Hernandez had settled in a town house in Plainville, Massachusetts, two hours east of Bristol, Connecticut. Once again, he was within driving distance of his family, and his boys. There were old friends like Carlos Ortiz to hang out with. There was Aaron’s cousin Tanya, and TL Singleton—TL and Tanya had recently gotten married. And there were new friends, like Alexander Bradley, who had met Aaron in Bristol while he was still living in Florida.
Bradley was tall and imposing, with a broad chest and broad shoulders. He was soft-spoken. And he was intelligent.
You had to be smart to be as successful as Bradley had gotten to be in his chosen profession.
Bradley sold weed—in “large amounts,” by his own estimation. He had a rap sheet: marijuana, cocaine, and battery assault were all on the menu. But Alexander Bradley and Aaron Hernandez got along well. The first time they’d met, Hernandez had no cash with which to buy marijuana. Bradley had given him an ounce on the house.
“I used to give him credit for weed all the time,” Bradley would say. “He didn’t have much money before he got drafted. I loaned him money…I wound up getting into it with my girl over hanging out with him so much. I wasn’t around as much. She was like, ‘If you want to hang out with your boy, hang out with your boy, but this is not going to work out with us.’”
Hernandez and Bradley cemented their friendship by smoking and playing video games for hours on end, and when Hernandez became a Patriot, and moved back to New England, he and Bradley saw each other much more often—three or four times a week, with phone calls and texts on the days in between. They gambled together, driving to Foxwoods Casino or Mohegan Sun. They went to clubs in Boston, Hartford, and Providence. Once, Hernandez took Bradley on a vacation to Miami.
“We were definitely best friends by 2012,” Bradley would tell the jury, during his testimony in one of Aaron’s subsequent murder trials.
On Sunday nights, he and Aaron went to Cure Lounge, a nightclub in Boston’s theater district. Waitresses carried buckets of champagne around its big room, trailing comet tails of dry ice. Sometimes, at the bar, or on the dance floor, patrons would recognize Hernandez and stare.
“He would ask me, ‘Why don’t people stare at you like that?’” Bradley would say.
“I would respond to him, pretty much, ‘Because I’m not you.’
“He didn’t like it when people stared at him,” Bradley explained. “He felt like they were trying him. What I usually would say was, ‘You’re a famous NFL player. That’s what’s gonna happen. It’s not that big of a deal.’ In other words, I would try to explain to him that people weren’t trying him all the time. It’s just the situation—the position he was in—and he didn’t need to overreact all the time to that type of scenario.”
Bradley thought that Hernandez was paranoid. The average person wouldn’t be bothered to this extent. But it began to seem as if, every time they went out, Bradley had to step in to stop Hernandez from starting trouble.
“He acted in a manner—like a tough guy all the time. He had a problem with things that most people don’t have a problem with.”
A few months after the Super Bowl, Hernandez and Bradley were at a Boston nightclub called Rumor.
“What are you looking at?” Hernandez said to a man he’d caught staring.
“I’m looking at you,” the man said.
Hernandez got up in the other man’s face.
“You lost me a lot of money on the Super Bowl,” the man protested.
The room grew tense, but Bradley stepped in, defused the situation, and got Hernandez to walk away.
Of course, Aaron also did things for Alexander Bradley. He supplied Bradley with Patriots tickets. In return, Bradley kept Hernandez supplied with all the weed he could smoke.
According to Bradley, Hernandez went through as much as four ounces a week.
Bradley did other things for his friend, too, acting more like a personal assistant, at times, than a friend. Bradley says that he would drop Aaron off at his cousin Tanya’s house on Lake Avenue, where Hernandez would sometimes spend days doing drugs with Tanya, TL Singleton, and their friends.
And, in addition to the weed supply, Bradley serviced Hernandez’s cars, did his shopping, and supplied him with firearms.
“He felt like people thought he was soft or something—and he was out to prove something,” Bradley explained. “He was fed up with the whole feeling-as-if-people-were-trying-him situation, so he wanted a firearm to protect himself, in the event…”
According to Alexander Bradley, downtown Boston was the place where Hernandez felt he was “tested” most often.
“In the Cure area,” Bradley said. “That’s where he was on heightened alert all the time.”
Jeff London was a promoter for Cure Lounge and other nightclubs in Boston. He met Aaron during his rookie year on the Patriots and, over time, grew to consider him a “good friend.” London took care of several Patriots who went out clubbing. From time to time, he’d ask female patrons if they wanted to meet one football player or another.
But, like Alexander Bradley, London noticed that Hernandez could be paranoid and “super-aggressive”—and that he became more paranoid, and more aggressive, as time went by.
“I’ve seen him punch people,” London says. “I’ve seen him do everything. Five times. Ten times. He’d smack people, punch them in the head, get violent with them.”
Because Hernandez was big and intimidating, he tended to get away with it.
“They would just walk away after he hit them,” says London.
One day, despite their friendship and the promoter’s own size (6′1″, 270 pounds), Hernandez picked a fight with London.
The promoter had spotted Hernandez, Bradley, and a third man walking into Cure. He approached to see if there was anything that he could do for the tight end.
“Is everything cool?” London asked. “Do you need anything? You up for a table?”
Hernandez sneered at him: “You’re a fed, a snitch. Get the fuck away from me.”
“It took me by surprise,” London would say, “because, obviously, I’m neither. The bouncers came over ’cause they saw me and I was in shock. His two boys came over to me and I was trying to explain to them: ‘What is he talking about?’”
As he so often did, Bradley stepped in to cool the situation. By now, this had become a typical night out with Aaron. Nevertheless, Bradley and Hernandez kept on going to Cure.