CRAZY TALK Former Red Sox reliever Jeff Reardon was acquitted of robbery after the judge ruled he was insane. |
Mr. Brightside
For those of you Red Sox fans searching for a silver lining to this prolonged and ultimately fatal flesh-eating-bacteria case of a baseball season, there is this: onetime Red Sox reliever Jeff Reardon has been found not guilty by reason of insanity in his jewelry-store-robbery trial. To refresh the memory: last December, Reardon walked into a jewelry store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, handed the clerk a note saying he had a gun, and walked out with an undisclosed sum. The investigation was swift (maybe the clerk gave a good description of the suspect: “he looked kind of like Jeff Reardon”) and Reardon was quickly put on trial. However, his attorney, Mitch Beers, argued that Reardon was distraught over the 2004 death of his son, had been taking numerous antidepressants, and was so confused at the time that he’d “contemplated” stepping in front of a moving truck. Beers argued that since Reardon was not having financial problems at the time, the crime was nonsensical and the reliever must have been insane.
Judge Steven Rapp agreed, which means Reardon will now avoid prison. I’m sympathetic, but somehow I don’t think Andre “Bad Moon” Rison got the same treatment when he ripped off an Atlanta jeweler — and to me, anyone who lived with Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes had to be crazy. Whatever. Mazel tov to Reardon, who now avoids the system.
Those darned Vikes
The Minnesota Vikings have been taking chances with some often-arrested players lately, and now it has come back to bite them.
Wideout Koren Robinson is fast becoming the Vin Baker of the NFL, a nice guy whom everyone roots for and who plays very well from time to time only to end up, six months later, sloshed behind the wheel of a parked Mercedes, an empty bottle of Old Grandad on the passenger seat.
Robinson, a top-10 pick out of NC State back in the Richard Seymour draft, was a Pro Bowler for the Vikes last year and even won the team’s Korey Stringer award for being a good guy with the local media. He signed a nice extension over theoff-season and headed into this year as the team’s number-one wideout. But last week he was clocked going 104 in a 55-mph zone in St. Peter, Minnesota. Cops pulled him over and Robinson registered a blood-alcohol reading of 0.11, above the state limit of .08. The Vikes cut him soon after, sending Patriots fans on message boards everywhere scrambling to weigh the pros and cons of signing a problem case to the Pats’ (Reche-who?) thin receiver corps.
The other troubled Viking is safety Dwight Smith, who was arrested last week for having more sex than police — er, excuse me, indecent conduct with a female in a Minneapolis stairwell. Smith is well known to Blotter readers as the former Tampa Bay Buc who was once arrested for waving a pellet at people in a McDonald’s drive-in line. He also once had a road-rage incident outside Hooters. Smith was not released by the team.
Another NFL-arrest standout was picked up last week: Tennessee Titans big-mouthed cornerback Adam “Pacman” Jones was busted for disorderly conduct when he refused to leave a nightclub in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Pacman claims that a girl stole his wallet and passed it to a friend and that he was arguing loudly with her when police arrived. The team bought Pacman’s story and only suspended him for one preseason game. Pacman was arrested in a nightclub incident a few months after being a top-ten pick in 2005.
Pizza, pizza!
If you happen to scan homicide accounts on a regular basis, you’ve probably already figured it out: working as a pizza-delivery guy is probably one job you’d rather do without. In the past ten years, killing and robbing the pizza-delivery guy has become a boutique crime among crackheads and aspiring Leopold and Loeb–type teenagers alike. But the trend hadn’t penetrated the sports world until this summer.
Police in Las Cruces last week arrested New Mexico State University forward Tyrone Nelson after a pizza-delivery man identified him as one of the men who’d robbed him days before. Nelson posted a $15,000 bond and was suspended by the team temporarily.
Earlier this summer James Kennedy, a baseball player for New Jersey’s Rider University, was arrested after a pizza-delivery woman thought she saw an automatic rifle in Kennedy’s room.
When he’s not googling “Old Grandad” and “pizza delivery,” Matt Taibbi is writing for Rolling Stone. He can be reached at m_taibbi@yahoo.com.
