Interference (53 page)

2. Piazza's description of himself as a key figure in the Beckley/Sklaroff—Dudley/Berry gambling syndicate was true, and that he was particularly active from 1967 to 1970. Also, Piazza was linked with John Owen Tyler, an Atlanta bookmaker, who “repeatedly took Kansas City off the boards in the late 60s.”

During my interview with Len Dawson, I read him the official unedited transcript of the
Frontline
interview with Piazza and told him that Piazza had passed the voice stress evaluation test. Dawson replied, “You know, because of that program, not only did he [Piazza] take a test, but I had to take one, too. They [the NFL] did it just to clarify it. The NFL Security people and Warren Welsh flew into Kansas City and were out at the Marriott hotel by the airport. I had to clear myself all over again.”

Once again, Dawson passed the test, proving his innocence. Dawson continued, “I'll tell you who was really hot when that PBS program came out: John Brodie [the star quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers from 1957 to 1973]. He wanted to sue them because it implicated all the starting quarterbacks in that era. He had gotten a tape [of the program] and looked it over and wanted all the quarterbacks of that era to see if we could get a lawsuit against public television.”

Dawson said that it was laughable that Emmitt Thomas would be involved in anything like that. “Of all people, Emmitt Thomas, why, he's the most superstitious guy in the world. I was quiet my first few years of professional football; but Emmitt was that way all the way through. I never ran around with Emmitt or hung out with him, other than on the football field.”

Stram, who was not polygraphed, laughed off Piazza's charges, repeating that he had never gambled on anything in his life. More concerned with the claim against his onetime defensive star, Stram told me, “I never heard Emmitt Thomas's name mentioned with a gambling issue. You'd have to know Emmitt to understand that he would never even consider anything like that.”

When I contacted Thomas and told him what Piazza had said, he told me that he wanted to talk to Len Dawson first and would then get back to me—which he never did.

When I asked Dawson why he was the target of so many rumors over the years, particularly regarding his alleged relationship with a variety of bookmakers and even the Civella Mafia family in Kansas City, he said, “I don't know why they singled me out. Maybe it's because I'm the quarterback. In 1966, I started my career in broadcasting. Maybe that was it: because I was so visible. I had four radio shows a day, five days a week, and I was the sports director of the television station in Kansas City. I was doing the six o'clock and the ten o'clock sports, starting in 1966 and all through that period. So Monday through Friday, everybody knew where I was.”

Len Dawson was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1987.

44 The Double Standard

ON JANUARY 20, 1983—just three days after the
Frontline
broadcast and five days after Lansky's death in bed—Allen Dorfman, the onetime fiduciary manager of the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund, was murdered by three ski-masked gunmen who approached him while he was walking across a parking lot in Lincolnwood, a Chicago suburb. He had been prominently mentioned in the PBS story because of his loans to Las Vegas casinos. At the scene of his slaying, Dorfman was accompanied by an old friend Irwin Weiner, the longtime bail bondsman for the Teamsters Union, who also had ties to numerous organized-crime figures. Weiner, who was not a target, ducked behind a car and escaped uninjured.

In addition to his pension fund activities, Dorfman was also involved in sports-gambling operations. The names of several NFL owners, coaches, and players were in his address book: Dallas Cowboys owner Clint Murchison, former Chicago Bears quarterback Sid Luckman, former Washington Redskins president Edward Bennett Williams, and former Minnesota Vikings running back Ed Marinaro, who had become an actor with a role on NBC's
Hill Street Blues.
¹
No NFL member listed in Dorfman's address book was ever charged with any wrongdoing.

Just the previous month, Dorfman had been convicted of conspiring to bribe U.S. Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada, culminating the FBI's Pendorf—Penetrate Dorfman—investigation that had been initiated in 1979. In return for his influence
to defeat a bill providing for the deregulation of the trucking industry on behalf of the Teamsters, Cannon, who was not indicted, was offered property owned by the union's pension fund. Evidence in the case had been accumulated with the help of court-authorized wiretaps. Four other men were convicted with Dorfman, including Teamsters general president Roy Williams and Chicago Mafia capo Joseph Lombardo, who was Tony Spilotro's immediate supervisor. The sixty-year-old Dorfman was facing a maximum fifty-five-year prison sentence.
²

“There was a real fear among the Chicago mob that Dorfman was ready to talk to save himself,” Patrick Healy, then head of the Chicago Crime Commission, told me. “And if Dorfman had decided to talk, he could have done some serious damage. The Mafia was well aware of that fact. They knew that he was not prepared to spend the rest of his life in jail. The murder was a blatant effort to silence him. And among the subjects Dorfman could have discussed was NFL football.”

Spilotro was again the key suspect for being responsible for making the arrangements for the Dorfman hit.
³
Four alleged Chicago hit men—Anthony Panzica, Frank Schweihs, Ron DeAngeles, and former Chicago Cardinals defensive tackle Wayne Bock—were all called to testify before a federal grand jury in Chicago that was probing the Dorfman murder.

Two months after the airing of the
Frontline
documentary, twenty-three-year-old Art Schlichter, a reserve quarterback with the Baltimore Colts, admitted to having placed bets on sporting events with four Baltimore bookmakers. Schlichter's bookies had all been indicted by a federal grand jury in Columbus, Ohio—where Schlichter had starred at Ohio State University and became an all-American, and where his parents were active on the harness-racing circuit. Schlichter had aided the FBI in its investigation.

Schlichter—who had received a $145,000-a-year salary as well as a $350,000 signing bonus from the Colts in 1982—had gone into heavy debt to the bookmakers, reportedly betting mostly on basketball games. He lost as much as $700,000 in bets during a two-year period. Schlichter, who had also made wagers on no fewer than ten NFL games, denied ever placing a bet on a game in which the Colts played.
⁴

When he was unable to pay his gambling debts, the bookmakers
reportedly threatened to go to the Colts and tell the team that he had been calling them regularly from a pay telephone just prior to game time. Schlichter had spent so much time in a locker room phone booth that several of his teammates once placed his equipment in the booth as a prank. However, in response to the blackmail attempt, Schlichter went to the FBI. The FBI then monitored the telephone calls of the bookmakers, which served as the basis for their indictments.

On May 20, 1983, Pete Rozelle suspended Schlichter indefinitely for his gambling habits and his associations with bookmakers. At the time of the announcement, Schlichter was in a rehabilitation program being treated for compulsive gambling. Schlichter was the first player since Alex Karras and Paul Hornung to be suspended on charges of gambling and associating with gamblers. The only other players suspended for gambling associations had been Frank Filchock and Merle Hapes in 1946.

In his statement, Rozelle said, in part, “I accept [Schlichter's] statement that he has never bet on or against his own team, attempted to improperly affect the outcome of any game, or accepted money or anything of value from those who might have been interested in doing so.”

Three of the four bookmakers with whom Schlichter had done business later pleaded guilty to lesser charges; those against the fourth man were dropped.
⁵
Like Karras and Hornung, Schlichter was reinstated after a one-year suspension.
⁶

In an interview with Paul Attner of
The Washington Post
, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell, commenting on the Schlichter case, used the age-old line: “I just don't believe there is a lot of this type of gambling activity going on in the league. You can't keep a secret that long in this business, mainly because [of] the bookmakers who would report any big swing in odds. I remember in 1964, I left one of our practices just as Frank Ryan twisted an ankle. Twelve minutes later, when I arrived at my office, I already had a call from the league. They wanted to know why our game that week had been taken off the boards.”

Modell was not asked whether he conducted an investigation of who on his team or staff had leaked the inside information about Ryan's ankle to the bookmakers during those twelve minutes.

The Schlichter affair, coming on the heels of
Frontline
, seemed to cause another round of attempts to get at football's
hidden cancer. Interestingly, just a few months earlier, on the day of the
Frontline
broadcast, the
Akron Beacon Journal
was in the midst of its three-part series about Art Modell. In part, news reporter Peter Phipps charged, “In New York, he [Modell] worked in an advertising firm with two clients linked to the underworld. In Cleveland, he raced horses with a man prominently mentioned in the Senate's Kefauver investigation into organized crime 30 years ago, despite an NFL prohibition against associating with gamblers … Modell, however, does not deny that his associates have included personalities ranging from professional gamblers to the country's most esteemed citizens.”

Of course, only Schlichter was suspended because of his gambling connections. The NFL didn't give much thought to doing the same to Modell.

After the Modell series and Schlichter's suspension, the players, perhaps in self-defense, publicly complained about the NFL owners. Ed Garvey, the executive director of the NFL Players Association, told me, “You have the commissioner and his office, hired by management and serving at their pleasure. It's obvious that the servant is not going to rise up and slay the master. To suggest that there is a ‘double standard' is to suggest that there is also a possibility of objectivity.

“It's like the old song, ‘Whose Side Are You On?' If you have a bargaining table, Rozelle sits on the owners side. He is a part of them. So there can only be one standard. And that is: What management does through his office is to investigate players. Rozelle doesn't have the authority or the mandate for the owners to be looking at themselves.”

Besides Modell, Garvey was also specifically referring to Leonard Tose, the owner of Philadelphia Eagles. Tose, an admitted gambler, who said that his favorite game was blackjack (he reputedly bet as much as $70,000 a hand), reportedly lost millions of dollars at gaming tables in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. “He's probably one of the worst blackjack players I've ever seen,” a casino source told
The Philadelphia Inquirer
. “He was a sweetheart to deal with. He paid us like he was a man with no worries.” But nothing could be further from the truth.

In 1980, when Tose needed relief from his debts, he received a $400,000 loan from Hugh Culverhouse, the owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Three years later, Culverhouse guaranteed a $3 million loan for Tose. By that time Tose was rumored
to have at least $2 million in gambling debts. Another NFL owner financially helping out Tose was William Clay Ford of the Detroit Lions, who arranged for Tose to receive loans from a bank controlled by the Ford family.
⁷

The NFL constitution prohibits owners from lending money to each other.

In January 1983, Rozelle commented defensively on Tose's behavior. “I would be a hell of a lot more concerned if I knew that [a player] had bet at the casinos,” he said. “An owner doesn't control the outcome of a game. So when you talk about the credibility of the game, anyone close to football knows that an owner doesn't interfere with the coaches and players. He's not going to send in plays, except in infrequent situations. But he's not going to have a big effect.”

In spite of all the gambling problems in professional sports and the disastrous Delaware NFL lottery, Governor Mario Cuomo of New York supported another state-run sports-gambling operation in the fall of 1983, which was expected to produce massive revenues “for education.” Cuomo specifically wanted gambling on professional football, basketball, and baseball legalized via a state lottery, which he predicted would raise $100 million a year as an extension of New York's Off-Track Betting operation. New York's state attorney general Robert Abrams insisted the Cuomo plan violated state law “both through its specific bans on bookmaking and pool-selling and through its general ban on all forms of gambling not expressly authorized.”

Soon after, the Cuomo plan collapsed and died.

Also, during the summer of 1984, former Washington Redskins quarterback Billy Kilmer took over Johnny Unitas's Baltimore-based handicapping business. Unitas, who had accepted a job with International Harvester, had quit the controversial enterprise under pressure from the NFL.

When asked who applied the pressure on Unitas to sell his interest in the tout sheet, NFL Security chief Warren Welsh told me, “That was done by the commissioner. Unitas, at that time, had a position with the Colts in an advisory capacity. It was distressing.”
⁸

Unitas told me, “I got out of it because I was getting so much abuse from sportswriters and people across the country that I was ruining my reputation—and I'm contributing to gambling. And
I said, ‘Wait a minute, you people, as sportswriters, condone it in your newspapers by printing the line. The National Football League condones it because they allow the television networks to pick games with the point spreads. You guys are promoting it yourself. Every damn newspaper in this country has some writer on their staff making picks. And I was contributing to gambling? Come on. All I was doing was analyzing a couple of games.”