Football writer Jim Dent faces long prison term after 10 DWIs
In August, we passed along a tidbit from the book Manziel Mania, which claimed that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was so close to drafting quarterback Johnny Manziel that Jones’s son Stephen had to take the card with Manziel’s name on it out of Jerry’s hand.
Little did we know that the story of the author of Manziel Mania was even crazier than the story of the goings-on in the Cowboys’ draft room: It turns out that at the very time Manziel Mania was generating headlines, author Jim Dent was on the lam in Mexico, having jumped bail because he was facing a long prison term in Texas after his 10th conviction for driving while intoxicated.
The Dallas Morning News has conducted a thorough investigation of Dent, who authored several well-regarded books about football, including The Junction Boys and King of the Cowboys: The Life and Times of Jerry Jones. Dent has now been caught and resides in the Collin County jail, where he awaits sentencing on Thursday on the DWI charges. In addition to the DWI sentence, he now faces a felony charge of bail jumping and failure to appear in court, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
Dent promoted Manziel Mania from Mexico, using an Internet phone service that makes calls hard to trace so that he could conduct radio interviews to talk about the book without the authorities tracking him down. In all the news accounts of Manziel Mania — which got plenty of attention thanks to that headline-grabbing anecdote about the Cowboys’ draft room — no one mentioned that Dent was on the run from the law.
Read more: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/04/13/football-writer-jim-dent-faces-long-prison-term-after-10-dwis/