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    Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football
    Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football
    Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football
    Ebook809 pages14 hours

    Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football

    By Mark Crispin Miller and Dan E. Moldea

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    A shocking exposé of widespread corruption and mob influence throughout the National Football League—on the field, in the owners’ boxes, and in the corporate suites

    According to investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, for decades the National Football League has had a strong and unspoken understanding with a dangerous institution: organized crime. In his classic exposé, Interference, Moldea bares the dark, sordid underbelly of America’s favorite professional team sport, revealing a nest of corruption that the league has largely ignored since its inception.

    Based on intensive research and in-depth interviews with coaches, players, mobsters, bookies, gamblers, referees, and league officials—including some of the sport’s all-time greats—the author’s shocking allegations suggest that the betting line is firmly in the hands of the mob, who occasionally manipulate the on-field action for maximum profit. Interference chronicles a long-standing history of gambling, drugs, and extortion, of point-shaving and game-fixing, and reveals the eye-opening truth about numerous gridiron contests where the final results were determined even before the kickoff. Moldea exposes the mob connections of many of the team owners and their startling complicity in illegal gambling operations, while showing how NFL internal security has managed to quash nearly every investigation into illegality and corruption within the professional football world before it could get off the ground. Provocative, disturbing, and controversial, Interference is a must-read for football fans and detractors alike, offering indisputable proof that what’s really happening on the field, in the locker room, and behind the scenes is a whole different ball game.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJun 10, 2014
    ISBN9781480461185
    Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football
    Author

    Dan E. Moldea

    Dan E. Moldea, a specialist on organized-crime investigations since 1974, bestselling author, and independent journalist, has published eight nonfiction books: The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians and the Mob (1978); The Hunting of Cain: A True Story of Money, Greed and Fratricide (1983); Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob (1986); Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football (1989); The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means, and Opportunity (1995); Evidence Dismissed: The Inside Story of the Police Investigation of O.J. Simpson (with Tom Lange and Philip Vannatter, 1997); A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm (1998); and Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer: Adventures in the Jungles of Crime, Politics, and Journalism (2013). He is currently at work on his ninth true-crime book.

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      Book preview

      Interference - Mark Crispin Miller

      Also by Dan E. Moldea

      The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa

      The Hunting of Cain: A True Story of Money, Greed, and Fratricide

      Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob

      The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means, and Opportunity

      Evidence Dismissed: The Inside Story of the Police Investigation of O. J. Simpson

      A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm

      Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer: Adventures in the Jungle of Crime, Politics, and Journalism

      Interference

      How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football

      Dan E. Moldea

      With a New Afterword by the Author

      To Mimi

      Contents

      Introduction

      PROLOGUE: Dealing with Myths

      1. On Fixing Games and Inside Information

      2. Getting Organized

      3. The Old Days with the Old Gang

      4. The Baugh Surveillance

      5. The Big Fix

      6. The Wire Services

      7. Boss Colt

      8. Growing Pains

      9. Winning Some and Losing Some

      10. A New Commissioner

      11. Murchison, Modell, and Ford Buy In

      12. The Gambling Scandal Erupts

      13. The Party Bus

      14. Rosenbloom in the Bahamas

      15. Football and Hollywood

      16. The Quarterback

      17. Gil Beckley and the Layoff

      18. Bill Hundley and NFL Security

      19. Seven Arts, Bobby Baker, and Mary Carter

      20. The Kansas City Shuffle

      21. The Outlaw Line

      22. Broadway Joe

      23. Lenny Dawson on the Brink

      24. Restaurants and Hotels

      25. The Heir Apparent

      26. Points of Contact

      27. Operation Anvil

      28. Façades of Legitimacy

      29. Foreshadowing a Drug Problem

      30. The Bad, the Worse, and the Ugly

      31. Davis’s Dilemma

      32. Colonel Culverhouse and Major Realty

      33. On the Principal Subjects List

      34. The Quiet Man

      35. More Players and Bookmakers

      36. Car Dealers’ Bonanza

      37. The Bagman

      38. Rosenbloom’s Fatal Swim

      39. Cobra in a Sunbonnet

      40. At War: Rosenthal and Spilotro

      41. Appearances and Realities

      42. Cranking Up the Drug Problem

      43. The Frontline Controversy

      44. The Double Standard

      45. Gambling or Drugs?

      46. The Computer Group

      47. Oddsmaker

      48. I’m so fucking glad I’m out

      49. Trouble in Paradise

      50. Rozelle Gets Tough on Players

      51. Crime and Punishment

      52. The Las Vegas and Outlaw Lines Today

      EPILOGUE: ON LEGALIZING SPORTS GAMBLING

      AFTERWORD

      NOTES TO AFTERWORD

      NOTES

      INDEX

      GLOSSARY

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      Among the types of conduct detrimental to the NFL and professional football that call for serious penalties are the following:

      1. Accepting a bribe or agreeing to throw or fix a game or to illegally influence its outcome.

      2. Failing to promptly report any bribe offer or any attempt to throw or fix a game or to illegally influence its outcome.

      3. Betting on any NFL game.

      4. Associating with gamblers or with gambling activities in a manner tending to bring discredit to the NFL.

      Any such conduct may result in severe penalties, up to and including a fine and/or suspension from the NFL for life.

      NFL COMMISSIONER PETE ROZELLE

      Introduction

      I

      We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display them—a bookshelf that would stretch from Boston’s Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore.

      Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won’t allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran, no book may be forbidden by the US government at any level (although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books are banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations-church groups, school boards, and other local (busy)bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby.

      Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it’s easy to locate those hot works that once were banned by the government as too obscene to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment grounds—Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as antifamily, Satanic, racist, and/or filthy, from Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.

      II

      And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can’t know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them.

      How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) dropped into the memory hole in these United States? As America does not ban books, other means—less evident, and so less controversial—have been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of national security or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiastically—then dumped, as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, or—most often—laughing them off as conspiracy theory, despite their soundness (or because of it).

      Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masse—or never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.

      III

      The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to life—first life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind.

      These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens. These books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protect—truths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.

      Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new light—for most of us, it’s still new light—on the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America’s broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan’s Mafia connections, Richard Nixon’s close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob’s grip on the NFL; America’s terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America’s most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City’s poor and middle class.

      The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of America—a history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long last—to shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.

      Mark Crispin Miller

      Prologue:

      Dealing with Myths

      YEARS BEFORE HE BECAME president of the United States, actor Ronald Reagan portrayed Notre Dame’s George Gipp in the 1940 Warner Brothers movie Knute Rockne—All-American. Gipp had died of pneumonia in December 1920 after an illustrious college football career. His purported deathbed request to Rockne, Win just one for the Gipper, was used during a locker room pep talk and helped to inspire Rockne’s 1928 team in its upset victory against Army. And, as the Gipper incarnate, Reagan used the line to inspire voters to elect him to the California governor’s mansion and later the White House. To those who saw the movie and listened to Reagan utter those now-famous words, Gipp epitomized the virtues of good character, sportsmanship, and the right way of living.

      History, however, now shows that Gipp, a man of truly questionable moral values, probably never made any such request on or off his deathbed; that Rockne, who was known for grasping at anything to incite his players, had fabricated the incident; and that Reagan’s movie further embellished the Gipp/Rockne charade.

      Hollywood, which is notorious for cooking up such fantasies as the Gipp/Rockne story, realizes that most Americans view sports as a vehicle of inspiration and entertainment. Thus, sports history is routinely manipulated. Left unquestioned, stories like that of the Gipper become permanent fixtures of Americana. Regardless of the facts, the American public continues to believe the legend of George Gipp’s deathbed request to Knute Rockne.

      The difficulties in debunking the myth about one college coach and one of his players is an indication of the problems in dispelling the legends about an entire institution, particularly one as popular as football. Powerful forces in America have built empires around these myths; and the preservation of these empires and the personal wealth of those who own them depend upon the maintenance of the legends.

      In the Reagan movie myth of the lives of Rockne and Gipp, there is one scene in which Rockne chases away a gambler who is looking for an edge. Rockne, played by actor Pat O’Brien, tells him, We haven’t got any use for gamblers around here. You’ve done your best to ruin baseball and horse racing. This is one game that’s clean and it’s going to stay clean.

      Considering that Gipp, with the knowledge of Rockne, was a notorious sports gambler, the O’Brien quote perhaps best illustrates my point.¹

      To a large degree, the National Football League (the NFL) has become the embodiment of the Gipp/Rockne myth. It has wrapped itself around the American flag and strutted into America’s homes to the thrilling stir of brass and percussion music as the choreography of bone-crushing tackles in dramatic slow motion flashes across the nation’s television screens. Based upon the illusion, the country’s love affair with professional football has given sports fans confidence that the NFL is an institution unencumbered by corruption.

      However, the greatest threat to professional football is also institutionalized: It is the institution of organized crime in America—and its control of illegal gambling and illicit drugs.

      At least twenty-five million people bet a total of over $25 billion each year on National Football League games. Bobby Martin, the nation’s premier oddsmaker, told me, Nobody really knows how much is bet. It could be twenty-five billion. It could be a hundred billion. Nobody knows for sure.

      Jack Danahy, the former security chief for the NFL, told me, It was a joke trying to estimate the dollar figure. I remember I once got a call and was asked to provide a figure on how many bookies there were in New York. I made a fast call to the New York Liquor Authority, and I found out the number of licensed bars in the city. I multiplied it times two. I called back and said that I had it on an authoritative source that there were 14,756 bookmakers. Even though it was bullshit, he bought it. I figured that every decent bar in New York had at least two bookies.

      Indeed, betting on pro football games has become a veritable American institution—with individual gamblers averaging wagers of between $100 to $500 on a single sporting event. And of all the money that is wagered on NFL games, only a small percentage of that amount is placed in Nevada, the only state where sports gambling and bookmaking are legal.

      The situation has been further exacerbated by the media. Newspapers insist on printing the line, for upcoming games. The television networks have hired oddsmakers to predict the outcomes of games. Law-enforcement officials say that each time an NFL game is nationally televised, the volume of legal and illegal gambling increases by an estimated 600 percent. The dollars wagered increase dramatically during the play-offs. And bets skyrocket for the Super Bowl. More money is bet on pro football in a single month than on major-league baseball in an entire year.

      Politicians and the media have failed to educate the public about the dangers of gambling, causing massive public insensitivity to the issue. During the spring of 1989, charges were filed against baseball great Pete Rose, the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, alleging that he had bet heavily on baseball games. In citing a Washington Post poll taken during the Rose investigation, sports columnist Thomas Boswell marveled that the survey showed strong national support for Rose, even if he’s bet on baseball and, more amazing, even if he’s bet on the Reds. … In other words, almost half of all people who identified themselves as serious fans fundamentally disagree with the game’s longstanding rules [against baseball personnel gambling] that have not changed since the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

      The only thing that keeps the NFL going is gambling, former all-pro defensive lineman Alex Karras, who was suspended from the NFL for gambling in 1963, told me, and I have objected to the hypocrisy within the NFL for not facing up to that. Karras is probably right. Gambling has made football more interesting for millions of Americans. But gambling has also brought Mafia figures, bookmakers, layoff operators, loan sharks, and juice collectors into the game. Law-enforcement authorities say that the largest source of revenue in organized crime’s gambling operations comes from wagers on NFL games.

      Donald Dawson of Detroit, a convicted sports gambler, told me, The NFL turns their collars around and pretends that they’re holier than thou. They say, ‘Oh, we can’t have gambling on football games.’ And up in the stands there are eighty thousand people who have money down on their favorite teams. Betting has made football, and the NFL knows it. It’s the bettors who made bookmakers. The bookmakers didn’t make bettors out of people who didn’t want to gamble. People like to bet on sports, and the NFL has profited from it.

      As all gamblers know, bookmakers are not too concerned with which team wins or loses a particular game. They are concerned only with balancing their books, hoping that an equal amount of money is wagered on both teams in any given contest. Bookmakers collect a 10 percent commission on the losing bets they book. Consequently, all a bookmaker wants out of life is a volume business and a balanced book.

      The effective manipulation of the point spread—a form of handicapping in which oddsmakers predict how many points one team needs against another in order to even out the public betting on a game—will help ensure the bookmakers’ vigorish, or commission. The total pool of bets—and how those bets have been placed—will cause the point spread to be adjusted, up or down, before a game is played.

      Ronald Goldstock, the chief of the New York Organized Crime Task Force, told me, If a bookmaker can’t balance his books and suffers a major loss he can’t cover, he will be forced to go to some Mafia loan shark and borrow the money at a five percent weekly interest rate. If he loses the following week, too, he’ll be forced to borrow again. Sooner or later, he’ll have to pay—one way or the other. Bookmakers, like gamblers who bet borrowed money, dread that visit from the mob’s juice collector, who will break their legs or worse if they don’t pay up. Thus, the idea that gambling and bookmaking are victimless crimes is another myth.

      There is also a myth that today most bookmakers in the major cities are independent contractors. Special agent Charlie Parsons, formerly of the Las Vegas FBI office, told me, It’s difficult to find any truly independent bookmakers in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and in the other big cities who operate without the permission of the mob. There are actual members of the LCN [La Cosa Nostra] who are bookmakers themselves—and that’s their major source of revenue. They take the layoff action themselves, while others [who are independent] pay a percentage to the mob to do the same thing.

      To ensure its investments, the underworld has infiltrated every level of the NFL—from the players’ locker rooms to the owners’ luxury boxes. For years, mobsters, bookmakers, and big-money gamblers have maintained relationships with NFL team owners, coaches, players, trainers, and game officials—relationships that have threatened the integrity of professional football. And these associations pose more far-reaching dangers to the game than the specter of a fixed game.

      At present, the NFL confirms that there have been only two attempts to fix NFL games. The first was in 1946 when gamblers tried to bribe two New York Giants players to throw the NFL championship game. The other was in 1971 when a player with the Houston Oilers was allegedly approached and offered money by a former teammate to shave points. According to the NFL, neither attempt was successful.

      However, this is also a myth. This book will provide evidence that there have been many other attempts to compromise the integrity of the game—with far greater success.

      Today, NFL games are rarely, if ever, fixed. The mechanics of bribing a team member or a referee who can guarantee the outcome of a game without raising suspicion are so intricate that the risk far outweighs the return. Seemingly everyone, from the NFL commissioner’s office to the highest echelon of the organized-crime syndicate, appears to be concerned about maintaining the integrity of the game.

      When I asked Jack Danahy whether there had been attempts to fix NFL games while he headed the league’s security unit from 1968 to 1980, he replied, "I’m sure there were. I think that in ninety percent of the cases, the ballplayer didn’t even bother to report it. He didn’t want to go through the hassle. It’s a lot easier to say, ‘Look, you bastard, I’ll hit you in the mouth if you don’t get lost.’

      "Approaches are very, very subtle. A guy isn’t going to walk right up to a player, and say, ‘Here’s ten grand. And I want you to drop that key pass at the crucial moment in the game on Sunday.’ In some instances, the player probably didn’t even realize that he was being approached.

      That’s the danger of drugs. They can potentially compromise the players. Thomas ‘Hollywood’ Henderson [a former Dallas Cowboys star linebacker] would’ve been an ideal situation. There’s a guy who played a hell of a Super Bowl. Of course, he was a colorful guy. He was attracting as much attention as the rest of the team put together. Within a year after that, he confessed that he had a terrible habit, and that he had shot something like a hundred and sixty thousand dollars on cocaine. That’s a dangerous situation—because the potential was there for him to be compromised by his dealer.

      Despite the fact that organized crime has always enjoyed a financial bonanza through its control of gambling on NFL football games, local, state, and federal governments have done little to stop it. Professional football has become a sacred cow, seemingly immune to anything more than incomplete probes by law-enforcement agencies. This book will document numerous examples of collapsed and even suppressed investigations.

      Much of this material has never before been published. With the help of my associate, William Scott Malone, I have uncovered a wealth of government documents and conducted dozens of public records searches, as well as over two hundred interviews. Because former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and the NFL team owners refused to be interviewed for this book, I have been forced to use selected statements made by them that have been obtained by other reporters with whom they have cooperated. In those cases in which previous reporting has been done, I have been scrupulous in crediting those who were responsible for it. And when describing a previously reported situation, I have attempted to advance the current state of evidence.

      I am a crime reporter, not a sportswriter. My job is not contingent on maintaining access to and the goodwill of the personnel of any particular team or sports institution. Friends of mine who do write about sports have expressed the need to behave and admit that they have willingly become a part of the NFL’s sophisticated public-relations machine on occasion in order to maintain their sources of information. I believe that the need for this professional access and goodwill has prevented a fair and responsible analysis of the relationship between professional sports and organized crime by all forms of the sports media.

      Punitive action has been the norm against those who cover sports and are critical of their local team management. One close friend, Washington reporter and author Robert Pack, wrote an article critical of Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke and was banned from the Redskins’ front office, locker room, and even the stadium, which is paid for by public funds.

      Further, this story doesn’t presume criminal guilt by association—although associations between NFL personnel and gamblers clearly violate the NFL’s own rules. Yet, organized crime is enterprise crime, crime by association, and operates accordingly. The leaders of the underworld have developed conspiracies that have resulted in criminal empires. And the NFL has often fallen prey to them.

      What this book does is outline the patterns of association that have been tolerated by the NFL while the league and the federal government were claiming to take a hard line against organized crime and its influence on professional sports. In fact, the NFL has too often been lax in the enforcement of its own rules, and law-enforcement agencies have permitted the NFL to get away with it. This sweetheart relationship has greatly contributed to the myth about the integrity of the NFL.

      Consequently, the NFL is sure to attempt to discredit this book, which strikes at the heart of the business of professional football, in any way it can—just as it did with an article I wrote about this subject after the 1987 regular season. An unnamed league spokesman said that the story was a cut-and-paste job and not very factual. It was filled with inaccuracies, gossip and innuendo.² But that response was a complete turnabout.

      In fact, I read my article to the current NFL Security director, Warren Welsh, prior to publication to solicit whatever changes he felt were required. And, because of Welsh’s expertise and inside information, I trusted him and made several necessary modifications upon his advice. In the end, he told me that it was a fair and accurate report. However, the NFL, for reasons only its unnamed spokesman can explain, changed its tune after the story was made public. But no one from the league would meet me face-to-face in a public forum to explain what its specific objections were, even after having been invited to do so on two national television programs on which I appeared.

      Predictably, with the publication of this book, the league’s now-familiar tactic will be to remain aloof from the charges, deny them from afar, and then send its front line of defense, the loyal sportswriters, to attack the messenger. But, once again, in good faith and asking only for confidentiality, I offered this manuscript to Welsh for his review. But neither he nor anyone else from the NFL responded.

      For the record, this book, just like my article, has been fact-checked extensively, read by sports and law-enforcement experts, and closely reviewed by attorneys. Sooner or later, the fans of honest football will be forced to enter this or a similar fray and finally demand accountability from the NFL.

      —DAN E. MOLDEA

      Washington, D. C.

      1 On Fixing Games and Inside Information

      I ONCE ASKED PRO Football Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson of the Kansas City Chiefs whether the fact that his team’s games had been taken off the betting boards by bookmakers across the country during the late 1960s was an indication that they were fixed. Dawson replied, "It would be a dangerous thing to fix a game. To me, a player would be branded for life if he did that. His teammates would express shock and anger. I don’t know how one guy could do it, even a quarterback. In our system, we ran the ball a lot. Even when I wasn’t in there, it didn’t make much difference who was quarterback, because the defense scored points to help win games.

      I suppose the quarterback could put the ball on the ground, with turnovers in crucial situations. It would certainly have a bearing on the game. Hell, a kicker could have as much to do with it just by missing. He has more control over it than sometimes the quarterback does.

      Defensive back Dick Night Train Lane, formerly of the Detroit Lions and also a member of the Hall of Fame, told me that while he was a player he was once approached by Donald Dawson, the Detroit gambler who was later linked in a federal probe with Len Dawson, who was no relation. Recalling the incident, which he did not report to the NFL, Lane says, Don told me, ‘Quarterbacks do a lot of betting themselves. Did you know that?’ I said [laughing], ‘Get out of here.’ He said, ‘You know it can be done, Night Train. You’re the only man between the goalpost and a receiver. You can slip and fall and let the guy score.’

      When I asked Lane whether Don Dawson was really suggesting that he throw a game, Lane replied that that was clearly his impression. He added that he had known Dawson for years and worked for his cousin, a Detroit car dealer, during the offseason. Lane also said that Dawson talked about the other players with whom he did business—a fact confirmed by agents for the FBI, the U.S. Strike Forces Against Organized Crime, and the IRS, among other federal agencies.

      Don Dawson admitted to me that he had made that statement to Lane, whom he described as a good friend of mine. Dawson says, I’m sure I said that to him. Not that I was trying to bribe him, but he was probably trying to feel me out, too. Over the years, there were a lot of players I bet for, but they weren’t necessarily doing any business [participating in a fix]. But some of them were prepared to do it. They came to me. I was a wealthy guy. I had money. The players weren’t making any money. The owners were making all the money.

      Former all-pro defensive back Bernie Parrish, an author of a 1971 book critical of the NFL and whose playing career spanned from 1959 to 1966, told me, Sure, there were players who participated in shaving points in games and that sort of thing. Yeah, I played in them. But I always heard about it after the game was over.

      Don Dawson confessed to me that during the 1950s and 1960s he had been personally involved in the fixing of no fewer than thirty-two NFL games.

      That was the fear during the 1980s when, according to law-enforcement officials, no fewer than nine NFL teams—the Cleveland Browns, Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos, Miami Dolphins, New England Patriots, New Orleans Saints, San Diego Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Washington Redskins—found themselves the targets of investigations in which players had been allegedly given drugs by gamblers who were looking for an on-field edge. And, particularly in 1988, numerous other NFL teams found their players being disciplined by the league for using, buying, and/or selling drugs, which along with gambling are the two most lucrative enterprises of organized crime.

      Don Dawson’s shocking admission is a first. No one has ever stepped forward and claimed to have actually been involved in fixed games. Although such charges have occasionally been made through the years of the NFL’s existence, they have traditionally been hard to prove. They are cases where it’s difficult to discover hard evidence as to who is involved, says Brian Gettings, a former Strike Force attorney in Miami who was responsible for prosecuting Gilbert Lee Beckley, the Mafia’s onetime top layoff bookmaker. You have to have an individual directly involved in the sports bribe or the fix to get a successful prosecution. And that is quite difficult.

      Marty Kane, one of Beckley’s top associates, told me, If I wanted to fix a game, there’re three players I’d get: the quarterback, the offensive center, and a defensive back. Then I would bet as much money as I could. I would have beards. I would have people all over the country trying to bet for me on this game.

      Oddsmaker Bobby Martin remembers, "There were a lot of fixed games during the 1950s, but there’s nothing like that anymore. Years ago, players bet, mostly on their own teams. They’d say, ‘Oh, I see we’re six-point favorites or four-point underdogs. We’ll win this game. We know much better than the people who post the odds about what we can do.’ And then they’d bet a hundred or two hundred dollars.

      But, now, the players are paid too much money. There’s too much of a spotlight on them. Oddsmakers want honest football. We don’t want anything dishonest. It interferes with our handicapping if the games are fixed. I can’t get a true picture of the value of the teams.

      Mort Olshan, perhaps the most renowned football handicapper in the United States and the publisher of the widely read Gold Sheet, agrees and told me, "The tip-off on any fix is manifested in the movement of the odds and the appearance of ‘unnatural’ money. To orchestrate a fix would require the cooperation of a coach and one or more of his top players; no nonessential player or underpaid sub is in a position to affect the outcome. Even then there is no guarantee the culprits could pull it off. There are too many outside factors.

      To make the risk worthwhile, the high-salaried athlete would expect a sizable payoff. But the chief deterrent to a setup is that virtually the only source one can place a substantial bet with is a bookie. And just as soon as the first plunge is made, the odds will move dramatically. Since this would be no penny-ante venture, more bets would follow. To avoid instant suspicion, ‘unnatural’ money would be spread all over the nation’s betting marts. Since bookmakers have telephones, word would spread faster than news of a nuclear attack. If the jackpot got too big the game would be taken off the board. The skullduggery would be spotted in no time.

      Olshan also added that sporting contests have been fixed. Sure, that kind of foul was going in college basketball during the 1950s. Games were fixed, and points were shaved. For the handicappers and the bookmakers, it was corrupt and costly. Bookmakers were burned financially and the handicappers’ figures became irrelevant. If you look at the college basketball fixes during the early 1950s, it had the effect of putting a lot of bookmakers out of business. When a game is fixed, they are the first ones to suffer the consequences.

      A star of the 1969 Super Bowl, Jim Hudson, a former defensive back with the New York Jets, told me, "My theory always was: If somebody was going to buy me to fall down on a pass play, I would want to know when that son of a bitch was going to pay me. Now, if you’re a gambler, would you pay me before the game? No. Would you pay me at halftime? No. You would say you’ll pay me after the game. Now, I’m the player, and I’m going to say, ‘Do you think I’m going to wait until after the game when I’m never going to see your ass again?’

      How are you going to bribe someone? Every bookie in the world is going to know about it. And that line is going to go crazy. I don’t believe that things like that went on then or now.

      Nevertheless, some argue that it doesn’t make any difference whether a game is fixed to anyone who doesn’t know that it is. Given the economics of bookmaking, which will be discussed at length in this book, the uninvolved and innocent bettor still has a fifty-fifty chance of winning, whether or not the game is fixed. The only people a fixed game means anything to are those who know about it. They know they have a winner. And their large bets, strategically placed around the country to avoid suspicion, simply become a part of the multibillion-dollar pool of wagers booked on every NFL game.

      To them, a fixed game is like insider trading on Wall Street. Every day, there are a handful of people who know a sure thing is going to happen before it happens. Yet, even when it does happen, the investment markets in America somehow manage to survive—and usually no one outside of the fix ever finds out about it.

      There is also the contention that it has been extremely rare that a member of the organized-crime gambling syndicate ordered a member of a team to throw a game or to shave points. History shows that fixers are prosecuted, and they go to jail. When a sporting event has been fixed, the public becomes disillusioned and loses confidence in the sport in which the fix occurred. That means less bookmaking volume from those who gamble and less vigorish for those who book their bets.

      When I asked Baton Rouge bookmaker Gene Nolan whether he had ever known anyone who ordered a fix, he replied, I don’t know that anybody ever told anyone what to do. I think someone just found out what a member of a team was going to do—on the basis of whether the player or the coach thought he could or couldn’t win. I don’t think anyone ever told someone to lie down—like a fighter.

      Consequently, it is naïve to think that the only litmus test of honest NFL football is whether or not its games are fixed. It is not. There are far more important considerations in making this determination. And those considerations must encompass the associations of NFL personnel with the underworld and, most important, the backgrounds and business relationships of those who rule professional football: the NFL team owners.

      The organized-crime gambling syndicate believes that inside information is necessary in order to discover what a member of a team is doing or might be doing. Aside from the rare fix, inside information is the commodity that professional gamblers will bank on. The mob wants to learn everything it can about the players’ health, their marital problems, deaths in their families, drug dependencies, internal team problems, and anything else that might affect on-field performances, especially those situations that are not immediately reported in a public forum.

      Los Angeles mobster-turned-government-informant Jimmy Fratianno told my associate, William Scott Malone, that from personal experience inside information is key for organized-crime figures and their associates. They get information, like, a person might know the coach, and some guy might have gotten hurt on Monday in practice, a key player. They [the team] won’t reveal that until probably later on in the week, because they don’t want the opposite team to get prepared for it. They get hurt on Monday; they reveal it on Thursday. Somebody finds out about it, and they bet on the game. Well, as soon as it is revealed that this person is hurt, then the odds will change. The guy that had the information already is in with maybe three or four points to the best of it.

      On the importance of injury reports, Mort Olshan only partially agrees with Fratianno. Ninety-five percent of the rumors [about injuries] are baloney and wouldn’t have a bearing on the game even if they were true, Olshan says. The most meaningful reports are those where multiple injuries occur on the same team, thereby wrecking the club’s cohesiveness and causing either the defense or the offense to overwork.

      Organized-crime expert G. Robert Blakey, a former top Justice Department lawyer who is now a professor of law at Notre Dame, told me, The Mafia wants an honest game because they know they have the contacts within the NFL teams to determine how to bet as accurately as possible. That’s the only edge they need. Providing inside information happens every week of the season. And that’s what goes to the heart of the integrity of the NFL.

      Another top crime expert, Vincent Piersante, who headed the organized-crime unit of the Michigan attorney general’s office, explained to me, The Mafia wants ace-rock information so that they can set a realistic point spread. They just want the public to bet. They make their ten percent commission on losing bets, so, as long as their bookmakers balance their books, what the hell do they care which team wins or loses. The old-line mob guys recognize the danger of trying to fix one game and destroying the whole structure. They just want the inside information that can help predict a player’s performance.

      Al Davis, the owner of the Los Angeles Raiders, also appears to agree with Fratianno and the others about the importance of inside information: They [bookmakers] have contacts with every owner in the league.¹

      Gene Klein, the former owner of the San Diego Chargers, told me, "I’ve heard rumors [about fixed games], but I probably closed my mind to it. I have had people come up to me and say, ‘How could the gamblers hit the points so well?’ But I am convinced that most owners are goddamn decent people.

      Yet, everybody is looking for inside information. Everyone wants the edge. That’s the great thing about [the NFL’s] publishing the injury reports. That’s the source of information. The league is very, very forceful on that point so that everyone has the same information.

      The league’s former commissioner, Pete Rozelle, strongly opposed legalizing sports gambling. He has said that gambling is more serious than drugs because it goes to the integrity of the game. Rozelle knew this better than anyone. He was forced to deal with a gambling problem of one kind or another every year since he was elected the NFL’s chief executive officer in 1960. The fact that most fans can’t recall much about the NFL’s gambling scandals is testimony to his ability to enhance the league’s public image while he policed the conduct of its personnel.

      We have a basic rule in the NFL, says a former law-enforcement official who advises the NFL on security matters. It is to keep it upbeat and keep it positive. But, above all, they want to keep everything quiet.

      Rozelle’s ability to keep things quiet earned him criticism, as well as admiration, in some quarters. A top NFL official is adamant in his defense of Rozelle. Why should the NFL publicize hearsay and innuendo? If the commissioner publicized a matter under investigation, that would be irresponsible. It’s our policy not to create a problem that might not be there. And if it is a problem, we handle it ourselves. And if the problem hits the newspapers, then we respond publicly.

      The security consultant replies, "Rozelle’s job [was] that of the protector of the appearance of integrity within the NFL. To Rozelle, a problem with a player’s gambling or an owner’s having some Mafia associations [didn’t] really become a major problem until the situation received publicity. Then he [was] forced to act in a public way.

      Rozelle is an honest guy. He [had] a long-term contract and a half-a-million-dollar-a-year salary to guarantee that. But his job [was] really dependent on the goodwill of the twenty-eight owners in the NFL to whom he [was] accountable … And when you consider the investments they have in their teams, none of them wants bad publicity. It’s bad for business.

      Since the underworld’s attempt to fix the NFL’s 1946 championship game—after which two New York Giants players, Frank Filchock and Merle Hapes, were suspended—the league has become especially conscious of occasional maneuvers by organized-crime figures, bookmakers, and gamblers to guarantee the outcomes of football games. When Bert Bell was the league’s commissioner from 1946 to 1959, he maintained close contacts with members of the nation’s gambling community in order to monitor unusual fluctuations in the betting line and unusually large, suspicious bets that were placed on games.

      Because of the concerns of Bell and Rozelle, a notice in bold letters now hangs in every locker room to warn NFL personnel of the league’s rules on gambling. The league prohibits players from betting on NFL games, from accepting bribes or agreeing to throw or fix games, from failing to promptly report offers of bribes or attempts to throw or fix games, and from associating with gamblers or with gambling activities in a manner that would discredit the NFL. Any such conduct, reads the sign, may result in severe penalties, up to and including a fine and/or suspension from the NFL for life.²

      Rozelle’s antigambling policy has been publicly supported by the NFL’s team managements. During my interview with Steve Gutman, the president of the New York Jets, he said, My views about gambling are precisely those of the league. I wouldn’t want to characterize them in any way to deviate from that. And I would want to stand on that.

      As is well known, defensive tackle Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions and running back Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers each received one-year suspensions from the NFL in 1963 because of their admitted gambling activities. Since then, only one other person has been suspended for gambling: Art Schlichter, a rookie quarterback with the Baltimore Colts. In 1983, he admitted to associating with gamblers and losing more than $700,000 in bets on NFL games and other sporting events.

      As a result of the 1963 players betting scandal, Rozelle created NFL Security and selected Jim Hamilton, the former chief of intelligence with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), as its first chief. In 1966, Hamilton, who died after a long illness, was replaced by William Hundley, the chief of Robert F. Kennedy’s organized-crime division in the Justice Department. Hundley was succeeded by Jack Danahy, a New York FBI agent, in 1968. Danahy held the position until 1980, when he was followed by the current director of NFL Security, Warren Welsh, a former Miami-based FBI agent.

      The directors of NFL Security have attempted to safeguard the league against the corruption of its players, trainers, coaches, owners, and referees, all of whom are potential targets for blackmail and payoffs in exchange for inside information and other favors. NFL Security is supported by a network of private investigators, mostly former officials with the Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies, who are stationed in the twenty-six cities where the twenty-eight NFL teams are based (New York and Los Angeles each support two teams).

      These representatives are on retainer to the league, and they specifically report to the league, Warren Welsh told me. In addition to their game-day coverage and their liaison with the local law-enforcement community, they would also do background investigations that we might have for game officials, an ownership group, impersonations, misrepresentations, whatever it might be, as opposed to just working for the local team.

      The NFL, under Rozelle, followed Bert Bell’s policy of maintaining regular contacts with members of the gambling underworld in order to monitor the betting on NFL games.

      Warren Welsh explains, We’re very cognizant that the early line comes out on Sunday, and we have somebody in Vegas that follows that for us. And then we have our security reps all over the country report in to us and give us the opening line. And then if there are changes in the line that are over two points, they report that immediately. If not, then the security reps report to us on Friday at about noon. And then we are able to disseminate the line and any changes to our key executives so that they are aware of the information and any changes.

      Monitoring NFL personnel, as well as the line, may be unpalatable, but it is necessary. Two years before the Schlichter suspension, several members of the Denver Broncos were quietly disciplined by the league for receiving cocaine from gambling figures. And, in 1986, the league began an investigation of Irving Fryar, a wide receiver for the New England Patriots who was accused of betting on NFL games. Fryar had been named by his team’s officials as one of six Patriots players who used illegal drugs. The investigation remains open.

      The conditions under which players may be compromised are clear and present in the NFL today. Our worst case would be the athlete who is strung out on drugs and has a line of credit with his drug dealer and can’t pay the bill, says Welsh. Then he gets that knock on the door. And [the player] says, ‘Hey, I told you. I can’t pay the bill.’ And then [the dealer] says, ‘Hey, I don’t want your money, but now you’re going to work for us.’

      A major West Coast bookmaker agrees. A lot of players have gotten involved in cocaine and are well over their heads—as much as ten thousand to twenty thousand dollars a month in cocaine. There is a very real danger that if they can’t pay their debt, they give information and do make some mistakes in a ball game so that the dealer can make a bet and even out. And that’s a great opportunity for a bookmaker, too: to set up something for a cocaine dealer and find out information that way.

      Michael Roxborough of Las Vegas, who has succeeded Bobby Martin as the nation’s most influential oddsmaker on NFL games, told me, The NFL is not doing a very good job in the area of drug enforcement. But people just don’t think that there is a problem with the manipulation of the outcome of NFL games. Most people think that drugs aren’t a very serious problem. Until the public demands that it gets cleaned up, the NFL isn’t going to feel that it has to do very much.

      Former Olympic gold medalist Bob Hayes, who was also a receiver for the Dallas Cowboys and pleaded guilty to setting up a cocaine deal after he retired from football, told me, It goes a lot further than just saying no to drugs. And the NFL has been unrealistic about that because they treat drug abuse as a problem, not a disease. The use of drugs is a disease. And when you have a disease, you are a sick person and you need to get well. Until then, people are going to try to take advantage of you.

      Criticism of the NFL’s security system is generally not targeted at the commissioner or the security director. Instead, it’s directed at the NFL owners, who establish the league’s policies.

      Aaron Kohn, the former executive director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, told me, "They [the NFL owners] have a tendency to employ as security people former FBI agents and other people of confidence who do competent investigations and do accumulate adverse information. But at the policy-making level, the decisions are not made consistent with the fact-finding.

      I know that the NFL can’t go too far. They are going to do whatever they have to to prevent the problems of their owners and players and their overall profits from becoming subjects of public scrutiny.

      Some critics say that the league enforces its rules selectively. Rozelle [couldn’t] enforce the rules against the owners because he [worked] for them, Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) and a former all-pro guard for the Oakland Raiders, told me. There’s no way he [could] say, ‘I’m going to punish you because you own a racetrack, because you’re involved in Las Vegas, or because you do business with people who are involved in gambling.’ But I would like to think that the rules of suspension and banishment should also apply to the owners.

      One top NFL official says, We’ve had owners that have supposedly been friends or associates of mobsters, and when we looked into it they had dinner in a restaurant, maybe four or five times in a year. Nevertheless, the NFL did nothing about these owners who socialized with underworld figures.

      Another football insider says that many investigations of NFL owners have ended up in a black hole and were never disclosed. To me, he says, NFL Security is a special police force that monitors the players but protects the owners. It’s one thing to monitor the activities of the players, because they come and go. It’s quite another to monitor the activities of the owners. They seem to last forever.

      Patrick Healy, the former executive director of the Chicago Crime Commission, told me, The NFL tries to give you the public Kiwanis Club talk: ‘We have very little gambling; we have very little drugs. We have everything under control. We have FBI agents working for us, and whenever any rumor comes out they pounce on it. They discover it. They investigate it.’ Actually, the whole thing is really just a witch tale.

      Former Senate investigator Phil Manuel, another critic of the NFL security system, told me, "The oldest trick in the world is to hire old Justice Department officials and then make them understand that the security they are to protect is the security of the NFL owners.

      These retired law-enforcement guys maintain their ties to their old agencies, and they can then tell which investigations are being done and whether they might be troublesome. When some wrongdoing is ready to go public, the NFL Security people can go to their old fellow workers and say, ‘We can handle this ourselves. Give us a chance to straighten the mess out without all the attention your public investigation will bring.’

      Ralph Salerno, the former supervisor of detectives for the New York Police Department, goes even further. "How does the NFL protect itself with one guy in each NFL city? They do it illegally. The local NFL Security guy takes the local police commissioner, the chief of detectives, and any other important law-enforcement official and gives him season tickets and box seats. They get wined and dined and taken out to play golf.

      And then these public employees who are paid with public funds come up with criminal information and turn it over to profit-making corporations, like the New York Giants, the Cincinnati Bengals, and so on. And that is illegal. Do the police do that for every trucking company or every furniture manufacturer? Of course not. It would be illegal for them to do it with anyone. But they do it for the NFL. That whole NFL Security operation that Rozelle [bragged] about is simply an illegal operation.

      Welsh defends the current system. He insists that he is a fact finder and has never been asked to halt an investigation of any NFL personnel. And there have never been any roadblocks put up in my path in terms of investigating anything that would have to do with a member club—whether it was a player, coach, or an owner.

      That might be true: Warren Welsh and his predecessors have all been men of high integrity. But they have had no final decision-making powers. Thus, the real question is: What have their bosses, the NFL owners, done once they received the results of their investigations? The evidence is clear that they have protected themselves and their investments—sometimes to the detriment of the sport they represent.

      2 Getting Organized

      EARLY PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL POSSESSED little finesse and only basic strategies. The public’s draw to the game was based upon its display of legal violence. During his eight-year tenure as president, Theodore Roosevelt had actively tried to ban the game because of its inherent brutality. For the most part, the players—who looked like faces on a post office wall—were picked for their size and toughness rather than their agility, intelligence, and speed. Many of them carried railroad ties, chopped wood, and cow-poked during the rest of the week. Fans came to football games to see dogfights—and to gamble.

      The only known successful bribery incident in the pre-NFL period took place back in November 1906, in the midst of an early attempt to organize a professional football league. During a two-game series between the Canton Bulldogs and the Massillon Tigers in Ohio, Blondy Wallace, the head coach of the Canton team, and Walter R. East, a key Massillon player, made a deal in which Canton was to win the first game and Massillon was to win the second, forcing a third game—with the biggest gate—to be played legitimately. Several gamblers involved with Wallace and East had also offered a $5,000 bribe to the Massillon coach and members of his team, but without success.

      When the rumors of the attempted bribery became widespread, East, who had boasted of fixing a college football game the year before, as well as a baseball game that same year, was fired from the Massillon team. The Canton-Massillon incident became the first known case of professional gamblers’ attempting to fix a professional sport.

      Professional football had emerged during the early part of the twentieth century in small towns and cities without major colleges. In the large cities, college football was still king. The American Professional Football Association (APFA) was officially formed on August 20, 1920, during a meeting at the brick, three-story Odd Fellows building that housed the Hupmobile and Jordan automobile dealership of Ralph Hay, the general manager of the Canton Bulldogs in Canton, Ohio. By the beginning of its first season, the association consisted of fourteen teams from five states.¹ Each owner was required to pay $100 for his franchise.

      Among those initial teams created in 1920 were the Racine (Avenue in Chicago) Cardinals, organized in 1899 by South Side Chicago contractor Chris O’Brien. Another was the Decatur Staleys, sponsored by a manufacturing company and represented by twenty-five-year-old ex-sailor George Halas. Formerly a New York Yankees right fielder, Halas’s baseball career had been cut short by a hip injury. Later, after receiving loans from his mother and Chicago businessman Charles Bidwill, an associate of the Al Capone mob, Halas bought the football team from his employer, A. E. Staley. In 1921, Halas moved his team to Cubs Park in Chicago where it became the Chicago Bears.

      The legendary Jim Thorpe, whose mentor had been coach Glenn Pop Warner, was elected the first president of the association. Four years earlier, while Thorpe was playing for the Canton Bulldogs, he and a fan of the rival Massillon Tigers had a heated exchange about which team was better. Just hours before a game between the two teams, Thorpe slapped down a blank check and filled it out for $2,500, challenging the fan, a wealthy local businessman, to respond in kind.

      A local newspaper, which reported the betting incident, took the matter in stride. Massillon had plenty of money to stake on the outcome of the game, the paper reported, while many of the Canton bugs were rather shy. They evidently feared the hoodoo which Massillon has been in former years. Now that the jinx has been chased the wagering in years to come is likely to be more lively.

      One of Thorpe’s star Bulldog players, Joe Guyon, recalled, Gamblers tried to buy us off. They would approach us at the hotel, where we stayed on the weekend … They didn’t fool with me … But there were guys who took their money … We had one guy. Oh, he was a high traveler. A halfback. We saw his contacts at the hotel. Then we saw his play. He was detailed to cover a man, and when he didn’t, why, we said it was an accident. But the second time, it was too obvious. I said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ I went over to the bench and said, ‘He didn’t cover his man, Jim. This guy is not covering his man.’ Jim braced him right there. He fired him.²

      Thorpe was replaced as the president of the professional football league in 1921 by Joe Carr of Columbus, Ohio, a highly respected sports reporter and promoter. Perhaps his greatest contribution was his crusade to prevent NFL teams from snagging college players for pro ball until they had graduated.³

      In 1922—the year that the APFA changed its name to the National Football League—a scandal involving the year-old Green Bay Packers erupted. The team’s owner was disciplined by Carr for hiring college athletes who used aliases and were paid for playing in NFL games during the 1921 season.⁴

      With the Packers’ ownership in deep financial trouble in the wake of the scandal, local businessmen in Green Bay purchased the team for $2,500 and made it a public, nonprofit corporation in 1923. Citizens purchased stock in the team for $5 a share. Today, the Green Bay Packers are still the only team owned by the citizens of the city that it represents.

      Most of the early owners were viewed as sportsmen who gambled heavily on horse racing, baseball, and any other sporting events available. Gambling was widely practiced and accepted, particularly in those early days of professional football when the fledgling sport wasn’t thought to be in the same league as professional baseball.

      Wagering at baseball games had become a part of the ballpark spectacle. It was common knowledge that bookmakers usually operated in the right-field bleachers of nearly every stadium in the country.

      Halas said, "Fans bet heavily, but I forbade my players to gamble on any of our games. Betting on one’s own team to win may not be harmful, because one player cannot make a team win.

      One player can make a team lose, however, by fumbling or missing a pass or failing a tackle. Although players have a sixth sense for detecting when a teammate is not doing his best, there is a terrible temptation to bet against the team. No gambler has ever approached me. Perhaps the word got around that gamblers would, at best, be wasting their time.⁵

      In the early days of professional football, an NFL owner had to have what was then an enormous cash flow, over $100,000 a season. Generally, only gamblers and robber barons had

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