LLOYD DANIELS, BASKETBALL GYPSY : His Saga Winds From New York to Las Vegas, and Takes Another Strange Turn Out in the Desert

WASHINGTON — Late on the afternoon of Feb. 9, officers from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department set up an undercover sting operation at a house suspected of being a distribution center for PCP--angel dust--and “rock” or “crack”--cocaine.

By early evening, the officers already had made more than a dozen arrests. And the biggest bust was yet to come.

At 7:40 p.m., Lloyd Daniels, a 6-8 Nevada-Las Vegas basketball recruit who is considered the finest prospect to emerge from New York City in two decades, walked up to the door of the house and knocked.

An undercover officer answered.

“Is Neil there?” Daniels said, according to the police report.

“No,” the officer said.

“I need a rock,” Daniels said, according to the report. “I want a rock.”

Daniels was arrested and charged with attempting to purchase a controlled substance after allegedly offering the officer $20--the price of one “rock” of cocaine.

He would later maintain his innocence, saying he only came to the house to collect some game tickets. But now, handcuffed in the back of a paddy wagon, Daniels was on his way to the Clark County (Nev.) Detention Center, and he didn’t have money to pay bail or hire an attorney.

Not to worry, though.

Help was on the way.

Shortly after 1 a.m., Sam Perry, a basketball enthusiast and friend of Daniels, arrived at the detention center with $1,500, to pay the bail.

“The guy is my friend,” Perry said later. “What was I going to do? Leave the guy in jail?”

Daniels was appreciative.

“Sam’s my man,” he said.

Fifteen hours later, David Chesnoff, a criminal defense lawyer and UNLV basketball fan, offered to represent Daniels without charge. “I had met Lloyd last summer and I liked him a great deal,” Chesnoff explained. “I also felt sorry for the kid.”

Daniels was appreciative.

“Dave’s my man,” he said.

Daniels--also known as “Sweet Pea” for his resemblance to the Popeye character--has been the recipient of such generosity before. Ever since he was anointed The Second Coming of Magic Johnson, four years ago on a Brooklyn playground, he has been advised, tutored, subsidized and, some would say, coddled by a batallion of benefactors.

If it wasn’t “My Man Sam” giving him an airplane ticket, it was “My Man Hersch” taking him to an amusement park--or “My Man Lou” sending him to a boarding school, all expenses paid.

Daniels attended four high schools in three states before quitting Andrew Jackson High in Queens in early 1986 as an 11th grader. “I ain’t allergic to no school,” he said at the time. “I just don’t want to go.” He was 18 1/2 years old, two years’ short of receiving a diploma, and he barely knew how to read. Not to worry, though. Help was on the way.

Last April, Daniels accepted an offer to enroll at UNLV as a special-admission, non-scholarship student. If all went as planned, he would be flaunting his stuff at the 18,000-seat Thomas and Mack Center during the 1987-88 season. “Lloyd Daniels is by far the best player I’ve ever been associated with,” UNLV Coach Jerry Tarkanian said.

The day after the arrest, Tarkanian announced that Daniels would never play a game for the Runnin’ Rebels. A day later he softened his stand, saying, “I should never have used the word ‘never.’ ”

Today Daniels is preparing to fight the felony drug charge, and if he is successful, it’s an even bet he’ll be playing college ball next season.

If there are any questions why a semi-literate high-school dropout would be recruited to represent an institution of higher learning, consider this: Lloyd (Sweet Pea) Daniels can put a ball into a hoop like few human beings.

He grew up in East New York, a squalid corner of Brooklyn known for its boarded-up tenements and rubble-strewn streets. He barely knew his father, and his mother died when he was 3, of causes he does not care to discuss.

“My grandmother did the best she could to raise me,” Daniels said recently in what he described as his first extensive interview. “She was a housekeeper, and sometimes she’d have to stay overnight at the white people’s house where she worked. So then I’d stay with my aunt, who lived in the Bushwick projects. She already had six kids, but she’d fit me in.”

By the fall of 1982, Daniels was known as a playground prodigy and classroom truant. Although he was 15, he had not advanced beyond the eighth grade, which he was repeating at Intermediate School 218.

“I remember Lloyd well, but he was absent much more than he was here,” said Richard Cincotta, assistant principal at 218. “He was in our special-education program, and we’d always tell him, ‘Just come to school. We’ll do what we can.’ But he only attended school about half of the time.”

After again failing to graduate from the eighth grade, Daniels did not return to school in the fall of 1983, according to Cincotta. Daniels was picked up as a truant, Cincotta said, and enrolled as a ninth grader at Thomas Jefferson High--a forbidding place where the front doors are manned by uniformed security guards, and the halls are monitored by closed-circuit TV cameras.

“The minute he walked in, people said, ‘Hey, do you know who’s in the building?’ ” recalled Mel Seeman, Jefferson’s basketball coach at the time. “I said, ‘No. Who?’ They said, ‘Lloyd Daniels!’ I’d never heard of Lloyd Daniels. But from the way some people talked, it was like he was King Tut.”

Daniels already had been the object of a royal recruiting war. “Lots of high-school coaches wanted me; so did the Gauchos and Riverside Church,” he said, referring to New York City’s most fiercely competitive Amateur Athletic Union basketball programs. “A couple of friends played for the Gauchos, and the next thing I knew I had a Gauchos jacket. And a bag. And a cap.”

With the Gauchos, directed by Lou d’Almeida, a Paris-born, Argentine-raised real-estate developer, Daniels would later travel to tournaments in Las Vegas, Florida, California and Hawaii, all expenses paid.

“The goal of our program is to spend money to help kids,” d’Almeida explained. “Some of these kids have never even been across the George Washington Bridge.”

Daniels’ class attendance continued to be sporadic. “When he was here, most of his conversations were based on sports. Like: ‘Did you see the game last night?’ ” said Marty Fiasconaro, who directed Jefferson’s special-education program at the time. “Lloyd had a different agenda. A smile--that was his explanation for not going to school. ‘I had things to do.’ ”

“I didn’t go to school because I had to work to help my grandmother,” Daniels said in the recent interview. “She needed to have fun, too.”

Asked where he worked, Daniels said, “I’d pack bags at A&P; on Saturdays and Sundays and sell the Daily News on Sundays.”

Asked how that prevented him from attending classes, Daniels shrugged. “I also worked to buy some clothes,” he said. “I didn’t want to go to school looking ratty. I didn’t want the girls to see me like that. You had to decent-up to go to school.”

As the 1983-84 basketball season approached, Seeman advised Daniels not to risk injury by playing in out-of-school leagues. Within a week, Daniels fractured his left ankle, playing in a church league in Queens. While his leg was in a cast, he was visited every day by a home-instruction teacher. “I liked having a tutor,” Daniels recalled. “I could communicate better.”

In January, he was back in school, ready to play ball.

“The man was a magician with the ball,” Fiasconaro said. “On the defensive end he looked like Jabbar, in terms of instinct and shot-blocking ability. On the offensive end, you saw Oscar Robertson.”

After scoring a total of 44 points in Jefferson’s last three regular-season games, Daniels walked into Fiasconaro’s office with a letter from Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim. “Lloyd said, ‘Marty, look what I’ve got!’ ” Fiasconaro said. “The letter said, ‘Dear Lloyd. We’ve heard of your progress . . . ‘ Lloyd was so proud of the letter. The sad thing was, he wasn’t able to read it.”

When the season ended, Daniels was gone.

“I didn’t go back to Jefferson because it a was like a baby Rikers Island there,” he said, referring to the New York City prison complex. “One day, a guy I knew opened up his coat to show me he was carrying two guns. He’s doing 5-to-10 right now. Jefferson was a bad school. Too wild for me.”

With Daniels a free agent, the recruiting war resumed. “Tons of coaches still wanted me,” he said. Case in point: Arnie Hershkowitz, a special-education teacher and assistant coach at Brooklyn’s Westinghouse Vocational Technical High.

“I met Lloyd at a little fish restaurant across the street from my school,” Hershkowitz said. “He walked in, and I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ It was the daytime and he belonged in school. So I took his number down and kept in touch.”

Hershkowitz not only kept in touch, he made a point of seeing Daniels regularly. “See, I have a liking toward these types of kids because I’ve been teaching them all my life,” he said. “Plus, he was a good player. He might be the best player in the history of basketball. You know, some people like nice-looking things. I like good players. So I thought I’d recruit him for Westinghouse.”

Daniels said he liked “Hersch,” liked him a lot. “He used to take me to Great Adventure (a New Jersey amusement park), and if we got back late, I’d stay at his house,” he said. “He even took me to Philadelphia once to see the 76ers play. The Doctor went crazy that night. Scored 37 points.”

But Daniels had no intention of attending Westinghouse, and while playing for the Gauchos that summer, he sought the guidance of Ernie Lorch, a Manhattan lawyer who directs the rival Riverside program.

“I told Lorch I didn’t want to be in New York anymore,” Daniels recalled, “and Lorch told me about Oak Hill, a school in the mountains in Virginia. But Lorch told me, ‘If I send you to Oak Hill, no more Gauchos. You play for Riverside.’ ”

Lorch said last week he intended only to “introduce” Daniels to Oak Hill--a $6,000-a-year Baptist-affiliated boarding academy in Mouth of Wilson, Va.--and never told him he would have to play for Riverside.

“When Lou d’Almeida found out I’d been talking to Lorch, he got very upset,” Daniels said. “Lou said, ‘Why didn’t you come to me? I know about Oak Hill, too. I’ll send you there.’ So I let Lou handle things. I told Lorch, ‘I have to be loyal to Lou. Lou has helped me, taken me to Hawaii.’ ”

D’Almeida not only arranged to send Daniels to Oak Hill; he flew his grandmother and an uncle there for a visit.

“I was just glad to get Lloyd away from all of the flesh-peddlers and blood-suckers who were going to be after him in the city,” d’Almeida said.

At Oak Hill, Daniels was given The Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills, which confirmed what his teachers had suspected: he wasn’t ready to do high-school work. According to the tests, Daniels’ skills were at a 2.8--second grade, eighth month--level in language, 3.6 in science, 4.0 in math and 2.0 in reading.

“Yes, I was embarrassed that I couldn’t read,” Daniels recalled. “Anybody would be embarrassed if you can’t read. But the majority of people in America can’t read. I’m not dumb. I’m just a guy who didn’t go to class.”

Daniels attended class at Oak Hill, even though, at first, he didn’t have any decent clothes.

“Lou sent some money so we could buy Lloyd a pair of dress shoes, a nice pair of jeans and slacks,” said Larry Davis, Oak Hill’s coach at the time. “And then Hersch would call and ask Lloyd if he needed anything. I can remember Lloyd calling Hersch one day and saying, just like this: ‘Hersch, I want a gold chain. Send me a gold chain with one of them basketball players on it. Not gold-plated. The real thing. I want a big, thick chain now.’ I mean, that’s how he talked to the guy.”

By early October, Daniels’ behavior had become a problem, according to Davis. At various times, he was reprimanded for fighting with a fellow student, showing verbal disrespect to a teacher and being caught in a room where other students were smoking marijuana.

“I wasn’t smoking, but they wanted me to snitch on the other kids--and I wasn’t going to snitch,” Daniels explained. The fight? “A girl used to wink at me, and I’d wink at her. One day her boy friend saw us winking, and we went at it in the cafeteria line.” Disrespect to teachers? “Yes, I showed disrespect to one teacher.” He called the teacher “prejudiced.”

His departure from Oak Hill was prompted by an argument with his coach. “He was loafing and repeatedly not doing what I asked him to do, so I jumped his butt in practice,” Davis said. “He said, ‘The hell with this, I’m breaking out.’ He walked out and I said, ‘Fine. I don’t need you. There’s the door.’ He said, ‘I’m going to call Lou.’ I said, ‘Fine. I’ll call Lou for you. Matter of fact, I’ll make the plane reservation.’ ”

Daniels headed home, at d’Almeida’s expense. “I just couldn’t take it anymore,” Daniels said. “Being in the mountains. Being away from my grandmother. Being away from the City. Being in a little chick-bone town.”

In New York, he huddled first with Hershkowitz, then d’Almeida.

“I was still thinking of a way of getting Sweet Pea into Westinghouse,” Hershkowitz said.

“I wanted to send Lloyd to another school out of town,” d’Almeida said.

D’Almeida phoned Frank (Bishop) McDuffie, basketball coach and president of the Laurinburg (N.C.) Institute, which had just graduated Chris Washburn, an academically troubled 6-11 All-American.

“Lloyd came here with a halo and light shining in his eyes, as if to say, ‘Down the road I’ll be making that dollar,’ ” McDuffie recalled. “At first he wanted to hang out and do his thing. He kind of wanted to be here as a basketball guru or something. He didn’t want to come to class. So we told him, ‘If you want to remain a star, then there are things you’ll need to do to make you a valid star. You need some fundamental help.’ ”

No one was surprised that Daniels averaged 24 points a game for Laurinburg. Surprising was the fact that he received passing grades in each of his 10th-grade classes: English II, Algebra I, Biology, World History, Black History, Reading and Physical Education.

“Lloyd tried,” McDuffie explained. “If a person tries, should he get an F, or should he at least get a D? If a student comes to school every day, sits down, pays attention, interacts with me and then fails on a test, has that kid actually failed the course?”

But Daniels was ready to move on. “Eat-wise, the cafeteria at Laurinburg was pathetic,” he said. “Excuse me, I don’t want to down the school. But it just wasn’t me.”

Home for the summer, Daniels conferred with d’Almeida. “Lou told me, ‘I think it’d be best for you to go back to Oak Hill,’ ” Daniels said. “So I went back. I did it for Lou.” D’Almeida, who said it was Daniels’ idea to return to Oak Hill, again paid the tuition.

“I was getting (upset) with Lloyd,” d’Almeida said, “but I didn’t want him to know that, because I wanted to encourage him. So I said to myself, ‘I’m going to give him another chance. And another chance. And another chance.’ ”

Daniels was asked--and agreed--to leave Oak Hill after a question was raised about whether he took a teammate’s watch. “I told Lloyd, ‘I can’t work with you anymore. I think it’d be better if you leave,’ ” said Steve Smith, who replaced Davis as Oak Hill’s basketball coach. “Lloyd understood.” Daniels said he never took a teammate’s watch.

Hershkowitz no longer had an interest in recruiting Daniels. “There was too much heat,” he said. “So I recommended that he go to Cardozo High in Queens.”

A splendid idea, Daniels thought. “The Cardozo coach (Ron Naclerio) already had tried to recruit me, and I liked him,” he said. “So I moved in with my other grandmother in Queens.” But the city school board’s admission office ruled that Daniels’ grandmother lived in a district assigned to Andrew Jackson High, the defending city basketball champion.

While at Jackson, Daniels had a private tutor, hired by d’Almeida. And Lorch offered him an opportunity to attend a private high school in Florida. “I knew some people--educators--who were willing to work with him and pay for everything,” Lorch said. “But Lloyd wasn’t interested.”

In the middle of his 11th-grade season, Daniels decided he was ready to play college basketball. “Hersh told me, ‘No way you’ll pass that 48 thing,’ ” Daniels said, referring to the NCAA’s Proposition 48 (which requires minimum scores on college-admission tests and a C average in core-curriculum courses). “So I figured I might as well (find another way to) go to college.”

UNLV was his first choice, because he had twice visited Las Vegas with the Gauchos.

“Lloyd liked the environment there,” d’Almeida said.

“So I introduced Lloyd to Sam Perry,” Hershkowitz said.

“And Sam took me to Vegas for a visit,” Daniels said.

“I just wanted to help the kid,” Perry said. “It’s no big deal to give the kid an airfare ticket or something. What does it cost--$300, $400? It wasn’t going to break me.”

Perry describes himself as a New York summer-league coach who works in commodities and winters in Las Vegas “because I’m allergic to the snow.” He said he encouraged Daniels to attend UNLV, because “I thought the (basketball) program there was very good. And let’s face it. He’s not a genius. He can’t go to a Harvard or Brown. So he had to go somewhere where maybe he has a chance to play.”

Under Nevada law, Daniels could take six hours of credit per semester at UNLV without being officially admitted or having a high-school diploma. If he could earn 14 hours with a 2.0 average, he would be eligible for regular admission. At that point, he would sit out one year of competition, an NCAA requirement of students who have not met Proposition 48 standards. If he made satisfactory progress that year, he would be eligible to play.

“It sounded good,” Daniels said.

Daniels quit high school after finishing his 11th-grade season with averages of 31.2 points, 12.3 rebounds and 10 assists per game.

“A ton of agents wanted me to forget college and go pro,” Daniels said. “I talked to a lot of them--some big, big names--but I don’t want to say anything about that. I don’t want to get nobody into trouble. But they wanted me to sign papers.”

“Lloyd told me, ‘Well, I could play in Europe,’ ” Perry recalled. “All these people were putting stupid ideas in his head. They were saying he could start for the Houston Rockets, they needed a backcourt man. I told Lloyd, ‘I know basketball very well. Right now you’d be making a mistake if you don’t try going to college.’ ”

On April 11 Daniels signed a letter of intent to play for UNLV. At Perry’s expense, he flew to Las Vegas, enrolled in UNLV’s continuing-education program and took two one-credit courses on juvenile delinquency. Perry said he also arranged for Daniels to share a three-bedroom apartment, rent-free, “with friends of mine.”

“Sam’s good people,” Daniels said.

During two UNLV summer sessions, Daniels took 12 hours of classes, mostly in reading. And he developed a close relationship with UNLV recruiting co-ordinator Mark Warkentien and his wife, Maureen.

“We’d help Lloyd with his reading,” Warkentien said. “My wife and Lloyd really hit it off, and we talked to Lloyd about becoming his legal guardian so we could give him some structure to lean on. Lloyd liked the idea, and we decided to do it.”

But first, Warkentien arranged for Daniels to be evaluated in Las Vegas by a family counselor and clinical psychologist, Joan Owen. After interviews and tests, Owen wrote a report--submitted to the court in the guardianship proceedings--stating Daniels had admitted feeling “humiliation and embarrassment” with his limited academic growth, that he had avoided school because he didn’t want to “face the continued failure,” that his primary worry was his inability to read, that he wanted to live with a family “where he could have a male model for identification” and that he suffered from dyslexia, in which words are often perceived backwards.

By midsummer, it was obvious that Daniels would not qualify for admission to UNLV as a full-time student. “Lloyd just didn’t have enough skills to make it at the university level,” Warkentien said.

Not to worry, though. Daniels was enrolled at Mount San Antonio College in Walnut, Calif., which is required under state law to admit “any person 18 or over who a local government board judges can benefit from instruction.”

With his letter of intent voided, Daniels was again a recruitable athlete. Under NCAA rules, that meant UNLV could have no more than six contacts with him, three at his new school.

This restriction also applied to Warkentien, even though on Oct. 24 the Clark County District Court appointed him as Daniels’ special guardian, for a period not to exceed 24 months.

As guardian, Warkentien was empowered to “borrow money and obtain loans,” to provide for “the proper care, maintenance, education, counseling, remedial tutoring and support” of Daniels. Under NCAA rules, however, Warkentien could not arrange or provide any financial assistance to Daniels.

UNLV Athletic Director Brad Rothermel said in an interview that the guardianship was proper under NCAA rules, because Warkentien and other UNLV staffers abided by the “contact rule” and did not offer Daniels any improper financial assistance. Warkentien said, “My position is we’ve acted in concert with our conference and the NCAA.”

On Nov. 7, Rothermel asked the NCAA for an opinion on whether a guardianship relationship violated any rules. NCAA assistant executive director Bill Hunt responded that such a relationship constituted an improper inducement. Rothermel appealed to the NCAA’s Legislation Interpretations Committee, which agreed with Hunt. Hunt said NCAA consideration is continuing.

At Mount San Antonio, Daniels’ curriculum included History of the Black American, Basketball--Men, Recreation and Fundamentals of Sports. He also was tutored privately in reading.