Crazy Raider stories Part III: GQ on Anthony Smith facing four murder charges

http://www.gq.com/sports/profiles/201302/nfl-anthony-smith-oakland-raiders-murder?printable=true&currentPage=7?mbid=social_mobile_tweet

I already started threads on Tim Brown's Super Bowl sabotage conspiracy and on JaMarcus Russell's pending comeback.

This one is strange -- and more than a bit frightening in retrospect for any reporter who dealt with what they may have thought was your garden-variety sack man with a mean streak but was apparently a burgeoning psychopathic serial killer. Through good lawyering and an engaging personality -- not to mention the presence of four menacing observers in Raiders jackets through the entirety of the trial -- he beat an arson rap with a hung jury in 2003. (Investigators found unburned mail addressed to him at the site.) Then he got another hung jury in a murder case even though police were tracking the cell phones the night it all went down, he ended up with the victim's car, and the other two co-defendants were convicted.

Now he's facing re-trial on that along with three other murders from 15 years ago that investigators just pieced together. According to police, he posed as one of them to get two people to willingly go with him, and then they turned up dead.

Interesting week of old Raider news. And since this is 10 years since Barret Robbins happened and we all know how much reporters live by anniversary stories, I imagine we'll see that one too.

It can only be a matter of time before we find out Al Davis was a frontman for nefarious ownership interests, or Lester Hayes' Stick-Umm was actually a chemical weapon being tested by the government, or something like that.

 

I'm surprised Ray Lewis loaned GQ his facemask for the art.