After that cranky rant, I feel I ought to mellow out a little bit. Here’s Matt Taibbi’s advice to professional athletes who plan to end up in the criminal justice system. An excerpt:
If you get caught in any kind of drug/illegal-substance scandal, even if the drugs are on you, it doesn’t matter: They belonged to your cousin. Even if you don’t have a cousin. A-Rod, outed last year for steroids, produced a cousin sporting the name of a Soviet cosmonaut: Yuri Sucart. The aforementioned Ty Law blamed his cousin, who wasn’t even in the area code of the ecstasy incident, for leaving a suitcase at Law’s house that just happened to contain seven E tabs and that Law just happened to grab instead of his own suitcase before heading out on a middle-of-the-night run to a strip club in Canada. Vikings running back Onterrio Smith, caught trying to hustle a rubber-dong-and-dried-urine kit called the Whizzinator through airport security, insisted that he was only shepherding the device “to my cousin” — curious, since between Smith and his cousin, Smith was probably the only one who needed a way to beat regular supervised drug tests. Variations on the cousin ploy include letting your friend take the rap for the shit found in your bag (see Anthony, Carmelo, busted on a weed-in-backpack rap in a Denver airport) and saying the drug pipe in your car belonged to a friend from rehab you’re trying to help get over an addiction (Michael Irvin, in an inspired performance).
(Obviously, this is for entertainment value only, not legal advice, not written by a lawyer, etc.)