Interference (20 page)

The expanded NFL would begin regular season play in 1970. Until then, the leagues were to remain separate with the champions of each to face off in an AFL-NFL world championship game—first proposed by Lamar Hunt—which later became known as the Super Bowl.
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To Davis's chagrin, Rozelle was selected to head the newly merged National Football League. Davis, who purchased a 10 percent interest in the Raiders for only $18,500, returned to Oakland as the managing general partner.

Congress approved the AFL-NFL merger on October 21,
1966, exempting the agreement from federal antitrust laws. According to several sources, the deal with Congress was greased when the powerful Senate Finance Committee chairman, Russell Long of Louisiana, was guaranteed that the next NFL franchise would be in Long's home state.

During the merger negotiations between the two leagues, commissioner Rozelle began to establish “ownership rules,” described in David Harris's book
The League
as including

• a prohibition of corporate ownership. “While entities like Anheuser-Busch, Ralston Purina Corp., and CBS owned franchises in other sports leagues, such were not allowed in the NFL”;

• a prohibition of “public ownership of NFL franchises, either through purchase by governmental entities or through the issuance of publicly traded stock”;

• “the fifty-one percent rule,” which would “require all franchises' ownership to include someone with at least a bare majority, so that franchise control was vested in a single individual”; and the prohibition of “cross-ownership,” which was “by far the most controversial. At issue was the ownership of other sports businesses by NFL members. The League's ‘traditional position' was that ‘no person having an operating control of a franchise in the National Football League may acquire control of, directly or indirectly, any other team sports enterprise or business.”
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Of course, Rozelle's cross ownership rule did not apply to those team owners who also owned racetracks since horse racing was not a team sport. Nevertheless, there were several owners in violation of the ownership rules. For instance, the Green Bay Packers were still a publicly held corporation. The Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, and St. Louis Cardinals were owned by families with no single member owning a clear 51 percent majority interest; and the Sullivan family, the largest owners of the Boston Patriots, could not combine its interests for a clear majority. Bud Adams of the Houston Oilers, Bill Bidwill of the St. Louis Cardinals, minority owner Jack Kent Cooke of the Washington Redskins, George Halas of the Chicago Bears, Lamar Hunt of the
Kansas City Chiefs, and Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers—all had interests in other professional sports teams.

The NFL solved the dilemma by opting to exempt current owners from these rules and make them applicable only to future owners.

Meantime, in the Bahamas, Lou Chesler attempted but failed to purchase the stock of his partner Wallace Groves in Devco. In fact, Chesler's plan completely backfired, and he was bought out by Groves instead—with the blessing of Meyer Lansky.

In the wake of Chesler's ouster, according to Morris Mac Schwebel, Rosenbloom emerged as the second-largest individual stockholder in the Seven Arts film company. Only Schwebel owned more.

When Chesler left the Bahamas in 1964, so, too, did Mike McLaney, who then went to Las Vegas where he and his brother William operated the Carousel Club casino until 1966.
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However, McLaney returned to the Bahamas later that year and announced that he was going to open another casino. Chesler, who was also forced to resign as the head of General Development Corporation in 1966, returned that same year to develop the Great Harbor Cay.

Among those attending the opening of Chesler's development were Sonny Werblin and Joe Namath of the New York Jets. Author Bernie Parrish reported that Edward Bennett Williams, the president of the Washington Redskins, had been “a frequent guest at Chesler's quaint little hideaway hotel in Jamaica, and the Redskins star quarterback, Sonny Jurgensen, spent two weeks at the Sunset Lodge Hotel and Beach Club on Montego Bay at host Lou Chesler's expense … [Cleveland Browns owner] Arthur Modell ‘used to lose at blackjack to Chesler while courting one of Lou's daughters.'”
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Rosenbloom, who was rarely, if ever, mentioned in any news reports about his Bahamian gambling investments, was in the midst of getting a divorce from his first wife, Velma, in June 1966. The couple had had three children—Steve, Suzanne, and Daniel—all of whom were grown. Details of Carroll and Velma's divorce were sealed by court order, hiding the extent of Rosenbloom's personal wealth and his gambling interests in the Bahamas
. Within a month, he was married again. This time the fifty-five-year-old Rosenbloom married thirty-eight-year-old Georgia Hayes. The wedding took place in London.

The divorce from Velma was a formality. Rosenbloom and Hayes had been living together since 1958. They later had two children of their own—Chip and Lucia.
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16 “The Quarterback”

AFTER THE AFL-NFL MERGER agreement, the joint league agreed to add two more teams to its roster: the New Orleans Saints in 1966 and the Cincinnati Bengals in 1967.

The Bengals were purchased by a group headed by longtime Cleveland Browns head coach Paul Brown, who was already a legend in professional football. Among the greatest coaches of all time, Brown had been fired in January 1963 by Art Modell over a dispute on how the team should be operated. A strict disciplinarian, Brown had become unpopular with some of the players, including fullback Jim Brown, who was enjoying his superstar status and was defiant of Brown's team rules. Modell fired Paul Brown in the midst of a Cleveland newspaper strike. “The announcement was timed to take advantage of this news blackout,” Brown later wrote, “and Modell had organized a full-scale publicity force to back him up. He had hired out-of-work sportswriters from the struck newspapers, and they put out a pamphlet that was supposed to present all sides of the story. It was nothing but a thirty-two-page justification for Modell.”
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The creation of the Saints was controversial because of its owner, twenty-seven-year-old John W. Mecom, Jr., a Houston businessman from an oil-rich Texas family. A close friend and neighbor of Bud Adams, the owner of the Houston Oilers, Mecom, along with twenty-one minority stockholders, paid $8.5 million for the franchise. His father, John Mecom, Sr., held a 15 percent interest in the team.

While in college at the University of Oklahoma, young
Mecom met his future wife, Katsy Mullendore, the sister of E. C. Mullendore III, one of the largest ranchers in the United States and the owner of Oklahoma's Cross Bell Ranch. Subsequent to their marriage and in the midst of his own financial difficulties, E.C. was later found shot between the eyes with a .38.

For help, Mullendore had turned to New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello and Leon Cohen, a convicted rapist and con man. Cohen and Mecom had been business associates. Cohen and his partner in United Family Life Insurance Company had written $22 million worth of insurance policies for members and associates of the Mecom family, as well as players on the Saints team.

“[T]he New Orleans Saints were scheduled to play the Falcons at Atlanta,” according to author Jonathan Kwitny, “and the Mullendores and Mecoms decided to make a weekend of it, [culminating with] a lavish bash in Cohen's house honoring the owner of the Falcons [Rankin Smith] and the owner of the Saints and many of their acquaintances … Among them, according to law enforcement sources, Was a New Orleans football fan named Carlos Marcello. Cohen kept the reputed Mafia boss's telephone number in his pocket secretary.”
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The title to the Mullendore empire was later given to Mecom and his wife. The murder was never solved. The Mecoms cooperated fully with the police investigation and were under no suspicion.

However, Mecom Jr. had close ties with the New Orleans underworld. He was also heavily involved in horse racing and associated with the sons of ex-boxer and convicted bootlegger James Brocato, aka Diamond Jim Moran, who was a bodyguard for Senator Huey Long on the day he was murdered. Brocato, who died in 1958, had been deeply implicated with the New Orleans Mafia, particularly with Marcello. Brocato was also named with mobster Frank Costello in a scheme to embezzle $500,000 in state funds.

Brocato owned what became known as La Louisiane restaurant in the French Quarter. It was a popular meeting place for the city's top underworld figures, including Marcello's brothers, Sammy and Vincent Marcello, who headed the Marcello family's bookmaking operations. The restaurant was taken over by Brocato's four sons, three of whom had changed their names to Moran.

A former top executive with the New Orleans Saints says, “I
know Jimmy Moran [Jr.], and he had a restaurant in the Quarter that was sports-oriented. He had all the helmets on the wall. He knows many of the players, and the players know him. He's always been, with me and other people, an up-front, straight-out kind of guy, and I can respect that. He's helped some of our players here. He would give those who liked to do a little hunting and fishing, for example, a little direction in that respect.”

Former FBI agent Aaron Kohn, who was managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, told me, “La Louisiane was a hangout for Mecom and his players. Sammy Marcello, Carlos's youngest brother, who ran the city's layoff bookmaking activity, had a table where he sat by a telephone constantly. When the sons got into trouble with the financing of the restaurant, they turned to the Marcellos, who ended up taking over the restaurant.”

The fourth son, Dr. Robert Brocato, who had not changed his name, became the Saints' dentist after Mecom purchased the team. Brocato had access to all the Saints' injury information. Known for his hot temper, Dr. Brocato was later charged with attempting to murder a New Orleans police officer who had ticketed his car for a parking violation. The district attorney, Jim Garrison, another close associate of Marcello, refused to prosecute. Garrison had once declared that there was “no evidence of organized crime” in New Orleans.

Speaking of Mecom's relationship with Marcello's associates, Aaron Kohn says, “It was an exposure to a criminal influence. That's what was wrong with hiring an organized-crime-connected dentist for the New Orleans Saints or when Mecom would bring his key players to La Louisiane to be met by the owners of the restaurant. Friends do favors for friends. That's a normal, and certainly not undesirable, quality. As a result, an NFL owner, coach, or player cannot tolerate the development of such friendships, especially when they are financial ones with people who have an intent to use it to their personal advantage and to the disadvantage of the integrity of sports, in this case professional football.”

The five-feet-two Marcello, whose real name is Calogero Minacore, is one of the most notorious men in American history. Quite simply, he has wielded incredible control over Louisiana—its politicians, law-enforcement authorities, business leaders, and union officials—as well as in its neighboring states. He has been known to use the Ku Klux Klan as occasional enforcers.

Known as “the Quarterback” by many, Marcello, who became the Mafia boss in New Orleans in 1950 and then built himself a multibillion-dollar empire, has owned numerous politicians and has been immune from legal pressures by most state and local law-enforcement agencies. He was a student of Frank Costello, who came to Louisiana in 1934 at the invitation of Huey Long, whose son, U.S. Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, enjoyed the full support of Marcello and his organization during his political career.
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Born in Tunis, Africa, in 1910 and a grade school dropout, Marcello—who enjoyed describing himself as “a tomato salesman” before he became a “real estate investor”—robbed his first bank in 1929. It wasn't until four years later that he was charged with attempting to kill a New Orleans police officer and convicted for the robbery of a grocery store. He spent four years in Louisiana State Penitentiary and was released after he received a pardon from Louisiana governor O. K. Allen. In 1938, he pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana and served another ten months. During the 1940s and 1950s, he was operating a string of gambling houses throughout the South. Marcello, through his Nola Printing Company, was also the New Orleans distributor of the Continental Racing Wire under Cleveland Browns owner Mickey McBride.

Marcello and his partner and alter ego in Florida, Santos Trafficante, the boss of Tampa and the protégé of Meyer Lansky, were the principal narcotics traffickers in the southern United States and Latin America. When Cuba became a satellite nation of the American underworld, Marcello personally controlled one third of its narcotics trade while Trafficante was Lansky's peacekeeper in Havana's gambling and casino operations.

An associate of Marcello alleges that whether or not Mecom knew it, he had been selected by Marcello to buy the Saints. “There were a bunch of doctors who had a chance to own an NFL team,” he alleges. “But they ended up not wanting it. They had already gone to Marcello and discussed possible financing with him. Carlos got ahold of Mecom's [people] to see if he was interested in owning the team, and he was. [There was a meeting] at Marcello's fishing camp. And then there was another meeting at Marcello's house on [Clifford] Drive in Metairie at about one in the morning. That's where they did the firming up of it. Mecom dealt with all the other people.”

The associate claims that one of the middlemen in the arrangement between Marcello and Mecom was Lou Gale, the owner of a major construction firm in Houston, Mecom's hometown. Gale, the source alleges, was also one of the top layoff bookmakers in the Houston area and connected with a nationwide gambling syndicate operated by Gil Beckley, which was protected by Mafia figures Mike Coppola and Tony Salerno of New York.