Racist Hate Mail Reportedly Sent to NFL Players
Thu Dec 4,10:47 AM ET Add U.S. National - Reuters to My Yahoo!
MIAMI (Reuters) - A dozen black NFL players have been sent threatening hate mail telling them African-Americans should not be allowed to play professional football and earn stacks of money, a newspaper reported on Thursday.
Related Links
• Memo Sent to NFL Players (Palm Beach Post)
Florida's Palm Beach Post said the NFL's security department sent out a memo last week warning players, and stating that the letters all appeared to come from the same person and were postmarked in Erie, Pennsylvania, or Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio.
"We do not have any suspects," special agent Robert Hawk of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cleveland office told the newspaper, saying the bureau was investigating the letters and would prosecute whoever was sending them.
"These letters contained veiled threats. There were overtures of violence," Hawk added.
No one was immediately available for comment at the FBI (news - web sites) office in Cleveland, nor at National Football League headquarters in New York. A spokeswoman for the FBI office in Miami told Reuters she had no information on the case.
The Palm Beach Post said one of the targets of the hate mail was an unidentified player with the Miami Dolphins.
"It was a threatening letter," Dolphins team security investigator Stu Weinstein told the paper.
"It said: 'African-Americans shouldn't be allowed to play professional sports and shouldn't be allowed to make the money that football players make and entertainers make.' Mostly it was about the dangers of racial mixing in our society."
The NFL memo said the sender was usually identified as "All Whites" or "Angry white women."
