Pro and Con

Then Hall remembered. In the mid-1980s, Hall had been an equipment clerk at Skyland Recreation Center in northeast Denver; Johnny Lawain Harlan was one of the local boys who spent time there. "A typical teenager," Hall, 52, recalls. "A bright-eyed kid. Seemed like he had the whole world waiting for him." Hall hadn't seen him since; after working at the rec center, he'd gotten into drugs and robbery and spent much of his life behind bars. It looked to Hall as though the world had treated Harlan well in the meantime.

"I have my own company," said Harlan, who added that he now went by Amadeus. "Why don't you be my operations manager? I'll pay you $50,000 a year."

Hall started working for Harlan21 right away. Since the company was in the process of moving into a new office, the operations manager spent his first few weeks working from home, hiring additional employees through Craigslist ads. In early October, Harlan21 took over a fourth-floor suite in an office building at 3801 East Florida Avenue. There were five employees, all of them new, working under Harlan; the boss explained that his old employees had been fired.

Harlan passed out employee handbooks that listed benefits such as child care, life insurance and a savings plan. The idea was simple, he explained: They would host tournaments — basketball, dodgeball, flag football and whatever else suited their fancy — all over the city. They'd be making money and giving back to the community at the same time. Revenue would be generated by entry fees minus cash prizes for tournament winners and minimal overhead. Plus, Harlan21 would sell its own water, said Harlan, showing them the "H21" bottles. All in all, he said, he expected them to clear tens of thousands of dollars per tournament.

"His concept seemed brilliant," says Joe Pineda, who, as a $50,000-a-year promoter, was supposed to organize five tournaments a month.

"It sounded like a pretty good idea," adds Hall, but parts of Harlan's story left him worried. Harlan would often brag about his past. He'd hint that he'd been in trouble with the law, but mostly he'd talk about his days as a pro football player. Before working for Nike, he said, he'd been a running back for Texas Tech University, then got signed with the Dallas Cowboys and, finally, with the Broncos. He added that he had rings from the Broncos' 1997 and 1998 Super Bowl victories sitting on his mantel at home.

He also had a tattoo on his left arm reading "XXI" — which may have been the so-called number of God or a reference to his Broncos number (or even Super Bowl XXI, which the team played against the New York Giants). "He never made it clear the tattoo was from the Broncos," says Pineda, "but everyone put things together."

When Hall said he'd never heard of him playing for the Broncos, Harlan brushed him off, saying, "You've been gone a long time." But Hall had followed the Broncos all his life; in east Denver, where both men had grown up in the 1970s and '80s, the Broncos were the biggest thing in town. Players like Rick Upchurch visited their neighborhood and stopped by the rec center. "These guys were the superheroes," says Hall. "They had fancy cars and big, fancy homes. Everyone wanted to emulate them."

While Harlan would often tell Hall to stop talking about his criminal past — as if keeping secrets were expected — Hall said he'd rather be honest. "You don't have to lie to people to get them to accept you. Be honest," Hall says he told his boss. "He just looked at me and said, 'Whatever,'" Hall remembers. "He said it didn't matter."

Fran, a former gym teacher at North Middle School in Aurora, will never forget the first time she met the eighth-grade boy who would grow up to be Amadeus Harlan.

It started with a fight on the playground, she remembers, a fight that was broken up by a handsome, broad-shouldered boy. Afterward, he made a beeline for Fran. "I didn't know this kid from Adam," she recalls. "He came up to me with a baseball bat and imitated Howard Cosell, talking into the bat like it was a microphone."

That make-believe Monday Night Football commentator was Johnny Harlan.

"He kind of attached himself to me. He had a lot of problems at home. His mother was not the best mother in the world, so he was looking for somebody to look up to," says Fran, who asked that her last name not be used. But domestic strife didn't keep him down: "He was funny. He was very sharp. He had the gift of gab. He always had a way with females."

She noticed, though, that he sometimes played fast and loose with the truth. "He was a con artist way back," she says. "He would exaggerate his home life with other kids. He would make it out to be very good."