Athletes Who Have Done A Lot Of Jail Time

Art Schlichter loved football, but he loved gambling more and is paying a mighty high price for it. Starting in high school, Schlichter fell in love with betting on races and games, then continued to do so throughout his high school, college, and professional careers. His NFL career died by 1986, thanks in large part to his constant betting on basically everything. He's also lost freedom: According to CBS News, he's been sent to over 44 prisons since 1994. His most recent prison tour will prove to be his longest yet.

In 2011, Schlichter was arrested on charges that he had bilked sports fans out of millions of dollars by promising them tickets to events like the Super Bowl. He, naturally, did not deliver those tickets, and simply ran off with the money. As federal prosecutors said in a statement, "Schlichter ... spent the money on personal expenses, gambled with it, or used it to repay older debts." The next year, he was found guilty and sentenced to just under 11 years in prison. Considering how he seems completely unwilling or unable to learn his lesson or curb his addiction, don't expect him to get out anything resembling early.

Peter Storey was known as a "hatchet man" during his soccer-playing days, and while he thankfully didn't become that during his life of crime, what he did do wasn't much better.

After 15 years of playing with Arsenal plus one more with Fulham, Storey began his second career: criminal. He recapped all of it in his autobiography, True Storey: My Life and Crimes as a Football Hatchet Man. In 1980, Storey was convicted as the moneyman in a conspiracy to produce counterfeit money and wound up behind bars for three years. Later on, in 1982, he wound up in trouble for stealing two cars; his punishment was two six-month prison terms, which were eventually suspended.

If all that wasn't enough, in 1990 he was caught trying to smuggle porn movies from the Netherlands into England, stuffing the smut into his car's spare tire. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to four weeks in jail. He's stayed clean in the decades since, marking what seems to be the end of his crazy criminal tale.

Matt Bush was a #1 draft pick for the San Diego Padres in 2004, though he didn't exactly live up to the hype. He simply had too many issues with alcohol and anger management, getting drunk and fighting several times over the next few years. This meant his dismissal from the Padres, as well as the Toronto Blue Jays and the Tampa Bay Rays' minor league system. Then, his bad behavior went many steps too far.

In 2012, the athlete was driving drunk (according to the Tampa Bay Times, his blood-alcohol content was 0.18, over twice the legal limit) when he hit 72-year-old Tony Tufano with his car. That's bad enough, but then he drove away, making things infinitely worse. He was arrested and charged with DUI with serious bodily injury (thankfully, Tufano survived), eventually pleading no-contest. He would serve 3.5 years in prison, getting out in late October 2015. Shortly thereafter, the Texas Rangers signed him to a contract, and in May 2016 he made their major league roster. As long as he doesn't succumb to anything stronger than a sweet, dark root beer, he might stand a chance at reminding people why he was the top draft pick.

As ESPN Classic put it, athlete Denny McLain was famous for two reasons: winning 30 games in the 1968 season (the last pitcher to win that many), and for being a jailbird.

McLain was suspended by the Detroit Tigers in 1970, after Sports Illustrated reported his participation in a bookkeeping operation back in 1967. It was a sign of things to come. After retirement, McLain bounced from gig to gig before finally becoming a partner in First Fidelity Financial Services, which may or may not have been a front for the Mob. There, he got into crime, and in 1985 was found guilty of racketeering and extortion. He originally got 23 years in the slammer, but after various negotiations and procedural issues, that became five years' probation.

What a break! Lucky enough for anyone to get the point and keep it clean, right? Not McLain. In 1994, he bought a meat-processing company that soon went belly-up. He and his associates stole $12 million from the company's pension fund. Bad move: In 1996, he was convicted of conspiracy, money laundering, and mail fraud, and sentenced to eight years in prison. He served six, which was as nice as the justice system was willing to be the second time around.

Hank Thompson was a star third baseman who joined the New York Giants (of baseball) from the Negro Leagues in 1949. Over the next eight years, he helped the Giants win two World Series before retiring in 1957. After that, came more than a few issues. He worked as a cabbie in New York City (long before you could play two years in professional sports and make enough money to last you the rest of your life), later moving to Texas after a divorce. There, apparently desperate for money, he committed armed robbery and was quickly arrested, according to the AP. In 1963, he was sentenced to ten years in prison, but won parole after four.

Unfortunately, just a couple years later, in 1969, Thompson suffered a massive seizure and died. He was attempting to turn his life around at the time, re-marrying, becoming a playground director, and working with underprivileged kids to make better choices than he did.

Darrell Allums was a star basketball player at UCLA, but not one who could channel that into success at the NBA level. After just a year in the pros (1980-1981), he was gone. He sadly developed a bad cocaine habit in retirement, one he soon struggled to pay for. To do so, he began robbing Domino's Pizza delivery guys in 1987, ultimately being arrested for 14 separate robberies. Worse, since he wielded a screwdriver when mugging the workers, it was considered armed robbery.

By trial's end, Allums had been convicted of eight of the robberies and sentenced to nine years in prison. Though the judge was sympathetic (he was quoted by the LA Times as saying, "I am convinced that, but for drugs, Mr. Allums never would have been here"), crimes were committed, so time had to be doled out.

Jack Molinas is known less for basketball than for almost destroying basketball. He would constantly bet on games, many of which he was playing in. He played for one season in the NBA, back in the '50s, but was almost immediately banned for life for his gambling.

In response, as described in the book The Wizard of Odds, Molinas began working with college players to make money by making basketball more fixed than pro wrestling. He would recruit players to intentionally score less and throw games, and he would then sell the fixed games' odds to bookies. That, along with his own betting on the game, brought him tens of thousands of dollars a week — even today, that's a ton of money. In the '50s and '60s, it was practically astronomical.

As with any scheme, however, this one eventually came crashing down. By 1961, 37 college players were arrested for their part in the scheme, and Molina himself was sentenced to 10-15 years behind bars for running the entire operation. He was released after five years and found a second, more honest career: pornography. Of course, according to ESPN Classic, his job was to smuggle in porn from Taiwan, so maybe it wasn't too honest after all. Either way, he met his end in 1975, shot in the back of the head. It may have been the Mafia taking revenge on Molinas for unpaid debts which, considering his life's work, makes a ton of sense.

Boxing fans and Bob Dylan fans alike are well aware of the story of Rubin Carter. After all, he's the Hurricane, the man the authorities came to blame.

As CNN wrote, in 1964 Carter was on top of the boxing world. He had won 11 out of his first 15 fights and was all set to challenge the middleweight champion of the world. He lost, and thereafter became a different boxer. He went 8-7 in his final 15 fights, and then was accused of killing three people in 1966. He was arrested and convicted the next year, then sentenced to three life terms for the deaths. Eventually, however, people began to suspect Carter didn't do it, a sentiment most famously shared by Bob Dylan in his 1976 song "Hurricane." A year after that song, and a decade after Carter was sent to prison, he won himself a new trial ... and was convicted again. Back to prison he went.

Then, in 1985, that second conviction was also overturned after a federal judge ruled he never got a fair trial. This time, Carter's freedom stuck, and by 1988 he had all charges against him dismissed. From then until his death in 2014, Carter worked tirelessly to advocate for the wrongly convicted. He even worked as Executive Director of the (Canadian) Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted from 1993 until 2004. He never became a champion in boxing, but he definitely became a champion of life and freedom.

Mike Danton played three years in the NHL before parlaying his experience into five years of prison time. In 2004, he was arrested on charges that he had attempted to hire someone to kill his old coach, mentor, and agent, David Frost. For some reason, paranoia apparently overtook Danton, and he started to believe Frost was going to hurt him. He was willing to pay $10,000 to have him bumped off. Meanwhile, prosecutors were willing to put him in the clink for even trying to do that.

Danton was sentenced to 7.5 years behind bars, but only served five before being granted parole. During the parole hearing, he told board members that he wasn't attempting to have Frost killed, but rather his own father. Yes, he fully believed at the time that his estranged father was trying to kill him, to which a board member actually responded, "Why on Earth would you believe that? That's like talking about the bogeyman." Danton believed his paranoia came from sleeping pills he was taking, though whether those pills also made him want to pay so much to have his father killed, he hasn't confirmed. Danton has since been quietly playing minor league hockey around the world.

Junichi Yamamoto was a sumo wrestling legend, who eventually became a sumo wrestling disgrace. When active, he was a successful star, rising all the way up to Komusubi, the fourth-highest rank in sumo. Upon retirement, he became a trainer, which is where his reputation and life eventually fell apart.

In June 2007, a 17-year-old sumo student named Takashi Saito was found beaten to death at a stable run by Yamamoto. He and three of his students were arrested in connection with Saito's death. All four were eventually found guilty of beating and exercising Saito to death after he supposedly tried to run away from the dojo. The three students all received suspended sentences — according to CNN, "The judge said [the students] had only followed their coach's instructions and the traditions of the sport." The coach, being the mastermind, received full punishment, even though he apparently did not take part in the beatings. In 2009, he was sentenced to six years in prison. According to one Japanese website (though apparently not reported elsewhere), Yamamoto died in August 2014 of lung cancer.