Former NFL player Sam Hurd isn't the first professional athlete to get caught trying to deal drugs to supplement his income. And he likely won't be the last. But Hurd is different than a lot of other guys who have gotten caught up in illegal drug-dealing in the past. That's because Hurd is likely going to spend the rest of his life behind bars after attempting to buy five kilos of cocaine and a ton of weed—no, really, a ton of weed—from two undercover federal agents back in December 2011. And in an excellent new investigative report that was just published by The MMQB, writer Michael McKnight reveals why Hurd was interested in buying drugs from the agents and how he went about doing it.
You can read the entire piece—it's incredibly long but well worth your time—over here. Here are some of the highlights:
- Prior to attempting to buy drugs to sell, Hurd was a huge stoner. Dude was copping pounds at a time from a dealer in California and smoked "all day, every day, and I didn't want to hear anyone trying to tell me I had a problem." He says the weed helped him focus on football.
- In addition to buying weed for himself from his Cali-based dealer, Hurd also bought and supplied his Cowboys teammates with weed regularly during his time in Dallas (Hurd later played for the Bears and was playing in Chicago when he got arrested). But in The MMQB story, he explains that he didn't sell weed to his teammates; he charged them the same exact price that he paid for the weed and, in some cases, let them slide without paying for it at all.
- The guy who got Hurd into the idea of buying cocaine in the first place was a mechanic named Toby Lujan who regularly worked on his cars.
- The first drug deal that Hurd helped finance—it was a botched deal that Lujan set up—involved $88,000 in cash that Hurd had set aside to buy his mother a house.
- When Hurd agreed to be part of a deal himself—the deal that eventually got him busted outside of a steakhouse in Chicago—he told the two undercover federal agents posing as drug traffickers that he was interested in buying 10 kilos of cocaine from them every week.
- Hurd accepted the first kilo of cocaine from the drug traffickers in a "Happy Birthday" bag. He was busted with it outside of the steakhouse just a few minutes later (The MMQB has a video of him leaving the restaurant and getting busted).
- Hurd is currently locked up at the Federal Correctional Facility in Seagoville, Texas. He was recently housed next to former NFL cornerback Darryl Henley, who is serving a sentence for dealing drugs during his playing days.
The entire Hurd story is fascinating, and it's crazy to see the moves that Hurd was trying to make in the streets in order to turn a profit off of cocaine. What's most interesting, though, is that it doesn't sound like he ever actually got deep enough into the drug game to make any money off of it. So Hurd is likely going to spend the rest of his life behind bars for trying to sell drugs, not for ever selling them. There are a lot of cautionary tales within his story. Go check it out here.
RELATED: A History of Drug-Dealing Athletes
[via The MMQB]
