Mike Chioda Recalls Refusing to Report Wrestlers to WWE Office

Longtime WWE referee Mike Chioda says he repeatedly refused requests from company management to report on wrestlers’ backstage conduct, including tracking when they arrived late to events.

Appearing on David Otunga’s podcast, Chioda recalled pushback he gave to agents Mark Carrano and John Laurinaitis when they wanted referees to act as informants on talent behavior. Chioda explained that doing so would have jeopardized the trust he needed with wrestlers he traveled alongside for the majority of the year.

“When the office comes to a referee and says, ‘I want you to stooge the boys out, what time they get in,’ when Mark Carrano and all that s*** used to enjoy, when Johnny Laurinaitis used to do all that s***, I used to go to Mark Carrano,” Chioda said. “They didn’t come to me and tell me that because I was like, ‘You want the referees, the boys that put the money on the company’s table, the boys that put the money and the food on my table, you want me to stooge them out because they come in 30 minutes late? And you expect the boys to want to work with me overseas instead of cutting my hair or ribbing me and maybe doing something to me? You want me to get heat with the boys that I got to travel with 300 days a year, 280 days a year? That ain’t happening.”

Chioda also said he discouraged the office from shifting those duties onto younger officials, arguing it would unfairly expose them to resentment from the roster. “And I used to tell Carrano that back in the day. You’re putting these young guns like Bones and all these other guys, you want them to stooge, and then these boys are going to get heat? You want them to be the stooge? Come on, let’s go a different route on that,” he said.

Drug testing created a similar conflict, according to Chioda. He said referees were sometimes expected to track down wrestlers selected for testing and ensure they showed up, a task he viewed as corrosive to the referee-talent relationship. “You want the referees to go get them for a drug test? The boys would be pissed to get away from me because if they’re doing something they shouldn’t be doing, the last thing you want is referees going, ‘Hey, you got to take a drug test,’ and then follow them around, ‘Hey, where you going?’” he said.

Chioda worked as a WWE referee for decades, officiating some of the promotion’s biggest matches while also serving as a trusted figure within the locker room — a dynamic he says made backstage policing duties especially fraught. Referees in pro wrestling occupy a unique middle ground: they answer to management but also need the cooperation and respect of the performers they work with night after night on the road. Chioda’s comments offer a rare glimpse into how that tension played out behind the scenes during his WWE tenure, particularly around sensitive issues like punctuality and drug testing that could carry real consequences for wrestlers’ careers.

His remarks add to a growing body of insider accounts from referees and agents about how WWE enforced internal discipline before many of its current policies took shape.