WRESTLING BABYLON News

TO SCOTT JAMES AND CHAVO GUERRERO

Dear Scott and Chavo:

I am following up on voice messages left at what I believe are your respective cell phone numbers. This was discussed in my previous blog post “Scott James, Chavo Guerrero – Keys to Unlocking WWE’s Implausible Benoit Timeline,” http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/03/29/scott-james-chavo-guerrero-%e2%80%93-keys-to-unlocking-wwe%e2%80%99s-implausible-benoit-timeline. (Isn’t technology wonderful?)

I don’t know if it was the two of you whom I reached live on those cells early Friday afternoon Orlando time. If so, and if you were trying to “work” me, my feelings are hurt. I would be especially disappointed in you, Chavo – many years ago, as a young fan, I watched your grandfather, Gory Guerrero, wrestle for my uncle, Sam Muchnick, in St. Louis.

Anyway, I’m trying again to get through to you. I gather it’s all hands on deck for tonight’s edition of Raw, a day after WrestleMania; no rest for the weary. But in the meantime there’s the little matter of getting to the bottom of the Chris Benoit story, nine months after he killed his wife and their son and himself.

I have one specific series of questions for you, Scott, and a more general line of questions for both of you.

SCOTT: Early in the morning of Sunday, June 24, 2007, Chris sent you (as well as Chavo) those cryptic text messages the world now knows all about. Yet according to the Fayette County sheriff’s logs of the calls on Chris’s cell phone, you sent the following text message to Chris hours later: “What time do u land?” That was at 9:26 a.m. (Eastern time, I think). A timeline released by World Wrestling Entertainment two days later would represent that WWE executives had booked Benoit on a Sunday morning flight from Atlanta to Houston. Therefore, a reasonable interpretation of your text is that you were asking Chris when his plane would arrive. The question is, why would you be asking that in the wake of his earlier texts to you? Did you really expect Benoit in Houston later Sunday morning? Or was there another reason for that text?

SCOTT AND CHAVO: The WWE timeline says you came forward with the Benoit texts at 12:45 p.m. Monday, June 25. Does that mean that you talked to nobody upon first receiving repeated mysterious messages containing only your good friend’s street address and notes that the dogs were in the yard and the garage door was open – all this after he had sounded strange on the phone and no-showed the Beaumont house show the day before? And does that mean, further, that you continued not to tell anyone, especially any of your supervisors at WWE, even as Benoit proceeded to no-show the Sunday night pay-per-view in Houston?

My phone number was left in my voicemail messages. If it turns out that those were not your cell numbers, you can email me at info@muchnick.net, and we can talk at your convenience. I look forward to hearing back from you.

Irv Muchnick

Readers of this blog know that a few weeks ago I ripped on Andrea Adelson and the Orlando Sentinel for what I thought was shallow, Chamber of Commerce coverage of WrestleMania 24.

Now I would like to apologize.

The body of Andrea’s recent series of articles adds up to the most thorough and thoughtful sustained coverage of pro wrestling ever seen in a major newspaper. It includes a lengthy examination of the steroid issue, which was published Friday and can be viewed at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/sports/custom/wrestling/orl-wrestlemania2808mar28,0,7094384.story?page=2. I am quoted in the article, as are others such as Dave Meltzer and Marc Mero. More important, our dissident perspectives are reflected accurately and in context.
After the publication of my cheeky blogs, Andrea handled the criticism with complete professionalism: she emailed me, assured me that her Countdown to WrestleMania series was not being directed by WWE, said a serious steroid piece had long been listed in the Sentinel’s “news budget,” and arranged to interview me for it.

By coincidence, Andrea also was assigned to do one of the first background stories in the Sentinel about the death of a University of Central Florida football player. The hazardous conditions and non-compensation of “amateur” college football players is another subject I’ve written a lot about, and Andrea and I had a thoughtful exchange about it. It’s a pleasure to call her a journalistic colleague, and a diligent one.

Irv Muchnick

by Irvin Muchnick

On Thursday night this blog reported that the chief of security for World Wrestling Entertainment erroneously told Fayette County 911 that Chris Benoit had left a mysterious message for a fellow wrestler “this morning” – Monday, June 25, 2007 (http://muchnick.net/babylon/2008/03/28/benoit-911-call-wwe-security-chief-gave-wrong-day-of-wrestlers-last-message).

On Friday I left voicemail messages on what I believe to be the cell phone numbers for WWE’s Scott James and Chavo Guerrero. James and Guerrero were colleagues and friends of Benoit’s, and had the last known contacts with him. The authorities have determined that these contacts came after Benoit murdered his wife and their son.

Those two gentlemen are thus uniquely positioned to answer the question, “What did Vince McMahon know and when did he know it?” Of course, the question does not bear on the theory of the double homicide/suicide itself; the crime is open-and-shut. However, it does bear on the explanation of how the Benoit family tragedy came to be exploited for yet another high-rated dead-wrestler-tribute edition of Monday Night Raw, which began more than five hours after the long-decomposing bodies of Chris, Nancy, and Daniel were found in their home outside Atlanta. That exploitation, in turn, would become the first chapter in what McMahon surely anticipated as an epic struggle to spin the sports entertainment industry’s role in the early drug-related deaths of so many of its performers.

My skepticism that security head Dennis Fagan’s mistake was innocent flows from knowledge that the 24-hour gap in the representation in his 911 call isn’t the only investigative detail casting suspicion on the Benoit timeline WWE issued on June 26.

The company put out a press release (viewable at http://corporate.wwe.com/news/2007/2007_06_26_2.jsp) to counter accusations that it had manipulated the previous day’s news from Fayette County. On cable news programs, hosts were speculating that WWE cynically chose to do the Benoit Raw tribute even though higher-ups already knew, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Chris was the perpetrator. (On some of those programs, such as MSNBC’s Live With Dan Abrams on June 26 and Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor on June 27, I found myself cast as the WWE apologist for resisting a rush to judgment.)

For present purposes, the significant item of the timeline is the action WWE claims it took once executives realized Benoit wouldn’t make it to the Saturday night, June 23, show in Beaumont, Texas. They “rebooked Benoit’s flight for the following morning, allowing Benoit to miss the Beaumont event and making alternate arrangements for him to attend the pay-per-view event in Houston on Sunday,” the news release asserts.

But unless I missed something, documents recently released by the sheriff’s office in Fayette County, Georgia, include nothing about a Sunday morning flight. They do, in considerable detail, chronicle how Benoit, after missing his Saturday morning flight, called Delta Airlines and reserved a seat on a Saturday night flight. (Benoit explained missing the early flight by saying Nancy and Daniel had food poisoning.)

Though it contradicts the WWE timeline, a Saturday night flight jibes with a second timeline floating out there on the Internet – a more detailed one whose provenance seems to be the June 27, 2007, New York Daily News. (See http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/06/27/2007-06-27_chris_benoit_timeline-2.html.)

That said, one item in the sheriff’s report would be consistent with the booking of a Sunday morning flight for Benoit. According to the log of the text messages retrieved from Chris’s cell phone, Scott James texted Benoit at 9:26 a.m. Sunday, “What time do u land?”

Vindication? Not so fast. There’s a big problem with that interpretation. And that big problem is the entire record of text messages. For shortly before 5 a.m. Sunday morning – four and a half hours before James messaged Benoit “What time do u land?” – Benoit had sent both James and Guerrero the now-infamous serial messages, “The dogs are in the enclosed pool area. Garage side door is open” and “Chavo, Scott. My physical address is 130 Green Meadow Lane. Fayetteville Georgia. 30215.”

Let’s go over this again. Scott James and Chavo Guerrero have strange conversations and text exchanges with Chris Benoit on Saturday. Their buddy misses the show in Beaumont. In the early morning hours on Sunday they receive new levels of text-message weirdness. Yet James is expecting Benoit on the ground in Houston late Sunday morning?

It just doesn’t add up. Nor is it logical that James and Guerrero would sit on the Sunday morning text messages all day and night – as Benoit proceeded, uncharacteristically, to no-show a second straight night (this time at a pay-per-view where he was booked to win a world title, no less) – and decide not to tell their bosses about them until 12:30 p.m. Monday, as the WWE timeline states.

That is why I called James and Guerrero on Friday.

What happened next isn’t clear. But it is in keeping with the paranoia and mindfucking m.o. of many wrestlers, if not with specific instructions by their bosses not to talk to me or anyone else probing the absolutely essential question of whom they told about the Sunday morning text messages, and when they told them.

I preface the following with the disclaimer that I am not familiar with the voices of James and Guerrero.

At the number for James, a man answered and, before I could even identify myself, feigned that he couldn’t hear me. I called back and he repeated the exercise. Our connection seemed fine to me both times. Later I called yet again, got voicemail, outlined my mission, and invited James to call me.

At the number for Guerrero, a man answered and, when I asked if he was Chavo Guerrero, replied, “Who are you?” I said, “Irv Muchnick” – whereupon the man said no, that he wasn’t Chavo Guerrero and I had a wrong number. As with James, I called back later, got voicemail, and left a message.

Also on Friday, I emailed Gary Davis, WWE’s vice president for corporate communications. After thanking Davis for getting back to me the night before on my question about Dennis Fagan, I proceeded: “WWE’s timeline said the company arranged for a Sunday morning flight for Benoit from Atlanta to Houston. Can you provide detail on that? I ask because the open records from the Fayette County Sheriff mention no evidence of a reservation for Benoit on a Sunday flight. We do know, however, that Benoit himself called Delta Airlines and rebooked himself for a Saturday evening flight.”

Davis, too, has not returned my message.

MARCH 28, 2008 – In the call to 911 just before the corpses of Chris Benoit and his wife and son were discovered last year, World Wrestling Entertainment’s chief of security twice stated the wrong day for the wrestler’s final cryptic text messages, an investigation by author Irvin Muchnick has revealed.

This finding raises new questions about the circumstances surrounding WWE’s Benoit tribute show, which aired on the USA cable network on Monday night, June 25, 2007. The company has defended the show by maintaining that it did not yet know that Chris Benoit had strangled his wife Nancy with a cord, snapped 7-year-old Daniel’s neck with a variation of his “Crippler Crossface” wrestling hold, and suspended himself by the throat from a basement gym weight-machine pulley.

The recording of the call to the Fayette County (Georgia) 911 Communications Center, obtained by Muchnick through a public records request, shows that at 1:16 p.m. Eastern time Monday, WWE’s Dennis Fagan requested a “welfare check” on the Benoit home. Benoit had missed WWE events in Beaumont, Texas, on Saturday night, and in Houston on Sunday night. After first missing his Saturday flight from Atlanta to Houston, he also failed to arrive on the Sunday morning flight that WWE officials scheduled for him, according to the company’s June 26, 2007, news release.

The WWE timeline further notes that in the early morning hours on Sunday, Benoit left a series of text messages for two other wrestlers highlighting his street address in Fayetteville.

But in the Monday call captured on the 911 audio, Fagan, a retired New York City Police Department detective who directs WWE security, gives a chronology that is off by 24 hours. He says, “At three o’clock this morning there was a message left for one of the other wrestlers. And basically it says, ‘The dogs are in the backyard. The back door is open. Goodbye.’ And that’s it.”

Author Muchnick said: “I have played the recording repeatedly to determine if Fagan spoke ambiguously or in confusion. The fair conclusion is that he did not. For example, if the theory is that he meant Sunday morning rather than Monday morning, because he had just been referring to Benoit’s failure to show up for the Sunday pay-per-view, that theory is dispelled by Fagan’s repetition of the error a few seconds later. In a completely neutral context. Fagan emphatically says a second time, ‘That message was left at three o’clock this morning …’”

The audio, lasting a little less than three minutes, can be heard at http://muchnick.net/Benoit911.mp3.

While Fagan’s misstatement is clear, Muchnick said, the reason for it is not. “I reached Fagan by phone yesterday [Thursday]. He immediately told me that he would have nothing to say about the matter and that I would have to talk about it with Rich Hering [WWE’s vice president for governmental relations].”

Muchnick added: “I hesitate to say Fagan lied to 911, because the possibility exists that he did not willfully tell an untruth. But in that case, other disturbing questions arise. If WWE executives did not get their own chief of security faithfully briefed on the facts prior to his being assigned to call 911, then what does that tell us about how urgent an effort they were making to get to the bottom of what had happened to the Benoit family over the weekend?

“Critics would speculate that WWE chairman Vince McMahon knew that the incident was a double homicide/suicide well before he went on the air at 8 p.m. Eastern time with the tribute to Benoit on Monday Night Raw. This new information that Fagan, seven hours earlier, had participated in the creation of an inaccurate record in his 911 call fuels those accusations.”

In an email to Muchnick, Gary Davis, WWE’s vice president of corporate communications, did not dispute the facts of this report. “I’m unsure of the point you’re trying to make,” Davis said.

Muchnick is author of Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal. He is one of four co-authors of Benoit: Wrestling with the Horror That Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport, and is working on the forthcoming Chris and Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death. All are published by ECW Press (http://ecwpress.com).

The Wrestling Babylon website is http://wrestlingbabylon.com. The blog is http://muchnick.net/babylon.

#####

The countdown to next Sunday’s WrestleMania began with the news that ex-wrestler Chase Tatum died last Sunday, at age 34, from what his father told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was an accidental overdose. See http://www.ajc.com/search/content/shared-gen/ap/National/Former_Wrestler_Dead.html.

Dave Meltzer of Wrestling Observer Newsletter says Tatum was “a former competition bodybuilder who wrestled for years with WCW,” the Ted Turner-owned defunct chief rival of World Wrestling Entertainment.

Tatum, like Chris Benoit, lived in the Atlanta area. It will be interesting to see if Tatum turns up on the patient list of Carrollton, Georgia, physician Phil Astin, who is under federal indictment.

Wade Keller of Pro Wrestling Torch has another must-read:

“[John] Cena preaches zero tolerance for steroids, but his choice of words might be revealing,” http://www.pwtorch.com/members/artman/publish/Keller_s_Take_9/article_24958.shtml

Jeff Hardy has been suspended for 60 days by WWE for a second strike under the wellness policy.

In the wake of last year’s fiasco with the guys caught in the Signature Pharmacy dragnet, WWE started publicizing the names of suspended wrestlers. But this one small step for transparency wasn’t exactly one giant leap for mankind, as we soon saw with the announcement of the suspension of Harry Smith (son of the late Davey Boy Smith); they didn’t disclose the fact that Smith’s failed test was actually months old. So the old suspicion that suspensions are manipulated punishments of carefully selected scapegoats continues.

The only way to allay that suspicion would be to announce, along with the suspension, both the date of the failed test and the drug. In Hardy’s case, the drug test almost certainly was in the last week or so, according to sources. As for the drug? Who knows? The media reports carry the tacit assumption that it was steroids, but maybe it was actually marijuana.

Hardy would be a higher-profile sacrificial lamb than Harry Smith — but Hardy still ain’t exactly John Cena. A case can be made that WWE needs to keep rolling out a suspension every once in a while for “credibility,” and perhaps especially so in the wake of the renewed heat on Capitol Hill. Until there’s true transparency, such perfectly reasonable speculation will not stop.

[originally published at SLAM! Wrestling under the headline, “McMahon botches his spot, and Congress is back,” http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/GuestColumn/2008/02/27/4880571.html]

No less Byzantine than the politics of wrestling are those of the United States Congress. Vince McMahon, a brilliant businessman, appears to have miscalculated the latter by declining to appear Wednesday at an omnibus hearing on steroids and sports that was called by Congressman Bobby Rush, chair of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection.

The upshot is that an investigation of steroids in wrestling — as well as, perhaps, of other abuses of the health and safety of “sports entertainment” talent — is back on the Capitol Hill radar screen, two months after it got crowded out by the Mitchell Report in the more, ah, dignified sport of baseball. (Earlier developments were discussed in my December 26 guest column for SLAM! Wrestling.)

As Rush angrily recounted at the hearing, the World Wrestling Entertainment chairman said he could not participate because his lawyer, Jerry McDevitt, had a scheduling conflict. “I am exceptionally and extremely disappointed,” said Rush, noting that McMahon was the only invited head of a sports organization not to show up. The commissioners of Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, and the heads of their players unions, were all there to address threatened legislation to force all sports to adopt the more stringent, independent and transparent drug-testing protocols already used by the U.S. Olympic Committee.

That statement alone would have made for a nervous day for WWE stockholders. But Rush went on to show that he had done a little homework and possessed an attention span on the subject of drugs, death and wrestling somewhat longer than that of the mainstream media.

“Steroid abuse in pro wrestling is probably worse than in any professional sport or amateur sport,” Rush said, adding that he realized that wrestling is not a legitimate sport. “The number of deaths in the professional wrestling ranks is startling to say the least. The tragedy of Chris Benoit has been well documented. I want to assure Mr. McMahon that this committee fully intends to deal with the illegal steroid abuse in professional wrestling. And we hope he will be part of the solution and not part of the problem.”

What happened? Let’s try to explain this so everyone can understand. Even all the “serious” sports journalists who look down their noses at wrestling, yet dutifully reported as gospel McMahon’s ridiculous claim that boxer Floyd Mayweather would be getting a $20 million appearance fee at WrestleMania.

Since last summer, two different Congressional committees have been probing wrestling. One is the Rush Subcommittee, which was initially spurred to action by Congressman Cliff Stearns, at the time its ranking minority. He remains a member but relinquished ranking status to take a similar position with another subcommittee.

The other is Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The Waxman committee was the first to give George Mitchell a megaphone for his December report on the history of steroids and human growth hormone in baseball; Waxman then staged the sensational hearing earlier this month in which Roger Clemens rather unconvincingly rebutted Mitchell and his source, personal trainer Brian McNamee — a performance that will probably get Clemens investigated by the Justice Department for perjury.

Last year I had interactions with both the Rush and Waxman staffs, who said officially that their efforts were cooperative. That may have been true, but Congresspeople are no less immune than the rest of us to turf wars. The Commerce subcommittee perceives its own mandate as more ambitious than Oversight’s. Rush seethed while Waxman garnered attention for the Clemens circus, for in Rush’s mind the real issue is not just the ability to pressure sports organizations through hearings, but also the prospect of writing toothful laws to govern how they’re run. In 2005, the Rush subcommittee had introduced legislation to require Olympics-standard testing across the board, and the Wednesday hearing revisited that topic.

Rush also promised last fall, in an email to a Baltimore Sun reporter, to take a public look at wrestling, and he obviously meant what he said.

McMahon’s motivation for “flipping his finger” at Rush — as another congressman, Lee Terry, colorfully put it — is another one of those secrets to which only he, his wife, his son, and his daughter and son-in-law are privy. If even they, or even Vince himself for that matter, know what he’s up to.

One possibility is that he’s toying with Congress, confident that there’s no such thing as cheap heat, especially on the eve of WrestleMania, and that he’ll be able to handle it all in the end. (Through family intermediaries, he has told the boys that he would show up at any Congressional hearing in a clown wig.) McMahon has on his side money, connections and a feeling among opinion-makers — widespread if misguided — that Congress shouldn’t soil its hands with wrestling, even though dozens of people in the industry are needlessly dying every year.

Another possibility is that the principle of avoiding any kind of regulation or oversight, at almost any cost, is paramount for WWE. Instinctively, one would think that the large and unwieldy Wednesday hearing would have provided McMahon with protection in numbers. But perhaps Vince prefers being singled out to being questioned.

Whatever the explanation, the headline is that C-SPAN wrestling hearings are back in play. This marks an opportunity for Michael Benoit, Chris’s father, to further spread the word not only about wrestling’s culture of drugs, but also about Chris Nowinski’s research on head trauma, which they believe is the central explanation for last June’s double murder/suicide in Georgia.

Newsletter writers and fans also need to seize the day. Sure, all of us are eager to know how quickly Rey Misterio will come back from biceps surgery, and we can’t wait to see Maria’s Playboy spread. But, in the name of decency, let’s also take a moment to tell Congressman Rush what should be done to prevent wrestlers from continuing to drop like flies.

The congressman’s phone, fax and email information is at www.house.gov/rush.

As blog readers know, I’ve made a hobby horse out of the Orlando Sentinel’s absurd “Countdown to WrestleMania” coverage, and the near-certainty that World Wrestling Entertainment flacks are in bed with the newspaper’s editors.

On the Wrestling Observer Newsletter website, Dave Meltzer points out that the Sentinel’s Sunday story about WWE’s finances lists $186.9 million in profits last year. The actual number is $52.1 million. Either number makes the point that “sports entertainment” is big business. But what’s an extra $134 million or so between friends?

Irv Muchnick

Jake Roberts’ camp is denying that there’s a set plan — first reported by Jason Powell at PROWRESTLING.net — for him to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame this year. Powell stands by his story. This will all play out soon enough. I’m very familiar with wrestling promotions that change their stories when word leaks out prematurely, just for the sake of proving … whatever it is wrestling promotions try to prove. That they’re in control, I suppose.
I assess the plausibility of the Roberts induction at 100%, based on WWE’s m.o., and the likelihood that it’s true as high even after receiving an email Saturday from Jake Butikas, who manages Roberts’ MySpace page. Butikas said, “As of today, Jake has not been contacted by the WWE to be a part of this year’s HOF. Jake is not saying it won’t happen (this year or in the future) but the news claiming he is being inducted this year is currently not true. Additionally, the article stated that Jake would be released from rehab to attend the event; this was also a falsity as Jake is set to be released from rehab before Wrestlemania weekend.”