Interference (51 page)

• In the June 14, 1982, issue of
Sports Illustrated
, former Miami Dolphins, New Orleans Saints, and San Diego Chargers defensive player Don Reese, who had been busted and imprisoned for purchasing cocaine, wrote an explosive cover story confession. Reese told SI investigative reporter John Underwood, “What you see on the tube on Sunday afternoon is often a lie. When players are messed up, the game is messed up. The outcome of the game is dishonest when playing ability is impaired. You can forget about point spreads or anything else in that kind of atmosphere … I've seen dealers literally standing on the practice fields of the NFL, guys everybody knew. They're not there to make the game better. What they do, and what they know about the players, can't possibly be good for the game.”
⁶

• On August 18, 1982, former Miami Dolphins running sensation Mercury Morris was arrested with four others on cocaine charges. The police had raided the star's south Miami house, seizing more than a pound of cocaine, $124,000 in cash, and
several guns. He was convicted on one count of trafficking and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

“Cocaine certainly poses a possible threat to the integrity of the game,” NFL Security's assistant director Charles S. Jackson told Ronald Sullivan of
The New York Times
in late June 1982. He added that forty to fifty players might have a “chemical dependency on the drug.” Sullivan quoted Jackson as saying that “there was ‘absolutely no evidence thus far' that gambling interests had succeeded in using cocaine to corrupt the game. But he also said that ‘the longer the problem of cocaine continues to grow, the greater the chance of [corruption] occurring …' Other officials said it was only a question of how long it would take before an addicted player would be confronted with what the league fears most: a cocaine dealer with organized-crime connections, offering the drug free to a player with only one thing in mind—the opportunity to fix a game.”

Minnesota Vikings star Carl Eller, an admitted drug user who had become an NFL consultant to deal with the problem, told reporter Sullivan that more than 40 percent of NFL players use cocaine.

To further complicate the NFL's problems, a new, rival league was founded on May 11, 1982. Unlike the defunct World Football League,
⁷
the new United States Football League (USFL) immediately received a two-year, $18 million contract with ABC-TV.
⁸
Also, in the first college draft in 1983, the USFL's New Jersey Generals, which were later bought by Manhattan real estate tycoon Donald Trump, signed 1982 Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker of Georgia.

The owner of the Pittsburgh Maulers in the new league was Edward J. DeBartolo, Sr., who was frequently under suspicion of having mob ties.
⁹

For example, the U.S. Customs Service had received information from one of its special agents, William F. Burda, in January 1981 that the DeBartolo organization “through its control of particular state banks in the state of Florida is operating money-laundering schemes, realizing huge profits from narcotics, guns, skimming operations, and other organized-crime-related activities. This organization is reported to have ties to [Carlos] Marcello, [Santos] Trafficante, and [Meyer] Lansky and because of its
enormous wealth and power has high-ranking political influence and affiliations.”

In an earlier report, authored by Burda, the special agent wrote that he had developed source information indicating that “Meyer Lansky, the financial wizard of OC [organized crime], is now considered by most to be almost senile and getting out of the business. His successor and new financial wizard is recognized as Edward J. DeBartolo.”

The DeBartolo organization was extremely concerned by the allegations made by special agent Burda after his reports began to surface in connection with DeBartolo's bid to be licensed in Oklahoma. DeBartolo's attorney, Charles Ruff, was asked to provide a legal opinion about the Burda report.

In a letter to the DeBartolo Corporation's general counsel, Ruff wrote in 1985, “The Burda report consists of statements attributed to unidentified persons and therefore its reliability cannot be confirmed without further investigation … In view of the time that has passed, some five years since the date of the Burda material, during which time Mr. DeBartolo has not been informed of any prosecutive steps by the Department of Justice, such as the convening of a grand jury, it is my opinion that the allegations contained in the Burda report were found by the Department either to be of no interest to it or an unreliable basis for concluding that possible criminal action was warranted … I have discussed the Burda report on an informal basis with officials in the Department of Justice, and although the Department's practice in matters such as this is not to comment formally, those discussions are not inconsistent with the opinion I have expressed in this letter.”

DeBartolo denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with any. When asked by Peter Phipps of the
Akron Beacon Journal
about the appearance of ties to the underworld, DeBartolo replied, “No one ever comes up with a thing, and still we have to hear about all these crazy innuendoes about us and the rackets. We're so clean it's amazing. I've never even gotten a union pension fund loan.”
¹⁰

DeBartolo had also acquired Louisiana Downs, a racetrack in Shreveport that became the target of an investigation by the Texas state legislature in 1983. Information submitted to the House committee that conducted the probe alleged that “reliable sources indicate that Mob money is being ‘laundered' at
Louisiana Downs with the knowledge and complicity of Edward J. DeBartolo, Sr.”

The information also alleged that DeBartolo and Carlos Marcello worked behind the scenes to defeat a pari-mutuel betting bill in Texas—which would have competed with the Louisiana track. The investigation of DeBartolo, who denied any wrongdoing, was later dropped. The Texas state legislature defeated the pari-mutuel bill, 75-73, just as DeBartolo had hoped.

The problems of DeBartolo Sr.'s owning a team in the USFL—in direct competition with the popular Rooney family and their Pittsburgh Steelers and DeBartolo Jr.'s owning the San Francisco 49ers in the NFL—were glaringly obvious, especially since both teams were subsidiaries of DeBartolo's parent company. Consequently, DeBartolo Jr. was confronted with the problem in March 1983 at the NFL owners' meeting. However, both DeBartolos brushed the whole issue off. They owned their teams. They were their properties. And no one could do anything about it.

“The League can't hurt me,” DeBartolo Jr. said. “It's not big enough. They don't like it? That's the way it is. Nobody's going to take this team away from me, including the League. Because, I tell you, the League can't afford the lawsuit, I can. Enough of this bullshit about conflict of interest. That's ridiculous. They can't afford a lawsuit because I'll bury them.”
¹¹

Like the American Football League nearly twenty years earlier, the USFL caused a dramatic escalation of salaries for the most-sought-after professional football players. The players, of course, loved it, but the team owners did not. USFL games were scheduled to begin during the NFL's off-season. The first game was played on March 6, 1983, almost six weeks after Super Bowl XVII.

In a move, aside from the ABC television contract, that seemed to ensure the USFL's success, the legal bookmakers in Las Vegas began accepting action on its games. “If somebody bets five dollars on a game, he's going to watch it on television,” predicted Billy Kilmer in an interview with reporter Bob Sansevere. “That's what's going to make [the USFL] successful.”

While the USFL was optimistic about its future, the NFL's growing problems seemed to culminate after only two weeks of games in the 1982 season. Unable to gain the owners' approval on a new contract, the NFL Players Association announced that
its members were on strike. It was the first time that NFL regular season games had been canceled as a result of a dispute between the league's owners and players.

Ending in November, the strike lasted fifty-seven days and cost the NFL cities, owners, club staffs, players, concessionaires, and others dependent on the smooth operation of the sport—including gamblers and bookmakers—billions of dollars. The season resumed at the conclusion of the strike—which the players clearly won—with each NFL team playing a total of only nine games. Incredibly enough, the NFL owners enjoyed the universal support of professional football fans, who naïvely viewed the players as being drugged-up, overpaid, and underworked.

Ed Garvey, the executive director of the NFLPA, is proud of the 1982 settlement. “It was one of the most successful strikes in labor history in that we obtained guaranteed collective benefits of $1.4 billion over five years,” Garvey told me. “We asked for fifty-five percent of the gross profits, and the players ended up with fifty-eight to sixty percent. We totally changed the way in which money is spent in the National Football League—with the union having an equal voice. Before, management could spend it any way it wanted. It was the only strike I know of in which people came off strike and received a bonus for the time they were on strike.”

Although many fans did not share Garvey's enthusiasm, the average NFL player's salary was still only $95,000 a year. Meantime, professional hockey players were making $110,000 annually. NBA players were averaging $214,000. Major-league baseball players were receiving a whopping $220,000. While fans complained about the NFL players' salaries, the annual revenues of the NFL team owners and the sale values of their teams were skyrocketing.

With the NFL players strike, increasing drug problems in the league, the creation of the USFL, the ticket-scalping scandal among the NFL owners, and Al Davis's antitrust suit, 1982 had been a terrible year for Pete Rozelle and Warren Welsh.

Little did they know that in 1983 things were going to get much worse.

43 The
Frontline
Controversy

ON JANUARY 15, 1983, an era within the underworld ended with the death of Meyer Lansky, the last surviving dinosaur of the old mob, which had Americanized and organized disorganized crime in 1931. The syndicate's financial wizard died in Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach after a long bout with cancer. Speaking of his crime empire, Lansky once said, “We're bigger than U.S. Steel.” In his entire life, he had been imprisoned only once as an adult—serving two months in Saratoga Springs, New York, for local gambling violations.

Two days after Lansky's death,
Frontline
, a new weekly PBS production, presented its premier program, “An Unauthorized History of the NFL,” which became the most-watched current-affairs program ever broadcast on public television. The one-hour program was moderated by NBC reporter Jessica Savitch, who was on loan to PBS.

The concept for the PBS program began after Tom Mechling, the chairman of the National Commission on Gambling Information, a nonprofit public-interest group, was approached by Ed Garvey, the executive director of the NFL Players Association, for the purpose of doing an investigation of the NFL owners on a consultancy basis. Mechling had come highly recommended after his work on an NBC “White Paper” on gambling which aired in December 1980.
¹

Mechling told me, “What I found out about many of the NFL teams after about six months of looking [on behalf of the NFLPA]
was really more than I wanted to know about who really owns the Great American Game. The NFLPA locked up the research in their files and never used it in any fashion and/or never wanted to.”

Garvey told me, “All we really had was rumors. Frankly, the battle with the owners was so great—through the National Labor Relations Board, the federal courts, collective bargaining, and just trying to hold the union together as a unit—that the rumors seemed to be the least of our problems. The union is not deputized by the U.S. marshal. It doesn't have any control over how management deals with its books. It doesn't have its own investigative arm.”
²

Mechling persisted. “Later,” he says, “I boiled the material down to the TV program outline. I first took it to Tony Potter of NBC News Documentaries, whom I had worked with on the gambling ‘White Paper' and other program subjects. At the time, NBC was in dire financial straits. But, regardless, Potter looked at the program idea, whistled, said it was a good program and that he would give his left nut to do it. But he also said, ‘I'm not even going to send it upstairs,' meaning to the NBC News head. He explained that fully twenty-five percent of NBC's revenues then were coming from the NFL contract with the network for televising their games and selected college ones too.”

Potter suggested that Mechling call executive producer David Fanning, who was starting the new
Frontline
series on PBS. Fanning had made his reputation with his production of the controversial “Death of a Princess” program and the
World
series. Fanning had received nearly $5 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Chubb Insurance Group, and seven of the local PBS stations around the country to produce weekly news programs too hot for the networks.

Mechling met Fanning and his producer, director, and writer William Cran. They accepted Mechling's idea and hired him as a consultant. Also hired to do the reporting were reporters Ben Loeterman and my associate, William Scott Malone.

This fascinating show was critical of the close association between the worlds of professional football and syndicate gamblers and charged that inside information is regularly provided, points are occasionally shaved, and games are sometimes fixed. The program was dramatic and startling, discussing the dark side of the NFL that few fans ever hear about, particularly from
network television—which enjoyed a cozy and lucrative sweetheart relationship with the NFL.