Team has swaggered for years

Misdemeanors over a seven-year period fuel the lacrosse team's rowdy reputation

The warning signs of a Duke University lacrosse team skidding toward disaster are scattered through the courthouse records of Durham and Orange counties -- and have been for at least the past seven years.

Speeding down I-40 while drunk. Urinating in public. Using an adult's ID to buy a case of beer while underage. Kicking in the slats of a fence after an argument with a girlfriend.

Since 1999, records show, 41 Blue Devil lacrosse players -- about 31 percent of all players on the roster from then until now -- have been charged with a variety of rowdy and drunken acts.

Of this year's squad of 47 players -- their season canceled, their coach exiled and their university shamed -- roughly a third have been charged with similar misdemeanors.

In contrast, records show, only two members of Duke's 27-man soccer squad for this year have been arrested -- on charges of misdemeanor property damage and resisting arrest. Four of this year's 22 baseball players have been arrested in connection with underage alcohol offenses, all misdemeanors, records show.

Taken separately, the charges against Duke lacrosse players read like standard-issue, alcohol-fueled offenses of college students experiencing their first taste of freedom. Most are minor cases, quickly settled, that fall far short of the allegations of an escort service dancer who says she was gang-raped during a team party March 13 in the bathroom of a white rental house on Buchanan Boulevard where three lacrosse co-captains lived.

None of the misdemeanor charges encompasses the ugliness of team member Ryan McFadyen's searing e-mail in which he threatened to kill and skin strippers or a racially provocative insult shouted by an unidentified white male on Buchanan Boulevard the night of the team party.

But taken as a body of work, the charges track the noisy passage of a championship lacrosse team with a reputation for a swaggering sense of entitlement and privilege. They underscore the hard-drinking image of the Duke lacrosse team -- which some residents say is a super-sized version of the university's elitist, party-hearty ethos.

"There is a culture at Duke of an entitlement to be drunk in the evenings and on the weekends," said Robert Panoff, a former Notre Dame club lacrosse player who has lived for more than a decade in Trinity Park, the neighborhood on the edge of Duke's east campus where the lacrosse team captains lived.

"That's the attitude that pervades the Duke campus, and it's not just the lacrosse team," said Panoff, founder and executive director of a nonprofit research and education organization. "There is a particular swagger at Duke. Is there a particular machismo and variation of that swagger on the lacrosse team? Absolutely."

Panoff is quick to point out that lacrosse is not a monolithic culture. But for other Durham residents, the lacrosse imbroglio has raised racial tensions.

The dancer who is alleging the rape is black. She says her three unidentified attackers are white. All but the team's lone black player have submitted to DNA tests, and Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong says results could be released this week. Nifong says he's confident the woman was sexually assaulted. But attorneys for the players say no rape, assault or sex occurred.

'Preppy arrogance'

The case has ripped an already frayed town-and-gown relationship, underscoring the friction between the school, with its $41,000-a-year cost and walled campus, and the surrounding city.

"It's this preppy arrogance that they will never be held accountable for what they've done -- that their daddies will get them out of it," said Eugene Brown, a Durham city councilman who lives on Buchanan Boulevard, a block from the rental house.