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Friday, May 03, 2002

We were standing by his pool, Tank Black and I, and he was on his cell phone with the guy who regularly did the detailing on his Mercedes, the big black one that set him back $144,000. There was a smaller one out front in the driveway and a massive gold Range Rover in the garage.

His wife wasn't home at the moment, but I don't imagine she was driving a '92 Bonneville.

"Damn Tank," I remember saying, "you've got close to a half million dollars' worth of vehicles here."

"Yeah," Tank said, smiling as he hung up, "I guess I do."

Earlier that day in his office at Professional Management Incorporated, he'd showed me a glossy brochure for a corporate jet he was thinking about buying. It would cost, well, he wasn't sure, but seven figures.

I felt good for him in a perverse way. He'd been born into blistering poverty in Johnson City, Tenn., one of nine children who'd been raised by his grandmother in a house not much bigger than the big black Mercedes.

I was hanging out at his house in South Carolina, doing a story on what the NFL draft is like for a wildly successful superagent in the afterglow of the Jerry Maguire craze, and how this wildly successful superagent impacted the lives of young people born into the same kind of rural poverty he'd come from.

One of them was superb Jacksonville Jaguars running back Fred Taylor, who quit school in 9th grade but was coaxed back to play football. In his grandmother's back yard the day he was the ninth player selected in the 1998 draft, Fred held his infant daughter and said this about Tank:

"I know I've got a great agent in Tank Black. He's as good as I could have found. I can spot a person who is down to earth, a person I can build a relationship with. He's right for me."

The remainder of the thousands of words I wrote about Tank that April was marked by similar testimony

Johnny Davis, who coached football and sold used cars in Belle Glade, Fla., who thought he could spot a con man from across three football fields, visited Tank on behalf of Tadpole Blackman, a Belle Glade kid who'd also be drafted that day.

"I was very impressed," Johnny was telling me in his showroom. "He offers a lot of services. Life and disability insurance. He has legal services. But what I really like about him is that I can tell the money will be wisely invested. He's not somebody who's just in this to get a signing bonus and get himself a signing bonus. I told Tank I'm looking for more than an agent. I'm lookin' for a relationship for the kid."

Maybe you've noted that a lot of Tank's relationships have taken a beating since that promising spring. Next week in a federal court in Florida, Tank finds out how big a chunk of the remainder of his natural life he'll spend in prison.

Of all the things I've been spectacularly wrong about -- and this includes pronouncements like "there will never be casino gambling in Atlantic City" (1975) and "professional teams with ridiculous nicknames like 'Penguins' and 'Blue Jays' will never win a championship" (1990) -- nothing's had quite the scalding embarrassing backlash as the story of William "Tank" Black.

For swindling up to $14 million dollars from Fred and about a dozen other NFL players, for defrauding the federal government, for conspiracy to commit mail fraud, for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and for obstruction of justice, Tank faces up to 25 years of hard time. He's already serving time on money laundering charges and for helping convicted drug traffickers move cash from Detroit to South Carolina and the Bahamas, then back into the United States via a complex series of phony corporations and off shore accounts.

Man, no wonder he had such a cool TV.

Fred cried on the witness stand in January when he described how Tank had swindled him out of a $5 million signing bonus. "I agreed with everything he said," Fred said. "I trusted him with my life, with my daughter's life."

Funny, but when I finally settled on Tank Black as the subject for that story, I was mildly disappointed because I didn't think Black was sleazy enough. Turned out the only inadequate element in the whole narrative was me.