10 Pro Wrestling Scandals You've Probably Never Heard Of

A wrestling promoter from the north-east, Herbert Christian Abrams formed the Universal Wrestling Federation in California (this wasn’t the more famous mid-south version run by Bill Watts) in 1990, intending to return pro wrestling back to its roots before Vince McMahon’s WWF had steamrolled the opposition in the 1980s.

A cagey, maverick businessman, Abrams snapped up the valuable UWF trademark precisely because Watts had failed to do so before selling his company to Jim Crockett in 1987. He’d negotiate valuable television deals at home and home video deals overseas for the product, and was committed in his efforts to turn the UWF into something that could theoretically one day challenge the primacy of the WWF and WCW in the US market.

Unfortunately, Abrams was as unstable as he was ambitious, and the wrestling wasn’t the only old school values he was keen to return to: he liked to hoover up cocaine like no one’s business, and as a result his paranoia was through the roof. Convinced that one of his roster was stealing from him and sleeping with his girlfriend, Abrams paid off ‘Dr. Death’ Steve Williams to hurt the man in his own ring as a form of revenge.

But it’s the manner of Abrams’ passing that raised the most eyebrows. Herb Abrams died in July 1996 of a cocaine-motivated heart attack while in police custody. He’d been arrested when police were called to the scene after he began running through his offices, stark naked, screaming and destroying everything in sight with a baseball bat.

To make matters… well, weirder, Abrams had several barely dressed prostitutes in tow at the time, and his body was covered in both cocaine and a waxy vaseline-like substance. Well, if you’re determined to go out with a bang, you might as well make it a big one.