Interference (27 page)

When I asked Stram for his explanation of the suspicions revolving around the Chiefs, he replied, “I never paid any attention
to it. I didn't know if we were off the boards or on the boards. The first time I heard about this off-the-boards thing, a very dear friend of mine, Tony Zoppi, who worked in Las Vegas, called me and said, ‘Hey, coach, there's a guy here in town, a bookmaker, who really hates your team. He said that a couple of guys on your team were gambling and throwing games.'“ Stram told me that Zoppi had identified the bookmaker as Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder.

Stram added, “Later, after I started broadcasting games and Jimmy was with CBS, he mentioned to me, ‘You had two guys on your team who were throwing games: Johnny Robinson and Lenny Dawson.' I said, ‘Jimmy, how can you so irresponsibly make those kinds of statements about these two kids. I recruited Lenny as a kid at Purdue. I know his moral, social, and athletic fiber. There is just no way in the world that Lenny Dawson would be involved in something like that, nor would Johnny Robinson.'”

In December 1968, Bill Hundley resigned as the director of NFL Security and was succeeded by Jack Danahy, a Columbia law school graduate and a former FBI special agent who had headed the New York office's organized-crime division. A man with a history of military-intelligence experience, he had monitored German intelligence for the FBI during World War II, and he later became an expert on Soviet espionage.

“I became the director of NFL Security through Bill Hundley,” Danahy told me. “Before he was head of the Organized Crime and Labor Racketeering Section, he was a special assistant to the attorney general, prosecuting espionage matters. And I was the supervisor of the Soviet-espionage squad in New York. So we knew each other from back in that era.

“Then Bill switched over to organized crime in the Justice Department. At about the same time, in 1961, I was transferred to Washington. And then, just three months later, I was sent back to New York to take over the organized-crime squad there. So we were running on parallel tracks again.

“About the time Bill's law practice began to pick up in Washington, Pete Rozelle wanted to have his security chief in the NFL office in New York. Bill was reluctant to leave his practice, so he told Pete he was going to have to give up the job.

“Pete asked him to recommend someone, and he recommended
me. I came in on December 13, 1968. I had retired from the FBI that Friday and came to work to my new job the following Monday morning. Actually, Hundley and I overlapped a little. Pete asked me if I would come aboard for a transition period. The Super Bowl was in Miami that year, and I went down there about a week before the game to meet with Hundley and all the security representatives. In effect, Hundley broke me in. He taught me the ropes. Hundley stayed on, as counsel to security, for a year or two after that. That ended after Hundley and Peloquin split up.”

A week after Danahy's arrival, the NFL hired Bernie Jackson as Danahy's assistant chief. Well-qualified for the job, attorney Jackson had been a New York City police officer and later an assistant U.S. attorney.

Like his predecessors, Danahy watched the fluctuations in the line carefully. “We all deal with bookmakers to monitor the line,” Danahy says. “I dealt with bookmakers whom I had known when I was with the FBI—my own private sources in New York.”

Danahy's office conducted about 50 investigations a year at first and as many as 150 by the end of his tenure in 1980. Most were background checks on prospective business partners for players, prospective new owners, and candidates to become NFL referees. Danahy and Jackson also continued a program that Hamilton had begun, which consisted of traveling from team to team during the preseason and discussing the problems of gambling and associations with the NFL players and staff.

Most players think beyond football and plan for their futures—and they attempt to make the contacts in the outside world necessary for players to achieve their postfootball goals. “Players are in the public eye,” Danahy says. “They are naturally going to attract con men. First of all, they are young men who have come right out of college. They have had a minimum amount of business experience. So they're potential bait for business sharpies.

“We initiated a program to assist the ballplayers in business opportunities. We would investigate the individuals who were offering these deals to them to see if they were legitimate. We would give them the results of our investigations, without recommendations. And then they would have to make up their own minds.”
¹²

21 The Outlaw Line

WARREN WELSH, A TOP NFL Security official, told me that the betting line is still one of the biggest problems that faces the NFL today. “The thing that really hurts us,” he says, “is that you go to a game and you have a thrilling contest and the final score is twenty-one to twenty in favor of the home team. And you have people who are really angry when they leave the stadium [because the home team didn't cover the spread]. It's very unhealthy.”

Most sports reporters and all professional bookmakers know that, for years, the official betting line was set by Robert “Bobby” Martin, who has been the most influential sports oddsmaker in the United States since the early 1950s. Martin is considered to be something of a genius at his trade. And, like Beckley, he cooperated with the NFL in the mid-1960s. “When Bill Hundley was the head of NFL Security,” Martin recalls, “he asked me to give him the opening line, the line in the middle of the week, and how it would close. And then maybe he'd ask for a reason why the line would close as it did.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1918, Martin was gambling by the time he was twelve years old. After earning his degree in journalism from New York University and serving in France during World War II, he became a professional gambler, hustling at Fiftieth Street and Broadway in midtown Manhattan. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1952, after betting on the wrong teams during the 1951 college-basketball point-shaving scandal. Consequently, he was financially wiped out.

“I was brought to Washington by Julius Silverman,” Martin recalls. “He had heard that I was good at making prices and predicting winners of fights. I was dead broke, and Julius wanted me to help set the odds on fights and to pick winners. We became the number one fight bookmakers in the United States. Everyone was afraid of fights, because they thought they were fixed. But we were trusted. We had everyone betting with us on the fights.”

In 1959, Martin, Silverman, and another associate Meyer “Nutsy” Schwartz were convicted of illegal gambling activities while operating from their office in a Foggy Bottom row house near the State Department. They were fined and sentenced to five years in prison. But the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark
Silverman
v.
United States
overturned their convictions because the surveillance method that had been used to gather evidence against them was deemed to be illegal—and it was a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.
¹
Edward Bennett Williams was their attorney. After the Justice Department renewed the government's case, this time without the surveillance records, all three pleaded guilty to lesser charges. They were fined $5,000 each but were not sentenced to prison.

Martin, who also worked with Gil Beckley, moved to Miami in 1961 but returned to Washington the following year. In 1963, the heat that was being put on gamblers by the Kennedy Justice Department caused him to move to Las Vegas, where he began to set and distribute line information legally. In 1967, he became the chief oddsmaker of the Churchill Downs Sports Book and became the premier oddsmaker in the country.

Here's how Martin created the weekly line on NFL games: “On Sunday night I'd make my own pro line. I'd tell what line I thought the games should be, then I'd consult with a few people. I'd say, ‘What do you think of such-and-such game?' And some guys would say, ‘Well, I think you're wrong here.' And we would make what we call ‘man-to-man' bets.
²
So it's getting a few opinions from people I call professionals, whose opinions I respect. The next morning we'd get a number of opinions, make some wagers, and then make some adjustments in the line [based on the betting].”
³

Martin calls the end of the process “the opening line.” The FBI calls it “the outlaw line.”

After Martin created the line, it was posted in the Las Vegas
casinos and then received widespread dissemination around the country. Bookmakers would base most of their action on his numbers, hoping they would attract an equal division of betting. The amount and trend of the money wagered, as well as injuries and inside information, caused adjustments in the line throughout the week.

NFL Security chief Jack Danahy told me that the NFL regularly monitors the line. “Our security representatives would start calling in, originally on Monday. And after
Monday Night Football
started, the line moved back to Tuesday. They would start calling us on Tuesday and give us the line in their particular city. And we would chart and monitor it. If there was any significant change during the course of the week, they would call it in to us, and we would seek an explanation for it. In most instances, there was an obvious explanation. Say, a key player had been injured the previous week or in practice, and the problem was more serious than originally thought. He would not be available. So we followed the line right up to game time.”

Martin was principally responsible for making the Baltimore Colts a seventeen-point favorite over the New York Jets in Super Bowl III on January 12, 1969. When the Jets upset the Colts, 16-7, Martin became the butt of jokes. Naïve football fans thought that he had badly misjudged the strengths of the teams.

But picking a winner wasn't Martin's job. “Our opening line was seventeen,” he explains. “The money that came in on Baltimore drove the price up to nineteen. Quite a few people thought that was too many points, and they bet on the Jets. Eventually, the line came back to the original price. That was one of the better prices I ever made because it threw money both ways.”

In the 1969 Super Bowl, the Jets' head coach since 1963, Weeb Ewbank, had been the Colts' head coach from 1954 to 1962. Don Shula, the Colts' head coach, had also played for the Colts under Ewbank. Sonny Werblin, one of Rosenbloom's closest friends and the man responsible for building the Jets into an AFL powerhouse, had sold his 23.4 percent interest in the team to his four partners in May 1968.

Werblin was replaced as president of the club by Donald Lillis, who died two months later and was succeeded by Philip Iselin.
⁴

For years, there have been questions as to whether Super Bowl III was fixed. Bubba Smith, a defensive lineman for the
Colts, has charged that the game had been “set up” for the Jets in an effort to give the AFL legitimacy.
⁵
Smith claimed that he had heard this charge from a bookmaker in New York and members of the NFL Players Association. He wrote in his autobiography that he had been told about “the Rosenbloom bet … East Coast say
[sic]
it was a cool million on the Jets to win.”
⁶
Smith believed that Carroll Rosenbloom had actually bet $1 million on the Jets.

In a subsequent interview with
Playboy
, Smith provided a little more detail. “A bookie in New York and members of the N.F.L. Players Association told me that the game was set up, because if the old AFL didn't establish credibility with the NFL by a certain year, the merger would never take place. That Super Bowl game, which we lost by nine points, was the critical year. The game just seemed too odd to me. Everything was out of place. I tried to rationalize that our coach, Don Shula, got out-coached, but that wasn't the case.
⁷
I don't know if any of my teammates were in on the fix.”

Danahy told me that Smith's charges are “bullshit.” He adds, “I would not deny the fact that Carroll Rosenbloom bet occasionally. He was a betting man. And he wasn't the only owner who did. But the situation was investigated.

“It started with an article by the late Ed Sullivan. He wrote the story the day after the Super Bowl. In effect, he said that Carroll Rosenbloom had not only lost the Super Bowl but that he had lost something like a hundred thousand dollars in bets he had made on the game.

“Pete [Rozelle] had seen the Sullivan story and called me, telling me to get on it. I knew Ed Sullivan, and I finally got ahold of him. He was very ill and many times didn't get to write his own column. He had an assistant. On the night of the Super Bowl, Sullivan was in a restaurant in New York. In general conversation at the bar, somebody made a remark to the effect that Carroll Rosenbloom must have lost a bundle on the game. Sullivan asked how much he lost. And the guy replied that he must have had a hundred grand on the game. He implied that the bet had been made through Las Vegas. So Sullivan wrote a note to himself. Sullivan's assistant picked up his notes and wrote the column.”

Upton Bell, who served as the Colts' personnel director from 1965 to 1971, told me, “After the game, I rode down in the elevator with Rosenbloom. I know an actor when I see one, and
I could tell when he was play-acting. He was so bitter about that loss. He said to me, ‘They will never forget this day: that I was the one who lost the Super Bowl.'”

According to published reports, Rosenbloom was totally distraught after the Colts' loss. He felt disgraced. Dave Anderson of
The New York Times
wrote, “When he [Rosenbloom] returned to his Golden Beach home, he was consoled by Senator Edward Kennedy, a long-time friend … Senator Kennedy persuaded him to go for a swim in the surf before the players, coaches, front office and friends arrived for what had been planned as the Colts' victory party. When everybody arrived, Carroll Rosenbloom was there to greet them with a smile—a forced smile. That night a six-piece band played, everyone had a few drinks and Carroll Rosenbloom was out where they could see him. He did not hide.”