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on NFL games. Fryar had been named by his team’s officials as one of six Patriots players who used illegal drugs. The investigation remains open.
    The conditions under which players may be compromised are clear and present in the NFL today. “Our worst case would be the athlete who is strung out on drugs and has a line of credit with his drug dealer and can’t pay the bill,” says Welsh. “Then he gets that knock on the door. And [the player] says, ‘Hey, I told you. I can’t pay the bill.’ And then [the dealer] says, ‘Hey, I don’t want your money, but now you’re going to work for us.’”
    A major West Coast bookmaker agrees. “A lot of players have gotten involved in cocaine and are well over their heads—asmuch as ten thousand to twenty thousand dollars a month in cocaine. There is a very real danger that if they can’t pay their debt, they give information and do make some mistakes in a ball game so that the dealer can make a bet and even out. And that’s a great opportunity for a bookmaker, too: to set up something for a cocaine dealer and find out information that way.”
    Michael Roxborough of Las Vegas, who has succeeded Bobby Martin as the nation’s most influential oddsmaker on NFL games, told me, “The NFL is not doing a very good job in the area of drug enforcement. But people just don’t think that there is a problem with the manipulation of the outcome of NFL games. Most people think that drugs aren’t a very serious problem. Until the public demands that it gets cleaned up, the NFL isn’t going to feel that it has to do very much.”
    Former Olympic gold medalist Bob Hayes, who was also a receiver for the Dallas Cowboys and pleaded guilty to setting up a cocaine deal after he retired from football, told me, “It goes a lot further than just saying no to drugs. And the NFL has been unrealistic about that because they treat drug abuse as a problem, not a disease. The use of drugs is a disease. And when you have a disease, you are a sick person and you need to get well. Until then, people are going to try to take advantage of you.”
    Criticism of the NFL’s security system is generally not targeted at the commissioner or the security director. Instead, it’s directed at the NFL owners, who establish the league’s policies.
    Aaron Kohn, the former executive director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, told me, “They [the NFL owners] have a tendency to employ as security people former FBI agents and other people of confidence who do competent investigations and do accumulate adverse information. But at the policy-making level, the decisions are not made consistent with the fact-finding.
    â€œI know that the NFL can’t go too far. They are going to do whatever they have to to prevent the problems of their owners and players and their overall profits from becoming subjects of public scrutiny.”
    Some critics say that the league enforces its rules selectively. “Rozelle [couldn’t] enforce the rules against the owners because he [worked] for them,” Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) and a former all-pro guard for the Oakland Raiders, told me. “There’s no way he [could] say,‘I’m going to punish you because you own a racetrack, because you’re involved in Las Vegas, or because you do business with people who are involved in gambling.’ But I would like to think that the rules of suspension and banishment should also apply to the owners.”
    One top NFL official says, “We’ve had owners that have supposedly been friends or associates of mobsters, and when we looked into it they had dinner in a restaurant, maybe four or five times in a year.” Nevertheless, the NFL did nothing about these owners who socialized with underworld figures.
    Another football insider says that many