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Bianchi: FSU, UF need criminal ‘fixers’ like Monk Bonasorte, Huntley Johnson

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Florida State University has two choices.

Either fire Monk Bonasorte.

Or give him a raise.

I say give him a raise for doing his job and doing it well.

His job, it seems, is to keep FSU football players in uniform and out of jail.

Without Bonasorte, a former FSU All-American who now serves as an associate athletic director, Jameis Winston might have never have played a down in Tallahassee, and the Seminoles would have one less national championship and one less Heisman in their trophy case. Coach Jimbo Fisher makes $5 million a year partly because Monk is a team player who is willing to do Jimbo’s dirty work.

Bonasorte is in the news again amid a recent ESPN Outside the Lines investigation into how often crimes involving college athletes are ignored, er, prosecuted by local law enforcement. The ESPN investigation looked at 10 big-time programs from across the country with much of the attention focused on the high number of UF and FSU athletes who are tied to criminal activity. The gist of the investigation pertaining to UF and FSU was this: Seminole and Gator athletes get arrested a lot, but don’t get prosecuted very much when compared to other college-age males in Gainesville and Tallahassee.

One reason is because of football programs employ people like Bonasorte, who ESPN painted as FSU’s athletic department eraser — the man in charge of making potential crimes disappear.

A former Florida State athletic department employee told ESPN that Bonasorte’s “routine involvement in criminal cases troubled some colleagues because of the administrator’s own record.” Bonasorte spent six months in jail after pleading guilty in 1987 to charges of cocaine distribution.

“He is kind of the fixer for football,” the former FSU employee told ESPN. “He knows where the skeletons are buried, but he also helps keep those football players, not out of trouble, but out of paying for the trouble they’ve gotten into.”

Translation: He is doing the job FSU wants him to do and he’s doing it well. Believe me, if FSU athletic director Stan Wilcox and/or school president John Thrasher objected to Bonasorte’s methods then he would have been fired by now. In fact, he would have been fired months ago during the botched Winston investigation when public records indicate Bonasorte leaked important witness information to Winston’s attorney Tim Jansen. As a result, Jansen, was able to interview and obtain sworn affidavits from two key witnesses — football players Ronald Darby and Chris Casher — before the police even had a chance to interview them.

“Police will contact probably Monk and say, ‘We need to talk to this student,'” Jansen told ESPN. “Now, then my phone rings or somehow that magically does happen, and how it’s done, I don’t know. It’s like making sausage.”

I hate to tell you this, but there are countless shadowy figures like Bonasorte who are part of the unseemly underbelly of college football; the part fans don’t really want to see or hear about.

These big-time institutions of higher earning have battalions of tutors so that academically challenged players who really don’t belong in college can stay eligible while taking their fake classes in their phantom majors.

They have high-powered attorneys on speed dial (see Huntley Johnson, UF) to keep their criminals (see Aaron Hernandez, UF) out of jail. As former UF football player Chris Rainey told ESPN, Johnson — a graduate of UF’s law school — was essentially Florida’s fixer. “If anything happens, we got Huntley,” Rainey said. “He will get you out of anything, everything.”

And all too often, these powerful programs have much-too-cozy relationships with the local police force (see Tallahassee Police Department’s Scott Angulo, the bungling lead investigator in the Winston case who also worked side jobs for Seminole Boosters).

It’s all part of the shadowy infrastructure of championship college football.

To paraphrase the famous speech by Col. Nathan Jessup in a “A Few Good Men” …

“You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at your tailgate parties or in your luxury suites, you want Monk Bonasorte on that wall; you need Huntley Johnson on that wall.

“I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to ESPN – a network that rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very fandom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather ESPN you just said thank you, and went on their way.”

mbianchi@tribune.com. Follow him on Twitter @BianchiWrites. Listen to his radio show every weekday from 6 to 9 a.m. on 740 AM.