Interference (11 page)

In 1953, his first season as the Colts' owner, the team sold
15,755 season tickets, worth nearly $300,000, to Baltimore fans. Rosenbloom had banked $1.5 million at the time of his purchase and vowed that when this money had been spent then he'd pull out of the NFL. But the Colts were so successful that Rosenbloom never had to touch his reserve funds.

At first, Rosenbloom was a passive owner until he saw one particular play. The Colts' great halfback George Taliaferro told me, “We were playing the Green Bay Packers in Green Bay in 1953 and the game, for all intents and purposes, had been decided. We were getting beaten badly. When Green Bay kicked off to us after one of their many touchdowns, I took the ball and just took off. I went down the sideline and took a big hit. Rosenbloom later asked me why I just didn't go out of bounds. And I told him, ‘Because you can't make a touchdown if you go out of bounds.' To me, it was just playing football.

“Rosenbloom said that it was that kind of determination that helped him make his decision. If I wanted to play that badly and wanted to go that extra yard, he wanted to put together an organization that would challenge the champions in the National Football League.”

After witnessing Taliaferro's unbridled devotion to the game of football, Rosenbloom decided to become more active in team matters, and he promised the city of Baltimore a championship team within five years. Before long, season ticket holders numbered over fifty thousand.

8 Growing Pains

THE NFL GREW REMARKABLY between 1953 and 1958. Television began taking an active interest in broadcasting games across the league. The now-defunct DuMont Network bought the rights to the NFL championship game beginning in 1951 for $75,000. In 1955, DuMont was outbid by NBC, which paid $100,000 to broadcast the title game. The following year, CBS began airing some regular season games.

On December 28, 1956, professional football players organized the NFL Players Association, a guild founded along the lines of the players' union of major-league baseball, which had been organized in 1946. Every NFL team, with the exception of George Halas's Chicago Bears, joined immediately. For years, Halas's players were among the lowest-paid in the league.

The NFL players were concerned about several issues, which had led to the formation of the union. Among them were the simple questions of who was going to pick up the players' expenses during training camp and whether the players should be paid for the exhibition season. A player representative was selected from each participating NFL team to discuss these and other problems. The player reps then selected two players, Norm van Brocklin of the Los Angeles Rams and Kyle Rote of the New York Giants, to be their spokesmen during a meeting with Bert Bell.

Although the NFL owners refused to recognize the players' union, they agreed to begin paying the players for their training
camp expenses and through the exhibition season. Carroll Rosenbloom took the lead among the NFL owners to grant these concessions to the players. After this initial peace, Bell decreed, “It is submitted that if any problems now exist or hereafter arise, the player or players on each club should meet with their individual owners for the purpose of discussing and resolving their particular grievances.”

Bell's declaration didn't hold for very long. On February 25, 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, to reinforce a decision that, unlike major-league baseball, the NFL was subject to federal antitrust laws. This landmark decision against the NFL resulted from a suit filed by William “Squato” Radovich, a guard from the University of Southern California who had played with the Detroit Lions from 1938 to 1941 and in 1945 after the war. Radovich then jumped leagues and began playing with the Los Angeles Dons of the AAFC until 1947. When Radovich tried to return to the NFL, he couldn't find a team that would take him.

Radovich claimed that he had been blacklisted by the NFL owners. He filed suit, charging that they had tied players to one particular team and prevented them, by the use of the NFL's reserve clause, from becoming free agents. The U.S. Justice Department under President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened in the case on behalf of Radovich; he won his case but never played professional football again.

Even after the Radovich decision—which would haunt the league for years to come—the NFL owners still refused to formally recognize the NFLPA as the official bargaining agent for all NFL players, granting only minor concessions after another confrontation between the owners and the players in December 1957.

Meantime, during the 1950s, gambling had become a major problem within the NFL but little was made of it publicly. Mobster Mickey McBride had sold the Cleveland Browns in 1953 for $600,000 to a partnership headed by Ohio businessmen David R. Jones and Saul Silberman who personally bought half of McBride's interest. Silberman was the colorful president of Tropical Park, Randall Raceway, and Painesville's Commodore Downs.

A business associate of several well-known bookmakers, Silberman was forced to sell his interest in the team after the 1953 season because of his gambling activities. “[H]e used to call me
for information on our upcoming games,” wrote Browns head coach Paul Brown, “and I never understood why until I found out that he was betting on football games, forbidden for all owners by the NFL constitution. I reported these calls to Bert Bell, as required by the rules, and a short time later, Silberman was ordered by Bell to sell his Browns stock because of conduct detrimental to football.”
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Silberman sold out for $575,000, almost doubling his initial investment. This is the only known case in which an NFL majority or minority owner was forced to sell his interest in a team because of his gambling activities.

Nevertheless, gambling in the NFL continued. Vincent Piersante, the former head of the organized-crime unit of the Michigan attorney general's office, told me, “There was alleged to have been some pretty heavy betting going on by the Detroit Lions players on a game-to-game basis with a Detroit bookmaker named Dice Dawson. But it never became public. None of the games I investigated were ever proven to be thrown. But there were situations of shaving points or working with the point spread, particularly when the bookies were working with the players who had bet on the games.”

Born in 1921, Donald “Dice” Dawson was a popular figure in the Detroit gambling world and well known among sports figures in the Motor City. Former Detroit Lions star Dick “Night Train” Lane, who says that Dawson was a friend of his, told me, “Don is a good operator. He hung around gamblers all of his life, and that's what he wanted to be. But he is a very likable guy and always fun to be around.”

Dawson is the son of a wealthy and respected Detroit Chevrolet car dealer. When young Dawson was thirteen, he was the water boy for the Detroit Lions, then owned by gambler Dick Richards. Dawson began gambling at an early age and in high school earned his nickname, Dice, because of his crap-shooting abilities. He attended Holy Cross, through which he became acquainted with other alumni, including attorney Edward Bennett Williams who would later become president of the Washington Redskins. Dawson also was in the Marine Corps and served in the South Pacific during World War II.

Upon his release from military service, Dawson went to work for his father, selling Chevrolets. He also started betting heavily on sporting events. During my interview with Dawson,
he said, “I wasn't an actual bookmaker. But I used to get the guys from the country club where I belonged in Detroit. They used to bet through a guy with me. I bankrolled it. I booked it all—but indirectly. I gave the booker twenty-five percent of what we won.”

Dawson admitted to me that he did business with Lions quarterback Bobby Layne. “It was Bobby Layne who was the bettor, who I bet for,” Dawson says. “I knew him better than [I knew] my own brothers. And he did plenty. He'd be playing in his own game, and he'd be betting all over the board. He'd bet five, six, seven games on a Sunday.”

Like Night Train Lane, quarterback Bobby Layne is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He is viewed as being among the best pressure players ever to play the game of football. Layne was born in Santa Ana, Texas, and grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. A graduate of Texas University, he played his first year in the NFL with the Chicago Bears and with the defunct New York Bulldogs, which was owned by singer Kate Smith, in his second. In 1950, he joined the Detroit Lions and led his team to three NFL championships.

Layne was thought to have shaved points or participated in the fixing of several NFL games, according to several bookmakers and law-enforcement officials. One was the final game of the 1956 season in which the 9-2 Lions played the 8-2-1 Chicago Bears on December 16. Layne left the game in the second quarter supposedly with a concussion. The Bears won the game, 38-21, and the Western Division title.

Lions receiver and 1955 Heisman Trophy winner Howard “Hopalong” Cassady told author Bernie Parrish of the Cleveland Browns that Layne “had faked his injury” during the 1956 Bears game. However, Parrish added that “other players discounted the story because of the enmity between Hoppy and Bobby Layne.”
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Don Dawson told me, “I wasn't involved in that game. He [Layne] was then with a bookmaker in Odessa, Texas. Bobby was whacked pretty good in the 1956 Bears game. He really was. If he was doing anything, like betting against himself, the last thing he would've wanted to do was get injured. He would've wanted to continue in the game to control it. I would say that Bobby did not throw that particular game. It was not fixed.”

However, Layne did fix games and shave points on other occasions. “I used to go down and play golf with Bobby in a
tournament and would stay at his house,” Dawson recalls. “Bobby was shaving, and he was doing all the betting. When I got to know Bobby, he blew the other guy [in Odessa] off. And then he started betting with me. He came to me. He bought a couple of cars from me when I first met him.”
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When I asked Dawson what the mechanics of the fixes were, Dawson replied, “Layne would come to me and say, ‘I need some bread.' Then he'd ask me to make a bet for him and myself. If the Lions were ten-point favorites, he'd say, ‘Well, we'll probably win by six or seven. We won't cover the spread.'”

Dawson adds that Layne had fixed games or shaved points in no fewer than seven games over a period of four years—while Layne played with Detroit Lions and later the Pittsburgh Steelers.
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On the subject of whether there were other players who fixed games and shaved points, Dawson told me, “There were a lot of players who did business. That's all I can say. I wouldn't want to say anything else because they are still alive and have families. Bobby was one of several players I knew. Naturally, I wanted to do business with the quarterback because he handles the ball on every play. And a lot of quarterbacks were shaving points. Sure, it happened. The players didn't make any money [from playing football], and so they bet. In those days, they were barely getting by. They were getting their brains beaten out for almost nothing.

“I was involved with players in at least thirty-two NFL games that were dumped or where points were shaved. I knew a lot of players and then through them I got acquainted with other players and then did business with them.”
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Within the organized-crime syndicate, troubles were brewing as the U.S. Senate created yet another select committee to investigate corrupt union and management practices. In January 1957, the Senate Rackets Committee, as it became known, was created and chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas. His chief counsel was a tough, young attorney Robert F. Kennedy, whose brother John Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts, was a member of the panel. The Kennedy brothers were the sons of Joseph P. Kennedy, the former ambassador to Great Britain, who, in his past life, had been a Prohibition bootlegger and an associate of Frank Costello.

But the Kennedy brothers, especially Robert, were not their
father and did not share his enthusiasm for the dark side of American business. To the contrary, their driving passion was to shed some light on it.

The underworld was so concerned over this investigation that it became a main topic of discussion the following November when over a hundred reputed mobsters from around the country gathered in Apalachin, New York, at the home of mob boss Joseph M. Barbara, for the largest-known meeting of organized-crime figures. However, through brilliant police work, the state police discovered the Apalachin Conference and raided it, arresting fifty-eight of those in attendance, many of whom had been convicted for illegal gambling. Several of these gangsters were marched in front of a national television audience after being subpoenaed to testify before the McClellan Committee.

The committee would operate until March 1960 after conducting 270 days of hearings and receiving testimony from 1,526 witnesses who filled 46,150 transcript pages. Congress was finally going to war with the organized-crime syndicate.

While the Senate Rackets Committee conducted its investigation, the organized-crime syndicate's gambling operations went further underground.

Handicapper William Kaplan, a chunky man with a ruddy complexion, born in 1897, had created the Kaplan Sports Service during the 1930s. He put out football line information to his subscribers in a scratch sheet called
Handicapped
. A bachelor, he operated out of Chicago's Croydon Hotel. In the Chicago yellow pages, his business was listed under “Football Service.”

Kaplan was also a close associate of Sidney Wyman, a former St. Louis bookmaker and a known front man for mob casino operations in Las Vegas. Among other jobs, Wyman had worked at the Flamingo and the Riviera.

Kaplan paid protection to Ralph Pierce, a former personal adviser to Al Capone. Pierce operated out of Chicago's Fifth Ward, which was represented by Sidney Korshak's brother Marshall, and answered to Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Pierce—who had been acquitted of shaking down several Hollywood studios—was a top suspect in several gangland murders. He had earlier controlled John Scanlan, who had owned Mid-West News, a Chicago-based racing wire service, which had been run out of business by the Kefauver Committee.