Interference (39 page)

With regard to the sports-gambling business, the commission concluded that the states should become competitive with illegal bookmakers and permit offtrack betting on sporting events. According to a University of Michigan survey contracted by the commission, “Sports betting, popularly thought to be associated with ‘organized crime,' is seen by bettors as having little impact on current organized-crime revenue. It is not viewed as likely to attract racketeers.”
²

Among those who provided testimony to the commission and were vehemently opposed to legalized sports gambling were NFL commissioner Rozelle and major-league baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Both warned that the institutionalization of sports gambling would lead to certain disaster.

Specifically, Rozelle issued a position paper stating, “The league believes legalized gambling on professional sports will dramatically change the character of the fan interests in the sports. No longer will sports fans identify their interests with the success or failure of their favorite teams but with the effect of their team's performance in the winning or losing of bets … Legalized gambling will greatly multiply the security problems confronting all professional sports.”

Interestingly, Las Vegas oddsmaker Bobby Martin told me that Ritchie had sent him early drafts of the commission's report for his review. “Jim Ritchie called me and asked me to do it,” Martin said. “Of course, I was glad to. I do have some expertise in this area.”

Soon after the commission's hearings ended, Ritchie became legal counsel for, among others, the National Association of Off-Track Betting and the Western Enterprise Political Action Committee. Both of these concerns were progambling-lobbying groups. Ritchie was also placed on retainer by two trade associations—the Nevada Casino Association and the Gaming Industry Association of Nevada—within three weeks after the commission filed its final report. He received an annual retainer of $75,000.

Reporter Robert S. Stokes, who published a critique of the commission in
The Washington Post
, found sources within the commission who alleged that Ritchie had self-serving motives for taking the job. One of those sources told Stokes, “[Ritchie] wanted to drum up clients for his future law practice. He talked about it frequently, how he was going to land the Las Vegas casinos as his clients. His priorities were Nevada casinos, U.S. horse racing and British gambling interests.”
³

Ritchie admitted that while still with the commission, he had discussed the possibility of being retained by a legal English bookmaking firm in the event that it expanded its operations to the United States. “I saw nothing improper in it,” Richie told Stokes.

Repeated attempts to interview Ritchie for this book were unsuccessful.

Criminologist Jerome Skolnick of the University of California at Berkeley was quoted by Stokes, saying that the commission's report was “a superficial work that did not require a three-million-dollar effort. The commission went through the motions of holding hearings with the predictable result that its report is shallow, and it certainly doesn't, in any way, challenge the claims of the gambling industry. It could scarcely be called a deep and profound investigation of the role of gambling in the United States.”

In August 1976, two months before the commission's final report was delivered to Congress and while fourteen states were considering sports lotteries, the state of Delaware, which had legalized a numbers-formatted lottery in 1974, announced that
it was going to be the first to operate a fully state-run sports-gambling lottery.

Two games, played on computerized cards, were going to be offered to bettors. One was called Touchdown, in which a person could pick the winners of three and five games, as well as the point spreads of each. The other game, Football Bonus, contained two slates of seven games each. Gamblers, who could wage between $1 and $10 for each game, could bet on one or both scales. All winning payoffs would be on a pari-mutuel basis.

After the state refused to respond favorably to a written protest by Rozelle against the lottery, the NFL finally filed for a temporary restraining order in federal court to block Delaware's effort, charging that the state's sports lottery could cause “irreparable harm” to the NFL. Rozelle, in his deposition, insisted that “the NFL clubs have established an organization of teams which are highly skilled, well-balanced, and honestly competitive, so that the public has come to expect, in the playing of NFL football, the highest degree of excellence, free from outside influence.”

At the time, Rozelle was reminding sports-gambling advocates that just the previous January, during Super Bowl X, the reaction of the fans did not correspond with the outcome of the game. The Pittsburgh Steelers won the championship, defeating the Dallas Cowboys, 21-17. Down 10-7 at the end of the third quarter, the Steelers, who were seven-point favorites, came back in the final quarter, scoring on a Dallas safety and two field goals, making the score 15-10. With just three minutes left in the game, Pittsburgh quarterback Terry Bradshaw connected on a sixty-four-yard touchdown pass to Lynn Swann. Although the extra point failed, the Steelers had covered the spread with a 21-10 lead.

The Steelers' fans were ecstatic. Their team was going to win the Super Bowl, and they were going to win their bets.

Then, with one minute and forty-eight seconds remaining, Dallas marched eighty yards on five plays, climaxed by a thirty-four-yard touchdown pass from Roger Staubach to wide receiver Percy Howard. The extra point was good, and the Steelers won by only four points—and did not cover the spread.

Dallas had lost the Super Bowl, but its fans had solace. They had taken the points and won their bets.

Editorializing on the NFL's suit against Delaware, Mort Olshan
of
The Gold Sheet
wrote, “One can only speculate why the NFL initiated legal action so late; too late for the court to adequately consider their argument. The fact is that [neither] the NFL, nor any other sports league for that matter, owns a proprietary interest in the outcome of a sporting event. No court will grant them that right.

“It is just possible legalized betting on the NFL would give [the NFL] a tremendous shot in the arm. According to recent television ratings and the contracts negotiated, viewer interest just might possibly have peaked out. The ancillary rights that could be capitalized on were the sport to gain new fans would be enormous.”
⁴

Delaware's attorneys insisted that its new betting games were nothing more than a formalization of the betting pools in most offices around the state and country.

On August 27, U.S. District Judge Walter Stapleton rejected the NFL's arguments in a one-and-a-half-page decision, saying that the league had failed to demonstrate how the lottery would result in “irreparable harm.” The federal judge gave no other reasons for his ruling.

Meantime,
CBS Sports
blitzed the foes of legalized sports gambling by hiring convicted bookmaker Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, recently pardoned by President Ford, as a color commentator during a four-minute halftime segment of the televised exhibition game between the Oakland Raiders and the San Francisco 49ers on September 12. “The Greek's Grapevine” was sponsored by Consolidated Cigar Corporation, a subsidiary of Gulf & Western. The company paid $500,000 for the spot.

Anchorman Brent Musburger enthusiastically introduced Snyder, saying, “Jimmy has some pretty good contacts in pro football. You'll be seeing him every Sunday on CBS-TV.” Snyder then began sharing his inside information and making his predictions.

Handicapper Mort Olshan told me, “Jimmy the Greek was a creation of television, which wanted a ‘dem' and ‘doze' guy from Las Vegas, who could talk about football and discreetly discuss the line.”

Aaron Kohn, chief of the New Orleans crime commission, says, “The old wire services weren't needed anymore—because television sports reporting and the newspapers were doing the job for them legitimately. So here you have free enterprise protected
by the First Amendment and serving as an adjunct to the gambling economy.”

Rozelle told reporters that he discussed the matter with CBS, which assured the commissioner that Snyder would not be citing the point spreads of games. Instead, he would simply contribute “general football discussion.”

Barry Frank, the head of
CBS Sports
, told Red Smith, “I think Jimmy is more than just a gambling figure. He's kind of a character. He's kind of interesting and has, if you will, a mystique in the minds of people who figure he knows more than they do about something … This isn't a case of CBS promoting gambling. I don't think we want to take a position on gambling versus not gambling. We're just trying to offer something different and maybe catch a little bigger share of that Sunday afternoon audience.”
⁵

In his autobiography, Snyder wrote, “[W]e all have our little identity problems. Mine has been to make people understand that I'm an oddsmaker. I don't pick winners. I'm not a sports-writer trying to match wits in the weekly ‘guesspert' competition. I establish favorites, odds, and point spreads—that is, the margin necessary to
equalize
the two teams.”
⁶

However, the question remains as to whether Snyder, who has denied the existence of organized crime in America,
⁷
occasionally used his authority as an oddsmaker to pick one team over another to help “equalize” the national betting action accepted by the major bookmakers. Snyder's enormous power to balance the bookmakers' books through his national television appearances was clear and present.

Within a few days of Snyder's first appearance on
CBS Sports
, two million NFL lottery tickets were put up for sale in Delaware, offering the public its Touchdown and Football Bonus betting games. The state expected to net $5 million to $8 million a year from the sports lottery. The second week's sales were 30 percent greater than the first, indicating popular support for this legal, state-run bookmaking operation.

However, disaster struck for the Delaware lottery on Saturday, December 11, when the agency's director, Pete Simmons, voided all betting cards sold for the following day's NFL games. Professional gamblers had gone public, charging that the state's handicappers had picked weaker teams as the favorites in two contests and were too far off on the point spreads of three other
games. The gamblers also were quoted in newspaper stories advising bettors how to beat the state's line.

Immediately after the state refused to cover the bets it booked, the Delaware lottery collapsed. Later, however, to prevent a public uprising, the state attorney general's office relented and paid off the winners who had not already thrown away their tickets in disgust—forcing the state to dig into its emergency fund as a consequence of its three-week experiment.

31 Davis's Dilemma

WHILE THE NATIONAL COMMISSION to Review National Policy Toward Gambling was busy advocating legalized sports gambling and insisting the Mafia was no longer a factor in Las Vegas, Allen Glick, the Stardust, and Argent were in trouble with their gambling operations.

Glick had attempted to fire Rosenthal for making personnel decisions without his approval. Upon hearing the news, Rosenthal angrily told Glick, “I think it's about time we had a discussion, Glick. You're not my boss. And when I say you're not my boss, I'm talking not just from an administrative position, but [about] your health. If you interfere with what's going on here, you will never leave this corporation alive.”

Glick then called Balistrieri who confirmed Rosenthal's claims and threats. A federal prosecutor explained, “Nick Civella and Frank Balistrieri quarreled over Allen Glick … his failure to pay the $1.2 million obligation for getting [the Teamsters'] loan, the hidden costs of doing business [with the mob] of which naïve Allen Glick was not even aware. What a trap this man was in!”

In March 1975, Glick was instructed by Rosenthal to go to Kansas City where he would meet with Nick Civella, the ailing boss of the local Mafia. Glick, who was picked up at the airport by mobster Carl DeLuna, was taken to a hotel room and seated in a chair directly across from Civella, who was wearing dark clothes and dark glasses. A single bright light shone down on
Glide's bald head as the men talked. Glick later described the scene as being “like interrogating a prisoner in a police room.” Civella coldly instructed Glick to “cling to every word I say.”

Civella growled, “You don't know me, but if it would be my choice, you wouldn't leave this room alive.” With Glick's full attention, Civella demanded that Glick give him $1.2 million. He explained that he, not Frank Balistrieri, had been responsible for getting Glick his loans from the Teamsters' pension fund; and that he [Civella] was among Glick's secret partners. Glick said that Balistrieri had not explained that to him.

When Glick replied that he didn't have any untraceable cash for the payoff, Civella told Glick that Rosenthal would take care of it. “You have a commitment to us,” Civella said. “You owe us $1.2 million. I want that paid. In addition, we own part of your corporation, and you are to do nothing to interfere with it … We will let Mr. Rosenthal continue with the casinos, and you are not to interfere.”
¹

According to Glick, when he returned to Las Vegas from Kansas City, he complained to Rosenthal that he had been misled. Rosenthal then informed him, “You are no longer in a position where you control your destiny in this company.”

That sounded ominous. But Glick's problems were just beginning—and they would implicate Al Davis.

Tamara Rand had been a $100,000-a-year consultant to the Glick/Davis Eastmont Mall since March 1975—the same month as Glick's meeting with Civella. A San Diego businesswoman and a partner with Glick in several real estate projects, Rand received the consultant's fee as a means of paying off a portion of a $500,000 loan Rand had earlier made to Glick when he purchased Recrion.