Interference (9 page)

Ryan was later shaken down for $60,000 by Chicago mobster Marshall Caifano. Ryan testified against him in court and helped send him to jail for ten years. Ryan was later killed in Evansville, Indiana, when his car was bombed. Caifano was suspected of ordering the murder but was never prosecuted.

Ryan and Mrs. Gehrig had withdrawn their interests in the AAFC franchise before league play began. The New York franchise then went to Dan Topping, the president of the New York
Yankees baseball team. Topping had owned the Brooklyn Dodgers franchise of the NFL but switched to the AAFC, also calling his new team the New York Yankees.

Topping's partner in the Yankees baseball and football franchises was Del E. Webb, an associate of numerous organized-crime figures. A builder from Phoenix, Webb was the contractor selected by gangster Bugsy Siegel to build the Flamingo, the first major hotel/casino in Las Vegas. Along with his building contract, Webb also received a 10 percent interest in Siegel's hotel. Later, Webb built and owned the Sahara hotel/casino and had other casino holdings in Las Vegas, Reno, and Lake Tahoe.

Ben Lindheimer bought the Los Angeles franchise and called it the Los Angeles Dons, named after his partner, actor Don Ameche. Lindheimer was the overlord of Chicago's racetracks. He was closely associated with the Chicago underworld. His personal attorney was Sidney Korshak, a young mouthpiece for the old Capone mob, who had also been hired by Ray Ryan to handle labor negotiations for RKO before the deal with Hughes collapsed.

Through political favors and payoffs, Lindheimer was principally responsible for the creation of the Illinois Racing Commission and was appointed as the chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission. In an attempt to legalize the state's three thousand bookmakers, Lindheimer later led the lobby to legalize offtrack betting. He was supported by the state attorney general Otto Kerner.
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However, the governor vetoed the bill.

6 The Wire Services

ANOTHER TEAM IN THE All-American Football Conference was the Cleveland Browns, formed by a crime-syndicate bookmaker, Arthur “Mickey” McBride. At the time he owned the Browns, McBride was the head of the Continental Racing Wire, the mob's gambling news service—which the Special Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, better known as the Kefauver Committee—later described as “Public Enemy Number One.”
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McBride's partner was James M. Ragen, Sr., of Chicago.

Born in Chicago in 1888, McBride was selling newspapers on the street at age six and became the circulation manager of William Randolph Hearst's
Chicago American
in 1911. Two years later, he was sent to Cleveland by Hearst and held the same position for
The Cleveland News
, an afternoon paper. McBride became the newspaper's point man in its rough-and-tumble circulation wars against
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
. Ragen was the circulation manager of
The Cleveland Leader
, the
News-
owned morning paper. In the midst of the battles, trucks were hijacked and people were beaten, stabbed, and shot.

Through these wars, McBride recruited Morris Dalitz and his Cleveland-based Mayfield Road Gang for the rough stuff. McBride remained in the newspaper business until 1930 when he purchased his first taxicab company and parlayed it into the only cab company in the metropolitan Cleveland area.
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A shrewd businessman with a wide variety of investments in
Cleveland, Chicago, and the Miami area, the quiet McBride once said, “Nobody ever got rich on a salary.”

McBride had founded the Continental Racing Wire in the wake of the collapse of the Nationwide News Service, which had been operated out of Chicago by Moses L. Annenberg, who like McBride and Ragen had started his career as a circulation manager for the Hearst newspaper chain. After Annenberg's August 1939 indictment for criminal tax fraud, he made a deal with the government that provided that similar charges be dropped against his son Walter Annenberg and two of their associates in Nationwide. In return, Annenberg pleaded guilty, paid $9.5 million in back taxes and penalties, and went to prison in 1940.
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Walter Annenberg closed down Nationwide and took over his father's publishing empire, which included
The Philadelphia Inquirer
and
The Daily Racing Form
, which the elder Annenberg had bought in 1922.
⁴

Among those sent by the Chicago mob to work for the elder Annenberg on his wire service had been Johnny Rosselli. After the collapse of Nationwide, Rosselli went to Hollywood to work for the Motion Picture Producers Association. Within three years, he and six other Chicago mobsters—who had taken over the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the largest union in Hollywood—were indicted and convicted for selling labor peace to the major movie studios.
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While the Mafia was busy shaking down Hollywood, Nationwide's Chicago manager, Tom Kelly, persuaded his brother-in-law, Mickey McBride, to create Continental in November 1939, in the wake of Nationwide's collapse, with a mere $20,000 investment. McBride was also encouraged to do so by James Ragen, who was indicted with Annenberg for his role in the Nationwide scheme and pleaded guilty.

The intent of the wire service had been to provide every bookmaker in the country with needed information on all aspects of sports gambling, particularly horse racing. Sports results were transmitted over both the telephone and telegraph to twenty-four large “distributors” throughout the United States. The gambling information was then printed and delivered to subscribers to the service.

Former Chicago FBI agent Aaron Kohn, who investigated the wire service, told me, “One of the mob's major sources of income was their operation of the wire service systems and the
layoff network for gambling on football. Among the clever devices they used for reaching out to the largest possible mass of consumers were football-betting parlay cards. By the 1950s, they were widespread.

“The mob had to do everything they could to control the outcome of these games in order to control the level of their profits. You found them manipulating and corrupting in football, as they sometimes did in basketball. They would corrupt players and move into ownership control of teams whenever they could. Once the mob found the market for illegal gambling, corruption became an inseparable part of their operation.”

Within two years of creating Continental, McBride sold it to Ragen, with whom he had been involved in some real estate deals after the newspaper wars. Because Ragen needed McBride's contacts, he asked the Cleveland businessman to stay on and become his minority partner. McBride agreed and kept a one-third interest in the wire service—but he placed his investment in the name of his son Edward McBride who was away at college at the time of the purchase.

The Chicago Mafia viewed Continental as potentially a multimillion-dollar business and a vehicle through which it could control sports bookmaking in the United States. In 1946, Chicago Mafia boss Tony Accardo, the Chicago mob's political fixer Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, and syndicate member Murray “the Camel” Humphreys offered to buy Continental from Ragen. Despite the underworld's promise to keep Ragen as a partner, Ragen refused because he foresaw the obvious problem: Sooner or later, he would lose his independence.

When the Chicago mobsters refused to relent, Ragen went to the FBI and signed a ninety-eight-page affidavit informing the bureau that Accardo, Guzik, and Humphreys were trying to take over his business. He also told the bureau that his own wire service had paid out over $600,000 to numerous unnamed politicians throughout the country for protection.

The Chicago Mafia responded by setting up a rival wire service, Trans-American Press Service. Accardo-hired leg breakers attempted to muscle Continental's subscribers to cancel their contracts. When that ploy failed, Ragen, although supposedly under police protection, was ambushed and shot while driving in rush hour on a Chicago street on June 24, 1946. He died from his wounds seven weeks later.

Indicted for the Ragen murder were David Yaras and Leonard
Patrick. Yaras, a non-Italian/Sicilian member of the Chicago Mafia, was a henchman for Chicago Mafia chiefs Accardo and Sam Giancana. However, the two key witnesses against Yaras and Patrick were murdered; two others then refused to testify. Consequently, the case was dropped.
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Yaras, who was among the first Chicago mobsters to “discover” Florida after Al Capone went to prison, was a key figure in the Continental Racing Wire and an ally of Mickey McBride.

Soon after, McBride, again in his son's name, bought out Ragen's two-thirds interest from Ragen's son. Trans-American immediately folded, and its customers were given to Continental, clearly indicating Accardo's approval of McBride.

Joe Nellis, the assistant counsel of the Kefauver Committee, told me that there was high drama when McBride was called to testify. “It took me two days to tear his ass apart,” Nellis says. “The McBride situation was a very serious matter. Here was a guy who owned the Cleveland Browns, who was in bed with a lot of gamblers and hoodlums. And he was a man people respected. They took off their hats when he came around.

“He tried to tell us that Continental Press was supplying racing wire information. That was simply not true. In the end, we undid Continental. It went out of business shortly after we exposed McBride as a supplier of illegal information to bookmakers all over the country about all sports.”

McBride was indeed the embodiment of the connection between organized crime and professional sports. In its final report, the Kefauver Committee charged that McBride was “making a gift to the Mafia-affiliated Capone mob in Chicago of about $4,000 a week.” The committee also concluded that as a result of the national network created by McBride, “the Capone affiliates and the Mafia are now in control of the distribution of racing wire news with a resultant source of enormous profits and power over bookmaking.”

Another target of the Kefauver investigation was Chicago Cardinals owner Charles Bidwill, who had died in April 1947 of bronchial pneumonia in Chicago's St. George's Hospital.
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Aside from his interest in the Cardinals, the fifty-one-year-old Bidwill was also president of the National Jockey Club, which operated the Sportsmen's Park racetrack, and was the managing director of the Hawthorne racetrack. Both were located in Cicero, a Chicago suburb.

Bidwill's partner at Sportsmen's Park was William H. Johnston
, who was identified by the select committee as an operative in the Capone syndicate; Bidwill and Johnston had bought out Jack Keeshin, a founding member of the All-American Football Conference and the owner of the Chicago Rockets. The attorney for the two partners was Edward O'Hare, who had also represented Capone and was the business manager of the Cardinals team. O'Hare was murdered in 1939. Another investor at Sportsmen's Park was Frank Erickson.

During testimony before the Kefauver Committee, racetrack operator John Patton—a Chicago Mafia associate and business partner of Frank Erickson—said that he, Bidwill, and Johnston had operated Sportsmen's Park together until Bidwill died.

After his purchase of the Chicago Cardinals NFL franchise in 1933, Bidwill had also become the president of Bentley-Murray Printing Company, which was one of Moses Annenberg's subsidiaries. The NFL owner and the mob-connected wire-service tycoon had been close friends for years. Still, Bidwill continued to do business with McBride and the wire-service operations after Annenberg was sent to prison.

When I asked Nellis what danger is posed to professional sports when underworld associates like McBride and Bidwill were involved, he replied, “The shaving of points, the fixing of games, and any of the illegal activities that you can think of related to organized sports is made much easier by those people who know the characters and the tricks of organized crime.”

The Kefauver Committee also crippled another Bidwill business partner, bookmaker Frank Erickson, by exposing his gambling empire. In the wake of the hearings, Erickson was indicted and convicted for sixty counts of bookmaking and conspiracy. He was sentenced to two years at Riker's Island Penitentiary.
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After another conviction for criminal tax fraud, Erickson moved from New York to Miami where he mentored a young gambler named Gilbert Lee Beckley who also maintained strong ties with the Mafia. Beckley would soon become the major figure in sports gambling in America.

The Kefauver Committee's clear evidence of a concentrated national syndicate of crime that controlled the bulk of the nation's gambling operations forced Congress to pass two pieces of legislation. It banned wire-service operations while imposing a 10 percent excise tax on legal bets and forcing legal and illegal
bookmakers to pay $50 a year for a gambling stamp, which was considered an “occupation tax.”

The new laws had the immediate effect of driving Continental and the wire services out of business.

Although both pieces of legislation were important, the overall response by Congress was wimpish. The Kefauver Committee's request to legalize wiretapping and electronic surveillance by federal law-enforcement officials was rejected, as was a proposal to provide immunity to those within the underworld who were willing to testify against their more dangerous bosses.

Congress's weak response to the work of the Kefauver Committee was among the reasons for the eventual institutionalization of organized crime in, among other groups, professional sports and America's political system.
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Meantime, the NFL's new, Bell-inspired rules on corruption covered owners, players, coaches, and other team personnel—but did not include officials. Discussing who would be the ideal person on the field to fix, Harry Wismer said, “Too many situations arise over which the players or coach have no control … The person I would go to would be an official … They are underpaid and overcriticized. They are a perfect target for a player or a coach who is anxious to alibi on poor performance.”
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