Brother, Where Art Thou?

By David E. Thigpen

Even before he abruptly quit professional basketball, Bison Dele was a 6-ft. 10-in. enigma. He was powerful on the basketball court, but off it he was reserved. He loved skydiving, but he was also a bookworm who spent hours poring over art and philosophy texts. He earned millions but was known to arrive at work on a skateboard. And in 1998 he changed his given name, Brian Williams, to Bison Dele, as a tribute to his Native American and African ancestors.

Dele recovered from depression and a 1992 suicide attempt to play eight seasons with five teams, including a stint with Michael Jordan and the 1997 World Champion Chicago Bulls. But in 1999 he gave up the remaining $35 million on his contract, telling his agent he was going to do something "to make the world better." So it seemed as if he might have embarked on another existential adventure when he disappeared in waters near Papeete, Tahiti. Surely he was reading Sartre on some remote beach. But authorities inspecting his abandoned yacht last week found blood traces and gunpowder residue from a "large-caliber" weapon, though no bodies. They suspected that Dele, 33, his girlfriend and a crew member had been murdered and said Dele's estranged brother Miles Dabord, 35, was under suspicion.

A two-week FBI manhunt finally located Dabord in a San Diego--area hospital, comatose and in critical condition after an apparent drug overdose. Dabord had been found five days earlier, unconscious and without identification, on a street in Tijuana, Mexico. The hospital called in police, who made the ID and charged him with fraud. Dabord may be the only person who can explain just what happened aboard Dele's boat. "We presume that the bodies of these people must be in the sea--the ocean--and will probably never be found," says prosecutor Michel Marotte in Tahiti. The 55-ft. boat Hakuna Matata embarked in late May from Auckland, New Zealand, bound for Tahiti and Hawaii. Dele was joined onboard by his girlfriend Serena Karlan, 30, who was a former New York City real estate agent, and Bertrand Saldo, 32, a Frenchman and professional yacht captain. Dabord, a computer programmer from California, turned up uninvited. In emails to her parents and friends, Karlan "didn't sound all that excited about him being there," says her best friend, Stacey Steele.

At Tahiti's Taina Marina, a witness reported, he overheard "a quarrel between the two brothers" on July 6. That same day Saldo phoned a friend to say they would soon be leaving Tahiti for the Marquesas Islands. Karlan left a voice-mail message for her parents: "Everything is going super." That was the last anyone would ever hear from Saldo, Karlan or Dele. Three days later the Hakuna Matata was spotted by a hotel employee in the lagoon of the nearby island of Moorea with one person onboard--possibly Dabord. Sometime around July 18, the boat turned up docked in Tahiti's Phaeton Bay; its name had been removed. Dabord had caught a ride to the airport, hopped on a plane and vanished.

Nearly seven weeks passed before the distraught families of the missing were able to spur authorities into action. "We were on the phone trying to find anybody--FBI, local people, anybody--to take us seriously, and the clock is ticking," says Scott Ohlgren, Karlan's stepfather. A break came when Dabord tried to buy $152,000 worth of gold from a Phoenix bullion dealer, using his brother's checkbook. On Sept. 5 he was arrested, but he was released a few hours later when police could not disprove his claim that Dele had authorized the transaction. Dabord left for Mexico--out of the hands of police until he surfaced in San Diego.

Dele's agent, Dwight Manley, wonders if the ballplayer's wealth had triggered fatal sibling jealousy: "Brian provided things for him. Maybe this was a simple case of financial motives." For now the answer lies with Dabord and in the waters of Tahiti.

With reporting by Simon Crittle/New York and Al Prince/Tahiti