Talent for the Drug Game: Tough and Loyal Athletes Recruited by Cocaine Rings

At 6 feet tall and 250 pounds, former Cal State Northridge football star Tracy Anderson, a Pacoima native known as Tank, was 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 ringing 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” that introduced him to the drug trade in Pacoima. Police 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. 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 July 31 of another former CSUN player, Douglas Henegan--have 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 about 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, Jeffrey A. Bryant, 37, of Pacoima, now serving a four-year prison sentence for a 1986 drug conviction.

Some of the former football players who detectives said got involved with the drug business were 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 had played football at 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.

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 half-way 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 graduation. 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.

Asking for Help

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 from his former players 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 squabble.

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

“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 of 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.

“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.”

“He lived on a street that already had a couple of narcotics sales locations,” Lambert said of Anderson. “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.”

Although 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, said that kind of money satisfied Anderson for a while but then he apparently decided to go it alone. He began buying cocaine from a cheaper source and signed up some 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 organizational chart with several street dealers below him.

Anderson’s arrest at his home on Feb. 6, 1987, did not deter him from continuing to sell drugs, police said. He was shot to death two days after he pleaded guilty Sept. 23 to the narcotics sales charge.

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

Times staff writer Mike Hiserman contributed to this article.