[trekfan]

What I’m about to tell you is the truth. Most of the truth, not the whole truth — names have been changed here and there, I’ve left some details out that would have compromised some other things, but this, this is the truest account you’ll ever get of what happened.

Let’s start with this: in my business, there are certain things you don’t ask. Normally, things like “Who, what, when, where, and why.” If the question starts like that, you’re likely gonna get a bunch of steaming BS. But “how” is an okay question to ask — not a popular one, but an okay one. And that’s how this all started because back in the 1970s, the NBA wasn’t what it was today.


The league was coming off a merger from the ABA and it was about as pretty as when your in-laws get together for Christmas and someone has the brilliant idea to buy lots of alcohol: someone’s gonna get *ucked up and make a mess of things. That’s exactly what happened when the ABA players entered the NBA … the league found themselves dealing with players who didn’t get in line with the way the NBA had done things in the past. They used a lot of drugs, hard stuff, and it was bad.


So bad, in fact, that the NBA had a major image problem. The commissioner at the time, Larry O’Brien (yeah, the same guy who they named the trophy after it), pushed for an anti-drug agreement with the players to clean up the league. It worked; not because the agreement was magical. You think the players willingly stopped doing drugs? You think they volunteered to cut back on their extracurricular activities?

Get outta here with that junk, it ain’t gonna fly. No, history records that there were some bumps but everything worked out in the end. History records that O’Brien got the deal done, cleaned up the league, and the NBA went onto becoming the super-power it is today.


History is written by people who don’t do anything except tell you what you want to hear. History didn’t record O’Brien asking the question that started us off: how. How to stop the players from doing drugs? How to clean up the sport? How to keep the league from collapsing from the bad PR, the worse TV deals, and the lack of interest?

O’Brien had his hands full in the '70s and the man knew how to get things done. He was a political man before he was named NBA commissioner. He knew guys who knew guys … he worked for JFK. He was part of that man’s “Irish Mafia,” Kennedy’s inner-circle. He worked for LBJ after JFK got his brains blown out … the guy had connections. He knew how to use them.

And in 1978, he called up my father, who was — as popular culture has named him — a “mobster.” He worked for the mob, was an important person within certain circles, and the mob controlled the streets in the most important places. East Coast. West Coast. Midwest. Just about anywhere there was an NBA team, there was a "family man" nearby, ready to do the bidding of the bosses.

O’Brien called up my father, my father called up the bosses, and a deal was struck: the mob would enforce O’Brien’s no drugs policy. Every arena would have a set of guys there, every city would have some family men who’d watch the streets and make sure no drugs made their way to an NBA player, either directly or indirectly.

You might think it’s all bull*hit, but remember — O’Brien worked for Kennedy. You think Kennedy was clean? You know he wasn’t and history does too, now. The American public wasn’t ready to hear their idolized president was just a regular *uck-up, like you and me. In the 70s, the public wasn’t ready to hear a major sports league was employing the mob to enforce a deal made with a union. It was life then — don’t ask me why, I didn’t come around till the 80s, but my father and my older brothers, they were around.

They helped keep the NBA’s nose clean. O’Brien got his league back. But what did the mob get?

Well, that’s where we come to the second how of this story. How the hell did the NBA give two teams to Kansas City and St. Louis?

The NBA owed the mob, that’s how. The bosses — in a rare moment of clarity for them — agreed to act as the enforcers for O’Brien if they could cash a blank check, essentially, someday in the future. They didn’t take any money from the NBA, they didn’t take any credit, but they wanted something for a rainy day.

And, boy, did it rain in the '80s and the '90s for the mob. The West Coast and East Coast bosses broke off relations, the East Coast eventually moved out to the Midwest, to places like St. Louis, after the feds started cracking down. The mob lost its status, its power, and became fodder for Martin Scorsese. They became a piece of Hollywood *ss that got passed around from director to director to tell another “true to life” tale that came from someone with “inside” knowledge.

What a load of BS. Hollywood got some things right, but a dead clock is right twice a day and that was about the going rate for Hollywood’s correctness.

Putting that aside, the bottom line is that the mob suffered some serious setbacks in the '80s, '90s, 2000s … the families weren’t just being locked away, they were being killed off — some by the feds, some by our own guys who sold us out for immunity. It was a dirty, nasty business by the time we get to 2015.

I was just 30 then, working under my father in one of the last of the mob families left, the Jones (not their real name — got to change certain things, you know). We were operating out of St. Louis, trying to squeeze out a profitable life as (mostly) legal citizens. We were doing a pretty good job for the family, but we weren’t making the kind of cash that the mob made back before all the crackdowns.

Across the state, way on the other side, was the main West Coast family: the Young clan (also, not their real name). Bunch of pricks with sticks up their *ss. Anyway, those guys worked the West side of that NBA deal back in the 70s and they were struggling. Kansas City isn’t exactly a cultured town — St. Louis is a great town, great people, they know how to do things, but Kansas City was the country town that ended up with a Walmart Supercenter and somehow stumbled into two pro sports teams.

As you can imagine, the Youngs weren’t exactly sure how to survive. But sports was big in KC, as it is in any town, and so they hatched the idea to cash the blank check, given to them by Larry O’Brien. They wanted a team.


Now, you got to ask, how did Adam Silver — a man who wasn’t even involved in this back in the '70s — maneuver the NBA owners to grant two more teams to the league?


He didn’t. Silver was many things, but the man didn’t like to be the bad guy. He could tow a hard line, but if he didn’t have a good deal of support behind him, he’d fold. No, the Youngs went to David Stern, who was a part of the deal as an underling for O’Brien, to push it through. When the Jones family caught word of what was happening, they cashed their blank check for the same thing.

Stern had no choice but to honor it. The man was a fighter, he could have dragged us through all kinds of legal BS, but he didn’t because he knew that without us it would have taken a hell of a lot longer for the NBA to clean up the league, if it ever got clean at all. No, he owed us and he paid up. We would have made life messy for him if he didn't. Behind the scenes, top-secret negotiations were carried out by Stern, all the while the last of the mob families gathered either in Kansas City or St. Louis, depending on their allegiances.


The deal was kept top-secret until the playoffs hit. With most of the NBA season over, the league announced the two teams. Kansas City went with the predictable “Knights” name, a boring *ss choice if there ever was one.


And St. Louis? Well, we decided to do something a little more abstract … something that captured just how we wanted the team to play, something that captured our imaginations, and something that was definitely marketable.

That’s how the St. Louis Flight came into existence.