Interference (10 page)

At the beginning of the 1951 NFL season, Los Angeles mobster Jimmy Fratianno was $35,000 in debt and looking for a way out of his financial problems. “It just happened to be that this friend of mine called me [one] night and told me that they had this referee for the [Los Angeles] Rams, and to start betting on the Rams,” Fratianno told my associate, William Scott Malone. “And so I started betting all over the country. And I bet between eighty thousand and ninety thousand dollars, I'm not sure.” Fratianno added that he gave the information to friends in the Cleveland Mafia.

The game Fratianno claimed was fixed was between the Rams and the now-extinct New York Yanks NFL football team on September 28, 1951.
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The Rams won, 54-14.

“Then, the next game we had was the San Francisco-Rams game [on October 28, 1951],” Fratianno continued. “And we had a loser there. We bet on the Rams and the Forty-niners won the game, [44-17].”

Because the Rams played so poorly, the alleged fixed referee
could not help them win their bets. “Everything they [the Rams] did went wrong,” Fratianno told UPI reporter Gregory Gordon. However, Fratianno said that they bet only $15,000 on that game.

Fratianno also said that there was a third game, the Rams versus the Green Bay Packers [on December 16, 1951], which he and his partners bet on and won. The Rams won, 42-14. “We won two and lost one. But then … the attorney general or somebody started investigating it. The bookmakers complained [about] all the money they lost, that there was something wrong. So [the referee] quit. That was the end of that with this referee.”

Describing the mechanics of the relationship with their referee, Fratianno said that he and his partners had laid down only $2,500 in bets for him on each game. In return, “He just called penalties, you know.”

Giving credence to Fratianno's story was the 1951 Rams star quarterback Bob Waterfield, who told Los Angeles reporter Bob Hunter that “at the end of the season, two officials were fired” by Bert Bell. Waterfield recalled seeing a referee arrive early for the Rams' workouts. After a period of time, the referee would talk to someone who would then make a telephone call. “I told [Rams owner] Dan Reeves about it,” Waterfield said. “He reported it to the NFL office, which had the official tailed. It turns out the calls were made to Las Vegas. The official was fired.”

All the games named by Fratianno were officiated by the same game officials, a crew headed by Rawson Bowen. Lawrence Houston was the field judge for the Bowen crew in 1951. A longtime college referee from UCLA, Houston, who was born in 1906, was asked to become an NFL official in the late 1940s.

When I found Houston and asked him about Fratianno's charges, he told me that he was part of the crew that officiated the three games cited by Fratianno. He added that he had known Waterfield since his days as a star quarterback with Van Nuys High School while Houston was coaching at the rival Eagle Rock High School. However, Houston denied knowing anything about fixed games or the dismissal of any official for gambling.

“In all the time I was associated with the professional football program, no one ever approached me, suggested it, or talked about it,” Houston says. “I never knew of any referees, owners, coaches, or players who gambled. The crew I worked with were very, very fine people. Nothing of that nature was ever discussed.”

Discussing his job as an official, Houston says, “We had to go out an hour before game time to inspect the field for markings and all of that. We would visit the dressing rooms and examine whether any player had any special protection. We had to examine whether there was a hard surface that might be injurious to someone else if they contacted it. After we got that, we went into our own dressing room, and we would chat about the mechanics of the game, just to be sure we were prepared and in the right frame of mind. We had a job to do.

“There were observers up there watching us. I understand that the commissioner of officials would have someone up there, and he might even come out himself and watch us work. The crew never got together socially at any time. The only times we were together were on the days we worked games or if Hugh ‘Shorty' Ray, who was in charge of officials for the NFL, would come out in the late summer or early fall for a day or two and have a meeting with us and go over things, like rules changes and things like that. We would actually be tested to make sure that we knew the right answers about any given situation that might arise during a game. Those were the only times we got together.

“I never knew of anyone who had a vested interest in the outcome of a game.”

Houston remained with the NFL until 1953 when he was knocked to the ground and injured by a player after he had blown a play dead. “He hit me between my shoulders and knocked me about fifteen feet away from the ball. The crowd loved it, of course. But I could hardly shave or comb my hair for about three weeks. That ended my career.”

The world of sports expanded, seemingly unaffected by the revelations of the Kefauver Committee, which had been shoved off the front pages by the Red-baiting hearings of the U.S. House UnAmerican Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt. To most people, Godless communism was a bigger threat to America's national security than the organized-crime syndicate was. With this public attitude to its advantage, the underworld fueled the fires of the Red scare and almost became perceived as acceptable citizens in the process.

7 Boss Colt

THE CLEVELAND BROWNS, BALTIMORE Colts, and San Francisco 49ers were the only three teams from the defunct AAFC that were merged into the NFL in 1950.
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The deal was cinched by Mickey McBride and his two close NFL friends Tim Mara and Art Rooney, who had been convinced by Bert Bell to warmly welcome the AAFC teams into the NFL—so as to avoid potential antitrust problems with the federal government.

However, the Colts folded at the end of the 1950 season after team owner Abraham Watner had lost $760,000. Part of the void left by the Colts was filled by the new Dallas Texans. But the owners of the Dallas team found themselves in even worse financial shape than Watner had been and gave up their franchise during the 1952 midseason. The Texans then went into a receivership controlled by Bert Bell and the NFL. The final five games of the Dallas Texans season were played in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The city of Baltimore desperately wanted the return of its NFL franchise. And commissioner Bell was happy to accommodate the Baltimore sports fans. But his major concern was finding an owner who had enough money to carry the team beyond a single season.

Carroll Rosenbloom had all the looks of a winner. Born on March 5, 1907, in Baltimore, he was handsome, charming, witty, and frequently generous. But friends and associates have also said that his generosity sometimes carried a price, and that he could be thin-skinned, condescending, and meanspirited. Because his
ego was as big as his financial portfolio, he seemed to enjoy keeping people guessing.

Totally unpredictable, he was the kind of guy who could slap a newspaper boy around for throwing the morning edition in the bushes—and then the next day offer to put the same boy through college. One NFL team owner said, “Carroll always gave you the feeling that if you crossed him, he was capable of slitting your throat, then donating your blood to the Red Cross blood drive.”
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Of course, those who crossed him were rarely forgiven. If he was in the midst of a war with someone and discovered that he had been wrong, he would rarely apologize. Instead, he would simply send flowers with a funny note attached and pretend that nothing had happened. His tone was slow and deliberate, as he switched between his Ivy League speech and racier, “mothahfuckah” street talk. He was intensely competitive and also a heavy gambler.

A ruthless businessman, he was the son of Solomon Rosenbloom, a manufacturer of denim work clothes. Carroll Rosenbloom's older brother Ben Rosenbloom told me, “When our father came over from Russia, he couldn't speak English. In about 1888, he became a partner in the Standard Overall Company in Baltimore. But, as his sons got older, he decided to start a business that they could participate in. He sold out to his partners in Standard and then founded S. Rosenbloom, Inc. We manufactured all kinds of denims and sportswear. And everything just evolved from there.

“When another overall company, [which eventually became] Blue Ridge Manufacturers of Roanoke, Virginia, went up for sale, we bought it [in or about 1900]. Soon, we had plants all over the country. We sold our products to all the big chains, like Sears and Montgomery Ward.”

The athletic, five-feet-eleven Carroll Rosenbloom grew up on Hollins Street—near the home of writer H. L. Mencken—before the family moved into a large home on Auchentroly Terrace, across from Druid Hill Park in northwestern Baltimore. A psychology major at Baltimore City College, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania.

There were nine children in the family, six boys and three girls.
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All the boys were raised to work in the family business; the girls were brought up to be good wives. Carroll went to work for his father when he graduated from college.

But Carroll wanted more responsibility and soon helped expand
the family business, creating new companies and opening new plants. During the mid-1980s, he became the head of Blue Ridge and its subsidiaries—which, at the time, had eighty employees and included the Imperial Shirt Company.

“Carroll's father was a genius,” said another member of the Rosenbloom family. “Although his oldest son, Isadore, was the obvious heir, and he ran another Rosenbloom company, Marlboro Shirts, while Solomon was alive, really none of the sons were very ambitious, with the exception of Carroll. He was special. He was dynamic but totally self-centered and gruff. He wasn't a very classy man, and despite his education, he didn't appear to be well educated.”

When Solomon died in 1942, Carroll Rosenbloom assumed control of all the family's business interests, as directed by the elder Rosenbloom's will. “Upon my father's death, Carroll consolidated all our family's holdings under Blue Ridge,” says Ben Rosenbloom. “Carroll did a hell of a job for all of us. He was the man who made it tick. He was a terrific guy.”

Solomon had named Carroll as the executor of his estate, passing over all the other, older sons. A member of the Rosenbloom family recalls, “Although there was a lot of trouble over the will, all the children received enough money to retire on after Blue Ridge and Marlboro were later sold. No one ever had to work again. Carroll was really the only member of the family to remain active and in business for himself.”

Ben Rosenbloom explains, “I had a sister Rose and she objected to some of the things in the will. We went to court, and it was settled. She basically challenged Carroll's authority over the estate. But everyone else was on Carroll's side because we knew he was doing the right thing.”

According to a close friend of the family, Rose had contended that her brother had handled the corporate affairs in a manner to enhance the family's wealth at her expense. She charged that she lost $700,000 as a result of Rosenbloom's actions. Rosenbloom claimed that he had increased the worth of the family's businesses tenfold. He ended up settling with his sister for $500,000. As part of the final agreement, the paperwork in the case was sealed by court order.

After taking over the family business, Carroll quickly became known as the “Overalls King of America” during World War II. Doing work for the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot,
he built upon the family fortune by cornering the market on the blue-green battle fatigues and parachutes for American soldiers. He had also expanded the business to include the manufacturing of industrial garments, leather jackets, children's play clothes, and various adult sportswear, which included matched sets of shirts and slacks.

Two years after the war ended, Rosenbloom bought the twenty-one-year-old, eight-hundred-employee Blue Buckle Overall Company of Lynchburg, Virginia, and Marshall, Texas, for $2 million. The takeover of Blue Buckle, one of the largest producers of work clothes and sportswear in the United States, had the effect of merging three of the top brand names in overalls—Blue Ridge, Blue Buckle, and Blue Jay—under the control of Rosenbloom and his management team. The entire company employed nearly seven thousand workers.
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Carroll Rosenbloom, a former second-string halfback at the University of Pennsylvania, had caught the eye of his old college football backfield coach, Bert Bell. Witnessing the collapse of the Baltimore Colts and the Dallas Texans, Bell approached Rosenbloom. Rosenbloom told
Los Angeles Times
reporter Charles Maher, “Bert had a home near me in Margate, New Jersey. He kept telling me I ought to come into the league and I kept saying I didn't have time. Finally, to get away from him, I took the family to my home in Palm Beach and shut off the phones. But one of my brothers flew down and said, ‘Carroll, you're really in a hell of [a] jam. Bert Bell has told the press the only way Baltimore can keep the franchise is if you will come in as owner.' So Bert had me on the spot. If I didn't take the team, they'd ‘hang the Jew bastard.' But I got the franchise for nothing, really.”

Bell offered Rosenbloom membership in the National Football League, which was “a very private club,” and the Colts franchise at a bargain price: $13,000 as a down payment for majority ownership. Rosenbloom bought his 52 percent interest in the Colts on January 23, 1953.
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His four partners each laid down $3,000 as their down payments.
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If that wasn't attractive enough, Bell even offered to guarantee his investment if the Colts continued to lose money.

“Bert Bell was very anxious to get someone to take over the Colts,” Ben Rosenbloom explains. “Carroll was doing him a favor by taking it over. But it turned out to be a very good favor.”