Interference (38 page)

“Mandell was not indicted. But some medical board of examiners brought him before a hearing officer of the state pharmacological board, and they took his license away. Then he got a lawyer, and they went to court. The decision to take away his license was revoked. As far as I know, he's still on the staff at the university.”

After the fines were handed out, Klein recommended that every NFL player be required to take a urine test after each game—and that anyone failing the test should be suspended.

There had been isolated drug problems in the NFL since May 1963 when Eugene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, the all-pro defensive tackle of the Baltimore Colts, was found slumped over a
chair in the kitchen of a friend's house with a half dozen needle marks in his arms. Lipscomb's death from an overdose of heroin shocked the sports world but appeared to be a completely isolated, as well as a tragic, situation.

After Lipscomb's death, there wasn't another public drug-related problem for years. Somehow, the NFL had managed to get through the late 1960s without a major drug scandal.

“We were getting rumbles on the side that players were socializing with marijuana,” NFL Security chief Jack Danahy told me. “They were coming out of the sixties era. We would have been naïve not to think that drugs were not present at that time. But there was never a big scandal. We had individual instances of players being arrested for possession of marijuana, but I don't remember any action being taken by the league. There were no suspensions. The first fines and suspensions for drugs weren't until the San Diego drug case.”

But, contrary to Danahy's statement, prior to the 1974 Chargers' revelations there were several incidents involving illegal drugs and drug dealers—and NFL responses and non-responses to those incidents:

• In December 1971, Bob Berry and Randy Marshall of the Atlanta Falcons were found in Marshall's apartment with a couple of joints in an ashtray. A twenty-year-old woman who was with the two players was charged for possession; the two players were not.

• In February 1972, Duane Thomas of the Dallas Cowboys was arrested and later pleaded guilty for possession of marijuana. The Thomas case caused public cries for the automatic suspension for life of any player convicted of any narcotics violations. However, Rozelle refused to ban Thomas from football.

• A year later, Lance Rentzel of the Los Angeles Rams pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana and codeine. He was later suspended from football following a second arrest for indecent exposure for which he pleaded guilty.

• In June 1973, the U.S. House Commerce Committee, at the conclusion of its hearings into drug abuse by professional athletes, called for spot-check urinalyses to determine whether players had been using narcotics. The committee also suggested stronger penalties for those involved with drugs. The NFL Players Association reacted harshly to the committee's conclusions,
blaming the public perception of drugs in sports on sensational newspaper headlines. The players' union also refused to support any program that violated the players' right to privacy.

Ed Garvey, who had become the executive director of the NFLPA in 1971, told me that the association had no choice in the matter. He explained, “The union's responsibility is to its members, to try and get them help, to save their jobs, and get them a fair hearing in the event that there was ever any kind of drug testing.”

• Also in June 1973, Commissioner Rozelle announced a new program to combat drug abuse in the NFL by organizing a reporting system within each of the NFL teams. Rozelle said that he would consider harsh penalties and might explore the use of urinalysis.

• Within a month after Rozelle's announcement, controversial Joe Don Looney, a former star running back with several NFL teams, was arrested for possession of a submachine gun. Also arrested with Looney was a man the police described as “a wholesale dealer of cocaine.”
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• In October 1973, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell permitted receiver Gloster Richardson to play with the team—even after his conviction for possession of illegal drugs.

• That same month, Mack Herron, a fullback for the New England Patriots, pleaded guilty in a Winnipeg court to possession of marijuana.
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• Soon after, center George Burman told Sandy Padwe of
Newsday
that nearly one third of his Washington Redskins teammates regularly used amphetamines prior to playing. Rozelle immediately opened an investigation of Burman's charges and promised a crackdown on amphetamine use. That was Burman's last year in the NFL, and no players were named in the NFL's investigation.

• In February 1974, Levi Johnson of the Detroit Lions was arrested for possession of marijuana, along with three Texas A & I University athletes in Kingsville, Texas.

And after the drug scandals involving Dr. Pisani and San Diego Chargers, incidents of drug abuse continued.

• In August 1974, David Reavis of the Pittsburgh Steelers was arrested for selling marijuana and thirty-five thousand amphetamines
to an undercover agent. He pleaded guilty to possession of 250 pounds of marijuana and was placed on probation. He then joined the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1976 and played with the team for the next seven years.

• At the same time, NFL Security initiated an investigation of Mike Ernst of the Cincinnati Bengals who had been arrested after a game for possession of cocaine. Within forty-eight hours after the arrest, Ernst was waived by the Bengals and was not picked up by any other NFL team. Ernst pleaded not guilty to the charges.

• In January 1975, a nineteen-year-old woman, Roxie Ann Rice, claimed to have been a go-between for major drug dealers and NFL players after she was arrested in possession of a credit card owned by Ken Houston of the Washington Redskins. When the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) asked for a full-scale investigation of Rice and her charges, she recanted everything—despite her thirty-nine-page statement to police officials. Without their key witness's testimony, DEA agents later declared that there was no evidence that Rice had been involved in a drug ring with any NFL players.

• In March 1975, Bob Maddox of the Cincinnati Bengals was charged with possession of a hallucinogen after a raid on his house in Ohio. The police also found $12,000 worth of hashish. Maddox, who pleaded guilty and received five years' probation, was permitted to continue his football career by Rozelle.

• In August 1975, Shelby Jordan, a lineman for the New England Patriots, was arrested by federal drug agents for selling cocaine in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was found guilty and received a two-year sentence.

• A year later, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Joe Gilliam went on trial for possession of heroin. He was found guilty and later sentenced to forty days in jail after a parole violation. Gilliam left the Steelers and tried to make his comeback with the New Orleans Saints—but was cut.

In the midst of the NFL's growing drug problems, Bernie Jackson, the assistant director of NFL Security, left his post to become an assistant to Governor Hugh Carey of New York.
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Replacing Jackson was Charlie Jackson, who was no relation to his predecessor. Before coming to the NFL, Charlie Jackson, the former assistant city manager of Yonkers, had been serving as the
head of the narcotics squad of the Westchester County police department and chief of a tri-state narcotics task force for Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York.

Commenting on the drug situation in professional sports, particularly the NFL, New Orleans crime fighter Aaron Kohn told me, “Those who supply the drugs to the players have an extortionate weapon to hold over their heads. Once players become consumers of drugs of any kind, their suppliers can destroy their source of income, and they can destroy their public acceptance. To the degree that their sources of drugs have communication or are involved with organized crime—which considers the proceeds of gambling a major part of their continuing wealth—players can be extorted to do favors on the playing field.”

Another, less tragic, controversy emerged in the NFL when the New York Giants team refused to renew its lease to play in Yankee Stadium after the 1973 season, making arrangements to move to Hackensack Meadows—better known as the Meadowlands—in East Rutherford, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River and west of the Holland Tunnel. The team's new, seventy-six-thousand-seat stadium was financed by bonds placed under the supervision of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which was headed by former New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin. As part of the $300 million sports complex, Werblin also built both thoroughbred- and harness-racing tracks.
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The New York Giants began to play in New Jersey at the beginning of the 1976 season. There was precedent for the team's move to another municipality. In 1971, the Dallas Cowboys, which had been playing home games in the Cotton Bowl, moved to Texas Stadium in Irving, Texas. That same year, the Boston Patriots moved to Schaefer Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts—just across the street from Foxboro Raceway, which was also owned by the Sullivan family—and became the New England Patriots. And in 1975, the Detroit Lions moved to Pontiac, Michigan.

30 The Bad, the Worse, and the Ugly

IN JANUARY 1975,
The New York Times
published a four-part series on sports gambling. Reporter Steve Cady warned, “[T]he
Times
study indicates that the enormous growth of sports betting has multiplied the temptation for betting coups, made bookies ever warier than usual and put the integrity of the games under increasing pressure. Despite assurances from leagues that players do not bet, persons close to the gambling scene suspect that many athletes are at least part-time bettors.”

The impact of gambling on American sports was to be addressed by a federal commission, which began a study of the situation in 1974; it had been originally mandated by Congress under the Organized Crime Act of 1970 while Richard Nixon was president. Appointed as the chairman of the fifteen-member commission was Charles H. Morin, a Washington attorney; its executive director was former Justice Department attorney James E. Ritchie, who had headed the U.S. Strike Force in Detroit during the Donald Dawson gambling scandal in early 1970 and had come to the commission from the Strike Force office in San Francisco.

As the National Commission to Review National Policy Toward Gambling was impaneled, Ritchie made it clear that “we are not a crime commission. We are mandated by Congress to make a study of gambling and recommend changes, if necessary.”

There were institutional problems with the commission.
First of all, Morin, its chairman, was general counsel to the Teamsters Union; and the union's pension fund had contributed over half a billion dollars to Las Vegas casinos and to those people associated with them. That was significant because during the 1972 presidential campaign, Las Vegas casino operators and their associates had contributed over a million dollars to Nixon's reelection effort.

When the creation of the commission on gambling was announced, Nevada's gaming industry began to sweat and wanted its voice heard inside the commission. Frank Fitzsimmons, then the general president of the Teamsters, obliged, using his sweetheart relationship with the Nixon White House and his union's support for Nixon in the 1972 election as leverage. The writing on the wall was apparent when members and staff of the commission were “comped”—given free room, food, and entertainment—at Caesars Palace during investigative trips to and official hearings in Las Vegas.

Morin had been recommended as the commission's chair by Fitzsimmons's close friend, White House counsel Charles Colson, who had left the White House in March 1973 in the midst of the Watergate scandal and became Morin's law partner at Morin & Shapiro. Colson, who has described Morin as his closest friend, was responsible for Morin being retained by the Teamsters. In order to make room for Morin and Colson, the Teamsters fired its longtime general counsel, Washington Redskins president Edward Bennett Williams—because of his representation of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate break-in case. Colson was later indicted and pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, stemming from the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office by the White House “plumbers unit.”

On March 10, 1975, soon after the commission began its series of hearings, Thomas Mechling, the executive director of the New York-based National Center for Gambling Information, wrote to Ritchie: “There is a widespread feeling among interested observers that your Commission is not ‘reaching out' and soliciting the views of interested parties. Your communications to this pool of potential informational resources have been practically nil. You have not even notified many of the interested press media—let along other potential expert witnesses—of the future schedule of public hearings. It is as if you were trying to conduct your ‘public' hearings, privately.”

Ritchie replied to Mechling, “Please keep in mind that the total commission staff numbers only eighteen. We have a wide range of activities to carry out and simply cannot conduct a large-scale publicity effort.”

The 413-page final report of the commission, which was submitted to Congress in October 1976, indicated that 80 percent of all Americans approved of legalized gambling and 68 percent gambled themselves.
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Among other recommendations, the commission advocated that all federal gambling laws and regulations be repealed, thus permitting the individual states to determine their own laws and regulations. It also concluded that the influence of organized crime in the state of Nevada had declined since 1966.

Two members of the commission, Sam Steiger of Arizona and Charles Wiggins of California, both Republican congressmen, refused to sign the report and filed a minority opinion distancing themselves from the commission's conclusions. Their particular objection was to another commission recommendation to exempt gamblers and bookmakers from federal excise taxes, which Congress had imposed in 1951 in the aftermath of the Kefauver hearings.