Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (24 page)

Rose was eager in the deposition, eager to talk and explain, to parry and justify, and sometimes Dowd had to put the reins on him, “Let me finish my question, please,” Dowd said, “and then I’ll let you answer.” He said “let me finish” numerous times over the course of the deposition and if it came off a little terse at times, Dowd also abided by a degree of formality. Through the early going he always called him, “Mr. Rose.”

“Please, call me Pete,” said Pete. “Mr. Rose is my dad.” Dowd apologized and said that he was just trying to be respectful. “I understand that,” Rose said, adding, “I’m going to call you John.”

This was the first time that Rose and Dowd had ever met or interacted, and the way that the ground rules were being set and the way they kept feeling each other out—circling one another, mannered and tentative, then full bore in a rush, jousting here and there, trading niceties, stiffening up, suddenly cheeky or flip, then relenting or consenting—it was as if each of the two men had a keen sense of how the other might come to impact his life.

THE DEPOSITION lasted for about three hours that evening, and when they came back to the convent at 8:30 the next morning, Dowd picked up where he’d left off. The Reds would play the Astros at Riverfront that night.

They covered a lot of ground—Rose discussed memorabilia shows that he did for cash and autographs that he signed, and how he’d had Gioiosa sign for him when he was squeezed for time. They talked about all kinds of money being exchanged and about the numerous Pete Rose checks written for $8,000, the figure under $10,000 so as to help the casher avoid having to file papers with the bank. They talked about checks written to Mike Bertolini and to Mike Fry, about checks given to Gioiosa and about checks with Pete’s signature on it that were made out to fictitious names. Checks cashed at the dog track. Checks cashed at the horse races. Checks, checks, checks.

They talked about expensive cars that Pete had owned and those that he had sold to certain individuals—a BMW, a Porsche, and also an M-1 that was bought by big Don Stenger. They talked about just what exactly was the nature of Rose’s association with Stenger and the other guys over at Gold’s Gym. Rose said that he liked going over there to work out at nine in the morning when it wasn’t too crowded and that he hadn’t known anything about any cocaine until much later on and that he had absolutely nothing to do with that.

The main issue, of course, the matter at which the deposition and the whole investigation aimed, was Rose’s extensive sports betting, which he admitted to, and specifically his betting on baseball and the Reds, both of which he denied. When the topic of Pete’s heavy betting in the early part of 1987 came under discussion, Rose recalled how Gioiosa had passed along a threat from a bookmaker that “the guy was going to burn my house down and break my kids’ legs if I didn’t pay him.” Pete said that he had owed some money after having lost a run of football and college basketball bets and that the bookie’s threat is what led him to write a check for $34,000 and settle things up. A little later Rose cracked a few jokes and said he hadn’t been worried at all about that threat, that “those guys are all talk.”

In the deposition Rose conveyed a solid and even intimate knowledge of bookmaking. He was clear about the collection schedules and the vigorish and how the odds are laid. He said that he didn’t know any bookmakers in New York, however, and that he certainly had never bet with them. He did not place bets with any Steve Chevashore, he said, and he could not explain why there were phone calls to Chevashore from his house, nor why there were also calls to the bookmaker Ron Peters from his home as well as from the Reds hotel. Maybe Janszen had made the calls, Pete said. As for all the calls that Janszen had made
into
the Reds clubhouse, those, Pete guessed, might have been Paulie looking for tickets to the game. The calls had nothing to do with wagering on ball games, that is.

He had never ever bet on baseball, Pete maintained, and he stuck hard to it. And if things didn’t always seem square in his testimony, if Rose’s version of events sometimes seemed to fly up against evidence already collected, or against the testimony of others, Pete offered an alternative answer, a plausible explanation for everything. He was often quite good at answering Dowd’s yes-or-no questions without actually saying yes or no, a skill that got under Dowd’s skin.

On key points, Dowd could be highly persistent and even, it seemed, intentionally dense. “I’m sorry” or “forgive me” or “it’s an education” he would say upon honing in and asking for clarification of some basic detail for the third time. Dowd says now that he, in fact, liked Pete and that he even felt a little sorry for the guy—not that he would ever let that sympathy show or let it translate into any kind of mercy or forgiveness. It was just a feeling Dowd had upon seeing Rose tripped up by the evidence set plainly in front of him. Rose was given exhibits to look at (checks, documents, letters) and, a few hours into the second day, Dowd played for him the Bertolini-Janszen conversation of April 4, 1988.

“An amusing tape,” Rose said when it finished. He agreed that some of the things in the conversation were true but said that the critical parts were made of lies and that he “did not owe anybody a dime.” Rose’s contempt for Janszen was complete and, he said, “That tape don’t mean diddlysquat to me.”

“O.K. Well, I will tell you, Pete, it means something to us and we’re troubled by it,” Dowd said in response.

All told, Rose was in that convent before god and man for seven hours. At times an expression of profound unpleasantness came over his face, a look that not even his fierce defiance could wipe away. As if he had eaten some lousy seafood. Several in the room noticed it: At times during the deposition, Pete Rose started to look a little green.

Chapter 15

Fable

W
HEN MEMBERS of the Reds brass get to musing about Pete Rose (and it’s inevitable that they do), they will sometimes liken his story to the parable of the Scorpion and the Frog. It is an old tale, ancient, and in other versions, a turtle, a fox or a small boy stands in for the frog. Sometimes a snake subs for the scorpion and in one quasiadaptation of the fable, an Aesop’s rendering with a moral about comeuppance, a mouse and a frog get set upon in the water by a predatory hawk.

No single origin of the Scorpion and the Frog is definitively known, but an outstanding work of scholarship by Arata Takeda—written when he was an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Tübingen in Germany—traces the seeds of the fable to the centuries-old Indian tales of the
Panchatantra
. More specifically a clear version of the story surfaces in the 12th century as told by a pair of truth-spewing jackals in the Arabic version of the
Panchatantra
,
Kalila and Dimna
. Takeda’s 2011 paper, written in German and titled as an inquiry into the rambling, East-West journey of
Der Skorpion und der Frosch
, suggests that ancient stories from the Orient and passages from the Koran influenced the creation of the fable as well.

The Scorpion and the Frog has gained wide cultural purchase in recent decades, beginning perhaps with its telling by the title character in Orson Welles’s strange (and strangely gripping) 1955 film
Mr. Arkadin
. In
The Crying Game
(1992) a blindfolded British captive relates the story to his IRA guard, as a means of appealing to the guard’s inherent kindness. The fable has been unspooled on the deck of the
Voyager
in a classic, two-part episode of
Star Trek
, and it appears, told in unique fashion (the frog is a woman, the scorpion a snake) by a Native American man in Oliver Stone’s
Natural Born Killers
.

Just as the fable has accommodated different characters, its moral can be interpreted in a number of ways. It can be seen as a parable about the dangers of risk-taking or gullibility or tempting fate. It’s also about not trusting enemies, or friends or strangers. There’s a lesson about Schadenfreude in the story. At times the Scorpion and the Frog has been adopted as an allegory about suicide bombing, and about difficult human relations in a contentious region of the world. In this rendering the river that the animals cross is the Jordan and the Scorpion’s final, explanatory line is, “This is the Middle East!”

The clearest and most potent moral though—the message that has made this fable endure and resonate as it has—comments on man’s inescapability from himself. A person is who he is, inevitably limited or undone by his own shortcomings and unable to change his essential self even in the face of dire consequences. This is the gist the folks with the Reds have in mind when the story comes up as they are talking about Pete Rose’s fate and ongoing plight. They tend to tell the fable with a crocodile instead of the frog, but the basic, familiar story is intact and the scorpion, in this case, represents Pete:

The Scorpion and the Frog

BART GIAMATTI might have avoided sitting in judgment on the Rose case altogether, and instead might have spent his months as baseball commissioner in other ways and doing other things. Ueberroth, before officially resigning as commissioner, had offered to see the Rose investigation through—either to try to wrap things up slambang or to stay on and oversee the case as a consultant even after stepping down. Giamatti, though, wanted to take it on. He welcomed the responsibility, he said, and he welcomed the challenge of doing it right.

Giamatti, it’s worth noting, adored Pete Rose as a player and as a baseball figure—“Isn’t he marvelous?” he had once said to the writer Roger Kahn, as they watched Rose gathering baseballs around the Reds’ batting cage in spring training—but that did not hold sway against his convictions. Giamatti had been unsparing in suspending Rose for his umpire clash in 1988, and as the Dowd investigation bore in, the commissioner did not like the feeling that Rose saw himself as being above baseball’s laws. Had Rose come to Giamatti early on, contrite and showing a desire to change, Giamatti might have opened his embrace as wide and warm as any mama bear’s. He was a man forgiving of many vices and many sins, but hubris and dishonesty were not among them.

“Pete thinks of himself as a national treasure, and we agree,” Reuven Katz said to Fay Vincent during the months that baseball was working the case. To which Giamatti responded, “I’ll show him who the national treasure is.” For Giamatti, the treasure, what had to be protected at any cost, was the game itself.

He stayed awake to all hours, at the commissioner’s office, or in his room at the Yale Club, and he pored through the information he received from Dowd and through the miles of Rose-colored type in so many newspapers. Giamatti had during his time as president of Yale been at the center of controversies—late in his tenure he weathered a high-profile and feverishly pitched strike of clerical and technical workers—but nothing had prepared him for what was happening now. Not for the unending media push, not for the waves of public secondguessing at any move that baseball made, and certainly not for the sensation of opening an anonymous letter to read in an unfamiliar hand or answering the telephone to hear in an unfamiliar voice these words: “If you put Pete Rose out of baseball, we will kill you.”

“One day, late afternoon, my father came to the restaurant where I was working,” says Marcus Giamatti, Bart’s eldest son. Marcus was in his late 20s and tending bar at McAleer’s, a wood-floor-and-Naugahydebooths pub on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “He told me I had to leave my job because it wasn’t safe for me. He was getting too many death threats and threats against his family too. My dad was worried about my mom, and my sister and brother, all of us. I wouldn’t quit my job but they started having an unmarked police car park outside the bar when I went to work.”

The commissioner, though, did not waver from his task. How could he, knowing what he knew? Whatever small holes there might have been in the case, whatever details might have been still in question, the evidence against Rose was overwhelming. The FBI knew what he had done, baseball knew what he had done. Yes, when Rose had denied betting on baseball in the commissioner’s office they had believed him, but in the weeks and months that followed, that belief proved impossible to maintain. The investigation needed to proceed in its thorough way, of course, and Rose had to be given every opportunity to state his case, and every word of testimony against Rose needed to be tested and retested before it was accepted as truth. But the fact was that Rose’s guilt was plain. And that gave Giamatti all of the confidence and moral conviction that he needed. Reuven Katz was flat-out wrong in his assessment of the man: “This guy was just a college professor,” he said of Giamatti when the investigation was young. “We’re going to roll right over this guy,”

After Ron Peters had given his deposition to Dowd, Giamatti wrote a letter to the U.S. sentencing judge in Peters’s cocaine case, hailing Peters for having been “forthright and truthful” with Dowd. It was, in effect, meant as a thank you to Peters for the critical information he had helped to provide. The sentencing judge, however, chafed, saying the letter was out of line and that he thought Giamatti had a “vendetta against Pete Rose.” In the minds of many, the letter confirmed that Rose was being “railroaded” and the Rose camp seized on that notion. Pete was being prematurely and unfairly judged, they argued, and false assumptions were clouding the truth of his innocence.

Yet neither Rose’s lawyers nor Rose himself nor any in the discontented public maw could explain
why
Giamatti or baseball might want to railroad Rose like this. Why would the commissioner, or anyone in baseball, want to unfairly bring down Pete Rose? Everyone understood what a sturdy ambassador Rose was for the game and knew that there were few who had brought more attention and joy to the sport. For Giamatti and his team, the fact that Rose had done something that so acutely threatened the game, that obligated them to respond, was a bitter blow. Even in the heat of Dowd’s chase that year (and that is at times what it felt like, a chase) and even in the thrill of new discovery, there was always something sad and lamentable about the work. Proving Rose’s guilt did not feel like it would be a real victory at all.

The Rose camp fought back at every turn, discrediting the witnesses, assailing Giamatti, cooperating with Dowd in slow, calculated and incomplete ways. When baseball officials privately asked Rose whether he might step aside as manager while the investigation was going on—to perhaps minimize the aggravation and the constant media exposure—he refused. He was not going to let go of what was his without a battle. He never had and he never would.

Baseball’s hearing on Rose was set for late May of 1989, but just before the date Rose asked for more time. Giamatti postponed the hearing for a month. A few weeks later, Rose sued to prevent Giamatti—with his allegedly prejudiced view—from presiding over the hearing. The suit failed but it bought Rose a couple more weeks. Rose’s lawyers filed other procedures and raised other objections and gummed up the system for as long as they could.

In mid-June the Reds had begun to lose more often than they won, and by late July the team had fallen to fifth place and out of the pennant race entirely. For the first time there were hard lines set upon Pete’s face each day as he stepped onto the field, a sullenness. For his part, Giamatti was gaining weight that he could ill-afford to gain, and he slept badly and he smoked as few men could smoke. “There is only one thing at which I am truly world-class,” Giamatti told Vincent, “and that is smoking cigarettes.” Some days he went through five packs.

At last, in late August, there were no options remaining for Rose and his lawyers, nor did they have the tools with which to combat the case against them. They had no serious counter-evidence, no alibis, no alternative reality. They had nothing at all. It was then that Rose agreed to forgo a hearing altogether, to instead sign a document saying that he agreed and submitted “to the sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the Commissioner.” As Rose’s lawyers explained it to him, bowing out of the hearing had helped them win a clear concession: the document included the provision that “Nothing in this agreement shall be deemed either an admission or a denial by Peter Edward Rose of the allegation that he bet on any Major League Baseball game.”

As concessions go, though, this was extravagantly slight—irrelevant and wiped out by the agreement’s most central determination. This: “Peter Edward Rose is hereby declared permanently ineligible in accordance with Major League Rule 21 and placed on the Ineligible List.”

The only relevant part of Rule 21 that mandates permanent ineligibility is the subset d), which concerns baseball club employees who bet on their own team. From Rose’s perspective signing the agreement, as he would gradually come to realize, was a pure and terrible miscalculation. It was true that he would be eligible to apply for reinstatement after one year, but that is a right that baseball bylaw affords to any player or official who is suspended indefinitely. Nothing was gained by putting his signature on that paper. In fact, one could argue, everything was lost.

Rose received and signed the document on the morning of Aug. 23. Carol had given birth to their daughter, Cara Chea, the day before and Pete had been there, in the delivery room at Cincinnati’s Jewish Hospital. He had left the Reds in Chicago after managing them to a 6–5 win over the Cubs in what would be his last game in a major league uniform. He had not told his players or his coaches anything about the agreement or the pending suspension. The Reds would learn of his banishment from bulletins on TV, or over the radio in their cars.

Four men signed the five-page banishment document: Rose, Katz, Giamatti and Vincent, and the next morning, at 9 a.m. on Aug. 24, 1989, the commissioner’s office faxed a copy to every team in the major leagues. Pete Rose was out of the game.

The settlement stipulated that “Neither the Commissioner nor Peter Edward Rose shall be prevented by this agreement from making any public statement relating to this matter so long as no such public statement contradicts the terms of this agreement and resolution.” That explains why Rose at a press conference that day continued to forcefully deny that he had bet on baseball, and also why when Giamatti was asked at his own, separate press conference whether he believed Rose had bet on baseball and bet on the Reds he answered, “Yes.”

Giamatti appeared worn that day and was somber when he spoke. Pete too had a deep sadness about him, and had to control his quavering voice when, at the start of his press conference he said, “Baseball is my life.” Soon, though, Rose’s natural feistiness took over, his recalcitrance and his optimism. He vowed that he would be out of baseball for only a “very short period of time,” that he would apply for reinstatement after a year and that he would surely get back in. That evening, for the second night in a row, in an appearance that, to many, seemed at odds with the circumstances of his life, Rose went on the TV shopping network CVN. He offered for purchase autographed bats and jerseys and mounted photos of him on the night he’d passed Ty Cobb, and he chatted carsalesman-style with prospective customers who called in.