Interference (21 page)

There was a subsequent dispute over the location of the Saints' stadium, the Louisiana Superdome. Marcello's associate says, “They built it downtown, which was the worst thing they could've ever done. Carlos had offered to donate two hundred acres of land. He wanted the stadium out in Jefferson Parrish, on his property. He was hurt, really dumbfoundedly hurt, because they turned down the site. But Carlos was really proud of the fact that they got the football team there.”

The source also alleges that Mecom was gambling on NFL games—and that Marcello was upset about it. “You know those Louisiana people, they love their ball teams,” the source says.
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Aaron Kohn confirms that Marcello had offered to donate his land for the stadium site—in return for the multimillion-dollar parking concession. However, Kohn says that he had no knowledge of Mecom's alleged gambling or about Marcello's selecting Mecom for the team's ownership. “I thought Marcello was probably supporting Lou Roussel, Jr.,” says Kohn. “There was a former FBI agent, who, when an NFL franchise for New Orleans developed, became the investigator to review the applications. He was viewed as the best FBI agent ever in the New Orleans office. One of the applicants was Roussel. He was the owner of banks, insurance companies, and politicians. He was a very wealthy man. When the FBI came to me for information about the people who had applied for the team, I was able to supply him with information that Roussel had corrupted judges, including two in our state supreme court. And he later admitted his personal and financial relationship with Marcello.”

Numerous attempts to interview the Houston-based Mecom for this book were unsuccessful. However, Mecom has vehemently insisted that he had never knowingly done business with Marcello or his associates. Marcello is currently in Texarkana Federal Penitentiary.

17 Gil Beckley and the Layoff

ATTORNEY GENERAL ROBERT KENNEDY had wreaked havoc on the underworld, particularly the organized gambling syndicate. While eating mobsters for breakfast, Kennedy said in 1961, “It is quite evident that modern organized crime's commercial gambling operations are so completely intertwined with the nation's communications systems that denial of their use to the gambling fraternity would be a mortal blow to their operations.”
¹

Prodded by Kennedy, Congress began to act. In September 1961, Senator John McClellan and his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations conducted hearings into gambling and organized crime. Among those called to testify during the so-called family-sports stage of the investigation were Don Angelini and Bill Kaplan—both of whom were associated with the Chicago-based handicapping service Angel-Kaplan Sports News, Inc.

Prior to his testimony, old man Kaplan was asked with whom he was doing business. He replied, “Somebody might drop a ton of bricks on my head if I start talking about my customers.” However, Kaplan did say that Angel-Kaplan serviced only thirty-six customers in Chicago, Montreal, Miami, and New York.

Angelini and Kaplan—along with two other associates, Sam Minkus, the owner of the Angel-Kaplan football betting card business, and Angel-Kaplan oddsmaker Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal—took the Fifth during their testimonies before the subcommittee. Rosenthal had stood accused at the hearings of fixing both basketball and football games.

At the time of the hearings, the Chicago Crime Commission stated in a confidential memorandum, “Kaplan is now about the age of 64 years and the firm employs three office clerks plus correspondents who attend college [and professional games] throughout the United States and who pass on information as to health and personal affairs of athletes. The publication is printed by a Minneapolis firm. As a sideline, Donald Angelini, alias Don Angel, sells insurance.”

The subcommittee concluded that, even though the initial line on football and other sporting events was probably based upon honest estimates, the final line was regularly manipulated through “regular consultation” with the gambling syndicate's top layoff bookmakers.

As a result of the McClellan hearings, Attorney General Kennedy, with the support of the committee, had rammed legislation through Congress that supplemented an earlier law passed in the wake of the Kefauver hearings.

A top assistant to Kennedy told me, “By simply making the transmission of the betting line, wagers, and gambling paraphernalia across interstate borders illegal—as well as personal travel from state to state for the purpose of gambling—bookmakers had to operate completely underground. And the FBI now had jurisdiction in these cases. That was a big victory.” Those violating the new antiracketeering acts faced a $10,000 fine and two years in prison.

Don Angelini told me that the new law seriously crippled his business. “The Angel-Kaplan sports service went out of business in 1968 when the government passed a law saying that the transmission of gambling information was illegal,” he said. When I reminded him that the law was passed in 1961, not 1968, he replied, “Well, they may have passed that in 1961, but we went out of business in 1968.”

Another bookmaker lamented, “Kennedy made it illegal to make a phone call.”
²

Later, Congress passed the Federal Sports Bribery Act of 1964.
³
New York Senator Kenneth Keating said during the debate over the legislation, “This bill would provide the authority our law-enforcement agencies need to prevent gamblers from corrupting college and professional sports. It would halt the contamination of sports by organized gambling syndicates by punishing any players or officials, as well as gamblers, who attempt to corrupt these games for personal gain. It would cover schemes
to affect the point spread in a contest, as well as to throw the game entirely, and would apply to every case in which interstate facilities—such as the telephone or the mail—have been used to carry out the conspiracy.”

Because of Kennedy's war on organized crime and gambling, bookmakers had to become increasingly creative in the operations of their businesses in order to continue making money and staying out of jail.

The basic economics of bookmaking dictate that every bookmaker will occasionally have to place a layoff wager with another bookmaker to create a more favorable balance in the bets he books and thereby reduce his risk. For example, if a Washington bookmaker has collected too much money on the Washington Redskins for an upcoming game against the San Francisco 49ers, he must either change the line in order to attract more balanced betting or lay off some of the money with a regional or national layoff bookmaker—so that he has as much money bet on the 49ers as he does on the Redskins.

“Arnold Rothstein created the first national layoff system,” Ralph Salerno told me. “He had some bookmaker friends in Baltimore, with whom he'd opened up a racetrack. He also knew bookmakers in Boston and Philadelphia and elsewhere. And they were all sitting around talking, and one of them said, ‘I had to turn down some heavy action because I was lopsided the other way. I didn't want to be loaded on one team over the other.' Rothstein told them, ‘Schmucks, the next time something like that happens, you go through me. And I'll take some of your Boston excess, and I'll match it against your Philadelphia excess. And we'll all make money.'”

As initiated by Ed Curd, gamblers generally put up $11 to win $10 from bookmakers, who are simply interested in the 10 percent commission, or vigorish, they receive from the losing bets they book.
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Without the layoff man, the local bookmaker could be forced out of business after a single, one-sided, big-betting game.

There are devices local bookmakers can utilize to maximize their winnings and minimize their losses. They can make individual adjustments in the line, knowing that most hometown fans will generally bet with the hometown team regardless of the spread. They can insist on winning all bets in which the spread between two teams ends in a tie. They can also circle games or
take them off the boards, indicating dramatic changes in the conditions of particular games or outright suspicions of unnatural money showing up. When games are circled or taken off the boards, bookmakers can limit or completely stop accepting money on them.

The major regional and national layoff bookmakers have long been controlled and financed by the Mafia. In the 1960s, the biggest layoff bookmaker in the United States was Gilbert Lee “the Brain” Beckley, who was also called to testify before the McClellan Committee in 1961 and took the Fifth twenty-five times. “He had accounts with just about every significant bookmaker in every significant city and in every little hamlet throughout the United States—approximately a hundred and twenty of these accounts,” says Brian Gettings, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Beckley. “He might move or take a half a million dollars in bets from just one of these gamblers a week.”

Born in 1912 in New Orleans, Beckley was raised by foster parents. “He was extremely sensitive about the fact that he was a bastard,” one of his top associates told me. “He was adopted out of an orphanage. But he later found his mother and got to know her.” Beckley's unhappy childhood was a constant topic of conversation when the bookmaker spoke to his closest friends. Characteristically, several say, he would often go into deep depressions over his mother; he would weep openly and uncontrollably.

Beckley moved to St. Louis after he dropped out of high school and began to lay off bets on horse races for Louis “Murph” Calcatera, a St. Louis mobster. He then became a protégé of New York's Frank Erickson, who was rendered ineffective after his bouts with the Kefauver Committee and his two-year imprisonment.
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Curd, who was one of Beckley's partners in Kentucky and one of the top oddsmakers in the country, told me, “I did a lot of business with Frank Erickson. But he was strictly a bookmaker. Erickson didn't have an opinion on the [oddsmaking of] ball games.

“Beckley was like Erickson. He operated on other people's opinions. There was a long period that he relied on what I was doing. Beckley didn't know if a game should be six or twenty points. He wasn't a pricemaker. He was a bookmaker who got some prices. And he was a good businessman.”

Gene Nolan, another Beckley associate, told me, “Gil worked
with the oddsmakers. He didn't fix the line on all games, just occasional ones that he wanted, that he was interested in, or the ones he had [his clients] on. And he would set the line in such a way that he would entice the bettors to bet on a certain ball team. Now, once in a while, when he fouled up or couldn't produce, he found out about it ahead of time. Say, he fixed the line at three, and it ended up going to four, four and a half, then his deal fell off. Then he'd try to recoup. Now Gil would go with the team that was giving the points, instead of the team that was taking them. Of course, his answer to the changing of the line was that the money did it.' Well, sure, but it was
his
money that did it.”

Beckley initiated the underworld's gambling operations in the Midwest, eventually setting up his layoff headquarters in the Newport/Covington region of Kentucky after a brief stay in Indianapolis.
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In Newport, one of Beckley's top associates, Tito Carinci—a onetime football star at Cincinnati's Xavier University—was later implicated in the frame-up of Newport's reform sheriff candidate George Ratterman, who was drugged by syndicate figures and photographed in bed with a known prostitute in 1961. Ratterman had been a pro quarterback with, among other teams, the Cleveland Browns. With the help of Attorney General Kennedy, Ratterman was elected and cleaned up the town.

Beckley also became active in the mob's casino operations in pre-Castro Cuba. He was directed, supported, and protected in Cuba, as well as in Newport, by Genovese crime family capo Michael “Trigger Mike” Coppola, who managed the New York underworld's interests in Cuba and south Florida.
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According to federal investigators, Beckley split his winnings fifty-fifty with Coppola and the Genovese group.
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When Castro assumed power, Beckley was expelled from Cuba and moved to Canada. While he worked in Montreal, he was protected by the syndicate of “French Connection” heroin traffickers, Antonio d'Agostino and his partners, Vinnie and Pepe Cotroni.
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However, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) busted up the operation.

Beckley then moved to Miami and picked up a junior partner, Marty Sklaroff. Beckley moved into a condominium in Miami's plush, Teamsters-pension-fund-built Blair House, where Jimmy Hoffa also maintained his Florida residence.

No fewer than ten people would regularly give Beckley $25,000 or more a week to bet for them. According to his associates,
Baltimore Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom and Dallas Cowboys owner Clint Murchison were among his biggest clients. Beckley had been introduced to Rosenbloom by Lou Chesler. Rosenbloom and Chesler had placed their million-dollar bet on the 1958 NFL championship game through Beckley.

“Rosenbloom's numbers were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says another former Beckley associate. “Murchison was very discreet. There was a lot of action from him, too. He bet big, and, sometimes, one of his partners would call and bet for him.”

The associate alleged that Art Modell of the Cleveland Browns even came to them to bet. “Modell was not discreet. He didn't give a shit, and I don't think he gives a shit today. Everybody in the country knows he's a bettor.”

Detroit gambler Donald Dawson told me, “Most of the owners played [bet on games]. The NFL owners are in there because they're competitive. They like sports. And everyone gambles on sports.”

Marty Kane, who was indicted and convicted with Beckley for bookmaking, said that when Beckley bet on someone's behalf Beckley would make a great deal of money. “Say, one of the clients would call Gil and say, ‘What do you see on the Miami-Cleveland game?' And Gil would say, ‘I see five [points].' The client would say, ‘I want to lay the five for thirty thousand dollars.' So Gil would start calling bookmakers all over the country, and he'd start to bet for the client. He might go to one bookmaker and find that game for four. He would move fifteen thousand dollars at four. The client would stand off his bet, and Gil would pick up whatever money he moved on four. That would belong to him.