Pittsburgh, where baseball was changed forever. Photo by Andrea Evangelo-Giamou/EyeEm/Getty Images
Whatever the price, by whatever name, cocaine is becoming the All-American Drug. . . . A snort in each nostril and you’re up and away for 30 minutes or so. Alert, witty, and with it. No hangover. No physical addiction. No lung cancer . . . instead drive, sparkle, energy.
—Time Magazine, 1981
“The butterflies have already started,” said Rod Scurry on April 18, 1981, in anticipation of his first major league start the following day in Houston. The season was almost two weeks old, and Scurry had yet to make an appearance on the mound. In fact, he hadn’t pitched more than four innings in a single outing in two years. He was only getting the break now because Pirates ace Jim Bibby was injured; still, Scurry was excited and was hoping not just to start but also to finish his own game. “I’ll be trying to go nine,” he said.
Growing up, Rod Scurry never doubted he would play in the majors, if not as a pitcher then as a hitter. In high school he once hit a five-hundred-foot home run. But despite his batting prowess, he had always been a pitcher at heart. In the 1960s, when he was just a child, he stacked mattresses against the wooden fence in the backyard of his Nevada home and hurled fastballs at them. He had always had power. But then there was the hook. He could sweep his curveball in at such an angle the ball would bend between a batter’s legs. Frequently compared to the preeminent lefty of all time, Sandy Koufax, Scurry drove himself to live up to the compliment. This desire propelled him out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to jog to school through high mountain air and sometimes freezing temperatures just so he could get extra pitching practice in at the Hug High gym before the opening bell rang. On game days, when his teachers believed him to be studiously tending to his work in the classroom he would in fact be poring over index cards he had made that listed the tendencies of the opposing team’s big hitters.
Scurry’s aspiration to pitch a complete game nearly came to fruition. He pitched seven strong innings, shutting out the Astros on four hits, while adding seven strikeouts. Lifted for a pinch hitter in the top half of the eighth in a scoreless game, Scurry was forced to pace the clubhouse floor, listening to the final innings on the radio, anxiously rooting for his club. His teammates cooperated, as the Pirates finally picked up a pair of runs to make the score 2–0. Reliever Eddie Solomon completed the shutout, going the final two innings to secure the victory.
Although he didn’t close the game, Scurry had made a superlative debut start that lived up to his pedigree and reminded many of the days when he struck out eighteen or nineteen per start back at Hug High. “I’m excited,” Scurry said. “My first big league win is a big thrill. I’ve dreamed about this day. Winning my first big league game is the highlight of my career. I never complained about relieving last year, but I’ve always wanted to be a starter.”
A Rod Scurry baseball card for sale on comc.com.
“Last year was frustrating,” Scurry admitted. “I understood the situation. They were world champions, and they had to go with the pitchers who won. I wasn’t thrilled too much with sitting around, but I didn’t get down on myself.”
Across the diamond, the Astros took notice of what they had seen thrown against them. “The kid has an outstanding curveball,” the opposing starter, Joe Niekro, commented. “Sometimes a pitcher has to wait a long time to get his chance. I know how it feels.” A poll of scouts echoed Niekro’s assessment, declaring that Scurry’s curveball was not just good but the finest in the major leagues.
“Scurry Can’t Sleep on Major Success,” read the Pittsburgh Press sports page the day after the game, playing off Scurry’s remark that he had been “too excited to sleep” the night before his start and had in fact slept little at all in the two days leading up to the outing. Pitching coach Harvey Haddix defended the young pitcher, saying, “You don’t need sleep to pitch. I did it many times in the days we rode trains between cities. In fact, it may help. You take it out on the other team’s hitters.”
What Scurry failed to mention to Haddix was that it wasn’t merely adrenaline keeping him up at night—it was cocaine, which he also used before the game. His memorable first big league start and win were accomplished while he was high.
By this time, Rod Scurry and Pirates mascot, the Pirate Parrot, Kevin Koch, had become friends. Soon, the circle soon expanded to include Koch’s high school buddy Dale Shiffman. It was a dream come true for the local boy Shiffman, who fit right in with the baseball crowd. He had always loved the game, but as he reached high school in the 1960s he didn’t have time for baseball anymore as his interests ran to “beers, cigs, and slicked-back hair.” In the army during the early 1970s Shiffman picked up baseball again and played at a high level while based at Fort Devin, Massachusetts. By the 1980s Shiffman had become a three-sport season ticket holder in the ’Burgh. He was the type of guy whose awareness of the four seasons was determined not by the temperature outside or the leaves on the trees but by the particular sport being played in his city. Fall was all about the Steelers, in the winter he followed the Penguins, and his summers were devoted to the Pirates. So when Koch started inviting Shiffman down to the stadium to hang out with the team before games, the outgoing Shiffman was in his element. When the invitation was extended for him to take to the field for batting practice and a chance to shag a few fly balls, Shiffman was in downright heaven. “I got to stand out there in right field with my heroes,” Shiffman said. “A few would even invite me to meet after the game to have a beer. Life could not have been better.”
Shiffman’s 1969 high school yearbook describes him as “a real car buff . . . enjoys a good laugh . . . dependable pal . . . carefree.” Shiffman stayed true to his character in the ensuing years, particularly to being “carefree” as he spent much of his time bowling, golfing, and playing softball. “Dale’s not interested in working,” a friend later told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Dale doesn’t want to grow up. All he wants to do is have a good time.”
Shiffman was employed only sporadically in the photography business when he made his entrance on the major league scene. Without a full-time occupation, he felt a certain validation in being able to say he knew and spent time with prominent sports figures. Right or wrong, “hanging out with athletes made your pride go up,” Shiffman admits. Instead of being just another guy struggling to hold down a job, he now felt important. He was being invited to golf and barbecue outings with different players. When he took a date down to the ballpark, all the ushers would know his name, and a player or two might give him a shout-out following the night’s contest, which would duly impress his female companion, not to mention Shiffman himself. “It made you feel like a somebody even if you really were a nobody,” he says.
Shiffman and Koch, like so many others in the early 1980s, had recently discovered cocaine. The drug was making the rounds through their softball league, alongside the other party mainstays: beer, pot, and Percodan. “Everyone we hung out with at the bar and from our end of town—everyone was into [cocaine],” Koch says.
When Koch and Shiffman hit the city’s nightclubs and bars after Pirates’ games, they typically ran into some of the players. Inside Pittsburgh-area nightspots such as Heaven, the VIP, Sophie’s Saloon, or the Sunken Cork, things got interesting for the pair. Koch explains, “Berra or somebody would say, ‘Hey, do you guys party?’ Then one thing led to another, and the players found out that Dale [Shiffman] could get stuff, and that’s how it kind of snowballed from there.”
Kevin Koch as the Pittsburgh Pirate. Photo via yinzster.com
Koch says that the players, mostly Scurry and shortstop Dale Berra, began to call him prior to games to ask if he could pick some blow up from Shiffman and bring it down to the ballpark. Shiffman purchased the cocaine from various locals. He cut the coke, not to increase the weight but rather to replace the cocaine he was taking out for his own personal consumption. Shiffman says his motivation wasn’t to make money; it was to get his party favors without having to pay for them. He figured he was not only scoring free coke but also greatly expanding his social circle, now filled with local sports figures. He could have hardly asked for more.
Typically Shiffman wrapped up a gram or two, or sometimes an eight ball, then Koch swung by and picked up the drugs on his way to work. The transactions between Koch and the players usually took place deep within the corridors of the stadium, such as in the runway outside the clubhouse or sometimes in the parking lots. The men never had any run-ins with Pirates officials; in fact, as cocaine use became more prevalent, Koch even suspected that those in charge had to know what was going on.
“It seemed like no one really cared,” Koch says. “I mean, I think Major League Baseball even knew itself that it had problems, like, years before, when they had alcohol problems with a lot of guys.”
After a while Koch realized that with Shiffman frequenting the games, maybe his own role in these transactions was superfluous. Beyond that, despite the fact that he was in a drug- and alcohol-induced haze much of the time, Koch could still see the precarious position he was putting himself in. Something in the back of his mind wouldn’t let him rest. “When you’re raised by a mom and dad that care about you, you start to put one and one together,” he says.
Growing up, Koch had been described as the typical “nice, regular all-American boy.” As he grew into adulthood, local papers painted a similar portrait, albeit one with a bit more edge. As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette put it, he was “the sort a mom would like her daughter to bring home, an earnest yes-ma’am kind of guy with a bit of the devil in him.”
Koch tried to distance himself from his middleman position, telling the guys that they had one another’s phone numbers and could set things up for themselves. A few of the players began to call Shiffman’s house directly, or Shiffman met them outside the clubhouse after the games, where they made their exchanges. These callers were usually Scurry and Berra, although Shiffman was also becoming close with the Pirates reliever Eddie “Buddy J.” Solomon. A pretty low-key guy, Solomon sometimes invited Shiffman over to his apartment, where they would do a couple lines and just hang out. Occasionally Shiffman received calls to bring some blow to a downtown hotel room for some of the visiting National League teams’ players.
“I remember some of the other teams all of a sudden started to get involved,” Koch says. “They’d say, ‘Hey, can you get your buddy to do this or that?’ And I’d call Dale, and he’d come down, and we’d party with just about everybody; it was pretty bizarre. It was pretty out of control in the eighties.”
Yet Koch insists it wasn’t all about the cocaine all the time. More often, he says, it was just a bunch of guys getting together, and if someone had some on them, then sure, they would all do a line. “Now, we would be in the clubs every night drinking and stuff,” Koch admits, “but it wasn’t like ‘Hey, let’s all get together because of cocaine.’”
Whenever there were requests made of Koch, however, he found it very hard to decline them. “Imagine guys that are making that much money, and now you’re partying with them. After a while you don’t think anything about it. You almost think you’re untouchable,” Koch says. If players were looking to hook up, and Shiffman wasn’t going down to the game that night, Shiffman called Koch. They both lived in the South Hills, so Koch could easily swing by Shiffman’s residence and pick up a couple grams for the boys that night. Other times the players would ask Koch to call Shiffman for them. Koch says he would think about the job that had opened up a whole new world to him, a job he cherished. He would think about how the people within the organization treated him so well. He had been welcomed into the family; he was well liked and appreciated.
He knew he wasn’t doing the team any favors by bringing drugs to the stadium, but in the end, he always agreed.
“I’d say all right,” Koch says. “I couldn’t say no. What are you gonna do? It’s almost impossible to say no. These were your heroes. Guys from when you were a kid. I remember sitting down with Willie [Stargell] going, ‘I remember your first game, Willie. It was in ’63 at Forbes Field. I was like nine or ten years old.’ And with other guys, we’d talk sports together, and I would tell them this or that; and they’d say, ‘Man, you were there that night?’ Like Gene Garber, I said, ‘I remember you pitching your first game against the Chicago Cubs. You had three perfect innings going at Forbes Field, then in the fourth Billy Williams jacked that ball.’ And Garber would be like, ‘Oh my God!’”
Koch wasn’t a mere fan. Baseball was a game he loved. And whether Dale Berra or Rod Scurry were stars or not, it didn’t matter to him. Or to Dale Shiffman. It was the name on the front of the jersey, not the back, that was important. For guys raised in the South Hills who grew up with baseball in their blood, anyone who donned the black and gold sat on a pedestal and was worthy of reverence, and it would be damn hard to say no to them.
Koch’s baseball memories are part of who he is, and more often than not his stories always come back to the Pirates previous home at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, otherwise known as the House of Thrills. “What a ballpark to go to. Ah, that was the park. That was heaven to me. When that ball was hit at Forbes Field in a night game, it would literally disappear into the darkness. There were no stands to see it bounce around in or people to grab it. It went straight into Schenley Park. You would see it going, and then once it went past the lights, it was gone; it was into the night.”
Scurry made six subsequent starts following his debut victory. The youngster pitched well, but as a member of the pitching-heavy Pirates, it wasn’t long before he was back in the bullpen. By 1982 his role as a full-time member of the Pirates bullpen was cemented. His starting days were behind him.
For somebody who was quiet to begin with, Scurry talked even less when using cocaine at the ballpark. He feared his mouth would betray him. He had begun living his life in secret. By his own account he became a con artist of sorts and “got to be pretty good at it.” He couldn’t let the outside world know that his life was now controlled by cocaine, and he became even more introverted. His future wife, Laura, later described to the Associated Press how tough it was for Scurry to deal with stress. “He had a hard time with pressure, and I think that’s why he started doing what he was doing,” she said. “It was the pressure of waiting and not knowing. The drugs made him quiet, shy, and scared. When he wasn’t on them, he was normal and fun and happy.”
In 1982 cocaine use had become routine for many major league ballplayers. The Pirates’ John Milner would later say that he, Parker, Scurry, Berra, and outfielder Lee Lacy shared up to seven grams a week with one another during this time. “If I had it, I shared it; if they had it, they shared it,” he said. In fact, it was so common that the first thing Scurry and Berra thought about prior to the season’s home opener was making sure someone had called Shiffman for easy home game delivery. Nothing said opening day like the sound of Pirates organist Vince Lascheid banging out a few notes of “Let’s Go Bucs,” the smell of hot dogs wafting through the stadium, or the prospect of an eight ball of cocaine to take it all up a notch.
The neighborhood of Garfield was settled on the hills above the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh’s East End. Up until the 1960s Garfield was home to predominately Catholic, working-class families. Its earliest inhabitants worked the mills along the Allegheny River and shopped locally from the merchants along Penn Avenue. Neighborhood activist Aggie Brose recalled to the Post-Gazette that Garfield was once a place where “you sponsored each other’s kids, you went to all the weddings and funerals, you never wanted for a babysitter…. When you put the kids to bed, the women went out on the stoops.”
In the latter half of the 1960s and early 1970s, Garfield’s citizens moved to nearby suburbs. Soon, the small businesses in the community were boarded up, and public housing projects sprouted up in the area. As more and more residents continued to flee, twenty-four-year-old heating and cooling repairman Kevin Connolly and his family remained.
Connolly was an all-state baseball player at the sports powerhouse Central Catholic High School, the alma mater of Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino. Connolly himself later played semipro football as a member of the Pittsburgh Tri-Ward Rebels.
If anyone could attest to what a slippery slope cocaine use could be, it was Connolly. Early during the 1982 baseball season, he was introduced to Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Rod Scurry on a double date arranged by the pair’s girlfriends. During the evening the talk turned to cocaine. Up until this point Connolly had only tried the drug a few times. “That night we all pitched in and got some,” Connolly says. “Then we went out again the next Friday.”
Before long the foursome was hitting the town three nights a week, when Scurry wasn’t out of town with the Pirates. Doing coke became an integral part of the evenings, with Connolly struggling to match funds with the well-to-do pitcher. From fifty dollars on the first occasion, the price of admission seemed to grow with each ensuing outing as the group’s drug consumption increased. After a month or two the evenings were costing the young repairman a minimum of $100 or $150. “I couldn’t afford that,” he says. “After going out three nights a week and pitching in every time, I couldn’t do it, you know. Then I got this brilliant idea.”
Connolly was having the time of his life hanging out with Scurry and the girls, and he had to find a way to make things work. He had to “find somebody that had [cocaine], get it at cost, then sell it.” That was the key to staying in the game.
Initially, he didn’t know exactly how or where to go about enacting his plan, but it didn’t take him long to figure out. The East End was Connolly’s turf. His business, Budget Air Conditioning and Heating, was located on Penn Avenue. He also played softball in the neighborhood. He knew people there, and he knew people who knew people. If he was going to find cocaine, the East End would be where he would find it.
Connolly began to regularly buy a quarter ounce of cocaine, which he would usually split, keeping half for himself and selling the other half to Scurry or sometimes a few other acquaintances or contacts. His new enterprise yielded hardly enough to make a profit. But he was doing free cocaine, and that was the whole point, anyway. On top of that, he was introduced to another Pirates ballplayer, shortstop Dale Berra, around this time, which was even cooler to the young sports fan. “Early on we didn’t hang out that much,” Connolly says, but he remembers it being a big deal whenever Berra did come around.
Connolly soon realized that his quarter-ounce purchase wasn’t sufficient to keep up with the group’s growing appetite for cocaine. It was time to up the ante. His next purchase was for a quarter kilogram. However, once initiated into the world of cocaine, it didn’t take him long to realize the extent of the money-making opportunities now open to him. A quarter kilogram wasn’t going to cut it either. The demand around him necessitated yet another increase in weight.
Nineteen eighty-two was Rod Scurry’s career year. If the switch to the bullpen bothered Scurry, he didn’t let it show on the mound. He had the season of his life, saving fourteen games as a reliever and posting a minuscule 1.74 earned run average, the lowest in the league of anyone with at least twenty appearances. The Pirates finished the season in fourth place, eight games off the pace.
Despite the fact that Connolly was emerging as a new supplier for Scurry, Dale Shiffman continued to receive calls from the pitcher throughout the season. Even on the road Scurry managed to hook up. He had a connection in Philadelphia and elsewhere it was far from a challenge to score. He snorted a gram before a game against Houston, and then went on to hold the Astros scoreless. From that point on, he figured drug use wouldn’t hurt him when he pitched. Scurry’s career ascent brought him an abundance of money and with it an abundance of cocaine. “Finally,” he would later tell the Pittsburgh Press, “it got to the point where I couldn’t quit.”
Come opening day 1983, scoring coke had become paramount to Scurry. Personal matters were arranged first, before any baseball would be played. Once more the season began with a call to Shiffman.
A year after meeting Rod Scurry for the first time, Kevin Connolly came to a realization: This shit is everywhere. Going out to clubs or parties with his new Pirates buddies, he saw cocaine use so out in the open, so common, that he looked around and quipped, “Cocaine is legal, isn’t it?” This pervasiveness made him feel like he wasn’t doing anything wrong by partaking, but now he was going to get in on the real action. By 1983, Garfield’s Kevin Connolly was heading to Miami to trade forty thousand dollars for two kilos of cocaine.
The deal was arranged through a girl he knew from the Pittsburgh area who was dating a supplier in Florida. From there a regular hook-up would be cemented. The suppliers taught Connolly the ropes, including how to pack his product for safe airline travel. The cocaine, which came in a large chunk, was placed in a plastic bag. The bag was then placed inside another bag and dipped in mustard. This package was placed into “another bag that had coffee grinds in it,” Connolly explains. “So we had three bags going. . . . Then we just sewed it into my jacket, and I’d walk through the airport.”
The experience tested Connolly’s mettle as his heart raced with fear; oddly enough, he found it to be an enjoyable fear. Transporting drugs gave him a rush he would come to love more than using the drug itself. He always stayed straight for the transactions and the transport. But that didn’t stop him from getting high. These deals became Connolly’s new source of adrenaline, and physiologically they took him places cocaine never did. If, for instance, a group of police dogs stood ahead of him, Connolly would not change his course; instead, he would walk straight toward the dogs, pushing the thrill as far as it could take him.
The scene in South Florida was like something out of a movie for the novice drug trader. Deals went down anywhere, from inside beautiful yet bullet hole-riddled houses to aboard Miami Vice-style cigarette boats. Other times, if his connection happened to fall through, he could score kilos in the parking lots of Miami’s or Ft. Lauderdale’s after-hours clubs.
“There was like ten or twelve people there who all had kilos in their car,” he recalls, “and they’d say ‘Try my stuff.’” One person’s loss was another man’s gain, and somebody was always more than happy to help out an out-of-towner.
“It was just a joke,” Connolly says. “There was just so much down there. I’d go out to the car, and they’d open up the trunk and they’d have like five keys [kilos] in it. Then another guy would say, ‘Hey, look at my stuff, man; I’ll give it to you for a hundred cheaper.’… It was like how you could get ounces in Pittsburgh, you could buy keys down there.” He could walk into a bar “knowing nobody,” and kilogram transactions were still guaranteed. “What a joke,” Connolly repeats.
Back home up north, Connolly couldn’t help but walk with a bit more of a strut. When darkness fell Connolly felt like the king of Pittsburgh. When he walked into a club and hung out with his new Pirates buddies, people turned to look. But it wasn’t just to check out their local sports heroes anymore. Connolly was making his own mark. He could hear the whispers—Hey that’s Kevin Connolly—and see the patrons gawk. Connolly says the club Heaven was where the in-crowd gathered. It was Pittsburgh’s answer to Studio 54 or the like—the club everyone talked about and went to be seen. Known for its grand marble staircase and white interior, Heaven also had private lounges and held events such as beach night or hot tub night. Connolly often joined a number of the Pirates and Steelers there. “[Lynn] Swann was there all the time, Mel Blount, Franco [Harris] too. It was the only place in Pittsburgh where everyone went,” Connolly says.
Despite making his own name for himself, Connolly could not deny the benefits that came with hanging out with athletes. Rod Scurry, for example, was known to attract a particular crowd. “Yeah, all the girls would know who he was,” Connolly says. This was a definite bonus for the lighthearted and good-natured Connolly, who was also not dumb to the allure that the little white powder he carried possessed. Right or wrong, he employed this magnetism to his advantage. Let me buy you a drink, he would say while reaching into the “wrong” pocket for his money. He religiously kept his coke in one pocket and his money in the other, always the same ones so that he would never make a mistake in front of the wrong people, such as law enforcement. Pulling out his abundant supply of blow, which was obviously much larger than most, he would make his female companions weak in the knees. Whoops, he would innocently declare, finger on his lip like a schoolboy. Needless to say, Connolly and his buddies were not short of company most evenings.
An Associated Press story after Scurry’s time in rehab.
One thing Connolly’s baseball acquaintances weren’t doing for him was making him any richer. Ballplayers are notoriously slow to their wallets. While some of them had voracious appetites for cocaine, this hunger did not translate to much money for those supplying it. There was a sense of privilege embedded in the athletes, as if they thought it should be enough for others to merely be around them. Other times they would adopt the stance, What’s the problem? You know I’m good for it! I’ll get you later.
“We never got paid,” Connolly remarks. Berra always seemed to be broke and even had his own particular excuse at the ready. “I get my check next week,” he would say.
“His checks were like $6,200, and he couldn’t even pay me,” says Connolly. Nor did Scurry. “You couldn’t get it off him, either.” Particularly if Scurry happened to already be holding; then it was an absolute certainty “you’d never see your money.”
It was inside Pittsburgh’s after-hours clubs, selling to patrons rather than ballplayers, where Connolly was truly making his money.
“We had a nice little round,” Connolly explains. “There was like five of them, and we’d hit them all starting at 2:30 a.m. The Allegheny Club was our first hit. Then we’d go dahntahn to Joyce’s, or JJ’s. After that we’d go up to Brookline, to the BYM Club [Brookline Young Men’s Club], a little higher class, nicer place. From there we’d go to the Perry Social in East Liberty, and our last stop would be at the BBC down in Bloomfield.”
All told the late-night rounds brought in around $2,800 on both Fridays and Saturdays. Add another thousand dollars or so during the day, and the weekends netted Connolly over seven thousand dollars. He puts his weekly gross profit at an estimated $13,000 at its peak. He would store the twenties and hundred-dollar bills in a shoe box and spend the rest. He blew through cash on women and partying as well as by charging the players less than he should have. For instance, many times he asked only two hundred dollars for five hundred dollars worth of coke. Connolly wasn’t exactly maximizing his profits. He knew the money was dirty, that it wasn’t really earned, so he felt no obligation to hold on to it. Still, he was having a damn good time.
Likewise, Dale Shiffman, the self-described “nobody,” was now living the high life as well. His life revolved around the Pittsburgh sports scene, from the green diamond of summer with the Pirates to the white ice of winter with the Penguins. “Dale’s a great guy. He was always at the games,” Penguins forward Kevin McClelland said. Added team captain Mike Bullard, “I think he more or less knew a bunch of us—ten of us. He probably knew everybody on the team to say hi.”
Shiffman wasn’t getting rich as a result of his role as a supplier. But it wasn’t about the money for him anyway; it was about hanging out with his heroes and having fun. He didn’t need much. He split his rent with a roommate or two, and when he needed money he found a freelance photography gig. Whatever money he was making from blow tended to go right back up his nose.
While there were some in the medical community who were still arguing in the 1980s that cocaine was “a safe, nonaddicting euphoriant,” Shiffman probably should have known he was headed for trouble the first time he tried the drug, an experience he describes as “love at first sight.” He slowly became addicted. The days of a little fun, in-control partying were long gone. He was now firmly in cocaine’s grip and wanting more, more, more.
This story is an excerpt from The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven, now out in paperback.