A rowdy Eagles-49ers game led to Eagles Court, where the hardest part was ‘keeping a straight face’

He told the judge that he was from Scranton and began to explain where the town is located in Pennsylvania.

“I know where Scranton is,” said Seamus McCaffery, the judge presiding in the courtroom tucked into the basement of Veterans Stadium.

The man was a rabid Eagles fan but had never been to a game. His work was running a trip — tickets to see the Birds and free food and drinks on the bus ride there — to South Philadelphia. He was in.

But the only thing he could remember, he told McCaffery in December 1997, was that he drank so much on the bus that he had to be carried to his seat. He was soon surrounded by Philadelphia police and handcuffed.

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“They put me in a jail cell, three hours later I appeared in front of you, and I missed the entire game,” the man told McCaffery. “And my bus went back to Scranton without me.”

There was a courtroom for three games in 1997 in the bowels of Veterans Stadium, an attempt to curb what had become an unruly scene every week. McCaffery, a municipal court judge who operated a night nuisance court in the city, volunteered to be the judge.

He ruled on everything from fights in the stands to underage drinking to public urination to a guy from Scranton who missed his bus home. It was Eagles Court.

“The hardest part sometimes was keeping a straight face,” McCaffery said.

“How do you plead?” McCaffery asked a 19-year-old man after he was charged with trespassing at the Vet in 2003.

“I plead stupidity,” he said.

“Is that aggravated stupidity or simple stupidity?” the judge said.

“Whatever the lesser charge is. I was an idiot.”

The man was acquitted.

On Nov. 10, 1997, Jimmy DeLeon, a municipal court judge, was watching from home when a blowout loss to the 49ers on Monday Night Football became more about what was happening in the stands. There were over 20 fights, a gang of fans broke a man’s ankle, two folks ran onto the Vet turf, and a New Jersey man was arrested after firing a flare across the stadium.

The concrete and steel fortress at Broad and Pattison had long been a haven for rough and rowdy football fans. There was the time the fans stole the headdress from the Washington fan who dressed like a Native American. And the whistling Cowboys fan who was chased out of the 700 Level.

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“It was a nightmare,” said Bill Brady, a retired traffic cop who spent game days patrolling the 700 Level. “Fights galore. People passed out in the bathroom. One of the security guys up there used to box in the Blue Horizon. It was nothing but aggravation. You’d have roll call in the police room and go up to the 700 Level. By the end of the day, you were beat up.”

But this Monday night game against the 49ers was too much. The flare gun — the man said he saw people firing them in the parking lot and then brought one into the Vet — became national news as Philadelphia’s unruly stadium was now portrayed as a war zone.

DeLeon called McCaffery as the two volunteered as judges in the city’s nuisance night courts, a program in which people who committed “quality of life crimes” such as loitering, underage drinking, and curfew violations would be brought immediately to a judge and receive a fine. DeLeon told McCaffery that they had to do something about the Vet.

“He was right on it,” DeLeon said. “He took it over.”

McCaffery was soon in a meeting with Jim Kenney — the future mayor who was then on City Council — along with Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie and president Joe Banner.

“I was a Flyers guy at the time, so I really wasn’t paying much attention to who Joe Banner and Jeff Lurie were,” McCaffery said. “But they said, ‘We need to do something for our image.’”

The night nuisance court was Kenney’s idea, and he thought it could work at the Vet. Arrested fans could be charged immediately, plead guilty, and be issued a fine by a judge.

Too often, an arrested fan would fail to show up to a court date and nothing more would happen. The city didn’t spend the resources to chase down fans from the 700 Level. McCaffery said it was a fine idea, but the stadium didn’t have a courtroom.

“Without missing a beat, Jeff Lurie said, ‘We’ll build you a courtroom here,’” McCaffery said.

“To be honest, I just wanted to see the game,” a man told McCaffery after being ejected and then arrested for sneaking back in. He was fined $198.50.

A maintenance room used by the Phillies in the stadium’s basement became a legitimate courtroom with public defenders, district attorneys, and flags.

“This was not a kangaroo court,” said McCaffery, who was not paid to be in the courtroom.

On Nov. 23, 1997, during a game against the Steelers, the first defendant at Eagles court was a 38-year-old from Delaware wearing a Starter jacket. Later that afternoon, a 34-year-old from Pennsauken pleaded not guilty to punching another fan. It was an elbow to the chin, he told the judge.

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There were 20 fans arrested that game, and McCaffery doled out 18 fines ranging from $158.50 to $300.

“This would be something that would be great for Netflix,” said Anthony “Butch” Buchanico, who was a sergeant in South Philly’s Fourth District and oversaw the courtroom. “People would come in their 20s and 30s crying and begging for mercy.”

The fans were warned before the game on Phanavision that “on-site court proceedings will be presided over by the Honorable Judge Seamus McCaffery.” Everyone booed, McCaffery said.

If you were faint of heart, you didn’t go up to the 700 Level. The people up there, that was their territory. They loved it.

The police had undercover officers enter the seating bowl dressed as opposing fans. If anyone confronted the “opposing fan,” a crew of police would intervene and McCaffery would have another case to hear. It was an operation.

The stadium was infamous for its concrete-like playing surface, but the upper deck of the “Nest of Death” was even more foreboding.

“I would be on the field and there would be fights in the 700 Level where players from both teams would look up and watch the fights,” Buchanico said. “It was insane. If you were faint of heart, you didn’t go up to the 700 Level. The people up there, that was their territory. They loved it.”

The fan who shot the flare was from New Jersey, and McCaffery likes to say that the majority of the people he saw in Eagles Court lived outside Philadelphia. He thought Eagles Court would be a way to prove that it wasn’t Philadelphians who made the Vet a madhouse.

“Here’s our city, here’s Philadelphia on national news getting beat up and berated, and the vast majority aren’t from here,” said McCaffery, now 75, who grew up in Germantown after his family moved from Northern Ireland when he was 5. “People are thinking that we’re nothing but a rowhouse, trash city and it galled me.”

McCaffery said he got hammered in the press but didn’t care. A sportswriter called him “Shameless McCaffery” but was then “kissing my [butt]” a few years later when he saw what the judge was doing.

The arrested fans would be brought down to the basement where McCaffery did more than just issue a verdict.

“They’d march them up to the court and Judge McCaffery would berate them,” Buchanico said. “The majority of people weren’t from Philadelphia, and that really bugged the judge.

“He would say, ‘Why don’t you do this where you live? Are you proud of yourself? Get out of here.’ Then he would say, ‘Guilty. $300 fine. Pay now’ ‘I don’t have any money.’ ‘Well, there’s a MAC machine in the hallway.’”

“I was washing my hands,” a man told McCaffery after he was arrested for urinating in a Vet sink.

A judge cannot accept a plea from someone who is intoxicated, and McCaffery said no one was ever drunk in his courtroom.

“I mean, who knows?” said DeLeon, who joined McCaffery and Rayford Means as the original judges of Eagles Court. “They were just bringing them in.”

The arrested fans appeared in Eagles Court just hours after their arrest — or longer if they needed to sober up — which meant they were still wearing whatever they wore to the Vet.

“Some of them would be bare-chested, and half their body was coated in green and the other half was coated in white,” DeLeon said. “Some people would have green faces. Back then, the people came ready for the game as if they were participants in the action. So they’d dress accordingly. We had some guys in helmets and shoulder pads. It was the ’90s.”

The court moved after the 1997 season to the Third District police precinct, and arrested fans would be driven from the stadium to 11th and Wharton Streets. And the arrests eventually slowed down so much that McCaffery saw just one case during one of the Vet’s final games in the 2002 season. Perhaps this was proof that Eagles Court made the stadium a safer place.

“Did it deter them? No,” Brady said. “They took it like a joke. Something to gloat about.”

The Eagles gave McCaffery a tour of Lincoln Financial Field before it opened in 2003, proudly showing him their enhanced security features and the cameras that could zoom in on every fan in the stadium. The judge could tell that Eagles Court would soon be phased out.

“The Linc is a church compared to what the Vet was,” said Buchanico, whose father patrolled the sidelines with Andy Reid as the team’s head of security.

McCaffery resigned from the state Supreme Court in 2014 after he acknowledged sending pornographic emails to state officials. He heard his last Eagles Court case in 2003 but is still known more than 20 years later as the judge from the Vet. He stopped that trial with the fan from Scranton and asked to talk to the police captain at the sidebar.

The judge quietly told the captain to drive the man to the bus station and gave him the money to buy his fare home.

“I turned around and said, ‘This officer here is going to give you a ride to the Greyhound bus terminal. There’s a bus that will take you to Scranton and you’re going to get on it,’” McCaffery said. “‘The next time you come down to an Eagles game, show up sober. This matter is discharged. Not guilty.’”

The man left the stadium’s courtroom and was thrilled even though he missed the entire game.

“Years later, I’m campaigning for Supreme Court justice and where do you think I am? Scranton, Pennsylvania,” McCaffery said. “Who do you think comes up to me at a big rally? The same guy.”