C.T., Gus and Wozniak: Inside the bond of Michael Jordan’s security team
Olivia Shea
Published Apr 07, 2026
John Michael Wozniak was a regular at the old White Hen Pantry, on 104th and Cicero, where he would grab his coffee, his newspaper and any other daily essentials. Dorothy Jasinsky served Wozniak there for more than 20 years, though that hardly sums up the friendship between the two.
Jasinsky was Polish and German, Wozniak was Polish, and the two came from the same generation. They shared a similar sense of humor. Jasinsky watched Wozniak’s three sons grow up. She would play his lottery numbers and buy him a carton of cigarettes for every Christmas and birthday. When Wozniak was diagnosed with cancer two years ago, he gave up smoking. So she gave him Polish chocolates filled with vodka.
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Wozniak often passed a homeless man before walking into the store and he would buy him a sandwich. He told Jasinsky to use the change to pay for another meal for the man.
Around Thanksgiving, with his weight dropping and his health deteriorating, Wozniak returned to the store — now a 7-Eleven — and told Jasinsky that he didn’t know how much longer he had left to live. He handed over an undisclosed amount of money and told her to continue to feed the homeless man.
Wozniak would have turned 70 last Thursday. He would have seen himself go viral two weeks ago, as the shrugging security guard for Michael Jordan on “The Last Dance.” Those close to him have been flooded with messages since. They laugh at the irony of Wozniak becoming the center of attention when he is no longer here to see it happen, because he never made anything about himself, even though he knew all along that his approach to every matter was the way that would eventually pay dividends.
He was visible again Sunday throughout Episode 9 of “The Last Dance,” trailing Jordan alongside mentors Gus Lett and Clarence Travis, the guys behind The Guy who was at the focus of the documentary. None of them are here to bathe in these moments of glory, with Lett having passed away in 2000 from cancer, Travis last March from dementia and Wozniak on Jan. 18 from colon cancer.
Given the stoic public nature of these men, the lack of ceremony is fitting. In other ways, though, the snapshots of them blending into the backgrounds of some of sports’ most iconic moments minimizes the impact they made across everyone, be it the most famous athlete in the world or a homeless man in Oak Lawn who wanted nothing more than something to eat.
“The Last Dance” has peeled back the curtain on the Bulls’ 1998 season. It has educated a whole new generation on the legacy of Jordan, with His Airness himself offering some candidly rare insights into how he really felt about being the most famous person in America for the better part of two decades.
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But it has also created some new stars, for lack of a more appropriate term. Folks may have been able to spot Wozniak because of his timeless hairstyle, yes — the number of people who reached out to his family to say they recognized him from the neighborhood speaks to his distinguishing characteristic — but few knew of the bond between Jordan and Wozniak, a relationship that stretched far beyond a televised game of quarters.
Lett was harder to identify from afar, despite his status within the circle. Still, he was a second father of sorts, a guy who was there for Jordan during his darkest hours, and whose presence at the United Center for Game 7 of the ’98 Eastern Conference Finals amid his cancer battle earned him a game ball from Jordan.
“At that time Michael was hurt about his dad,” his widow, Tisher Lett, said in Episode 9. “He still had a hard time with his death, and he would call him crying at two o’clock in the morning and Gus would get up and go to him. Whatever he needed, he was there to take care of him.”
When Rick Reilly tagged along with the ’98 Bulls for a Sports Illustrated story, with Jordan still sour on the magazine because of its critical cover on his baseball career four years earlier, the writer backdoored his way in through Lett.
“I found a hook; I found Gus,” Reilly said in a CNN/SI interview at the time. “Then I knew I had to go that way.”
“When people are around they think they’re entitled to certain things,” Jordan said during the documentary. “Gus would put them straight. That was Gus. He was a protector, but he was more than that, and I saw him for being more than that.”
Then there is Travis (“C.T.”), who was the life of every party. He can be heard in Episode 6, negotiating the terms of the now-famous quarters game with Jordan before Jordan addresses him as Jerry Krause and tells him to sit down. C.T. served as the bridge between Lett and Wozniak, working with the former on the narcotics team before mentoring the latter and helping to recommend him to Jordan for his security detail. His nickname on the force was “Batman.”
C.T. and his wife Orenbee became the godparents to Wozniak’s oldest son, Nicholi, whose middle name is Travis.
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“For every holiday we’d barbecue there and he’d rip on my dad,” Nicholi Wozniak says. “Being around him you’d just want to laugh. He had a perpetual smile and was always cracking jokes.”
For all of the initial fear of Jordan’s legend somehow becoming tarnished through a 10-part documentary, for all of the questions of whether he was a nice guy, an unforeseen residual effect of “The Last Dance” has been the highlighting of his impact away from the hardwood — the humility of going from the NBA Finals to the minor leagues, the humanity of his raw emotion in the years after his father’s death, the loyalty to those who always had his back and never took advantage of him.
None of the conversations caught on camera between Jordan and his bodyguards were particularly unique, save for the venue. (The record shows that Jordan went on to score 24 points after losing in quarters, avenging his pregame loss with a 23-point rout of a poor Celtics team.)
One day about 30 years ago, C.T.’s son, Derron, got chosen from the Chicago Stadium crowd to take part in a shooting contest at halftime. When he found out that he was picked, he raced down to tell his dad. He later learned that his dad had told Jordan and that Jordan had bet C.T. and the rest of the security team that night that Derron would lose.
“I hit the last shot to win,” Derron Travis says, laughing, “so they had to collect.”
Jordan once gifted Wozniak a Rolex for Christmas with the engraving “from MJ to JM.” When Jordan caught Wozniak at the stadium without it, he told him he better not see him bare-wristed again.
Games of quarters were commonplace among friends while growing up; they were just more like games of nickels or pennies.
“Four quarters? I could get two packs of cigarettes for that at that time,” says Mike Calcaterra, Wozniak’s childhood friend.
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The buddies, like many of their era, ran a social club in their late teenage years. “The Marauders,” as they called themselves, were made up of a group of mostly Polish and Italian guys from the neighborhood who would host parties every other Saturday, and on holidays, out of their Little Village headquarters. Depending on the time, that could have been at any number of different area storefronts. Wozniak, never lacking for confidence, once dressed up as a Playboy bunny for Halloween.
Discipline, though, was not an issue in Wozniak’s formative years. He hung up a picture of Bruce Lee in his bedroom. He wore the only pair of shoes he owned so often that a hole developed in one, yet he polished both anyway. He ended up serving in the Army.
And then, of course, there was that signature hair, which, per Gloria Wozniak-Nathan, one of his two sisters, originated sometime in the early 1970s.
“He wanted a unique look,” she says, “and us girls would get a permanent, and he would say: ‘Does that take long, Gloria?’ And I’d say, No, but you’ve got to go to a beauty shop. Men go, you know?
“He took a buddy of his and he went to the beauty shop and had it done. He started playing with it and created his own look.”
To fully understand Wozniak is to watch the 1941 western “They Died with Their Boots On.” He loved the actor Errol Flynn, who played a highly fictionalized version of Gen. George Armstrong Custer. The idea of a flashy but decorated warrior was his inspiration. He was a cop through and through, and his family says he would have done that job for a dollar a day. He loved the art of storytelling, though, and he told Nicholi that he could have been an English professor in another life.
If Gus was the old head of the group, and C.T. was the jokester, then Wozniak was a healthy blend of the two. Derron Travis, who is now 59 and was old enough to be around the group every so often during the Bulls’ second three-peat, was thinking to himself the other day about the time Jordan and his team were out in Los Angeles handling duties for “Space Jam” when Lett was tending to a minor commotion related to access.
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“My dad turned around and looked and saw who it was and he said, ‘Uh, Gus, that’s Tyra Banks. Let her in,’” Derron Travis says.
The Travises had hosted so many gatherings at their South Shore home that Nicholi Wozniak still recites the address off the top of his head. C.T., Lett and Wozniak were always playing cards, always telling old cop stories, always laughing their tails off. Together, they all got Jumpman tattoos. Wozniak did the eulogy at C.T.’s funeral.
The actual last dance of the ’98 season accounted for some of the happiest times of their lives together. That run, as the first episode of the documentary showed, featured a preseason trip to Paris, which resonated strongly with C.T., who was born in Mississippi before moving to Chicago as a child.
“Man, I’m sitting in this restaurant drinking one of the most expensive wines in the world,” C.T. once told his son. “Who ever thought a poor kid from Mississippi would be in Paris drinking the best wines?”
Wozniak’s family has learned of more and more people he has touched in the months since he passed. At the wake, Gloria Wozniak-Nathan saw an emotional woman whom she did not recognize. She approached her and asked how she knew her brother John Michael, and right then and there, Dorothy Jasinsky began to tell her about all of those years of seeing him in the convenience shop, about the signed Jordan poster he once gave her boss, about the money he had spent taking care of that homeless man, about how he was the kindest person she had ever met.
“People knew him in the store,” Jasinsky says, “but they didn’t know what kind of job he had. He was like a regular customer to them.”
Wozniak was a regular patron of Dorothy Jasinsky, and four months after he departed, Jasinsky continues to return the favor: she goes to the cemetery every week to visit him.
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“I never saw somebody so generous,” she says.
(Photo of Michael Jordan with Gus Lett: Andy Hayt / NBAE via Getty Images)
