What Did Internet Trolls Do Before The Internet? They Sent Letters To Wellington Mara That Wound Up In His FBI File

So you think you're a successful troll? Think again, tough guy.

Yes, thanks to the internet, you don't even have to get out of your racecar bed to hurl invective at your least favorite athlete. All you have to do is log on to your @BonerJ4w6969 Twitter account and type "@KingJames ur nickname should be queef james u fckin [insert racist epithet]" and voila, you have successfully trolled a famous person.

But guess what? There used to be real trolls in this country, before the internet let all the lightweights run amok. I'm talking about people who would take the time to sit down and handwrite a crazy letter, and then walk down to the post office and mail their masterpiece to a carefully selected target. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, we recently attained one such letter that was sent to Wellington Mara, then the owner of the New York Giants, in 1983.


The letter reads:

Mr. Well Mara did you know that your Nevev [redacted] is

A) A drunk arrested for drunken driving Fall 82.

B) Seen snoorting cocain Eastern 83

C) Corrupting [redacted] and condaminating the air we breathe

D) Get him out of the NFL

A plethora of typos, nonsensical accusations, and a failure to understand how ordered lists work. Yep, that's some high-quality trolling!

Poor old Wellington Mara, not having had the Internet to steel him against all of the haters, actually submitted the letter to the FBI for investigation. You can view the FBI transcript of the letter below, as well as the other 16 pages of documents that were produced by their investigation. According to the documents, the FBI actually looked into whether the player in question was arrested for a DUI in 1982.

Our first hunch was that the player in question was Harry Carson—he was the most famous Giant whose last name began with a letter between A and F, as referenced in the file, and he had been on the team long enough to live in New York and New Jersey in 1979 and 1980—but because the FBI redacts all names of living people, we can't know for sure. Or maybe it's someone in management? (We also don't know what a "nevev" is.) Got better ideas? Drop us a line or put 'em in the comments..