Interference (33 page)

However, the case was simply dropped, with no indictments
and no explanation as to who or what had been under investigation.

In late 1972, Jim Kensil, Rozelle's deputy, announced that an unnamed player had been approached by an unnamed former player and asked to throw a game for $10,000. Kensil said that details of the attempted fix were reported to Florida congressman Claude Pepper, who had chaired the U.S. House Select Committee on Crime's May 1972 hearings on “Organized Crime in Sports.”
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The unnamed player was identified by the committee only as Player X.

It was disclosed at the time that Player X was going to testify at further hearings on the mob's role in sports. “We intend to get into football, baseball, and basketball next year,” Joe Phillips, the committee's counsel told
The New York Times
in December 1972. Phillips also charged that the NFL had been circulating a story that it had given the information about the alleged fix attempt to the committee. However, Phillips insisted that the committee had found out about it on its own—with no help from the NFL. Regardless, the hearings were never held.

Danahy explains what happened. “On a Sunday morning I got a call from our security man in Houston. Jerry Sturm [a center with the Houston Oilers] had come in and told his coach about being approached. We had a fast conference, and I called the coach. I also consulted with Rozelle. We agreed to let Jerry play.

“An ex-player for Denver had a company that had gone bad and had lost a lot of money in an investment. And he was looking for a score. They were out drinking, like Thursday night, and that's when the offer was made. We gave the case to the FBI, but I don't think anything came of it.”

Specifically, Sturm had been offered $30,000 to help shave points in three 1971 Oilers games. He reported to the NFL that he had been visited by a former teammate Donnie Stone.
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Stone, who had retired five years earlier, had allegedly introduced Sturm to a gambler who offered him $10,000 a game for his cooperation.

“On field-goal and extra-point situations, they wanted me to snap the ball over the kicker's head,” Sturm told reporter Bill Brubaker, who is now with
The Washington Post
. “Then, when we were down on the goal line ready to score, they wanted me to not get the ball to the quarterback.”

Sturm, who was making $30,000 a year in salary, told the two men that he would get back to them. He turned the offer down the following day. He then reported the incident to Ed Hughes, the head coach of the Oilers, who told NFL Security. The Oilers won their game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, who had been six-point favorites, the following Sunday, 29-3.

When Stone was confronted with the allegations by the FBI, he denied making the bribe offer. Consequently, it was Sturm's word against Stone's, and the government refused to prosecute.

Soon after, Pete Rozelle received a letter from an unnamed person who charged that he had loaned $10,000 to Stone for the purpose of fixing an NFL game. Stone had allegedly skipped off with the money, and the author of the letter wanted to make a claim against Stone's NFL pension.

The gambler in the Sturm case, who was also investigated but not arrested, was allegedly a part of the Beckley/Sklaroff gambling network operating out of Texas. No wiretaps had been authorized to help confirm Sturm's story.

26 “Points of Contact”

CONGRESSMAN PEPPER'S COMMITTEE ALSO received explosive testimony about an NFL owner on May 31, 1972, supplied by Aaron M. Kohn, the highly respected head of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans. Kohn testified, “Many ‘points of contact' have been established by gamblers and other racketeers with officials, staff, and players of the New Orleans Saints in the National Football League.”

Kohn revealed that, just the previous month, John Mecom, Jr., the owner of the New Orleans Saints, “was a principal in the organization of two corporations at Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Two other principals are a convicted gambler and a developer with ties to the Marcello syndicate.”

The two men with whom Mecom was doing business were Sam Presley, Jr., who “was sentenced to serve one year in prison for conspiracy and the use of an interstate facility to promote a gambling enterprise,” and Gerald E. Stenner, who “has a considerable record of forming business partnerships with individuals who are also partners of Carlos Marcello or other major members of the Marcello structure.”
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Kohn added that “‘point of contact' is the need for great concern in talking about the influence of organized crime on professional sports … And what do you talk about when you are a football player? You talk about your everyday life, which is football. When you are an owner of a football team, [you] talk about your interests. And nothing is of more interest to people
who are ‘points of contact' for the gambling fraternity than that kind of relaxed discussion of what is happening before the game, what the anticipations are, the boasting, the criticism, the inner fighting. And it is at that level that these people easily establish ‘points of contact.'”
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Speaking of Mecom, the New Orleans crime fighter concluded, “When local sports officials, expected to protect sports against corrupting influences, are instead actively participating in organized crime, or economically allied with organized-crime elements, the public interest is endangered and the need for federal checks becomes imperative.”

On June 14, two weeks after Kohn's testimony, Commissioner Rozelle announced that the NFL had conducted an investigation of Kohn's charges against Mecom. Rozelle concluded that Mecom's business interests with Presley and Stenner were “simple real estate deals.” However, the commissioner did acknowledge that Presley “has an Internal Revenue Service conviction on a gambling charge, but it was not Mr. Mecom who brought him into the transactions and the individual is by no means an associate of the Saints' owner.”

Despite the fact that Rozelle had absolved Mecom of any wrongdoing, he added, “[T]o remove all possible suspicion of involvement with alleged undesirable persons, Mr. Mecom has agreed to dispose of his holdings and sever all connections with the investment programs.” Rozelle did not say whether the league had forced Mecom to sell.

Mecom—who said the day of Rozelle's announcement that he had cooperated fully with the NFL's investigation—angrily released a statement, saying, “My name was mentioned by Mr. Kohn who thought by insinuation and far-reaching innuendos to make headlines derogatory to my character, business reputation, and the New Orleans Saints. These insinuations and innuendos have no basis whatsoever for the damaging conclusions Mr. Kohn attempted to draw from them … It is my firm belief that divesting myself of any interests in the Florida investments will dispel any public doubts concerning this situation.”

Kohn is still bitter about the way he was treated by the NFL and told me, “These people have to use the only weapon available to them when they are confronted with the truth: To deny the facts and to attack the messenger.”

Earlier in 1972, during a January appearance on CBS-TV's
Face the Nation
, Rozelle, referring indirectly to Danahy's work, announced that NFL team owners had been subjected to lie detector tests which asked whether they had been gambling on NFL games. Although no specific case was mentioned, Rozelle left the impression that everyone passed. “If an owner were proven guilty of gambling,” he said, “according to the league rules he would be expelled from the NFL.”

During his 1972 appearance on the CBS program, Rozelle, a longtime critic of legalized sports gambling, also announced that he was totally opposed to any movement that would expand offtrack betting to football. “I don't ever want to see the day when a whole new generation of fans exists who will sit in a stadium and boo a home team for sitting on a four-point lead and not covering the point spread.”

Rozelle then took the opportunity to announce that although some players had been known to take drugs, like “greenies” and “pep pills,” before games, the practice of drug abuse within the NFL “was not widespread.”

At the time of Rozelle's appearance on CBS, the league was in negotiations for the creation of a new NFL franchise in Seattle, Washington. In June 1972, an investment group headed by Lloyd W. Nordstrom, the owner of a large, eight-state department-store chain that carried his name, and Herman Sarkowsky, the majority owner of the Portland Trail Blazers of the NBA, announced their intention to buy the franchise for $16 million. They were awarded the franchise in 1974.

The partners immediately announced that they were going to build a sixty-five-thousand-seat, indoor stadium called the Kingdome. The team, which didn't begin league play until 1976, was called the Seattle Seahawks. However, before the Seahawks' first game, Nordstrom died of a heart attack, leaving Sarkowsky as the managing general partner.
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There was more news on the owners' front. On July 13, 1972, Carroll Rosenbloom stunned the sports world by swapping his Baltimore Colts for the Los Angeles Rams, with no money changing hands. “Actually, the deal was made over a year earlier,” a longtime friend of Rosenbloom told me. “When Dan Reeves [the owner of the Rams] died in April 1971, part of his estate, including the team, was put up for sale. Rosenbloom had been unhappy in Baltimore and had been taking a lot of grief from the local media for some time and wanted out. So he bought an option on the Rams. That gave him the ability to approve its next owner.”

Forty-nine-year-old, ex-Marine Robert Irsay, the president of a major heating and air-conditioning company based in Skokie, Illinois, was looking for an NFL team to buy and had always been a big fan of Johnny Unitas of the Colts. In 1971, Irsay, who was publicly accused by his wife of being an alcoholic and a heavy gambler, sold his company to Katy Industries and had money to burn.
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“Irsay became Carroll's beard,” the friend continued. “Irsay went in and bought the Rams for nineteen million dollars. Of course, he had the approval of Rosenbloom, who immediately gave Irsay the Colts in return for the paper on the Rams. Irsay got Unitas and Rosenbloom got to move to the West Coast.
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Everyone was happy, and the league didn't interfere.”

Indeed, Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke, who was one of Rosenbloom's neighbors in Los Angeles, told sports columnist Shirley Povich of
The Washington Post
that the NFL would approve of the trade. “It was brilliantly conceived by one of our league's finest men. I applaud it.”

Also, the even trade permitted Rosenbloom to legally save nearly $4.5 million in capital-gains taxes. “I am the hundred percent owner of the Rams,” Rosenbloom said in a statement. “That's the only way I operate. I didn't have any cash in the transaction. It was simply a trade.” The 1972 Colts/Rams trade resembled the 1941 swap between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles, which involved Art Rooney, Bert Bell, and Alex Thompson.

Rosenbloom had reportedly grown disillusioned in Baltimore—even after his team had gone fifteen years without a losing season and won three NFL championships, including the 1971 Super Bowl over Dallas, 16-13, with five seconds left in the game. He charged that the Baltimore Orioles major-league baseball team and its owner, Jerry Hoffberger, were receiving preferential treatment over the Colts by the city.

Rosenbloom was also constantly complaining about the condition of Baltimore's Memorial Stadium. Threatening to move the Colts to a nearby Maryland suburb or even to Tampa, Florida—where Rosenbloom had planned to play three exhibition games in 1972—he had felt misled by local politicians who had promised to make improvements.

Also, being the second-largest individual stockholder in Warner Communications,
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Rosenbloom was looking forward to moving to Southern California and becoming part of the Hollywood
set, where he could watch over his massive investment in the corporation.

After his move to Los Angeles, Rosenbloom sold his East Coast houses, including one in Golden Beach, Florida, where he was a neighbor of his old friend Sonny Werblin, the former owner of the New York Jets. Rosenbloom immediately bought a huge mansion in Bel Air and a second house on the Pacific Ocean on Broad Beach Road near Malibu. He soon became a host to the stars he met through Warner Communications.

His son Steve—who had served as club president of the Colts since March 18, 1971, when his father promoted himself to chairman of the board—balked at first about going to the West Coast. Steve had his own business investments and had recently married a woman whom the elder Rosenbloom did not like.

But, after sitting out for the 1972 season, Steve Rosenbloom succumbed and moved to Los Angeles,
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as did Rosenbloom's general manager, Don Klosterman, who retained Tommy Prothro as the Rams head coach.

Speaking of the former Colts' owner, Klosterman once said, “The most important man on a pro football team is the club owner. That's why I joined Carroll Rosenbloom in Baltimore when I got the chance. The marrow of a football structure is ownership. You win if you have absolute direction, if you have the know-how and if he's willing to pay the price.”
⁸

Rosenbloom seemed to confirm that at his first press conference in Los Angeles after he bought the Rams. Showing off his Super Bowl ring, Rosenbloom told reporters, “I'm hoping that some of the luck I've had will rub off on the Rams. There's nothing of which I'm more proud than my Super Bowl ring. I'd like to be the first owner to win the Super Bowl in both conferences.”

There was only one lingering problem that resulted from the Colts/Rams trade. A Jacksonville attorney, Hugh Culverhouse, had reportedly made a handshake agreement with Dan Reeves—before Reeves's death—to buy the Rams for $17 million. Consequently, Culverhouse filed a $6 million antitrust suit in federal court against the Colts and the Rams. Culverhouse charged that the transaction suppressed competition and would “further monopolize the monopoly power acquired by them in the business of pro football in the territory of Los Angeles and its environs.”