nfl players are FOOD for car dealers, jewelry dealers, agents and financial advisors
Let's discuss Clinton Portis.
In the words of Dolemite......ah you thought I didn't do it,huh?...well check out this good shyt...
By
Brian Burnsed
June 28, 2017
Fortune pilfered, Clinton Portis contemplated revenge under the veil of darkness. On a handful of late nights and early mornings in 2013 he lurked in his car near a Washington, D.C.–area office building, pistol at his side, and waited for one of several men who had managed a large chunk of the $43.1 million he earned with his 2,230 carries over nine NFL seasons. Purportedly safe investments had suspiciously soured, and almost all the money Portis set aside to fund his future had evaporated. That future included a mother who doubles as his hero and four sons scattered across the Southeast. Their comfort and security. Their happiness.
The hucksters he deemed most responsible ignored his calls. None were bound for jail. Their coffers were dry; a lawsuit seemed pointless. Once his helplessness gave way to rage, Portis lusted for a confrontation. He would meet this betrayer not with pleas or demands, or even blows delivered by thick fists attached to thick forearms. Bullets, he thought, were his sole means of balancing the scale.
“It wasn’t no
beat up,” Portis says. “It was
kill.”
He recounts those grim urges in the kitchen of his two-bedroom apartment, 11 floors below the penthouse of a chic tower in Northern Virginia, as winds bellow outside the panoramic windows. Portis, 35, plays dominoes with a nephew as he speaks, reflecting on his private fury and his public bankruptcy—due in part to his own gambling and profligacy—and how he gradually learned to embrace life this far from the top.
As he sifts through his past, his focus remains fixed on the array of tiles in front of him.
Illustration by Michael Byers
Flanked by Redskins owner and close friend Daniel Snyder at his retirement press conference on Aug. 23, 2012, Portis responded to a question about his life after football by calling to his side two of his sons, Chaz and Camdin. Ever fashionable, Clinton wore a sharp dark-blue blazer and a sparkling stud in each ear. Ever honest, he choked back tears while reminiscing about a nursing assistant who once told her young son that if she ever grew wealthy, she would buy a Jaguar and a house painted purple, the color of royalty. “She’s got a Jaguar. She’s got a purple house,” Portis said of his mother, Rhonnel Hearn-Pearson. “And she’ll forever be a queen in my eyes.”
Just 30 years old, the 5' 11", 218-pound Portis was only 77 rushing yards shy of 10,000 for his career and 648 short of John Riggins’s all-time Redskins mark—but he was eager to deliver that farewell speech. His infatuation with football, in fact, had begun to wane five years earlier when Snyder had knocked on his hotel room door in Miami, sun not yet peeking through the blinds, and collapsed into the running back’s arms, muttering through sobs that the teammate Portis most revered, Sean Taylor, had succumbed to gunshot wounds.
Taylor’s death, compounded by the loss of several other friends and family members in short succession, marked the end of Portis’s trademark frivolity. Gone were Southeast Jerome, Kid Bro Sweets, Sheriff Gonna Getcha and the gaggle of other characters he’d once embodied, in full costume—loud wigs, novelty glasses, fake teeth—to enliven press conferences. Football became a vocation; chasing accolades and solidifying a legacy proved not to be worth the concussions, the broken bones, the dislocated joints. And that mind-set carried repercussions. Though he ranks sixth in NFL history in rushing yards per game (87.8—less than a yard behind Walter Payton) and though teammates still tout his singular skills as a pass blocker, Portis fielded two questions about his famous characters during his farewell press conference . . . and only one about the Hall of Fame. Canton-eligible since 2015, he has yet to be named even a finalist.
Portis says that sex, not drugs or alcohol, provided the salve he needed after Taylor’s death. He took lavish, impromptu trips overseas, sometimes with women he hardly knew, sometimes three or four at a time. “It was empty,” Portis laments.
In 2004, when he was only 22, he had been traded to the Redskins after two seasons with the Broncos and inked what was then the largest contract for a running back in league history: eight years for $50.5 million, including $17 million in bonuses. He flaunted his various houses (how many? “A lot,” he says) on MTV and on the NFL Network, leading cameras past waterfalls, tanks of exotic fish, stripper poles, rows of designer suits and an armada of cars with gargantuan rims. As Portis’s fortune grew, so seemingly did its gravity, pulling more properties, luxuries and hangers-on into his orbit. Former teammates and friends in the league, even those of comparable means, dared not try to keep pace. “Portis was on a different level,” says former Washington teammate Santana Moss, who himself once owned 11 vehicles. “He didn’t think about tomorrow.”
Not all of Portis’s expenses were typical of what he flaunted on
Cribs. He built a house for his maternal grandparents. He helped support a vast extended family in Mississippi. He bought his mother the Jaguar and the 8,381-square-foot purple abode in Gainesville, Fla., that he knew she craved. He hosted massive picnics in Florida and Virginia for anyone who wanted a free meal.
In hindsight, Portis wishes he’d spent millions more—better that than to see so much of his fortune immolated with a few flicks of a pen. Once he was a star, former University of Miami teammate Rod Mack, who worked as a money manager after college, introduced Portis to Jeff Rubin, a financial adviser whose client list would go on to include Moss, Terrell Owens, Jevon Kearse and a cadre of other notable (and wealthy) players. Eventually, Portis made the acquaintance of Jinesh Brahmbhatt, a financial adviser whose past included a stint at Stratton Oakmont, the infamous firm that inspired
The Wolf of Wall Street. Tailored suits and indecipherable business jargon worked their magic. “They come impressive,” Portis says. “The complication begins because you don’t understand it. You don’t know what they’re saying, but you just get involved.”
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Classic photos of Clinton Portis |
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Snyder and former Washington coach Joe Gibbs checked with Portis on occasion.
Was he being wise with his money? Earnestly, Portis assured them he was. He’d entrusted millions on the word of men he had reason to believe in—both Rubin and Brahmbhatt were registered financial advisers with the NFL Players Association, after all.
That designation proved meaningless. According to a series of lawsuits filed by Portis between 2011 and ’13, Rubin and his associates first persuaded the running back to sink $1 million into a southern Alabama casino. In ’12, local authorities shut down that casino’s lifeblood, a digital bingo operation, after it ran afoul of state regulations.
One suit also alleges that Rubin’s company opened an account for Portis at BankAtlantic using a forged signature card that gave power of attorney to some of Rubin’s employees. Rubin’s firm, Portis says, made withdrawals without his knowledge, bleeding more than $3.1 million from his account, some of it funneled to the casino project. (Rubin’s lawyer did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
Simultaneously, Brahmbhatt steered Portis and other NFL players to invest with Success Trade Securities, overseen by his former Stratton Oakmont colleague Fuad Ahmed, whose Ponzi scheme would unravel in 2013. Nearly $14 million of those investments vanished. STS was ordered to repay the losses, and Brahmbhatt and Ahmed were eventually barred from securities trading by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. (Ahmed’s lawyer did not comment; Brahmbhatt’s rep says his client was also deceived by Ahmed, and while Brahmbhatt frequently conferred with Portis, they held no official advisory agreement.)
Portis won’t reveal exactly how much he lost through these alleged misdeeds, but among the assets in his 2015 bankruptcy filings he included a $1 million note from Ahmed’s firm as well as “potential” claims of $2 million and $8 million against Brahmbhatt’s and Rubin’s firms, respectively. Portis says that because of those investors’ insolvencies and his own legal fees, he will be lucky to recover even a fraction of his losses.
The men who duped him were shamed publicly and stripped of their right to work in the financial industry, but Portis was livid that they walked free while he was left to rebuild from relative financial ruin. “No jail time, no nothing,” Portis says. “Living happily ever after.”
A notorious press conference entertainer, Portis's lighthearted demeanor soured as he plunged into financial ruin. (Notable Portis personas, clockwise from left: Coach Janky Spanky, Bro Sweets, Dolla Bill, Dr. I Don't Know, Sheriff Gonna Getcha, Choo Choo, Reverend Gonna Change)
Caleb Jones/AP; boygabe-blogspot.co (3); Deadspin.co
Portis never pulled his gun because he couldn’t put down his phone. The voice on the other line belonged to a television producer he had met when he was auditioning for a reality show as his football career reached its end; her training as a family therapist spurred him to stay in touch as his life came unmoored. Several times she fielded calls from a man who had found bottom—sitting and waiting in the gloom, ready to upend his life and take someone else’s. “He was talking real crazy,” Portis’s friend says. “He was just so depressed.”
Even if the money had disappeared, she told him, the people who truly loved him wouldn’t. She begged him to turn his car around and go home to his mother in Gainesville, visit loved ones in Charlotte, see some friends in Miami. If he didn’t, his four boys would know him not as a charismatic former-NFL-star-turned-carpool-driver but as the man on the other side of a glass prison partition.
“You’ve already lost,” his friend told him, “but the loss you would sustain [by killing someone] would be greater.”
Prepared as he was to commit murder, sacrificing his freedom and his name for revenge, he never found whom he was looking for. But what if he
had caught a glimpse before coming to his senses? What if their paths had crossed, there in the darkness? Portis doesn’t hesitate: “We’d probably be doing this interview from prison.” (After two lengthy interviews, Portis declined to further participate in this story.)
the rest of the story is HERE
Clinton Portis's public bankruptcy, private fury
to him, fukk the NFL
.. there could be a reason they picked that day. 
