The Sleuth

The Sleuth walks quietly through the Chicago night, saying nothing. He enters the building and takes a seat, away from anyone. He is not wearing sunglasses or the hat he sometimes pulls low on his head to hide his identity, nor is he arriving under an assumed name or crouching behind a pillar or lurking in the building's dark upper shadows, all things he has done in the line of duty. But he makes no ripples, either. To the Sleuth's left, separated from him by one seat, is his underling and fellow operative, 32-year-old Jim Stack. To the Sleuth's right, also a seat away, is another assistant intelligence gatherer. His name is Ivica Dukan; he is 36, Croatian, speaks five languages.

Down below, an orange sphere is tossed into the air, and a basketball game begins—Wright State versus the University of Illinois-Chicago, at the UIC Pavilion. A few hundred people think enough of this event to have shown up tonight. The Sleuth, also known as Jerry Krause, vice-president/basketball operations (read: general manager) for the world champion Chicago Bulls, thinks only that there is knowledge to be gleaned here, information that can be used in his battle against the outside forces that conspire to grind him into oblivion.

Whom is he scouting? He will not say, of course. Secrecy rules. Knowledge is king, but only when the bad guys—the Celtics, the Trail Blazers, the Lakers, the Knicks, the dreaded Pistons, the irresponsible press, anybody at all except for himself and his trusted inner circle—don't have it.

"There is a kid here who is on our list," Krause admits. The list, he has already explained, contains between 150 and 200 names of players—most of them members of U.S. college teams but a few from lesser American pro or foreign leagues—that "we look at," he says. Naturally the names are secret.

There are only a couple of players on the floor who possibly could be NBA prospects: a 6'7" UIC sophomore forward named Sherell Ford and a 6'8" Wright State senior named Bill Edwards. Is either on the list? Maybe. When he writes, Krause turns his notebook sideways and raises the cover like a shield.

Maybe not.

Krause, who has spent virtually his entire working life assessing baseball and/or basketball talent, feels he has a gift. Instinct, he calls it, the ability to identify and evaluate skilled athletic movement. "It's God-given," he says.

"I remember actions, how a guy walks or runs or throws or shoots. If those actions change, I see it. If a hitter is going bad, I see it in two or three swings. If somebody has the goods, I see it right away, basketball or baseball. Swinging a bat and shooting a ball are exactly the same—wrists, hand-eye coordination, recognition of the pitch, how to get the shot off."

Krause is a scout of epic proportions, flaming obsession, monumental quirks, the only man ever to be an executive in both major league baseball and the NBA, with all of his clout having arisen from the simple premise that he can ascertain better than almost anyone else who can throw, hit, run, catch and shoot well enough to play in the big leagues.

For much of the time between 1961 and '85, Krause was a scout for the Cleveland Indians, the Oakland A's, the Seattle Mariners and the Chicago White Sox. And for 26 years he has worked in the NBA with the Baltimore Bullets, the Phoenix Suns, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Bulls, doing double duty with baseball in many of those years. For eight seasons now Krause has been at the helm of Chicago's basketball operations, having been handpicked for the job by owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who plucked him from the staff of the White Sox, another club Reinsdorf owns. At 53, Krause has seen so many ball games that he has decided that if he ever writes his autobiography—an act that would clash wildly with his clandestine nature and thus will never happen—he will call it One Million National Anthems.