From Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports:
Fractured friendship of Aaron Hernandez and a gangster played out in bone-chilling...
BOSTON – They were once best friends, confidants and keepers of the most wicked of secrets.
“Inseparable,” Aaron Hernandez once described his relationship with Alexander Bradley.
They were very much separated, however, Monday on the ninth floor of Suffolk Superior Court during Hernandez’s double murder trial.
Separated by six court officers, either directly between them or ready to restrain. Separated by the distance between the witness stand (Bradley) and the defense table (Hernandez), although under different circumstances those positions could have been reversed. Separated because their relationship is as complex as it is combustible, most apparent perhaps when Bradley explained to the jury why he didn’t go to the police even after Hernandez allegedly pointed a gun between his eyebrows, fired and left him to die in an alley of an industrial area of South Florida.
Bradley survived with one eye but all his vengeance. Talking to the cops didn’t just violate his no-snitching street ethos, it violated any sense of fairness.
“I didn’t want to talk to the police,” Bradley said. “I wanted Mr. Hernandez. I wanted his life.”
The tone chilled an already tense courtroom as Bradley stared with his left eye, the one that still worked, directly at Hernandez. He tilted his head to the right and shook it in fury at his old friend. These were no empty words, no posing. Given the chance, Bradley would almost certainly kill Hernandez. And vice versa, at least if Hernandez learned that when it comes to Alexander Bradley, it takes more than one close-range shot to the skull to finish him.
Judge Jeffrey Locke broke for lunch right then, leaving Bradley’s words and stare to hang over a jury stuck contemplating the levels of personal betrayal overwhelming this case. As court officers ushered Bradley out, he walked past Hernandez, the two of them locked in a shared look of pure menace.
Hernandez is charged with killing Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado in a 2012 drive-by shooting after a brief encounter earlier at a Boston nightclub. Bradley is the state’s star witness, the driver of the vehicle Hernandez was in that night and the lone eyewitness capable of putting the gun in the former New England Patriot’s hand.
Across a lengthy day of direct examination (the defense’s ferocious cross of Bradley is expected to begin Tuesday) the trial focused on the chaotic friendship of Bradley and Hernandez – the former a Connecticut drug trafficker, the latter an NFL star, both of them with a propensity for rage and unnecessary violence that have dominated and doomed their lives thus far.
Hernandez, 27, is serving a life sentence for the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd in North Attleboro, Mass. Bradley, 34, is currently doing a five-year stint in Connecticut for indiscriminately shooting up a Hartford nightclub in 2013 after someone there shot him three times in the leg over a dispute about money.
Together they make a pathetic pairing. Penned up and battle-scarred, each trying to save whatever is left of himself by accusing the other of actually killing de Abreu and Furtado.
Their relationship had begun through commerce, a buyer and a seller, Bradley often supplying marijuana on a payment plan because Hernandez was still just a college football player then, a Florida Gator, and money was tight. It wouldn’t be for long, though, not with the NFL beckoning.
They became friends. They smoked a lot. They played video games a lot. They partied a lot together. They also provided something for each other. Hernandez allowed Bradley into his orbit of superstardom. Bradley gave Hernandez undeniable street toughness that he always coveted. Bradley was true gangster. He was also the rare peer who didn’t need his money.
They also shared an unexpected level of depth. Hernandez, for all his tough-guy posturing, grew up in a two-parent, middle-class home, and had the gift of a chameleon. He went to college for three years. He could act like a thug, but he was smart and well spoken. So, too, was Bradley, who from the witness stand offered a large vocabulary. In his testimony, a car was a “vehicle,” a house was a “residence” and a gun was a “firearm.” Aaron Hernandez was “Mr. Hernandez.” He used legal jargon. Notes of his entered into evidence displayed admirable penmanship.
At one point he described issuing Hernandez a death threat this way: “I expressed my feeling to him about how I wanted to handle the situation,” Bradley said.
That’s one way to put it.
Bonded by evenings of bottles and blunts, it was a rare day they didn’t at least check in by phone, and a rare week they weren’t hanging out two or three times, often in Boston nightclubs.
The most fateful came in July 2012, when Bradley testified that Hernandez grew angry that de Abreu didn’t pay him enough respect when he bumped into the Patriot and caused a drink to splash. Later, Hernandez spotted de Abreu’s party driving away at closing time and ordered Bradley to follow in pursuit.
Bradley did just that, running a red light to pull up alongside the Cape Verdean immigrant’s car. That’s when Bradley said Hernandez, wearing rosary beads as a necklace, fired five shots. He would have done more, but he was out of ammo.
The two fled and headed back to Connecticut, each of them, according to Bradley, shocked at what had occurred.
“He was kind of panicked,” Bradley said. “He said, ‘I hit one in the head and one in the chest"...
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.
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