DarrylHenley.com

Darryl's Biography &
Legal Summary

BIOGRAPHY:

Darryl Henley was born in Los Angeles on October 30,
1966 to Thomas Henley and his wife Dorothy -- freshly
married and off the bus from rural Texas.

Thomas, or "T.H." as he became known, worked tirelessly
over the next ten years to move his family from South
Central LA to the Inland Empire, a swatch of quiet suburbs
northeast of the city. Once outside the cauldron of LA, the
Henleys worked even harder to send their three sons to
Damien High School, a private, boys-only, parochial school
in the town of LaVerne.

Darryl's older brother, Thomas III, went on to receive an
athletic scholarship from Stanford University and an M.B.A.
from UCLA Graduate School. His younger brother, Eric,
also received an athletic scholarship to Rice University
(Houston, Texas) where he received a degree in business
management.

The Henley boys were an educated bunch whose talents on
the football field brought numerous accomplishments.
Darryl chose UCLA over Stanford and about 100 other
schools.

While at UCLA, he became a member of Alpha Phi Alpha
Fraternity, Inc. in the fall of 1985. By his senior year in
college, he received several underclassmen awards
including First Team Freshman All-American and Second
Team ALL-PAC 10 Conference. However, it was his final
season that reaped the most personal success; First Team
All PAC Conference, First Team Kodak All-American, First
Team Sporting News All-American, First Team Walter Camp
All-American. In all, Darryl achieved a Consensus
All-American First Team Selection as one of the top 11
defensive players in the country.

In April, 1989, he was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in
the second round of the NFL Draft. A draft class that
included household greats such as Troy Aikman (Henley's
teammate at UCLA), Deion Sanders "Prime-Time", the late
Derrick Thomas, Barry Sanders, Andre Rison, Eric Metcalf,
and a host of others. By the end of spring of the same year,
he also graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor of Arts
Degree in History with an emphasis on African-American
Studies. His GPA was 3.2.

In his first season as a Los Angeles Ram defensive back,
Darryl was voted Ram's defensive rookie of the year. He
went on to become a 41/2 year starter at corner back tying
twice for the team lead in interceptions. His best pro
season, 1994, was his last. Darryl played that fall under
indictment on federal cocaine trafficking charges, under the
watch of armed bodyguards, and under the weight of his
January, 1995 trial, which loomed large as either a glorious
exoneration, or a life-shattering conviction.

Darryl was convicted.

After trial? Well, that is still up in the air; the outcome as
unpredictable as a pass thrown toward a receiver and a
corner back....

Darryl is now 39 years old (2005) and is the father of a
beautiful daughter.

LEGAL SUMMARY:

It started simple. On July 15, 1993, Darryl Henley's girlfriend
was caught in an airport carrying a suitcase that contained
twelve kilos of his cocaine. That's what the authorities said,
anyway.

It's how that suitcase linked to Darryl Henley that was
complex.

Tracy Donaho wasn't his girlfriend. She was a nineteen
year-old waitress, junior college student, and cheerleader
for the Los Angeles Rams - the NFL team Henley played
for-- who shared intimate times with him, enjoyed his sense
of humor, his fame, and his friends, and became embroiled
in a cocaine trafficking conspiracy that ended up far too big
for both of them.

Had Henley expected financial benefit from his
involvement? Even the DEA's head case agent said no.

In February 1995 - a year and a half after her arrest, and
during the hottest days of America's War on Drugs- Tracy
Donaho testified against Darryl Henley and his four, less
famous co-defendants at trial. Darryl's uncle, Rex Henley,
three years older than Darryl and - like Darryl - the owner
of a spotless criminal record, was joined at the defense
table by Willie McGowan, Henley's boyhood football idol
from Duarte, California - the star that had chosen the wrong
path after high school; Garey West, a high school
basketball star turned cocaine dealer; and Rafael
Bustamante, the ambitious, hot-tempered Mexican
immigrant who had supplied the drugs transported by Tracy
Donaho, from LA to Atlanta, that fateful summer day in
1993. Darryl hadn't seen Willie in fifteen years prior to
1993. He'd never met West prior to that spring. And he
didn't meet Bustamante until after Donaho was arrested,
when Bustamante threatened to kill both Henley and his
mother in an effort to recoup the $360,000 he'd lost thanks
to the bust of Darryl's "girlfriend" in Atlanta.

In March 1995, Henley and his four co-defendants were
convicted in U.S. District court of cocaine trafficking. By law,
each convict faced a minimum of ten years in prison. The
following year, based on her cooperation with the
government, Tracy Donaho - the only white defendant, a
pretty blond daughter of a former policeman - was
sentenced to spend four months in a halfway house.

The strangest turn came fourteen months after Darryl
Henley's conviction, when he was caught on tape using a
cell phone from inside his downtown LA jail cell to approve
the contract murders of Donaho and Gary Taylor, the
federal judge who had presided over his trial, and to agree
to traffic $1,000,000 worth of heroin from LA to Detroit.

The layperson remembers the strongest words within the
Henley story: football, drugs, murder. Few recall the oddity
of those last two words when placed next to Henley's
upbringing in a close-knit, Christian family, or the college
degrees earned by him and his two brothers, from Stanford,
Rice, and UCLA. The final dominoes in his fall from grace
have only been glossed over by the record, namely the
glaring evidence of a racism and drug use among jurors in
his trial - which took place in highly conservative, highly
Caucasian Orange County at the exact time O.J. Simpson
was being tried in urban LA - the government's dilution of
that evidence after the verdict, and the subsequent feeling
within Henley of desperation, complete abandonment by the
justice system, and financial ruin brought on by the
expenses of that system. It was this, Henley says, which fed
his final, fateful decision to agree to a Mafia man's offer to
move drugs and kill two people. The Mafia man, of course,
turned out to be an undercover DEA Special Agent. And
the circumstances under which his offer was presented
might be the strangest domino of all.

Darryl Henley lives now in a medium security federal prison
in the South. He is scheduled to be released in 2031. All of
his 1993 drug case co-defendants have been released
from prison after having their conviction remanded due to
juror misconduct and a racially biased jury.

December, 2005