Otto Penzler - The Best American Crime Writing 2003

“There are too many things to list,” says the voice. “It would take ten sheets of paper.”

If he’d made that tape today, Gus may have added one more thing: the credit card he had finally obtained. The first he ever owned. It was one of the proudest moments of his life, proof of his new standing in society.

Jayson had had something of an epiphany himself a few years earlier, after another NBA star and St. John’s alumnus, Chris Mullin, explained the economics of sobriety. Mullin told Jayson he had decided to give up drinking. If I stick with alcohol, he said, I’ll end up back on the streets with nothing to show for my work. If I sober up, it’ll translate into nearly $30 million over ten years. With a return like that, why not put the high life on hold for at least a decade?

These figures, this logic, they intrigued Jayson, a man forever obsessed with money. How much he had. How much others had. So he cut back on the party scene. Even suggested inserting a no-alcohol clause into his 1996 contract. No more public scandals. No more tipsy brawls.

Smarter, soberer, more mature, Jayson became a near-great player, the best rebounder in the NBA. He was selected to the Eastern Conference All-Star team. The year his Nets made the playoffs, this was when all the promise was finally fulfilled. The Nets rewarded Jayson with an astounding $86 million contract, which spawned an estate measured by equally astounding numbers: more than $100,000 a year in property taxes. Proof that a former outlaw can be made clean and shiny and new.

As the guided tour of Who Knew? stretches into the early-morning hours, Jayson’s blood alcohol level, according to a source close to the investigation, is conservatively estimated at.19. He is animated. Witnesses say that at one point he bares his torso to show off how buff he is; at another, for the second time that evening, he addresses Gus. Puts him down. Half good-naturedly.

Why Gus? Maybe because he’s neither a player nor a groupie.

Maybe because he’s the clear-cut comic foil in this late-night tableau, which is by now replete with all the makings of a Jayson Williams theatrical performance: alcohol, money, attitude. The only thing missing is a gun-the most obvious manifestation of a man’s need to prove his manhood.

Tales of athletes and firearms are hardly unusual in this day and time, but there’s nothing routine about Jayson’s love of guns, not if one anecdote in his book is grounded in any semblance of truth. The scene was an after-hours gathering at Manute Bol’s home. Jayson and his buddy Franco were drinking with Bol and his uncle from the Sudan. Fueled by a couple of Heinekens, Bol’s uncle started giving Jayson a hard time. “You the one they call Mr. Capone? You not so tough.” When Bol’s uncle donned a necklace of crow feet, rooster feet, and turtle heads to prove that Jayson’s tough-guy act was no match for his charms, they all had a good laugh. But Bol’s uncle kept pushing. It was around 3:00 A.M. when Jayson fetched a pistol from his BMW, pointed it at Bol’s uncle, and scared the man half to death.

These days Jayson’s tastes run toward shotguns. He shoots skeet, as if he has tamed his family’s legacy of Wild West shoot-outs. Turned his frontier sensibility into a rich man’s game. Truth be told, though, he nearly blew New York Jets receiver Wayne Chrebet’s head off by accident once, not the kind of gunmanship a hunt club looks for in a man.

In fact, it’s remarkable that Jayson is permitted to own guns, considering the night in 1994 when he was charged with reckless endangerment and unlawful possession of a weapon in the parking lot outside the Nets’ arena. Prosecutor John Fahy claims Jayson fired a SIG Sauer.40-caliber automatic pistol over the heads of teammates. Jayson says he never fired the gun. No one was hurt. Over Fahy’s vigorous objections, the judge dropped the charges after Jayson agreed to enter a pretrial program and to spend a year lecturing children about the dangers of guns. As part of his rehabilitation, he purchased newspaper ads in the Bergen Record . “Shoot for the top. Shoot for your future. Shoot Baskets, not Guns.”

The rack on the wall in Jayson’s enormous bedroom holds several shotguns. It is one of the first things Gus sees when he enters the room between 2:30 and 3:00 A.M. along with Jayson and three Globetrotters. Gus does not have to know that some of the guns are loaded to feel uneasy; he hates all guns. He has hated them since his father tried to teach him to hunt as a child. Back then Gus would not touch his father’s shotgun. Even the replica pistols his friend Joe used to collect gave him the creeps.

According to witness accounts, evidence at the scene, and sources close to the investigation, this is what happens next: With Culuko in the doorway behind him, Williams opens the glass case-which is unlocked-and takes out a twelve-gauge double-barreled Browning shotgun. He cracks the gun open, lowers the barrel, and peers inside. Turning toward Gus, who stands three feet away, he flicks the gun shut with a snap of his wrist. The moment the barrel clicks into place, the shotgun discharges. All twelve pellets enter the left side of Gus’s chest. They open a hole large enough to swallow a silver dollar. Gus Christofi falls, coming to rest on the floor on his left side. The life bleeds out of him, a good life, fifty-five years in the making and a few minutes in the ending.

It is not likely that he is conscious after the pellets tear into his chest. It is not likely he is able to reflect on the profound and futile and sorry unfairness of it all: that seven years spent fleeing his previous life led him back to a world worse than any he’d left. That there are some sins for which you never stop paying.

According to witness accounts, the blast awakens Jayson’s half brother, who rushes in from a distant bedroom. John Gordnick comes from the downstairs gym, where he was playing ball with his two young sons. Williams and Culuko confer. Culuko instructs the witnesses to tell the police it was a suicide. Jayson wipes down the gun. And then he takes the hand of Gus’s dead body, still warm, and tries to imprint Gus’s fingerprints on the stock.

Jayson takes off his clothes and tosses them to Gordnick to dispose of before the police arrive. He goes downstairs and dives into the pool to wash himself clean, wipe away any trace of what he has done, and when his body emerges, six feet ten inches of finely tuned athlete, it glistens, free of all sin-renewed, restored, absolved. He drapes it in a fresh set of clothes and awaits the arrival of the authorities. He will plead innocent to seven charges, including aggravated manslaughter, a crime that carries a penalty of ten to thirty years in prison.

On February 20, Gus Christofi’s body is lowered into the ground, accompanied by Joe Armstrong’s seven-year-sobriety medallion. Gus himself didn’t make it to seven. But perhaps in death he will right one more life, the life of Jayson Williams, as Jayson sits and ponders his misdeeds, maybe in a jail cell, a cell Gus used to call home. Who knew?

Jayson Williams’s book wasn’t your average athletes bio. Jayson Williams’s book boasted of the usual-his tough-childhood-to-rural-estate rise through the ranks; his basketball skills; his predictably defiant attitude. But it also boasted of some very odd stuff. Like his swaggery abuse of alcohol. Like the night he pointed a pistol at a teammate’s uncle. The night he inadvertently discharged a shotgun so close to another athlete’s head that the other guy was knocked unconscious. Jayson Williams was always a popular guy as a player. No surprise his book became a best-seller. Some must have loved it for its comic content. Me, I found it fascinating as a grim, dead-serious cry for help. For someone to save him from himself. But there must have been a lot of people who hadn’t read it, judging from the widespread response in the days after a limo driver was shot dead in Jayson’s bedroom after a night of revelry. Jayson? Jayson the doer of good works? Kind-hearted and funny as hell? Jayson couldn’t have blown the guy away. Jayson the national TV commentator? Former All-Star? But he had: with one of the shotguns he kept loaded in an unlocked case on his bedroom wall. After a night of drinking .