It’s like Goodfellas with a healthy dose of Manischevitz, according to Maurice Clarett’s attorney Nick Mango in an exclusive report by ESPN. In seeking to explain why his client may have been in fear for his life, Mango has offered that Israeli Hai Waknine bankrolled Clarett with the expectation that Clarett’s NFL contract would pay him back, ESPN reported. Waknine is a convicted felon whom prosecutors believe is connected to the Israeli mafia enclave known as "The Jerusalem Group."
ESPN broke the story last night when it was announced that Clarett had received a threatening postcard from the Los Angeles area. Clarett has claimed to have received numerous such death threats over the past year and Mango asserts that this could be why his client was arrested earlier this month while driving a truck filled with firearms by police in Columbus, Ohio. After a short chase, officers subdued Clarett and found him to be wearing a bulletproof vest. When the officers inspected his Clarett’s truck, they found a hatchet, an assault rifle and three handguns.
The postcard in question was sent to Mango’s office.
"That's our question, whether it's from him or people associated with that scene out there," Mango told ESPN. "Again, it came from Los Angeles, and we don't know what to make of that. ... We're going to turn this over to someone in law enforcement and see what they think [of the postcard]. ... We've always felt he had some reasons to fear for his safety, and we don't think any of his actions the night he was arrested — despite the way it's been spun — were that he was a threat to anyone else but more of him being in fear for his safety for quite some time."
The alleged connection between Clarett and Waknine is said to have come from a shady deal struck between the two men shortly after Clarett left college. Mango said Waknine is supposed to have bankrolled Clarett, giving him cars, cash, bodyguards and the use of a Malibu beach house in return for what would have been 60 percent of Clarett’s NFL contract.
Problems arose when the only NFL team to give Clarett an offer dumped him before he’d ever hit the field, leaving him broke. His attorney believes that this debt to Waknine and others resulted in the death threats and may have something to do with the postcard in question.
"I believe he owes [Waknine] money, and I think [Waknine] is probably not the only one" he owes, Mango told ESPN. "Whether it's someone all the way on that coast or more on this side of the country; it's no one that I'd want to owe money to. ... A call came to our office [about Waknine], kind of giving us a rumored story. It's been kind of tossed around by us, and quite frankly, Youngstown has quite a reputation — if you don't know it already — for the Italian side of that ballgame. And everyone here thought, 'Well, you wonder with money changing hands ...' Having heard the things we've heard, this is a little more concerning."
Mango told ESPN that he didn’t have the time or resources to chase down the Waknine connection but wondered why someone had put such time into creating the postcard.
"It came on a small index card like you use in school or whatever, and whatever language that was on it was actually cut and pasted in the old-fashioned sense, like typed and then cut out and pasted onto it," he said. "And then, obviously, the identity of the sender has been pretty well kept ... they took steps to keep that ... I think anything you get where the sender has taken very obvious and extreme and multiple steps to keep their identity sealed, that concerns me," he said. "Maurice has gotten other letters and, quite frankly, so have we. People write notes and might use the N-words, but it's in their handwriting some. Some sign it, even an address. In this case, none of that. There's no way to trace this one."
No comments:
Post a Comment