Death at the Wing Episode 3: Len Bias and the Crack Panic

[APPLAUSE] ARCHIVAL -- Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame speech “And then there’s Leroy Smith. Now you guys think that’s a myth. Leroy Smith was the guy, when I got cut, he made the team, on the varsity team, and he’s here tonight.”

ADAM McKAY (host): When you watch Michael Jordan’s 2009 NBA Hall of Fame acceptance speech, of course, you can’t help but notice the past grudges and slights that he gives credit to, in his mind, for fueling his competitive fire.

ARCHIVAL -- Jordan HOF speech “I wanted to prove, not just to Leroy Smith, not just to myself, but to the coach who actually picked Leroy over me, I wanted to make sure you understood, you made a mistake, dude.” [LAUGHTER]

A lot of people joked about it, claimed that maybe it wasn’t the most appropriate or gracious of speeches. None of us should be surprised though knowing Michael Jordan.

I mean, Michael Jordan, without exaggeration, may be the most competitive person that has ever walked planet Earth. I’m sure there’s some gladiator from ancient Rome we don’t know about, but for now, we’ll go with Jordan.

But watching the speech, what sticks out to me is that there’s not really a great, single rival from Michael Jordan’s career. I mean, you think of Muhhamad Ali, you think of Frasier, you think of Foreman. You think of Messi, you think of Ronaldo. Bird. Magic. Russell. Wilt.

But, who does Michael Jordan talk about? He talks about … Bryon Russell.

ARCHIVAL -- Jordan HOF speech “And Bryon Russell came over to me and said, you know what man, ‘why’d you quit? Why’d you quit? You know I could guard you.’ You remember this John? And...”

1 There was never that player, the guy who can match him shot for shot. Dramatic dunk for dramatic dunk.

But there could have been...

ARCHIVAL -- Len Bias game highlights “Bias from outside and he got it.”

His name was Len Bias.

ARCHIVAL “Len Bias with 29 and...Oh my, And he made the steal and the jam!”

I was watching college basketball at the time he was playing for the University of Maryland and he was breathtaking.

His teammates called him ‘horse’ due to his freakish athleticism, a 6’8” muscle-bound Adonis with a 40 inch vertical leap, who could handle the rock like a point guard, hit the boards like a power forward and attack the rim with violent dunks that were rivaled only by, well, Michael Jordan.

Jordan was the better all around player, but Bias had more size and better range.

And the gap was closing fast.

ARCHIVAL “...and Bias from 20. OH! Time out. 33 from Bias and Maryland will…”

By the night of the 1986 draft, fans like myself, I remember, I was a freshman in college, we were salivating to see what the Bias/Jordan rivalry could become.

ARCHIVAL -- 1986 NBA Draft “The Boston Celtics select Len Bias from the University of Maryland.”

Len Bias would be picked 2nd in the NBA draft, one spot higher than Jordan had been drafted two years earlier...

ARCHIVAL “There he is, Len Bias!”

...by the world championship Boston Celtics.

2 ARCHIVAL ‘“Len was sitting by his mother, she is here with him...”

Bias was poised to become the next great NBA star, and help Jordan transform the league into a high-flying, cultural phenomenon.

It was happening.

ARCHIVAL -- 1986 NBA draft “He had a great career in Maryland, Many people think he may be the best athlete in the draft.”

Two days later, he would be dead.

ARCHIVAL -- 1986 NBA draft “Well he certainly has to be about the happiest…”

I’m Adam McKay, welcome to “Death at the Wing.” In tonight’s episode, we look at one tragic night and see how it would change public policy in America for decades to come.

ARCHIVAL -- Red Auerbach on Len “Time goes, you know? Time goes. Guys get older, they get more playing time.”

ARCHIVAL -- 1986 NBA DRAFT “The only thing keeping him from being the number one pick today was about three inches that he forgot to grow.”

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JACKIE MacMULLAN: I was in my twenties when Len Bias died. I was 26 years old. I was a really young reporter for the globe...And, you know, Len Bias was the closest thing to me, a slam dunk as a draft pick as any player in recent memory. He was a surefire thing.

ADAM McKAY: That’s Jackie MacMullan, the all-time great sportswriter, whose career was just getting going back in 1986, the year Bias was drafted. And she remembers what a steal he seemed for the Celtics at the time.

JACKIE MacMULLAN: Len Bias, for lack of a better way of putting it, checked out.

3 ADAM McKAY: It wasn’t just Bias’ talents on the court, which were generational. He was also a good guy. Someone teammates loved, and someone the organization could invest their future in.

JACKIE MacMULLAN: The Celtics even had private investigators following him around. Cause that's what people did. They, they had private investigators before they drafted a player very high in the draft. They did their due diligence, he was a good kid from a great family.

ADAM McKAY: See, the Celtics had lucked into the 2nd pick in the draft that season — even after winning 67 games and a championship — thanks to a timely trade two years earlier. Now that trade was paying off in a big, big way.

ARCHIVAL -- Red Auerbach on Len INTERVIEWER: “A lot of people are asking how do you improve the best team in basketball. Is Len Bias the answer to that?” AUERBACH: “Well, he gives us a lot of support. He can play some guard, He can play some forward. He can play power forward, a quick forward.”

That’s Red Auerbach, the legendary GM of the Boston Celtics, and the former coach, and owner of 16 championship rings. That’s right, 16.

He’s also the man who drafted Len Bias.

ARCHIVAL -- Red Auerbach on Len AUERBACH: “He is the best athlete, in my opinion, in the whole draft. And he’s going to really help this ballclub.”

The Celtics hadn’t just picked a good player, they’d secured their future. Larry Bird was just months shy of his 30th birthday, and this was an era where longevity was based on how many packs of Kools you smoked a day.

And Kevin McHale, he had entered the league looking like he was thirty eight years old, and played a tough, physical, bruising style of play.

So the Celtics needed a jolt of energy and youth to secure their next generation of championship rings, and that was going to be Len Bias.

See things like this just didn't happen in sports. You don't get to win a title and draft a superstar in the same year. Not without cutting some sort of deal with the devil.

4 But the point is everyone wanted a piece of Len Bias. Even the local big shots came calling for their photo op. Tip O'Neill, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, a veritable Holy Trinity of Boston politicians had Red on the phone within hours, begging for their state's newest superstar to pay them a visit at the Capitol.

Bias may have just become a Celtic, but he was already Beantown royalty.

ARCHIVAL RED AUERBACH: “As a matter of fact, y’know, Larry Bird said that if we draft Bias, he’s gonna come up to the rookie camp. That’s right, he is very, very high on Bias, as K.C was, and Jimmy. They’re all high on him and he’s the guy we wanted. And we got him.”

ADAM McKAY: After Len Bias got drafted, he did what any kid on the brink of millions dollars would do. He partied with his friends.

And in the 1980s, it wasn’t really a party unless you had a big old bag of cocaine. And so, Len took part. He was the “horse,” after all. What was a little blow for a freak athlete like him.

In fact, that was, reportedly, the last thing he ever said, as he leaned over for one more line. ''I'm a horse, I can take it!'”

JACKIE MacMULLAN: He never plays a game. You know, he came to Boston, he did his press conference, and then he went back to Maryland and partied with some friends and didn't make it to the next morning.

ADAM McKAY: By the time the seizures started, his friends realized something was very wrong.

ARCHIVAL -- Len Bias 911 Call DISPATCH: 'P.G. County Emergency.’ TRIBBLE: 'Yes, I would like to have an ambulance come to… TRIBBLE: 'Someone's needs ... Len Bias needs help.' DISPATCH: 'It doesn't matter what his name is, what's the problem?' TRIBBLE: 'He's not breathing right.'

Len wasn’t a regular cocaine user. But in the end, that didn’t matter.

ARCHIVAL -- Local News Coverage “A local success story took a tragic turn this morning.”

His death sent shockwaves throughout the league, and the country.

5 ARCHIVAL “Len Bias, the Maryland University basketball star, on his way to becoming a World Champion Boston Celtic, died of an apparent heart attack today at Leland Memorial Hospital in Prince George’s County.”

He wasn’t the first player to use drugs, far from it, but he was the first of his stature to die from them during the age of cable TV. The media was louder and bigger than ever before.

JACKIE MacMULLAN: Everybody was looking for blood, like, all right, who are we going to blame for this?

ADAM McKAY: He was just 22 years old! What the hell had happened?!

JACKIE MacMULLAN: And my thought was. I get that, but this dude made the choice to do all this cocaine and it killed him. And now everyone else has to pay, you know? Again, I’m not advocating for drug use, but it was just such an overreaction.

ADAM McKAY: Accusations were everywhere. Some claimed Len’s college coaches knew about rampant drug use in his program and looked the other way.

Others pointed fingers at his friends, claiming one was a campus kingpin who ran the drug network Len got caught up in.

JACKIE MacMULLAN: I just, this is a horrible, horrible tragedy. And it felt to me like by overcompensating you're affecting a lot of other people's lives in a very adverse way.”

ADAM McKAY: But the worst whispers, the ones that traveled the farthest and did the most damage, were that Len was freebasing crack, a devastating rumor that took root and spread like wildfire.

ARCHIVAL

REPORTER: “a specialist in sports medicine, speculated what could have occurred.” SPECIALIST: “Either he was a novice who was exposed to larger doses than he could tolerate,or somebody substituted crack, a very potent form, and he thought he was getting lower doses than he was given.”

He wasn’t using crack, but it didn’t matter to most. Because crack had become the racial scare word of the decade, right up there with “welfare queen.”

6 Even the name of the new drug was perfect for hysterical headlines: crack. It was the perfect drug for America, the fast food nation: An immediate rush. Highly addictive. Cheap and easy to mass produce.

ARCHIVAL -- Dan Rather segment on crack “This is the typical, tiny bottle for the new, illegal drug of choice in America, Crack.”

Everything, every single news story seemed to be about crack, and how it was going to sneak into your little kids’ bedrooms at night and steal their innocence.

ARCHIVAL “...Vials like this one are turning up empty and discarded in the streets, in the parks, in the schoolyards around the nation, and many of the people who use crack are turning up with blown minds and blown bank accounts and worse.”

With the drug trade industrializing in the early 80s, cocaine costs had started to come down to Earth.

Coke used to be smuggled into the country in small batches, but thanks to the cut throat genius of Pablo Esobar it was now being shipped by planeload.

Even the CIA got into the game, funding the insurgent right-wing Contras against Nicaragua’s, quote ‘Marxist Sandinista government,’ by lending a helping hand when it came to smuggling drugs into the country.

But, as the prices for cocaine plummeted, dealers started looking for new ways to turn a profit.

And boy did they find a gold mine.All the dealers had to do was convert cocaine powder into solid form with the help of a little baking soda, break up their supply into some “rocks,” then sell those smaller quantities for more money.

A little bit of coke could turn into a lot of crack. Which then turned into a lot of cash.

ARCHIVAL -- News segments on crack “Officials are determined to crack down on crack, per dose the cheapest, most potent, most addictive form of cocaine ever seen in this country.”

So crack flooded the streets. And fears about crack flooded the airwaves.

Whether perception was reality or not, a divide had opened up. Coke for us, and crack for them. And by us and them, I mean rich and poor. White and black.

7 Cate Hardmann knows. She’s not just my friend, and the script supervisor for the movie I’m filming right now, but she lived through the party world of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

CATE HARDMAN: It was totally a, totally a white. It was recreational. It was, it was a white person's drug. And I think that might've been. I think when it became crack cocaine, it became a black person's issue.

ADAM McKAY: Cate remembers how a certain kind of affluent, white drug user saw the writing on the wall: Cocaine was no longer cool.

CATE HARDMAN: I think then that's when the cocaine stopped being popular too, because that's so many people that partied and did all that. They didn't really want that to be associated to what they were doing. So they switched over to other drugs. I think they switched over to, you know, Like more party drugs like GHB and, you know, ecstasy stuff that you just go dance, you know, your brains out, but not as much like addicting.

ADAM McKAY: Meanwhile, in 1986, income inequality was soaring and wages were flat for the majority of Americans due in part to Republican economic policy. And the right wing needed somewhere to focus that growing anger and fear.

What better place than a scary new drug being used by non-whites? This would become a go-to move for this brand new Republican Party for decades to come: starve the working class and scapegoat towards race to redirect the anger.

And if there was a master of this coded language two-step, it was one man:

ARCHIVAL -- President Reagan’s Address to the Nation “Today there’s a new epidemic.”

Ronald Reagan...

“Smokeable cocaine, otherwise known as Crack. It is an explosively destructive and often lethal substance which is crushing its users. It is an uncontrolled fire.”

And television news, which was increasingly becoming more and more about ratings and the ad revenue they generated, ate up this brand new scary story about black people and their new super drug… A drug that had cost the Celtics, the whitest team in America, their brand new superstar.

ARCHIVAL -- Len Bias news report

8 "What makes the death suspicious?" "It was unattended very healthy young man for no apparent reason went into cardiac arrest" "They say this is a routine investigation but it looks anything but routine, and could involve administrative if not criminal action against other Maryland athletes."

Len Bias never tried crack, remember? It was regular old powder cocaine that had done him in. But it didn’t matter. Enough people thought he had to start a full blown feeding frenzy.

According to Dan Baum, author of “Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure,” "In the month following Bias's death, the networks aired 74 evening news segments about crack and cocaine, often erroneously interchanging the two substances and blithely asserting it was crack that killed Bias."

Evan after Maryland's chief medical examiner, came out and corrected the record, stating that they had zero proof that Len was free-basing that evening, the story continued to grow.

See, if people were looking for someone to blame, a picture-perfect scapegoat, well, Washington D.C. was happy to give them one just in time for an election.

But it wouldn’t be the Republicans that would make the first move. No, it would be the political party that had bet on policy and data over storytelling and narrative. The political party that had been getting their butts kicked by Republican visions of cowboys, welfare queens and lazy bureaucrats ever since:

It would be the Democrats.

That’s after the break.

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ARCHIVAL -- Tip O’Neill on Drugs

NEWS ANCHOR: “Pressure is also coming from Congress. House Speaker Tip O’Neill is ordering his House leaders to draft a comprehensive, bipartisan drug plan.” TIP O’NEILL: “If I had my way, I would take all the drug pushers, take Alcatraz, and send them there for life without the privilege of any visitors.”

9 ADAM McKAY: That was Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the House in ‘86, and a Boston boy, born and bred.

Remember that lunch he was going to have with Len Bias, the one that was scheduled for just a few days after the draft? Well, it would have been a huge boon to his brand. A chance to embrace the next superstar in town. But it never happened.

Instead, Tip spent the weeks following Len’s death rattled. His constituents back in Boston were screaming bloody murder.

If you think politics motivates people to do strange things, you haven’t met a Boston sports fan.

ARCHIVAL “...recent pressures to do something about drug abuse intensified after the cocaine-related death of basketball star Len BIas…”

Something had to be done, right? And the Democratic congressman was damn sure his side was going to be the one to do it. If not for his personal stake in the situation, then for the chance to jump on the outrage horse and ride it for as many votes as it was worth.

“Democrats deny they’re jumping on a popular bandwagon…” “All of us are against drugs. Democrats just as much as Republicans and vice versa. This is not a partisan issue.”

See, the Republicans had seized the law and order throne in the 1984 election, bludgeoning Democrats with it. Portraying weak-kneed liberals letting criminals loose.

Now, O’Neil was determined not to let that happen again. He called an emergency meeting the second legislators got back from their July 4th recess, demanding his caucus to write up some, quote, “goddamn legislation.” Take it off the table for the White House heading into the ‘86 election.

Every committee, even ones that had nothing to do with crime and drugs, anyone with a gavel got to work. The Agriculture Committee, Education, Labor, even Ways and Means. The rush was on.

And in the blink of an eye, a matter of weeks, they had come up with a new law. An omnibus bill titled ‘The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986,’ or, as it would forever be known, ‘The Len Bias Law.’

10 ARCHIVAL -- “...the bipartisan congressional plan to fight drug abuse could cost as much as 5 billion dollars. Even if it does stretch the budget, House Speaker O’Neill says he believes the american people will support it.

Numbers had been pulled out of thin air. Hearings barely held. This was not business as usual. It was a mad dash to pass something, anything, before the election.

And when the Republicans finally got a look at it, they must have been fighting back laughter. The Democrats had walked right into their talking points.

And the Republicans would respond to the bIll the way they would respond every time since in the decades that followed: They said it wasn’t conervative enough. And the Dems did what they would always do. They caved.

So there was a last-minute change, devised by a bunch of Democratic senators, including Joe Biden, and it was tossed into the bill without any due diligence, a mandatory-sentencing provision.

ARCHIVAL -- Democratic Senators discuss the ‘Len Bias Bill’ “This bill is important. It’s essential.” “...I assume if anything they’ll be more money next year.”

Setting up a new structure on the fly for how long drug offenders would serve.

“We have broken new ground and for the first time we have a national strategy. “For a person who sells drugs to children, there should be no mercy on them.”

But the effects of this change would be felt for generations to come in America.

ARCHIVAL -- Reagan signs the ‘Len Bias Bill’ “Today it gives me great pleasure to sign legislation that reflects the total commitment of the American people and their government to fight the evil of drugs.”

RICK PERLSTEIN: I mean, the 1986 drug abuse act, uh, that passed. I got the number here. It passed the house 392 votes to 16. And passed the Senate on a voice vote.

ADAM McKAY: That’s Rick Perlstein, the American historian and journalist. He still can't believe how the entire government got behind this devastating bill.

11 RICK PERLSTEIN: This created the a hundred to one, a sentencing disparity between, uh, crack cocaine and powder cocaine. I mean, this is the stuff that's universally understood to have just decimated African-American communities in America.”

ADAM McKAY: While the goal may have been to impose longer prison sentences on high-level dealers, the numbers didn't match reality. Five grams of crack meant five years in prison, 1/100th the amount of powder cocaine it would take to trigger the same sentencing.

Police and prosecutors weren’t getting to the bottom of the drug trade, they were prosecuting the people at the bottom of it.

ARCHIVAL -- Anti-Drug Crack PSA “You know who I am. Snake. Dealing in weed. Coke. Crack. Your choice.”

Public Service Announcements like that on TV... didn’t exactly help.

ARCHIVAL “Take one hit and you’ll do anything to get more. Steal from you mama. Lie. Cheat on your homeboy. But hey, that’s the price you pay when you deal with dudes like me.”

RICK PERLSTEIN: And it was all about scapegoating African-Americans who were medicating themselves against the trauma of, you know, basically their communities collapsing around them because the government was withdrawing its support.

ADAM McKAY: The results of this scapegoating were devastating.

RICK PERLSTEIN: It's not just the federal government, right. When the federal government withdraws 87% of their funding, that has to be made up for by city services or not at all. So the city can't spend money on something else. Right? Uh, and it's just this cascade.

ADAM McKAY: A 2006 report by the ACLU determined that, while African-Americans made up only 15 percent of the country’s drug users, they were 74 percent of those sentenced to prison for drug offenses.

Over 80 percent of the defendants sentenced for crack offenses were African-American at the time, despite 66 percent of crack users being white or Hispanic.

The sad fact is, while the bill may have been known as the ‘Len Bias Law,’ it had little to do with the reality of his death.

12 While Democrats pushed the bill for political purposes, Republicans saw a chance to take it even further. Ronald Reagan, well, he signed it into law, getting to claim credit too. Everyone in Washington had their fingerprints on this thing, the proud parents of the prison industrial complex.

We’ll be right back.

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ARCHIVAL -- LA Lakers: “Just Say No” rap

ADAM McKAY: As politicians were preaching “Just Say No,” the NBA was frantically following suit.

If there's one thing we all know. There's only one way to solve a complicated systemic issue. You get the Showtime Lakers together in a room and you record a rap song.

ARCHIVAL “Cocaine and crack, it’s all got to go. We got to learn to just say no!”

In 1983, the collective bargaining agreement between the players and the league had added a three strikes and you’re out policy.

Test positive for drugs enough times and you could be banned for life.

And remember, this was a mostly-black league trying to cater to white television audiences.

They weren’t about to let the spectre of drugs get in the way. Not anymore.

The players themselves understood what was at stake. They had seen players like Chris Washburn, David Thompson, Terry Furlow and, now, Len Bias lose their careers and, for some, their lives, to drugs.

But now, NBA television revenues and licensing deals were causing salaries to skyrocket. What was once a nice payday was quickly becoming generational wealth. The average NBA salary in 1985 was about $370,00 per year.

Ten years later it was $1.5 million, with the highest paid player in the league, one Michael Jeffrey Jordan, making twenty times that.

13 ARCHIVAL -- Michael Jordan Anti-Drug PSA “I’m Michael Jordan. McDonald’s restaurants have given me this time to talk to you about something we both really care about: Kids.”

And as the new face of the NBA, Michael Jordan had a responsibility to record a PSA about the dangers of drugs.

That also was a McDonald's ad.

ARCHIVAL “So don’t blow it. Don’t do drugs. If you’re doing it, stop it.”

But, for the bottom rung, the inner-city kids just barely getting by, a war was coming. A war designed to make their lives a living hell.

As columnist Radley Balko wrote in the Washington Post, quote, “In life, Len Bias was a terrific basketball player. In death, he would become the Archduke Ferdinand of the Total War on Drugs. What came before had been only skirmishing; the real Drug War had yet to begin. Within weeks the country would be marching, bayonets fixed.”

Len Bias died of a drug overdose. As a result, generations of men who looked like him were thrown in jail.

ARCHIVAL -- Len Bias gameplay “Good lob! And a stuff for Bias!”

What could have been? Would Jordan still have won 6 rings? Would Jordan/Bias have become bigger than Magic/Bird?

Those are the easy questions. The ones that are fun to debate over beers.

But there are darker questions that are worth pondering too. Between 1986 and 2016, the federal prison population more than quadrupled. A black man in America today has a more than 1 in 4 chance of ending up behind bars.

America has more people in prison than any other country in the world, and those are raw numbers, not per capita.

Len Bias wasn’t the only one who lost his life that night back in 1986. There were generations of black men that did too, they just didn’t know it yet.

14 How many millions of people missed out on making their dreams come true because they were locked up behind bars? How many more futures were lost thanks to 5 grams of crack cocaine tucked into a pocket or a backpack or a fist?

We’ve talked a lot about the players we’ve lost on this podcast. Famous names, some more than others, who were tragically taken from us for a whole host of reasons. Sad stories, each and every one.

But, if you really want to look for a lost generation of young men, with the potential to change the game and the world, but also artists, politicians, doctors, fathers, churchgoers, husbands, friends, well, you might want to start by looking in a 48-square foot cell.

There’s plenty of them in this country.

ARCHIVAL -- News Reports montage “24 people indicted after a mont-hlong investigation.” “Today, we are here to announce a major roundup of street-level drug dealers.” “Residents are now complaining that police are using unfair strong-arm tactics.” “According to the Florida Sheriffs Association, the operation sends a message to street level dealers and buyers: Use crack and you’re going to jail.” “Lieutenant, how long is it gonna be before some other sellers are back here at this location tonight? I’ll give you a conservative estimate of maybe a couple hours.”

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