Interference (25 page)

McCracken concluded his report, “Upon my departure it
was noted that his [McLaney's] next-door neighbor is Anthony Salerno.” At the time, Salerno was financing the Gil Beckley national layoff syndicate, in which Rosenbloom, Murchison, and other NFL owners were clients.

McLaney—who, like Chesler, was being squeezed out of the Bahamas by Lansky—did not receive his gambling license from the Pindling government. Instead, the Royal Commission declared, “We formed the opinion that Mr. McLaney was an unscrupulous individual who was playing on the worldly inexperience of the Premier [and his political party] with the aim of maneuvering them into a position whereby they would feel obliged to ‘do a deal' There is little doubt that the deal would have involved some sort of gambling concession. We regard Mr. McLaney as a thoroughly dangerous person who is likely to do nothing but harm the Bahamas.”
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The Royal Commission's report also referred to McLaney's relationship with Rosenbloom—but without actually naming the Colts' owner. The report stated that McLaney “has been associated in business with Mr. Chesler, notably in relation to a restaurant and supper club in Surfside, Miami, in 1955 and 1956. In October, 1958, after prolonged negotiations and with indirect backing from Mr. Chesler he took over the casino in the Hotel Nacionale
[sic]
in Havana using money supplied by friends for the purpose. As with more than one of his enterprises, he arrived on the scene too late for the project to be a success. Fidel Castro on assuming control of Cuba, closed the Havana casinos early in 1959 and Mr. McLaney thereby lost his friends' investments. In 1963 and 1964 with his brother William, he operated the casino at Cat Cay for its short season. He was also concerned in 1963 in Baltimore in gambling on football games which received much newspaper publicity and ended in litigation with a business associate.”
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By the end of the year, Peloquin left the Justice Department and—along with his new law partner, Bill Hundley—was hired by Mary Carter in October 1967 to provide advice about security in its casino operations in the Bahamas. Also, by that time, Hundley and Peloquin were already working for NFL Security.

It was Bob Peloquin who advised Mary Carter to hire Eddie Cellini to manage its new casino at the $15 million Paradise Island Hotel, which opened in December 1967.
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The hotel was
operated by Loew's Theatres, Inc. Cellini was a longtime associate of Gil Beckley from their days in Newport, Kentucky. Cellini had gone to work at the Monte Carlo in Freeport and then moved to the Bahamian Club in 1967 under the direction of Crosby and Groves. Peloquin knew, probably better than anyone, that Cellini had worked as a dealer for Lansky at Havana's Riviera casino in pre-Castro Cuba and later had operated a London-based croupier school.

Cellini, the brother of Dino Cellini, a longtime business associate of Lansky, was obviously mob-connected, causing immediate challenges to Mary Carter's claims that it had rid the company of the influence of organized crime.

Significantly, Dino Cellini was a close friend and business associate of Washington, D.C., syndicate leader, Joe Nesline, who was the target of the 1967-68 IRS investigation of sports gambling and the Washington Redskins. Nesline told Washington, D.C., reporter Frank Kuznik, “I think what little I know about gamblin' came from Dino. He was very good with figures. He could tell you what a cigarette smoked halfway down was worth. There's nobody I know who ever came close to Dino for being a gentleman and a nice man. He got a lot of bum raps.”

However, under public pressure, Eddie Cellini was forced out as the head of the casino, although he remained on payroll, arranging tours of Paradise Island from Crosby's offices in Miami. During his three-year contract with Crosby, Cellini made nearly $500,000. Peloquin later stated that Cellini was ousted because of “guilt by association … damned because of the alleged organized-crime involvement of his brother, Dino.”

In mid-1968, after selling off its paint division for nearly $10 million, Mary Carter changed its name to Resorts International, with James Crosby as its chairman of the board and I. G. “Jack” Davis, a Harvard M.B.A. and longtime employee of the paint company, as its president. That same month, Resorts opened its second gambling spot, the Paradise Island Casino.

With the murder of Robert Kennedy in 1968,
¹⁴
the federal government's war against organized crime, waged so effectively by the Kennedy Justice Department, was over. And two of its best warriors—Bill Hundley and Bob Peloquin—were dressed for war but had no one to fight.

In July 1970, with $2 million from Crosby and Resorts, Peloquin
and Hundley cofounded International Intelligence, Inc., or Intertel, a subsidiary of Resorts International. Peloquin became its president; Hundley, the secretary and chief counsel. Intertel was created “to provide unique services to domestic and multinational corporations, their outside law and public accounting firms as well as brokerage firms and investment bankers that support corporate objectives,” according to a company brochure.

Peloquin and Hundley hired numerous former top officials and agents in the Strike Force, FBI, IRS, and CIA, among others, as well as officials from Scotland Yard and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Among them was William Kolar, the former chief of the intelligence division of the IRS. Intertel was a supersecret, private, Strike Force-type organization hired by corporations “to keep the underworld out of the companies affairs,” says Tom McKeon, Intertel's executive director and another respected member of Robert Kennedy's legendary anti-organized crime staff.

Intertel immediately became the security arm for Resorts International's casino operations, as well as for Howard Hughes's casino empire in Nevada
¹⁵
and the St. Maarten's gambling casino of Henry Ford II, the brother of Detroit Lions owner William Clay Ford.

Although Hundley remained as a member of Intertel's board of directors, only Peloquin continued full-time and became a vice president and member of the board of directors of Resorts International.
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The law partnership of Hundley and Peloquin dissolved in 1970. Soon after, Hundley & Cacheris was formed. Subsequently, Hundley, one of the greatest anti-Mafia prosecutors in history, told a reporter, “My days with Valachi convinced me that the Cosa Nostra was the most overrated thing since the Communist party.”

On October 15, 1970, a glimmer of hope in the war against organized crime was revived when the Organized Crime Control Act became law. The new legislation provided for immunity for those who testified against more dangerous criminals, the creation of the Federal Witness Protection Program, and gave the FBI jurisdiction over “major gambling operations and hoodlum infiltration of legitimate business,” according to an FBI statement. Most important, Title IX of the act was the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Statute (RICO), which gave federal prosecutors the means by which indictments and
convictions could be obtained when a “pattern of racketeering activity” could be proven within a particular crime group. The new law also threatened the underworld's financial base—since convictions could lead to federal seizures of mob assets obtained illegally and even legitimate enterprises if it could be proven that they were purchased with illegally obtained money.

The author of the act was the chief counsel of a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, G. Robert Blakey, who was also responsible for drafting the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which approved court-authorized electronic surveillance.
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“RICO is to organized-crime prosecutions what Rockne's invention of the forward pass was to football,” Blakey told me. “It's a whole new ball game. We used to prosecute individuals and tried to lock them up. Now we could prosecute whole organizations—and not only lock them up but seize their ill-gotten gains.”

However, it would not be until almost ten years later that the full impact of RICO would be realized by federal prosecutors.

20 The Kansas City Shuffle

WHEN ASKED WHETHER GIL Beckley had ever influenced the outcomes of professional football games, FBI supervisor Ralph Hill replied, “The records would show that, yes. They would have been manipulated in many ways. One is getting to the ballplayers, to get the coaching staff to manipulate the points down and then ensure that they are within the spread.”

Hill added that Beckley and his associates were successful in getting to those team members who could guarantee their bets. “They would have to. If you're going to get to a given football organization, you would have to get to those key people.”

Hill cited one government informant who was a part of the Beckley/Sklaroff organization and had claimed to have fixed several players on a particular team. He told my associate, William Scott Malone, “We have this guy … who says that on a particular occasion he had at least [three members of one team] sharing in their profits from manipulating a point spread on certain football games. [He] is in a far better position to do that than I am because he was involved; and he was there.”

In convicted bookmaker Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder's autobiography, he told of the Kansas City Chiefs being taken off the betting boards in Las Vegas during the 1968 season because “‘unnatural money' had begun to show up on their games. I should say, unnaturally
big
money.”
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Snyder wrote that he had investigated the situation and discovered that two or three Chiefs players were thought to have been cooperating with gamblers and throwing games.

Mobster Jimmy Fratianno told Malone, “For years, bookmakers were always skeptical about Kansas City. When money starts showing up on a team, there is a reason for it … When everybody starts coming in and bets Kansas City—Kansas City or the other side, it doesn't matter. They know something is wrong. Either they have got some information that somebody is hurt or maybe they got a little help in there.”

Bookmaker Ed Curd told me, “What was going on with the Kansas City Chiefs was common knowledge all over the country. We took many of those games off the boards.”

Marty Kane says, “I used to find out about these Chiefs games because I worked in Las Vegas. Whenever I'd see a Kansas City game go off the board, I'd run to a pay phone and call Marty Sklaroff in Miami and say, ‘Listen, bet with whoever is still playing the Chiefs for all you can take.'”

Oddsmaker Bobby Martin agreed and noted that Washington, Detroit, Oakland, San Diego, and Houston also had been taken off the boards on occasion. “It's always hard to find out for sure what's going on,” he told me. “I personally believed that there were two players with the Chiefs who were shaving points. They had a mutual friend betting for them, and week after week the bets got bigger and bigger. Sooner or later, the money started showing up.”

Discussing the Chiefs, sports reporter Larry Merchant wrote, “I've always had success betting on and against the Chiefs, which is why I have always retained a scintilla of doubt about the exact nature of their alleged misdeeds.

“I believe, absolutely, Bob Martin's revelation about the betting pyramid that resulted in the Chiefs being taken down from the line in 1966. What I'm not so sure about is how the pyramid started.”
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For years, the rumors about the Kansas City Chiefs have circulated among bookmakers and gamblers. However, the origin and circumstances of this talk have never been explained. A major Mafia-connected gambler in New Orleans told me, “In the case of Kansas City being taken off the boards, it was not because of some vague rumors.” And there weren't just gamblers who were hearing these rumors.

During the late 1960s, it was thought by federal and local law-enforcement agencies that members of the Kansas City team had been cooperating with the Beckley/ Sklaroff gambling network, particularly through Kansas City mobsters, and were occasionally
shaving points and even throwing games in return for a piece of the gambling action.

Throughout the 1966, 1967, and 1968 football seasons odds-makers took several Kansas City Chiefs games off the boards—and no further bets were accepted on them. According to FBI documents, the FBI considered a sports-bribery investigation into an October 1, 1967, game between the Chiefs and the Oakland Raiders, which the Raiders won, 23-21. The heavily edited document, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, stated, “An investigation was initiated by the Kansas City Office … to determine whether a sports bribery violation had occurred involving a member of the Kansas City Chiefs football team, in the Oakland-Kansas City football game.”

The following week, the FBI monitored the game between Kansas City and the Miami Dolphins in Miami, which the Chiefs won, 24-0.

After the Chiefs' big victory over the Dolphins, the matter was considered closed because FBI “auxiliary offices [have] failed to reflect any relevant information indicating sports-bribery violation. Information compiled does reflect that bookmakers are generally reluctant to accept bets on the Kansas City Chiefs football games because of their erratic play and alleged squad dissension.”

At the time Kansas City was off the boards, two Chiefs players were suspected to have been involved with members of the gambling community: quarterback Len Dawson and defensive back Johnny Robinson. Both players were thought to have been providing inside information to bookmakers, if not shaving points and even fixing games.

Len Dawson is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time.
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He grew up in Alliance, Ohio, just about twenty miles from the automobile agency in Canton where the NFL was chartered in 1920. A three-letter man in football, basketball, and baseball at Alliance High School, he starred at Purdue and became an all-American. He was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1957. He remained with the team until 1959 when he was traded to Cleveland.