Joey Janela Details Recent Incident Where Big Cass Threatened To Kill Him
After his altercation with Enzo Amore, Joey Janela had another strange situation with Amore's tag team partner Big Cass just a few weeks later. Janela retold that story and why he felt bad for Cass even after he was the one threatened when Janela joined Wrestlers On The Road Ordering Room Service on the Behind the Elite YouTube channel.
"I went outside for a smoke and I had said 'Hello' to the dude earlier and he was like, 'Hey, what's up?' I go out for a smoke and he corners me and then smacks me in the head," Janela said of Cass. "It wasn't like a hard smack but it just caught me off guard. I'm like, 'What the f*ck is going on here?'
"Then he starts chasing me, 'Joey, I'm' coming to kill you!'
"The dude starts chasing me and it's in the Rahway (NJ) Rec Center. So it looks like an episode of Tom & Jerry where Big Cass is chasing me around the locker room going, 'I'm going to shoot you! I'm going to kill you!'"
Janela says that Orange Cassidy and everyone else in the locker room was wondering what was going on. The promoters ended up putting Janela in a separate locker room and locked the doors as he was legitimately terrified.
"I then looked back in the locker room and I see him opening every door and saying, 'Bad boy, where are you?' It was like a horror movie," recalled Janela.
Janela said that when he was in gorilla for his match, Cass tried to get to him again and had to be taken down by other wrestlers there. Janela could sense that there was some underlying issue with Cass that was causing him to act this way.
"I feel bad because I have friends who had substance abuse problems. One of my best friends overdosed so I feel for him," stated Janela. "At the time of it, it was kinda a funny story as this guy tried to kill me and people leaked it on the internet. But the next day I felt like complete sh*t."
Janela added that he had the opportunity to press charges but he declined to even though Cass said he had a gun in his car and was going to shoot everyone.
"He just didn't know what he was doing and I felt bad?. Get him to a hospital because you know he's dealing with something crazy," said Janela.
Several days before the incident with Janela, Cass spoke to Wrestling Inc. on our WINCLY podcast and discussed his issues with drinking. He noted that the seizure that he suffered last December was due to alcohol withdrawal.
"Not many people know this, I've said it on record one time – the reason for the seizure was alcohol withdrawal," Cass said. "So that means, at that point in time, I was drinking so much that 9 hours away from alcohol caused me to have a seizure. So, to stay away from that – I'm not epileptic, I have no health problems like that. It was clearly alcohol, so all I need to do is to stay away from that type of s–t is to stop drinking alcohol. That has been my main goal going forward."
Cass says that he didn't struggle much with transitioning into an alcohol-free life and that the seizure was it's own terrifying wake-up call.
"I don't think it gets as low as the seizure [for most people]. So once that happened, it was kind of the wake-up call," Cass explained. "It wasn't going through withdrawals that bad or anything, once that [seizure] happened, I said, 'Dude, you need to stop drinking. That's it. Not during the week, not on weekends, not with friends, not a beer at the Knicks game, not a beer at the Yankees game, you cannot f–king drink.'"
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Wrestlers On The Road Ordering Room Service with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.