Jump by Mike Lupica Read Free Book Online Page B

big shots there was a big Yankee fan and a friend of George Steinbrenner, the owner. The big shot, named DeLuca, acted like he was doing DiMaggio a favor by getting him in there with the other drones, all those young Ivy League dickheads who came to work half asleep because that was the time in New York when cocaine started showing up everywhere and the Ivy Leaguers had been out all night. DiMaggio lasted seventeen fun-filled months, then it was down to Washington, ending up on John Dowd’s staff. One of the lawyers at the Players Association knew DiMaggio was looking to make a move. He also knew Dowd was going to be handling the Pete Rose investigation for baseball. He got DiMaggio an interview, and Dowd jumped at the chance of having an ex-player on his staff.
    Suddenly, lawyering wasn’t just sitting behind a desk. Suddenly, he wasn’t waiting anymore. Waiting for his father. Waiting for the big leagues. Waiting for a chance to get into the game. Waiting for real cases. This
was
a real case, with real action. Some of the other guys on the case were in awe of Rose, felt sorry for him because they’d grown up watching him play his ass off and get all those hits. They wanted to buy into the bullshit mythology, too. Shit, he’s Charlie Hustle, he can’t be betting on baseball! They were like everybody on the outside, amazed that their heroes could fuck up.
    DiMaggio came at it all differently, after all the years on the inside. DiMaggio was long past thinking line drives made you smart or noble or good. There’d always been drunks, there’d always been guys taking dope, there’d always been gambling going on. Guys beatingtheir wives. Now it just happened to be the guy who ended up with more hits than anybody in history.
    “You’re not trying to make a case against Pete Rose,” Dowd would tell them. “You’re just trying to make a case against some guy who may have broken the baseball law.” Sometimes DiMaggio thought he was the only one who got it, all the way up until Dowd got Rose.
    Dowd offered him a permanent job in D.C., and DiMaggio thought about taking it. He had an apartment he liked in Georgetown, he had drifted into an affair with a producer from National Public Radio, he felt settled for the first time since he’d left Commack to play ball. Then Dowd got the call from Jupiter that changed everything.
    The man’s name was Ness Florescu. DiMaggio was vaguely aware of him from watching gymnastics at the Olympics. He had been coaching the Romanian women for years, and the Romanian women had won a pile of medals, and finally Florescu had moved to the United States and opened his own academy in Jupiter, Florida, about a half hour north of Palm Beach. Parents brought girls from all over the country to Florescu because he was supposed to be a kid’s best shot at a gold medal. His best shot at a medal that year, 1992, was a sixteen-year-old named Kim Cassidy. But a few weeks before, Cassidy had been mugged and nearly raped outside one of Florescu’s dormitories. In the process, the attacker had ruined the kid’s knee to the point where she needed surgery.
    It turned out Florescu was a baseball fan, so he knew all about the Rose investigation. Florescu called John Dowd and said he didn’t think what happened to Kim Cassidy was an accident. He didn’t want to press charges if he was wrong because he figured that would finish him in gymnastics. But the Olympic trials were coming up and now that Cassidy couldn’t compete, the favorite for the gold medal was another kid from Houston who’d been Cassidy’s rival from the time they started competing against each other when they were eight.
    Florescu sat in Dowd’s office with Dowd and DiMaggio and told them he thought the attack on Kim Cassidy might have been arranged.
    “I don’t want to be the official sports snoop,” Dowd said afterFlorescu left. “Besides, this guy sounds crazy. Nobody’s been whacking out the competition since they used to do it