Hard Time
When the Rams departed Anaheim for St. Louis, they left starting cornerback Darryl Henley behind.
In prison.
A short time later, after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, Henley was transferred to the U.S. Penitentiary here, a little more than 100 miles up the road from the Trans World Dome, where the St. Louis Rams will play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday for the right to advance to the Super Bowl.
“I had never heard of this place and had no idea where it was, and I get here and all they show on TV are the Rams,” Henley said. “I remember saying to myself, ‘God, now you’re really punishing me.’ ”
He could have been preparing this week to take on the Buccaneers, lending his experience, having played in the Rams’ last appearance in an NFC championship game 10 years ago this month as a rookie defensive back from UCLA.
He had led the Rams in interceptions their final season in Anaheim, and had a $1.2-million contract offer to continue his career in St. Louis.
But now he’s Inmate No. 01915-112, confined to his prison cell 21 hours a day, and instead of practicing with his Ram buddies Todd Lyght and Keith Lyle, he bumps into the likes of organized crime boss John Gotti while walking the yard.
There is no possibility for parole. With good time already factored into his release, Henley, 33, will not get out of prison before March 28, 2031.
“In the beginning you don’t even want to wake up--wanting to be just dead,” he said. “And not because of 2031, but because of today and tomorrow and there’s nothing. . . .”
It is visiting day, and Henley and the institution’s warden have given permission for a face-to-face interview in one of the country’s two maximum-security federal prisons. With the exception of Henley and Gotti, who have been sent here directly by their sentencing judges, most of the 285 inmates ensconced beneath the gun turrets and behind the fences, bars and barbed wire have been transferred to Marion because of discipline problems elsewhere in the prison system.
This is the toughest crowd anywhere behind bars, bars so secure that since it became a maximum security facility in 1983, there have been no escapes.
There is no physical contact with anyone from the outside world. Henley’s daughter, Gia, is 4, and although she visits once a month, he has not touched her since before her first birthday while he was being held in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center. He watched her walk for the first time behind plexiglass.
He married Alisa, the mother of his child, a little more than two years ago, the bride and groom separated by plexiglass. They exchanged rings through a tray normally used by attorneys to pass documents to inmates, a mechanism designed to prevent any kind of human contact.
“This is not a good place at all,” Henley said, and while most inmates at Marion earn a transfer to a less-restrictive facility after a three-year behavior modification program, Henley’s offense will keep him here much longer. “I just want to have contact with my family. You can put me in China, but I just want to kiss my daughter instead of kissing the glass when she leaves.”
Henley has been brought to the visiting room in handcuffs and has been locked into a smaller room not much larger than a telephone booth. The handcuffs have been removed, and the interview takes place over the telephone.
“I told my mom . . . everything I touched, turned to crap,” he said. “Every single thing I tried to do dug me a hole that much deeper.”
The July 15, 1993, arrest of a former Ram cheerleader with a suitcase carrying 12 kilos of cocaine led to Henley’s indictment. He was accused of masterminding a cross-country drug trafficking ring. An Orange County jury found him and several others guilty, but before the judge could impose the sentence--a minimum of 10 years--there was an investigation into jury tampering.
While in jail, Henley tried to put together a heroin deal--pulling in his younger brother--with the intent of raising $200,000 to arrange for the murders of the cheerleader, who testified against him, and the presiding U.S. District Court judge.
His brother pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy and is serving time in Big Springs, Texas.
“He would not have been in jail if it wasn’t for me,” Henley said. “It just takes one second to try and pull yourself out of a spin and you can find yourself in so much crap. Just one second.”
Henley vigorously defended himself on the drug charges that began his troubles and still maintains he was not guilty of many of the specific things suggested by the government. But he acknowledges that he knew what was going on, and given the opportunity to stop it, he did not.
“Did I know what was going on? Yes, I knew what was going on. I did nothing, absolutely nothing, and I could have. There was a window of opportunity. I could have literally said this ain’t cool and this isn’t going to happen. There was a chance to say, ‘yea’ or ‘nay.’ I didn’t say either, so if you decide to do nothing, aren’t you really saying OK?
“And I foresaw what was coming, or what could go wrong. You make a decision, and it’s like you’re drunk. You know you need to call somebody or whatever because you can’t drive. You even entertain the disaster possibilities, but you go against that. You’re too drunk to get in that car, but you get in anyway and something tragic happens.
“That’s what has affected me personally more than anything else. I shouldn’t be locked up, but I put myself in here.”
After being found guilty of the drug charges, he became implicated in a scheme to buy off a juror, while also learning later that another juror had been predisposed to convict him from the outset of the trial because of a racial bias. While the government worked to convict him on bribing a juror, he became infuriated by the judge’s ruling that the weight of evidence outweighed any racial bias from any other juror.
“That’s when I lost it, when I lost everything,” said Henley, who began talking about a plan to murder U.S. District Court Judge Gary Taylor.
“Yeah, I was part of the conspiracy to commit murder,” he said. “When it was brought up to me on the phone in jail, I said, ‘How ridiculous.’ But an hour later I’m entertaining the idea and then I’m on the phone listening to how it can actually be done. That whole process started on a Thursday night and ended the next Wednesday and shaped the rest of my life.
“At no point in my life was there a history of violence, but there were moments in my trial after hearing things said, that it was like, ‘God, if I could kill that person.’ It was like [road rage] and being cut off on a highway. I don’t know at what point a man entertains something that he would never be a part of in his life--maybe a professional person can help me with that.”
Penitentiary rules allow only five 15-minute phone calls a month, and with 21 hours a day spent in his cell, there isn’t much more to do than think about what has brought him to this wasted moment of time.
“When I lay down at night, that’s what I think about. Even when I had the chance to get some of my life back I wasn’t strong enough to pull myself out. I think about two weeks in July in 1993, and the snowball effect it had on my life. This all started in the course of two weeks. The people involved [in the drug trafficking] were not very good at it, obviously. From the beginning of the month when everything was fine to the 15th when it was horrible--that’s a downward spiral that happened so fast.”
Henley struggles when pressed to explain why an athlete making hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a Mercedes and BMW and all the other luxuries of life, would risk throwing it all away.
“It’s like the prosecutors said in their closing arguments,” he said. “Don’t ask us for a motive because we don’t have one.
“I got off the why early on because there wasn’t an answer. That was a different Darryl Henley, who was chasing ghosts. The reality of it now is prison. The message--the result--has to be greater than the why. I put myself in handcuffs; I put myself in Marion by the decisions I made.”
After the Rams’ success in Henley’s rookie season, the team suffered three consecutive losing seasons, and Henley became increasingly depressed. He had enjoyed success at UCLA, played in the NFC title game as a rookie and expected the good run to continue.
Unhappy, he left California to build a house in Atlanta without really knowing anyone there. He attracted a new cadre of friends, and as he would understand too late, they shared none of the character qualities or goals that he had come to expect in his life.
“I remember Coach Terry Donahue being called to testify and the prosecutor asking only one question: Do you know [the co-defendants] in this case or anything about them? And he didn’t, and it hit me right in the stomach. How had I allowed these external factors to become so prominent in my life?
“How does someone who has the world by the tail allow something that’s destined for disaster to become all encompassing in his life? I had gotten caught up in something. Terrible, terrible mistakes--mistakes in judgment.”
He is not allowed to work in prison or do much of anything beyond the two or three hours of recreation a day, and so there is always the unrelenting insistence of time to reflect. And that can be as punishing.
“I had one guy tell me, ‘Youngster, in here you want to stay up late at night and sleep in as long as you can in the morning.’ I was doing that for a while. All the time you are awake, your mind, it’s like it becomes overwhelming. But you just have to go on--what other choices are there? You don’t walk around thinking about 2031--to be productive or remain sane, I deal with the reality of how can I get from here to there.”
Where is “there” when there’s nowhere to go? There is no understanding life on the inside while standing outside with a certified get-out-of-jail card, but Henley’s problems are of his own making.
“It’s hard to feel sorry for anyone accused of wanting to kill someone, and how do you feel sorry?” he said. “I don’t want anyone to feel that way about me. But I need to salvage the life that I have left.
“My daughter asks, ‘Daddy, when are you coming home?’ When she leaves here, it breaks my heart. I’ve gotten mad at God: ‘Why did you let me have a kid?’ Some day I am going to have to sit across from her and tell her about the mistakes I have made. Right now we tell her Daddy’s out of town, but she’s already figuring things out. She told my mom, ‘He’s stuck in that town and I can’t get him out.’ I have a family, and they depend on me, and so there has to be something progressive and positive about life. There’s too much at stake.”
Henley has written letters to athletes who have had problems of their own recently, but he does not want to talk about it for fear someone will consider him a crusader. He wrote a letter to Ram President John Shaw a few years ago, and Shaw passed it on to Coach Dick Vermeil, who read it to the team.
It is not good to be a celebrity in prison, Henley said, so he doesn’t talk much and does not advertise that he previously played for the Rams. He said he marvels at the speed of the Ram players, but wonders if he couldn’t still measure up.
But Sunday he will be sitting in a jail cell watching them play.
“Can’t you coat that in any other way?” he said.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
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