Patriots great Julian Edelman called Celtics legend Paul Pierce his “partner in crime” while the two recalled Edelman’s 2020 arrest during a joint outing in Beverly Hills.
During the Tuesday installment of Edelman and Sam Morril’s “Games with Names” podcast, the retired NFL receiver said Pierce “had [his] back” when he was arrested after attempting to slide across the hood of a car.
“Technically it was a citizen’s citation arrest,” Edelman said about the incident, which occurred in Jan. 2020. “I mean you can’t even hood slide anymore, ‘Starsky and Hutch’ hood slide. I mean, Paul was right there.”
At the time, Edelman was reportedly charged with vandalism for causing damage to the driver’s vehicle.
Edelman said on his podcast that he and Pierce were leaving Cantina Frida in Beverly Hills, an eco-chic Mexican restaurant, when the arrest happened. They also were at the restaurant with Danny Amendola, Edelman’s former Patriots teammate, who announced his retirement in July.
“That was the weakest hood slide ever,” said Pierce, who was a guest on the podcast. “You didn’t even make it off. You like stood and stopped in the middle. I was like, ‘Ah, nah.'”
Edelman explained that his pants hindered his ability to slide across the hood.
“It was my jeans,” he said. “There was no slide, there was too much friction… Me, wearing straight jeans, go over there and I kind of stuck. Home boy gets out of [the] car, waves down a cop, they start hemming me up.
“Paul is over there. Paul had my back though. He’s like, ‘Nah get off. He didn’t do sh-t.”
“We were stuck in the restaurant because there was a robbery and couldn’t leave. There were already 25 cops right there anyway. I thought it was nothing, though,” Pierce said of Edelman’s actions that night. “If you had landed the slide, it wouldn’t have been nothing. But since you skid and stopped, it was a thing.”
After Edelman’s run-in with police, the two were unable to the leave the venue for hours, so they continued to drink tequila together.
“We were on our way to leave and we couldn’t leave the place for 2 1/2 hours, so what did we do? We just drank tequila all night long. We get done, we think we get out of it scot free,” Edelman said.
“We go back to the house, we’re over here thinking it’s not on TMZ, it’s not out, we’re having the best night of our life. We go out and we’re playing one-on-one basketball at Soho House and people are like, ‘What’s going on?’ I wake up in the morning to 300 text messages from my agent, this, that.”
Said Pierce: “Welcome to the club.”
