Unfortunately for Henley, not everybody found him as charming as his pet warder. When his tiresome boasts about being ‘Da Man’ wore thin on fellow inmates, they grassed on him. Predictably for such an inept criminal, the men on the outside with whom he was dealing turned out to be undercover FBI agents who later testified that they set up $1m of sham drug deals with Henley and the guard, adding that Henley offered then $100,000 per hit to ‘whack’ Judge Taylor and Donaho. Another outside accomplice, brother Eric, was also arrested and sentenced to five years in jail.
In March 1997, Henley received forty-one years for trafficking and plotting to kill Donaho and Taylor. ‘It is obvious that he [Henley] is even more dangerous in custody than out of custody,’ said judge Idelman at his trial. ‘If there was ever a guy who needed to be locked down twenty-four hours a day, it’s Henley. If the court was sentencing Mr Henley, the sentence would be different, I assure you. The defendant is obviously a complete and hardened criminal, so any speech to him is a waste of time.’
Henley is currently spending his time in an Illinois super-maximum-security prison alongside teflon don John Gotti and the rest of America’s most wanted. He spends twenty-three hours a day in his cell and becomes eligible for parole in 2031, when he reaches 65.
The wildest goose of ’em all
After winning the European Championship in 1992 with Denmark in one of sport’s great fairytales, the pro-digiously talented Luton Town footballer quit the beautiful game at the height of his powers to join the Wild Geese religious commune in Copenhagen. During his time with the Geese, he was to become ‘a body artist’ and rechristen himself Dorando, but it was all to end in tears.
Seven years after joining the cult, which he eventually came to run with his then girlfriend, Elstrup decided he needed a dose of self-diagnosed therapy and got it by playing music so loud that it blew all of his speakers. Even hippies draw the line somewhere, and by way of punishment Elstrup’s better half denied him visiting rights to his pet daschund. Naturally enough, this was the cue for the suicide bid which saw him kicked out of the commune seven years after he’d joined. ‘I was so depressed that I saw no reason to carry on. I tried to hang myself and cut my wrists but I couldn’t go through with it. I lay in bed for eighteen hours a day for two years.’
Not that that was the end of loony Lars. He made a brief comeback with Danish side Odense, during which he starred in a memorable testimonial match with former Denmark keeper Peter Schmeichel. ‘He screamed at me to defend,’ said Elstrup, ‘so I said, “Shut up, you big fuck”. He was so shocked he dropped the ball and their striker scored!’
After quitting Odense, Elstrup was soon in trouble again, this time for slapping a schoolboy. And then, nine years after he’d quit football, he mysteriously turned up in the middle of Copenhagen’s busiest pedestrian shopping street circled by a rope and waving his penis at passers-by. ‘In some respects,’ he said shortly before being removed by the police while kicking and screaming and threatening legal action in the European Court of Human Rights, ‘I do this to provoke people. I am very aware of people’s reactions and I love the fact that people recognise me as Lars Elstrup.’
Nakedness and cross-dressing have become themes for Elstrup. The former striker now wears women’s clothing all the time, and was arrested for showing his manhood in a mall while wearing a dress and rollerskates. Asked what he was doing by the police, he said simply: ‘We must drop our masks and examine our own shit.’
The last sighting of Elstrup was in London, when he made a guest appearance for the New Musical Express’s football side wearing only a pair of skimpy paisley underpants. Having scored five goals in their 9-5 win over lad’s mag Loaded, during which he had constantly exhorted his team-mates to drink more water, he then ran to the sidelines screaming ‘Yellow piss is for losers’. Asked if he fancied a post-match pint, a virtually naked Elstrup answered: ‘No…pussy’ and was last seen running full-tilt towards the fleshpots of Soho.
Happy families? Not him…
The man with a head shaped like a baked bean rivals Darryl Henley and OJ Simpson for first place in the gridiron Hall of Shame, which is quite some boast. A real up-and-comer for the Carolina Panthers NFL team, his gravy train hit the buffers in 1999 when his 24-year-old girlfriend Cherica Adams told him she was expecting his child. Not wanting to play happy families and with hefty drugs debts to service, the thought of handing over any of his $650,000 salary in child maintenance payments was quickly dismissed as a non-starter. The solution? The little Rae of sunshine coldly arranged for a heavily pregnant Adams to be the victim of a drive-by killing in which she was shot four times in November 1999.
He hired Van Brett Watkins to do the actual shooting, and under questioning, he soon confessed. Both Watkins and his friend Michael Kennedy, who drove the car that carried Watkins, gave identical testimony—and both of them put Carruth squarely in the frame as the mastermind of the plot. The most damning evidence of all, however, came from the mouth of the dying mother-to-be. In obvious pain, Adams told the operator who fielded her 911 call that Carruth had pulled his Ford Expedition in front of her car, forcing her to stop, before ‘somebody pulled up beside me and did this. I think he [Carruth] did it. I don’t know what to think.’
It didn’t look good when the FBI, searching for Carruth, tracked him down in a motel parking lot, where they found him in the trunk of a Toyota surrounded by candy bar wrappers and a bottle of his own urine. He’d been there for almost twenty-four hours, curled up in the foetal position.
In the face of strong evidence, further notes written by Adams before she died, and unflattering testimony from two ex-girlfriends, Carruth put up a flimsy defence. In a version of events contradicted by just about every other witness, he maintained that an angry Watkins shot Adams on his own because Adams had made an obscene gesture at him from her car after he had earlier rowed with Carruth because the gridiron star had backed out of a drug deal. It cut little ice. As a nation watched transfixed, it was clear to everyone that it was an embarrassingly porous yarn. Although Carruth’s lawyers managed to get him off the death penalty that would have accompanied the first-degree murder conviction sought by prosecutors, there was little doubt about his guilt, and his lack of remorse or emotion did little to endear him to judge or jury.
Convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, of shooting into an occupied vehicle and of using a gun with intent to kill an unborn child, Carruth will be behind bars until approximately 2039. That’s if he lives that long: the numbskull has already had two spells in solitary confinement in Raleigh’s maximum security jail for his own safety after fighting with other inmates.
His son Chancellor, however, was successfully delivered by emergency Caesarian section, but still bears the legacy of his traumatic entry to the world. Despite being a very rich child, he suffers from cerebral palsy and was unable to walk, hold a bottle or spoon until he was three years of age.
Cheeky chappie from the Valleys
Mickey Thomas was always a bit of a jack the lad, even to the point that for several seasons Match of the Day’s opening sequence included the bit of footage that had him smiling and winking to the camera after conning his way to a highly dubious free-kick. A gifted winger who could even run rings around Tommy Docherty, he gave a hint of the cheeky cockiness which was later to land him in deep water when