmar High School football coach Jeff Engilman said he too has seen some former players succumb to the temptations of the drug business. He’s also seen the consequences. While at Manual Arts High in the early 1980s, one of his team members was murdered in a drug-related dispute.

Engilman is troubled by the problem but he does not easily condemn those who drift into the narcotics trade.

Possible Allure

“All coaches feel for their ballplayers,” he said. “This is a rough thing. If I was hungry enough and poor enough and wanted to wear nice clothes, and I didn’t have a mom and dad at home setting me straight, I would probably be influenced by my buddies who are making good money through drugs.”

As for Anderson, CSUN head football coach Bob Burt said he saw no signs that his player was dealing drugs, despite his arrest for narcotics sales while he was a team member in February, 1987.

“I had no idea that it had happened,” Burt said. “Had I known and I knew the charges were substantiated then certainly, at least the minimum would have been to suspend him.”

Under the circumstances, he said, he would not have hesitated to dismiss Anderson, who was last year’s defensive player of the year, from the team.

“If we know a guy is a proven criminal, there’s no way we want him a part of what we do,” Burt said. “It goes against everything athletic programs stand for.”

Grew Up With Drugs

Anderson was raised on Desmond Street in Pacoima down the block from two rock houses supplied by the Bryant organization, police said.

By late 1986 he had joined the organization and sold cocaine out of the house where he lived with his mother, police said.

“He lived on a street that already had a couple of narcotics sales locations,” Lambert said. “There was already a steady base of customers coming through. He had seen it growing up. All he had to do was hang his shingle out.”

Though he worked part-time coaching a private high school football team, that was a volunteer position and drug dealing was his sole means of support, court records show.

Police said the Bryant organization is believed to pay its dealers a straight salary, which informants revealed was $1,500 a week at the end of last year. Detective Jim Vojtecky, who is investigating the murder of Anderson and others attributed to the Bryant organization, said that kind of money satisfied Anderson for a while but then he apparently decided to go it alone.

Business Decision

He began buying cocaine from a cheaper source outside the Valley, Vojtecky said, and signed up other former football players to work with his then-fledgling movement.

“It was a business decision,” Vojtecky said. “He wanted to make more money.”

Police said Anderson eventually sat at the top of a pyramid-style organization with several street dealers below him.

Anderson’s arrest at the Desmond Street house on Feb. 6, 1987, did not deter him from continuing to sell drugs, police said.

He was shot to death 2 days after he pleaded guilty Sept. 23 to the narcotics sales charge.

Police don’t know how much he was making in the end, but say they found several thousand dollars at the Desmond Street house after his death, along with $26,000 in a safe-deposit box.

It was the decision to turn his back on the Bryant organization that got Anderson--and Henegan--killed, police believe. Le Roy Wheeler, a member of that organization, has been charged in Anderson’s killing and other members are still being sought in connection with it. Charges have not yet been filed for Henegan’s slaying.

Police would not identify the other former athletes they believe were connected to Anderson’s organization because their investigation is not finished.

Detectives concede that while they know first-hand of some players’ involvement, information about others is based on what they call “he say/she say” street information. Since Anderson’s death, his organization has folded.

Authorities stress that the number of former athletes believed to have entered the northeast Valley drug scene is small compared to the area’s overall number of drug criminals.

But it illustrates some of the pressures youths face in portions of the northeast Valley.

“When you grow up in the middle of this, it is hard to escape it,” said Vojtecky.

“It kind of bursts the bubble of what sports are supposed to do,” said Bill Foster, football coach at Grant High School in North Hollywood.

Times Staff Writer Mike Hiserman contributed to this report.