Tom Brady destroyed his cellphone just before he met with NFL Deflategate investigators — the smoking gun that led the league to uphold his four-game suspension, officials revealed yesterday.
As part of his sloppy pigskin coverup, the New England Patriots quarterback ordered his personal assistant to get rid of the phone — which contained 10,000 text messages — knowing that probers wanted it as evidence, according to a scathing report by NFL Com missioner Roger Goodell.
Mr. Brady knew that Mr. Wells and his team had requested information from that cellphone,’’ Goodell wrote.
Yet “on or shortly before March 6, the day that Brady met with independent investigator Ted Wells and his colleagues, Brady directed that the cellphone he had used for the prior four months be destroyed.”
Brady tried to explain his suspicious move by claiming that he’d just gotten a new phone and that it was his “ordinary practice’’ to always destroy the old one.
The league said that “Brady’s representatives provided a letter from his cellphone carrier confirming that the text messages sent from or received by the destroyed cellphone could no longer be recovered.”
But investigators proved Brady did not, in fact, destroy all his old phones, because they had access to one.
The Super Bowl MVP was accused of instructing Patriots locker-room employees to deflate game balls below the minimum pressure the league allows.
The scheme came to light after the AFC Championship against the Ravens last January. Just before the game, one of Brady’s ball handlers went into a bathroom with the pigskins — which all later tested to be below the air-pressure standard.
In upholding the superstar’s suspension, the NFL said in a statement, “Brady was aware of, and took steps to support, the actions of other team employees to deflate game footballs below the levels called for by the NFL’s Official Playing Rules.
“He [then] sought to hide evidence of his own participation in the underlying scheme to alter the footballs.”
The NFL has fined the team $1 million and taken away two draft picks as punishment. Brady had appealed his suspension.
Missing the first four games of the season would cost the four-time Super Bowl champion $1.88 million.
Goodell said that neither Brady nor his lawyers should be surprised by the league’s ruling.
“A player of Mr. Brady’s tenure in the league and sophistication . . . cannot credibly contend that he believed that he could, without consequences, destroy his cellphone,’’ Goodell said.
But Brady’s agent, Don Yee, insisted that “neither Tom nor the Patriots did anything wrong.”
“The appeal process was a sham,’’ Yee said. “We presented the commissioner with an unprecedented amount of electronic data.’’
The NFL players union announced it would be appealing “this outrageous decision’’ by the NFL.
Additional reporting by Bart Hubbuch and Jonathan Lehman