The Best American Sports Writing 2014(127)

Patty turned to Falafel. “This is how you lose weight,” she said.

“Yeah, for sure,” Falafel said. He gazed at the hill uncertainly. At his last weigh-in, he was 245 pounds. But things were looking up. He had won on the Super Bowl. He was flying back to Israel to attend a wedding, and to spend some time near his childhood home. Then he was off to Copenhagen, for the Nordic Open, to participate in a tournament known as “Denmark vs. the World.” Falafel, who was captaining “the World,” was putting together an international team, and hoped to bring in Genius and Abe the Snake. The whales seemed increasingly within reach. Squinting in the bright Los Angeles sun, Falafel pushed his feet into the hot sand. Slowly, he began to climb.





KATHY DOBIE

Raider. QB Crusher. Murderer?


FROM GQ





ON A COOL, DRIZZLY February night in 2003, at one-thirty or so in the morning, a police officer cruising down Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica spotted flames shooting horizontally out a window of the Simply Sofas furniture showroom. From overhead he could hear popping sounds as the fire leapt up to eat at the power lines in the street outside. Inside, the blaze spread quickly, engulfing upholstery and wood, roaring up through the roof and melting the metal skin right off the loading dock door.

The fire was almost immediately deemed suspicious. Firefighters reported the strong smell of gasoline, and when investigators were able to get inside the building the next day, they found three “firebombs”—five-gallon plastic water jugs cut off at the neck, stuffed with paper and filled with gasoline. The evidence was gathered and sent to the lab.

Five months later, Sergeant Robert Almada, the police investigator for Santa Monica’s Arson Squad Task Force, walked into the interview room at the police station on Main Street with every reason to believe things were going his way. He had motive—revenge—and he had the kind of physical evidence almost never left behind in a fire: 30 pieces of gasoline-soaked mail, each addressed to the suspect or his wife. (In the heat of the blaze, the firebombs had caved in on themselves, preserving the magazines and catalogs and envelopes inside.) That suspect, one Anthony Smith, six feet four inches and over 320 pounds, a 36-year-old former defensive end for the LA/Oakland Raiders, dwarfed the little table in the room.

“Okeydoke,” Almada said as he settled himself into a chair and opened his case file. Almada was blue-eyed and brown-haired, with bland, boyish good looks. His eagerness (the whole case was ready to tumble into place; it was right there at his fingertips) and the slight discomfort he felt in the presence of Smith were camouflaged by an overly casual manner. He confirmed some phone numbers he had for Smith; he asked if he preferred the interview-room door open or closed. It was all cordial enough, Almada in control . . . so how did it happen that within minutes the sergeant was floundering, struggling for a foothold while his suspect was coldly telling him his case was a pile of shit?

“You know how stupid this is. This is stupid, this is stupid,” Smith said. How would he even have the time to set a fire? “I’m a very busy man. I don’t have time for that crap.”

Who the hell was this guy? A half-hour earlier, Almada would testify, while both men were sitting in the kitchen of Smith’s condo in Marina del Rey, the sergeant had confronted him with the physical evidence and Smith had broken down and cried. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he’d said, weeping with his head in his hands. As Almada saw it, Smith was more or less confessing to the arson. (He and the store’s owner had argued over money two weeks before the fire.) When Smith’s wife, Teresa, had hurried into the kitchen, asking what was wrong, Smith had wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her body.

Now that broken guy, whoever he was, had morphed into this deadpan, assured guy . . . whoever he was.

Almada thought he’d try a side attack. He took a paper from his file—a record of Smith’s gun ownership. “It says you own a .45 pistol, a .22 pistol, a .357 revolver, .44 revolver, .44 Desert Eagle, .44 Colt, Olympic .223, another .223 pistol from Rocky Mountain Arms, and a .22 derringer,” Almada said.

“That’s it?” Smith asked.

“What do you mean, ‘That’s it’? That’s a lot of guns for one guy.”

“You ran that list and that’s what you came up with?”

“That’s what’s listed in the Automated Firearms System, yes,” Almada said.

“I only own shotguns,” Smith stated flatly.

“Who bought all these guns?”

“You go back into your records and you’ll see.”