Interference (69 page)

4
.  In 1925, the Milwaukee Badgers Club placed four high school players on its roster. When Carr discovered this blatant violation, he forced the Badgers' owner, Ambrose McGurk, to sell his franchise and banned for life a member of the team who had recruited the four youngsters.

5
.  George Halas with Gwen Morgan and Arthur Veysey,
Halas by Halas: The Autobiography of George Halas
(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1979), pp. 62-63.

CHAPTER 3

1
. 
The New York Times
, 17 February 1959.

2
.  Halas had actually violated the NFL's rules by signing Grange before he had graduated from the University of Illinois. However, considering the revenues produced by Grange, an exception was made. Halas made his deal with Grange through the player's agent, C. C. “Cash 'n' Carry” Pyle.

Grange's “barnstorming” across the country provided the impetus for the
big cities with major colleges and big-time college sports to accept professional football.

However, professional football was still not receiving respect. When Halas and Grange were introduced as members of the Chicago Bears to President Calvin Coolidge, the President replied, “I've always enjoyed animal acts.” Coolidge thought that these Bears were part of the circus.

3
.  The Chicago Cardinals became the St. Louis Cardinals in 1960 and the Phoenix Cardinals in 1988.

4
.  In 1938, Rooney hired his first, big star player, Byron “Whizzer” White, an all-American halfback from the University of Colorado. White was later appointed as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court by President John Kennedy.

5
.  Red Smith,
The Red Smith Reader
(New York: Random House, Inc., 1982), p. 107.

6
.  Myron Cope,
The Game That Was: The Early Days of Pro Football
(New York: World Publishing Co., 1970), p. 122.

7
.  Regarding Capone, Upton Bell told me, “When the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, Bert Bell was one of the people the police talked to to see if he could go to Sing Sing and talk to Capone to find out if it was an underworld murder. The story is my father did go and talk to Capone. And within twenty-four hours, without ever removing himself from prison, Capone found out that the Mafia was not involved.”

8
.  Harry Wismer,
The Public Calls It Sport
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965), pp. 25-26. The college roommate of future Florida senator George Smathers and
Washington Post
publisher Phil Graham, Wismer was principally a sports broadcaster. His first wife was Betty Bryant, the niece of Henry Ford; and Wismer's second wife was Mary Zwillman, the widow of New Jersey Mafia figure, Abner “Longy” Zwillman—who had been part of a conspiracy in the 1930s to take over the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees union, which became the largest union in Hollywood. Zwillman had also bankrolled studio mogul Harry Cohn in his takeover of Columbia Pictures. The mobster was later found hanging from a water pipe in his basement. Zwillman's widow's lawyer was Sidney Korshak, the Chicago Mafia's liaison to the Hollywood film industry.

9
.  Cope,
Game That Was
, pp. 91-92.

10
.  Reeves's other partners were Fred Levy, Edwin W. Pauley, and Hal Seley. Levy had bought the Rams with Reeves in 1941 but sold his interest to his partner two years later.

11
.  The Philadelphia Eagles regrouped in 1944 and resumed play under Thompson. However, Pittsburgh merged with the Chicago Cardinals for the 1944 season, forming Card-Pitt. After a 0-10 year, both teams went back on their own in 1945.

CHAPTER 4

1
.  NFL president Joe Carr had died in 1939. Bert Bell was one of the few NFL owners who had objected to Elmer Layden's appointment as NFL commissioner.

CHAPTER 5

1
.  See William Barry Furlong's article “Of ‘lines,' ‘point spreads' and ‘middles,'“
The New York Times Magazine
, 2 January 1977. Furlong also quotes oddsmaker Jimmy the Greek as saying, “I used to go to Chicago just to watch him [McNeil] work.” Also, the March 10, 1986, issue of
Sports Illustrated
featured a special report on gambling, which included a sidebar story, “The Brain That Gave Us the Point Spread,” that gave McNeil the credit.

“In 1950, McNeil suddenly quit bookmaking,” reported
SI
's Robert H. Boyle. “He later told a friend he did so because the Mob wanted ‘to go partners with my brain.'”

2
.  Olshan peeled off from
The Green Sheet
in 1952 and began his own publication. In 1957, he founded
‘Nation-Wide Football
, a six-panel publication that covered college and professional football games. In 1966,
Nation-Wide Football
became known as
The Gold Sheet
, with Olshan as its publisher. It has become the premier handicapping service in the United States.

3
.  David Leon Chandler,
Brothers in Blood: The Rise of the Criminal Brotherhoods
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1975), pp. 181-82. Carolla, who was deported to Sicily in April 1947, was succeeded as the boss of the New Orleans Mafia by Carlos Marcello.

4
.  According to the FBI, through Curd, Costello won a traceable $26,000 on football games in 1950 alone.

During the Kefauver Committee hearings, Costello slipped up and identified Curd as the bookmaker who handled his bets on football games. Curd, who owned a large horse-breeding farm in Lexington and was viewed by all who knew him as a genuine “Southern gentleman,” sold his house and fled the country before being indicted for federal tax evasion. Curd first went to Montreal but was expelled by the Canadian government. He later surrendered to authorities in Detroit, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $400,000. After being released from prison in 1959, Curd moved to the Bahamas.

Curd told me that he has forgiven Costello for fingering him. “I was really upset at the time, but he never dreamed that anything would come of it.”

5
.  Other AAFC owners were baseball legend Branch Rickey and publisher Gerald Smith of the Brooklyn Dodgers, oil company executives James Brueil and Will Bennett of the Buffalo Bisons (the Buffalo Bills in 1947), Harvey Hester of the Miami Seahawks, and lumber company executive Tony Morabito of the San Francisco 49ers. After the 1946 season, the Miami team was replaced by the Baltimore Colts, owned by Washington businessman Robert H. Rodenberg. James Crowley was selected as the first AAFC commissioner but later resigned to take over the Chicago Rockets.

6
.  Hoffa became an international vice president of the union in 1952 under Teamsters president Dave Beck. In 1957, after Beck's indictment for theft, Hoffa was elected general president. Hoffa's election contributed to the decision to expel the Teamsters from the AFL-CIO.

7
.  Ryan also had some oil investments with oddsmaker Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder.

8
. 
Ben Lindheimer's daughter is Marjorie Everett, who took over his racing empire after his death in 1960. She blamed Korshak for her father's fatal heart attack because the attorney had failed to head off a strike at one of Lindheimer's Illinois racetracks. State attorney general Otto Kerner, who later became Illinois' governor, was convicted on bribery, perjury, tax evasion, and mail fraud charges after he received stock at a cut-rate price from Everett's racetracks in return for favorable treatment. Everett was not charged with any wrongdoing.

CHAPTER 6

1
.  The Kefauver Committee began its investigation on May 26, 1950, and held hearings in fifteen U.S. cities.

2
.  Reserve players for the Cleveland Browns, who were waiting to join the team roster, were offered jobs with McBride's cab company; thus the term
taxi squad
was born.

3
.  John Cooney,
The Annenbergs: The Salvaging of a Tainted Dynasty
(New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1982), p. 21.

4
.  Also the owner of
TV Guide
and
Seventeen
, Walter Annenberg was appointed the ambassador to Great Britain in 1969 by President Richard Nixon and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with Frank Sinatra, by President Ronald Reagan. In 1981, Reagan appointed Annenberg's wife, Leonore, as the White House chief of protocol. Mrs. Annenberg, the niece of movie mogul Harry Cohn, had been previously married to Beldon Katleman, the owner of El Rancho Vegas hotel/casino in Las Vegas, and Lewis Rosenstiel, the head of Schenley Industries, the liquor distributors. Annenberg sold his publishing empire to Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch in 1988.

5
.  Among those indicted was Chicago mob leader Frank Nitti, the heir to Al Capone. Nitti committed suicide on the day the indictments were handed up. He was replaced as the head of the Chicago Capone underworld by Anthony Accardo.

For more information about the Hollywood extortion scheme, see my book
Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob
(New York: Viking Press, 1986).

6
.  The police captain who headed the investigation of the Ragen murder was found slain in his garage, with his jaw torn off by a .45 caliber bullet.

7
.  After Bidwill's death, the Chicago Cardinals were inherited by his widow and their two sons, William V. and Charles Jr., also known as Stormy. Mrs. Bidwill, who had married St. Louis businessman Walter Wolfner in 1949, died in 1962. The two sons then took over the team. William bought out Stormy in 1972 after a turbulent partnership.

Charles Bidwill's brother Arthur J. Bidwill was an Illinois state senator at the time of Charles's death.

8
.  Erickson's partner, Frank Costello, also fell on hard times. During his fifth appearance before the Kefauver Committee, he angrily walked out of the hearing. Cited for contempt of Congress, Costello was found guilty in 1952 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. The following year, Costello was indicted
again—this time for tax evasion. He was found guilty on three counts and sentenced to another five years in prison.

While fighting his convictions, Costello retained a young Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams, who soon after became a part owner and president of the Washington Redskins. In 1955, while the federal government was attempting to deport Costello, Williams successfully engineered the dismissal of the deportation case because of illegal wiretaps used by the government. However, Williams was unable to overturn Costello's income-tax conviction, and in 1958, Costello was sent back to prison.

A year earlier, in May 1957, an assassin Vincent Gigante tried to kill Costello—but his bullet only grazed the mobster's head. Costello got the message and retired as the head of his crime family. He was replaced by Vito Genovese.

9
.  During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the sports world had been rocked by point-shaving and game-fixing scandals in college basketball. Seven schools and thirty-two players were involved, including Manhattan College, Kentucky, City College of New York (which won the national championship in 1950), Bradley, New York University, and Long Island University.

“All of these fixes were set up in the Catskill Mountains,” Ralph Salerno told me. “The way it worked was that if you were a good basketball player, someone would come to you and say they could get you a cushy job at some Catskill resort—and just play basketball for the summer. And the hotels formed a basketball league—the Catskill Mountain League. People who vacationed up there would see some top basketball by players like Bob Cousy of Holy Cross. And there were a lot of New York bookmakers who went there for their vacations. Even though it was just a small summer league, the bookmakers would wine them and dine them [the players] and throw them a few bucks when they shaved points. What difference did it make to the kid? These games didn't count.

“But that's when they conditioned the kids. There were only seven colleges implicated—but there were many more involved. Frank Hogan, the D.A. in New York County, was a gentleman. Way back then, Bob Cousy was among those brought in for interrogation. But Hogan's policy was ‘While we're still investigating, bring these college kids in late at night after the New York press has gone home. I don't want to see the name of a single college player in the paper until he's indicted. Then he gets his name in the paper.'”

One of those players implicated in the point-shaving scheme, Dale Bornstable of the University of Kentucky, said that, at first, he couldn't tell the gamblers from the average fan. “Those guys were smooth talkers. They should have been salesmen. They took us out for a stroll, treated us to a meal, and before we knew anything we were right in the middle of it. They said that we didn't have to dump a game.”

Earlier, in 1948, two players in the National Hockey League—Don Galinger of the Boston Bruins and Billy Taylor of the Detroit Red Wings—were suspended for life because they had placed bets with a Detroit bookmaker. Galinger confessed that he had placed his money against his own team.

In the midst of these sports scandals, the Harry Gross police corruption case in New York also erupted. A top bookmaker in the Erickson sphere of influence, Brooklyn-based Gross had been paying off police officers in return for protection
. After being arrested for gambling and imprisoned for a year, Gross turned state's evidence against his silent partners. Twenty-three officers, including five captains, were convicted and dismissed from the department. The fact that law-enforcement officials were accepting money to protect bookmaking operations was proven to be widespread.

The Gross case served as the impetus to expand the college basketball point-fixing investigation.

10
.  Harry Wismer,
The Public Calls It Sport
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965), pp. 54-55.