Vince McMahon, WWE scandal and secrets exposed in a new book

On May 23, 1999, Owen Hart, aka Blue Blazer, was gearing up for a heroic moment.

The beloved professional wrestler was due to descend 70 feet from the rafters of a packed Kansas City stadium and into the ring for a World Wrestling Federation pay-per-view matchup against The Godfather.

But instead of triumph, there was tragedy.

An equipment malfunction caused Hart to fall to the ground, leaving him with a severed aorta.

Paramedics rushed to the arena floor and the audience first assumed it was all part of the show.

But it was not like that.

Moments later, Hart stopped breathing and would soon be pronounced dead.

But Vince McMahon, the CEO already plagued by WWF scandals who declined to comment on the allegations in this article, reportedly couldn’t bear the thought of ending the lucrative proceedings.

“Vince decreed that they must move on,” Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of the new book. “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the destruction of the United States”, he told The Post.

“Then the rest of the fighters had to act knowing that their friend was seriously injured, probably dead, and then [later] knowing he was dead,” said Riesman, who interviewed more than 150 people, many of them quite close to McMahon, while researching the tell-tale tome.

Riesman examines McMahon’s rise from an allegedly abusive childhood in impoverished Southern Pines, NC to a tycoon overseeing a $6 billion industry – and some very dark moments along the way.

In the book, Riesman claims that on that fateful night in Kansas City, McMahon had settled for a technician who had never worked with the WWF before and who had “significantly less experience with the stunt than the technician who had overseen similar entries in the past.” .

And Riesman writes that, moments after the fatal accident, McMahon had the crowd in the palm of his hand, chanting “Vince! Vince! Vince! as he entered the ring, desperate for the show to go on.

“Before the broadcast went down, you could see Vince standing there, in his character capacity, panting, trying to get his act together. He was making a theatrical grimace of determination,” Riesman writes.

The author’s research led him back to McMahon’s origin story, beginning in a supposedly toxic home with mother Vicki Askew (then Lupton) and stepfather Leo Lupton.

In an archived interview with Playboy in 2000, McMahon said that his stepfather used to physically abuse him to the point that McMahon regrets that he “died before I could kill him.”

McMahon’s ticket out of a troubled childhood came when he finally met his biological father, wrestling pioneer Vince McMahon Sr., at age 12 in the late 1950s.

“Vince basically learned the dark art of being a wrestling promoter from his father,” Riesman said of McMahon Sr., who had previously abandoned his family for another.

“That really set him on a path where he realized that he could take all of these resentments, all of these frustrations, many of them with his own father, and try to use them as leverage to assert himself or at least use them as motivation to assert himself. in addition.”

After years of training under his father, McMahon was finally ready to take over the macho empire, acquired for approximately $1 million, paid in four installments, in the early 1980s.

But the reign of the young McMahon was controversial from before the first day.

As early as 1983, for example, there were allegations, based on a police report, that McMahon was involved in, and later attempted to cover up, the death of Nancy Argentino, allegedly murdered by her WWF superstar partner Jimmy Snuka.

“There appears to be strong evidence that a previous incident of domestic violence between Nancy Argentino and Jimmy Snuka had been [suppressed] by Vince in the sense that he told Nancy to drop the case,” Riesman said.

In particular, a police report from that time stated that “Vince McMahon tried to talk [Argentino] to file the complaint against Snuka.”

A few months later, when Argentino was found dead, McMahon was reportedly on the phone with police soon after, Riesman claimed, citing a conversation with Snuka’s wrestling competitor. McMahon has previously denied any involvement in the Snuka investigation.

“The coroner recommended that it be investigated as a homicide. But long story short, the case just disappeared. Nothing came of it,” Riesman said.

“There’s a story that Jimmy Snuka told, it’s very vague in his memoir, about Vince showing up to a meeting with some authorities and bringing a briefcase, which wasn’t the usual MO, to have a briefcase with him. AND [Snuka] He doesn’t know what was in the case, but he must have helped because he was cleared of the charges immediately afterward,” Riesman said.

Following a 2015 reinvestigation, Snuka was eventually charged with murder and manslaughter.

He was found unfit for trial and died two years later in Pompano Beach, FL.

Just a few years after Argentino’s death, close associates of McMahon were embroiled in an alleged child molestation scandal, centered on the WWF’s “ring boy” program, which took children with difficult lives in the home and offered them learning to perform various tasks within the organization.

Tom Cole, a former ring boy, came forward in the early 1990s with allegations, based on a police report, of sexual misconduct against Mel Phillips, a ring announcer and head of the youth team, as well as Terry Garvin, another manager of the boy in the ring. , who allegedly propositioned Cole in exchange for a promotion.

Cole alleged that when he refused, he was fired.

The allegations ended up making headlines, including in The Post, in 1992. Phillips and Garvin, as well as their superior and McMahon’s “right-hand man” Pat Patterson, resigned that spring.

Cole eventually sued the WWF, along with his brother Lee, for $750,000 in damages. In the end, Tom earned little more than the job from him, plus $55,000.

McMahon was already battling a nightmarish press onslaught, a grand jury investigation into the company’s dealings and rape allegations against McMahon himself from its first arbitrator Rita Chatterton, who first went public on the Geraldo Rivera show in 1992 and reached an out-of-court settlement earlier this year.

. McMahon continues to deny Chatterton’s allegations.

She apparently assumed that the situation with the Coles was one she could easily charm herself out of.

Lee Cole told Riesman in an interview that McMahon had drinks and dinner, himself and Tom, and put them up in a fancy hotel room, even setting up an allegedly impromptu meeting with WWF wrestlers and managers in the hotel lobby.

The next day, at WWF headquarters in Stamford, Conn., Tom signed documents stating that the then-disgraced Pat Patterson had nothing to do with the alleged sexual abuse cases.

Patterson would be quickly reinstated.

Tom Cole took his own life years later, in 2021.

Despite McMahon’s public embarrassments, the lord of Titan Towers continues to be loved by fans around the world and many industry journalists.

In the years that followed, many more allegedly shady deals would come to light, many of them detailed in the 2022 wall street journal report that McMahon paid $12 million over the past 16 years to cover up alleged accounts of sexual misconduct and infidelity, a bombshell that resulted in McMahon’s temporary departure from the organization.

“I have pledged my full cooperation with the Special Committee’s investigation and will do my best to support the investigation. I also committed to accepting the findings and the outcome of the investigation, whatever they may be,” McMahon said at the time.

McMahon, now 77, currently serves as the executive chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, a change from his previous titles of CEO and president.

Now it is said to be actively buying the company for up to $9 billion.

Despite everything, he remains undefeated.

“The wrestling news outlets still write deferentially, sometimes even lovingly, about Vince,” Riesman wrote. “His legacy of him is safe in the industry that he remade. Mr. McMahon is armor that virtue cannot destroy.”