Chiefs employees live in environment of ‘secrecy, intimidation, and fear’

It got lost in the excitement of the divisional round, but there was an amazing story in the Kansas City Star, published on Saturday, about the allegedly negative environment from top to bottom in the Kansas City Chiefs' front office. The Kent Babb-penned piece outlined a culture of paranoia that reportedly led ex-head coach Todd Haley to believe that his phone was being tapped and his office was bugged. In addition, the move to general manager Scott Pioli in 2009 started a plan of secrecy in motion that prevented non-football employees — even those who had worked for the team for decades — from accessing certain areas and entire floors of the team's head offices.

Staff members with office windows facing the team's practice fields were directed to keep the shades in their offices drawn, and security guards would interrupt phone calls if necessary to tell employees to close those shades. This applied to team president Mark Donovan as well — he told Babb that he kept his shades drawn in an effort to let employees know that one was not more trusted than other.

Three department heads have sued the Chiefs for age discrimination, and according to the Babb piece, people don't know who to trust anymore. But it's the Haley story that is perhaps the most interesting and disturbing. Before he was fired in mid-December, Haley was to the point where he was checking his office for bugs and believed that his personal cellphone had been tampered with.

Haley wasn't the only one. According to several former employees who spoke to Babb, people in the Chiefs' front office were directed to be careful what they said and who they spoke to.

Stephanie Melton, who worked in the Chiefs' operations department for 11 years, told Babb that she was once made to believe she'd be fired because she parked a courier van in Pioli's (unmarked) parking space. "He was so focused on what seemed like unimportant details for the general manager of a football team," Melton told Babb. "We all had to step to the beat of his drum, but we all kept questioning: 'How is this building a better football team?'" Those still in the organization will understandably tell a different tale. Pro personnel director Ray Farmer told Babb that Pioli simply has the attention to detail one would expect from a man trying to turn an organization around.

"In some instances, you could say that he's a micromanager to a degree," Farmer said. "I think he likes to know what information is and what you're doing. … Scott wants to know, like as a math teacher, 'How did you get to your problem; how did you get to the answer of the problem?'"