Interference (46 page)

Although the Weiss murder remains officially unsolved and no arrests have been made, detective Orozco of the LAPD says that there were “reports that Weiss was involved in a major West
Coast layoff gambling operation, and that he had been placing large bets on NFL games.”

Another law-enforcement official said, “In the evening hours at the auto shop where Weiss worked, an individual, unknown, would come in and leave a large brown paper bag filled with what an informant believed was money. This money was left for Vic. The next morning when Vic came in, he would take this bag and usually as near as everybody could tell, he would make a trip to Vegas. It was over to Vegas and then back the same day.”

“Vic placed a lot of bets,” says another LAPD official. “And we found some items in Vic's writing that indicated that he kept a record of NFL games, what the line would've been for the games, certain numbers and notations after the odds that would indicate that he is betting either for himself or for someone else. They were heavy wagers in sports bookmaking, particularly the NFL.”

Orozco continues, “Weiss was definitely a bagman for some of the Vegas people. Weiss came up on some phone records at a place called the Gold Rush, a little jewelry shop in Circus Circus, a casino in Las Vegas. The Gold Rush was run by Tony Spilotro.”

When I asked Orozco who Weiss's contact in the NFL was, the detective replied, “Weiss and Carroll Rosenbloom were definitely associated. Rosenbloom trusted Weiss, who had what appeared to be a close relationship with the Rams. He used to spend Sundays at the home games either with Rosenbloom or in the Rams press box. It was common knowledge that his wife's carrot cake was a favorite among the press members up in the box. We know Rosenbloom was gambling, and we believe that Weiss played some role in that.”

Orozco added that several Rams games during the 1978 season were suspect. “We found that the Rams had very low-scoring games, which was an advantage to the bettor.”

In fact, the Rams, which were 12-4 during the 1978 regular season, were 5-11 against the point spread, which was the worst in the NFL that year. Although the Rams were Western Division champions, the team lost the conference championship to the Dallas Cowboys, 28-0. The Rams had been only five-point underdogs.

A Chicago bookmaker, who is also a federal witness, says, “Weiss was Rosenbloom's bagman. He had held out some money
on some games they were doing business on. He was $200,000 in debt from the previous year and was skimming. The problem was: Rosenbloom wasn't running the show. Other people were involved, too. And most of them were from Vegas.”

When I gave that information to Orozco, he agreed, saying, “Weiss was skimming, was warned, and got hit.”

The bagman was last seen near the hotel where his body was found in the company of two males. One was a large, six-feet-seven blond man, and the other was short, dark-haired, and much older. Both of them were dressed in three-piece suits and were wearing dark glasses. “We have been told that both these guys were killed,” Orozco told me.

Carroll Rosenbloom couldn't be questioned either. Just two and a half months before the Weiss murder, the Rams' owner drowned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.

38 Rosenbloom's Fatal Swim

UNDER CARROLL ROSENBLOOM, THE Los Angeles Rams had won six consecutive NFC Western Division Championships—but they had lost four of the last five NFC title games and had never gone to a Super Bowl. To Rosenbloom, that was the prize, and he had been unable to grasp it—despite the fact that he had continued to have one of the biggest payrolls in the NFL.

Although he enjoyed calling the Rams “a family,” it had been nearly torn apart by internal strife that he himself caused in his desperation to have another world championship team, just as he'd had with the Baltimore Colts in 1958, 1959, and in Super Bowl V in 1971.

Although Rosenbloom's oldest son, Steve, was running the team on the day-to-day basis, Carroll had become known as “the Godfather” and the “Great White Father” to those on the team. While some of his supporters viewed the descriptions as demonstrations of endearment, others saw them as being scornful slaps against the white-toupeed Rosenbloom who bullied his way through the Rams organization and the NFL. Suddenly, taking a hands-on approach to running his team, he often arrived at the Rams' practices in a helicopter and watched from the sidelines, sitting in a director's chair with his name printed on the back.

Watching Rosenbloom, according to his friends, was a déjà vu of his final days in Baltimore. He began having trouble with the local media and city officials. He again claimed a lack of fan support. He was irrational in his handling of his head coaches.
¹
He ran through a string of quarterbacks, all of whom he considered unworthy, until 1977 when Joe Namath came to the Rams to play his final season in the NFL. However, Namath was injured in the fourth game and spent the rest of the season on the bench.

Rosenbloom finally decided to leave the Los Angeles Coliseum to play in a newer stadium.
²
He had announced in July 1978 that he was planning to move the Rams nearly thirty miles south to Anaheim, where he had obtained almost a hundred acres of Orange County land with the right to develop parking lots adjacent to the stadium. He also had received a pledge from city officials prior to his real estate purchase to increase the seating capacity of its Big A Stadium, the home of the California Angels major-league baseball team, from forty-two thousand to seventy thousand.

When Rosenbloom made his decision to move, he called his old friend Howard Cosell for advice. Cosell, in one of the most vivid descriptions of Rosenbloom, testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about this conversation he had had with the Boss Ram.

Cosell said, “I was on assignment one day in Los Angeles, and I got a call at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel from one of the most brilliant men I know … Carroll Rosenbloom, extraordinary businessman. And he asked me to come over to his home on [Bellagio Road] in the Bel-Air section of Greater Los Angeles. I went with my wife, and we sat at poolside with Carroll as he talked in those carefully muted measured tones wearing his great suede slippers, no socks. It was Hollywood. The manicured gabardine slacks, the proper suede belt, the carefully tailored suede sport shirt, the silk ascot to envelop the otherwise open neck. And he tried me on for media size, and he said, ‘Howard, what would be your on-air position if I moved the Rams to Anaheim?' I said my position has never wavered … I believe that franchise removal should be countenanced, apart from abridgement [
sic
] of the lease or another extraordinary matter, to the detriment of the tenant, should be predicated only upon the ability to show continuity of economic distress.

“‘But, Howard, Walter O'Malley [who moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles] did it, [Wellington] Mara [who moved the New York Giants to New Jersey] did it. I can have the best of both worlds. I can have the land, indeed, options at a marvelous price for 95 acres, duly exercised, a subsequent deal with
Gannett Realty in Boston, and more than 110 luxury loges producing into the area of $2½ million a year.'

“I said, ‘Carroll, this just is not right. You asked me my position; you know it. You know where I stand.'

“‘But, Howard, it is legal; is it not?'

“‘Yes; it is legal, because Los Angeles would take whatever they could get … Los Angeles had filthy hands. They had taken the Rams from Cleveland, the Dodgers from Brooklyn, the Lakers from Minneapolis. So they had to take another tack, steal another team …'”
³

Cosell's advice might have had an impact on Rosenbloom's thinking, because Rosenbloom began speaking to Al Davis on a regular basis about moving the Oakland Raiders to the Los Angeles Coliseum. These conversations would result in Davis's antitrust suit against the NFL, which became Rosenbloom's final revenge against Pete Rozelle.

During the early spring of 1979, the Rosenblooms took a vacation in Golden Beach, Florida. In the early afternoon of Monday, April 2, after a week of vacationing, the seventy-two-year-old Carroll Rosenbloom returned from a telephone call with a Rams vice president, who later said that Rosenbloom's spirits were high and that he was feeling good. During their discussion, Rosenbloom also told him that the wind was too strong for tennis that day.

Rosenbloom was to have played with real estate developer Irving Cowan, the owner of Diplomat Hotel and Country Club in Hollywood, just north of Miami and near the Rosenblooms' Golden Beach vacation house.
⁴
However, Cowan was extremely busy that day and had to postpone. The night before, Cowan had given the Rosenblooms tickets to the Liza Minnelli concert in Miami Beach. “He was fine,” Cowan told me. “We couldn't get tickets seated together, but we talked at intermission and after the concert. He didn't seem aggravated or agitated. I didn't see any perceptible problems. He was the old Carroll.”

Instead of playing tennis, the Rosenblooms spent the day relaxing. Although the sun shone brightly, the wind was kicking up and gusting. The waves from the ocean were breaking heavily onto the beach, mixing a tremendous amount of sand with the surf and causing the clear blue Florida water to turn brownish-gray.

Just before 2:00
P.M
., Carroll, wearing a blue-striped bathing suit, told Georgia, “I'm going to take a walk. I'll be back in a little while.” The stretch of shoreline where Rosenbloom strolled was well known to him. He had lived at Golden Beach for nearly eight years until he sold his oceanfront house in 1972—when he swapped the Colts for the Rams. The sprawling beach house where the family was now staying was rented.

A few minutes later, at the Diplomat Hotel, Cowan was still working in his office. Cowan recalls, “I received a rather frantic call from Georgia, who told me that they were in the process of pulling Carroll from the water. Something terrible had happened. She cried, ‘Please come down right away with a doctor.' There was a doctor/friend of mine with an office right across the street from my hotel. I told him that there was an emergency and asked him to do me a favor. He left a waiting room full of patients, and the two of us immediately went to the beach.

“When we arrived, Carroll was lying on the beach near the water's edge. He wasn't covered or anything. Georgia hadn't arrived yet, but the police were there. We knew right away that he was dead.”

The police and the medical examiner's office concluded that Rosenbloom had drowned.

During my interview with then Golden Beach chief of police William Henrikson, he told me that he had heard a report over his police radio at the Golden Beach station that a man was drowning at the 100 block of Ocean Boulevard. He rushed out to respond to the call. “It was a rough day and the waves were high,” Henrikson says. “Rosenbloom entered the water between two sandbars. He was caught in a washout, also known as a riptide—which is like a river running out to sea. Apparently, he tried to get in it, and that's when he ran into trouble.”

Henrikson, who is six feet seven, had been a lifeguard for five years during his youth in New Hampshire. Seeing Rosenbloom and another man in the water, Henrikson and his deputy Ron Nasca, who had heard the radio report in his cruiser and arrived at the same time, stripped off their clothes and went in after Rosenbloom. Henrikson told me that the five-feet-eleven Rosenbloom was in water that was only a little over five feet deep. “But, even at my height, I had to swim to get out to him because of the washout. I could only wade for a short period of time. And deputy Nasca was swimming, too. I saw another man struggling in the
water. He had tried to save Rosenbloom. I motioned to him to get back, and that I would take care of it.

“When I got to Rosenbloom, he was in a dead man's float position—in which his shoulders, arms, and head were on the surface but his face was down in the water. I turned him over, and I knew he was already dead.

“I used the typical rescue carry. My one arm was over his chest, and I swam with my other arm. The water was bad. A wave crashed, and I lost him for a minute—but I got him back.”

The paramedics were just arriving as Henrikson, Nasca, and Rosenbloom reached the shore. Henrikson says, “We had been swept north about eighty to a hundred yards before we could get Rosenbloom out—because of the undertow. I had to walk down the beach in my underwear to get my pile of clothes.”

Henrikson and Nasca then delivered Rosenbloom to the paramedics and then immediately left the scene. The investigation was handled by the Dade County Public Safety Department, which interviewed Raymond Tanguay, the other man in the water who had tried to save Rosenbloom. A French Canadian, Tanguay could speak only French to the police, causing an immediate communication problem. His wife, whose English wasn't much better, translated for the police.
⁵

Georgia Rosenbloom was reportedly hysterical when she saw her dead husband on the beach. She pleaded with rescue workers to revive him. Their young son Chip also watched the scene in horror. After Rosenbloom was pronounced dead, she immediately called Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Hugh Culver-house, who then notified Pete Rozelle and the other NFL officials. Rosenbloom had been with Culverhouse earlier in the day and had talked to Rozelle on the telephone.

Rosenbloom's body was cremated on April 4, 1979. His wife, Georgia, was over an hour late for the private ceremony in Hollywood, Florida. When she did arrive, she reportedly was already talking about her husband's estate and how it was going to be divided up.

One week later, nearly nine hundred people attended Rosenbloom's memorial service at his Bel Air estate. His wife was an hour late for that too. Attending the hardly solemn extravaganza under a green-and-white tent were some of the biggest names in show business, politics, and sports: Warren Beatty, Mayor Tom Bradley, Jim Brown, Howard Cosell, Kirk Douglas,
Greer Garson, Cary Grant, Diane Keaton, Ethel Kennedy, Henry Mancini, Ricardo Montalban, George Peppard, Robert Stack, Rod Steiger, Jules Stein, Jimmy Stewart, Johnny Unitas, and Lew Wasserman, along with Pete Rozelle and half of the NFL team owners. Comedian Jonathan Winters was the master of ceremonies and a twelve-piece string orchestra played upbeat music.