Aaron Hernandez; The Gangster in The Huddle

The first text pinged him around nine that Sunday night: I’m coming to grab that tonight, you gon b around? I need dat and we could step for a little again. For Odin Lloyd, this was bang-up news, proof that his luck had turned around. Aaron Hernandez, the Pro Bowl tight end of the New England Patriots, was coming by later to scoop him up for another five-star debauch, just 36 hours after he’d taken Lloyd out for the wildest ride of his life. All night Friday, they’d kicked it at Rumor, popping bottles and pulling models up the steps of the VIP section of the Boston theater district’s hottest club. “Shit was crazy,” Lloyd told friends the next day at his niece’s dance recital. “The girls were off the chain. We smoked that super-duper and Aaron dropped 10 G’s like it was nothing. We kept rolling past dawn at his big-ass mansion, then he tossed me the keys to his Suburban.”

Big doings for a semipro football player and underemployed landscape helper, though there, too, fortune smiled on Lloyd, 27. He’d just gotten word that he’d have shifts all week, his first steady hours in some time. And now he was about to burn it down again with Hernandez, the $40 million man with the restless streak and a bottomless taste for chronic. The problem, Lloyd said, was it didn’t end there with Hernandez and his how-high crew: “Them boys is into way worse shit than herb.”

How much worse? About as bad as it gets, say longtime family friends. In exclusive conversations with Rolling Stone, those friends, who insisted they not be named, say Hernandez was using the maniacal drug angel dust, had fallen in with a crew of gangsters and convinced himself that his life was in danger, carrying a gun wherever he went. Sources close to the tight end add that throughout the spring, when players are expected to be preparing themselves for the marathon NFL season, Hernandez had missed workouts and sessions with a rehab trainer, and had been told by his head coach, Bill Belichick, that he was one misstep from being cut.

But training camp was six weeks away, and Hernandez wasn’t one to heed a warning. He went on hitting the clubs with his boys, including Lloyd, who was dating his fiancee’s sister. That Sunday, Lloyd’s best friend urged him to stay home, saying he needed his sleep for the week ahead. Lloyd had already been up all weekend – he’d taken his friends clubbing Saturday night in Hernandez’s black Suburban. Hernandez wouldn’t hear it, though; he kept texting Lloyd. Aite, where? Lloyd relented, ignoring his friend. It don’t matter but imma hit you, said Hernandez at 9:39. If my phone dies imma hit u when I charge it.

Tonight, though, wouldn’t be anything like Friday. All weekend, Hernandez had been stewing in his 7,000-square-foot mansion 45 minutes outside Boston in North Attleborough, not far from Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play, fixated on something that happened in the club two nights earlier. Per a close friend of Lloyd’s, they’d been getting buzzed in VIP when Lloyd saw two of his cousins downstairs. He went to hug them up and buy them drinks when one of them, a West Indian with dreads, started pointing and mean-mugging Hernandez. “I don’t like that nigger, he’s one of them funny people,” said the cousin. “Stop pointing, that’s my boy,” said Lloyd of Hernandez. “You’re gonna start some shit ’tween me and him.” “Well, I don’t want you with him, he’s a punk,” said Lloyd’s cousin, jabbing his finger again in Hernandez’s direction.

When Lloyd went back upstairs, Hernandez was enraged. Club security cameras allegedly capture the two men squabbling, showing Hernandez, six-two and a rippled 250, facing off with the five-11 Lloyd. The friends stopped short of throwing punches, though cameras mounted outside the club show the argument resuming in the street.

Most people, even self-important stars blowing thousands on bottle-shape women, might have simmered down about now. But the 23-year-old Aaron Hernandez wasn’t like most people; for ages, he hadn’t even been like himself. The sweet, goofy kid from Bristol, Connecticut, with the klieg-light smile and ex-thug dad who’d turned his life around to raise two phenom sons – that Aaron Hernandez had barely been heard from in the seven hard years since his father was snatched away, killed in his prime by a medical error that left his boys soul-sick and lost. Once in a great while, the good Aaron would surface, phoning one of his college coaches to tell him he loved him and to talk to the man’s kids for hours, or stopping Robert Kraft, the Patriots’ owner, to kiss him on the cheek and thank him damply. There was such hunger in that kid for a father’s hand, and such greatness itching to get out, that coach after coach had covered for him whenever the bad Aaron showed – the violent, furious kid who was dangerous to all, most particularly, it seems, to his friends.

More: http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-…the-huddle