Rico Comments On Past Health Issues With Blood Clots, How He’s Doing Now

Rico had a bit of a health scare several years ago, something he recounted in a recent interview. Rico is best known for his time in WWE, during which he was a manager to Billy & Chuck as well as, later, Three Minute Warning. He exited the company in November of 2004.

Rico was asked about his health in an appearance Insight With Chris Van Vliet. he spoke about how he had blood clot issues in 2014 to 2015, which forced him to retire from his work in law enforcement. He also said that hye’s been doing good in recent years but had another blood clot scare in 2019. You can see the highlights below:

On His Previous Health Issues:

“When I was an officer, 2014-2015, I caught blood clots. I had three of them in my femoral artery, and I tried to overcome them. They put me on blood thinners. When it came time for the state to make a decision, I was a liability because I was on blood thinners. So I was forced to medically retire. I went vegan. I did juicing every day, did everything, and then I got rid of the blood clots. My health came back. I went back to working out, and in July 2019, took me six months. I went back into work, I got a job as a security officer, and then I got back into what I really love, investigations, detective work. But I couldn’t be an officer, so I became an investigator for a commercial insurance company called Bell United. We did limousines for a number of hotels, insured them, did accidents. I did the same thing I did as a cop, except I didn’t arrest anybody or give anybody a ticket. I wrote reports, and higher-ups would decide what was going on. The insurance company, you know, you take photos of the accident or a passenger gets injured, or stuff like that. So I did all that, I did that as a police officer too. I wrote a report, and I passed it to the detectives, and who passed it on a district attorney or city attorney, and they decided to proceed or not proceed with the case. But I never took anybody into physical custody or wrote him a ticket as an insurance investigator.”

On How His Heath Has Been Lately:

“It was great, but last March [2025], I was doing great in the gym, everything. Joe Matthews, a promoter, brought me to New York, and my fiance has never been to New York, and I did a Friday, Saturday morning, Saturday night signing, and Sunday, when I was leaving, the promoter, out of his good graces, took Julie and I to New York and gave us a tour of Times Square and everything, and took pictures with Julie and everything. It was great. He dropped us off at the airport three hours delay, and so by the time I hit my seat, I was exhausted, and it’s five and a half hours to get back to Phoenix, and I didn’t get up once, so I developed DVT [Deep vein thrombosis]. That’s a blood clot in the legs. So I got one more in my femoral but what other one that’s more dangerous is I got one in my popliteal artery, which is harder to get rid of, and it was causing me pain behind the leg and stuff like that. Since then, I’ve been on a new blood thinner and the pain behind the legs has gone away. I go for an ultrasound next month to see if all of it’s gone away. And in that, within that, I was getting my physicals and stuff like that, they found a small blockage on the left side of my heart. So I’m going through that now. And my sleep apnea returned, so now I do a CPAP machine at night.”