Interference (12 page)

In 1957, Pierce—along with two other Chicago mobsters,
Gus Alex, who had taken the Fifth thirty-nine times before the McClellan Committee, and Alfred Frabotta—leaned on the sixty-year-old Kaplan and allegedly forced him to accept a partner, local mob soldier Donald Angelini, also known as Don Angel.

Already starting to burn out, Kaplan, who wanted to make the partnership look voluntary, told oddsmaker Bobby Martin, “I'd like to come to Miami for three or four months a year. So I'm going to bring someone in with me.” Kaplan moved into the Peter Miller Hotel in Miami Beach when winter began to approach.

I asked Angelini whether Gus Alex had forced him on Kaplan. Angelini replied, “That's not true. But I don't want to go into that. Bill and I had similar interests. He was a helluva guy. We got along fine. He was like a father to me.”

Born in December 1926, Angelini had had several scrapes with the law. Between 1946 and 1949, he was arrested four times for disorderly conduct and twice for traffic violations. Between 1950 and 1954, he was arrested four times for gambling violations—while using the alias Marc Schwartz.

When Angelini joined Kaplan, their handicapping service became Angel-Kaplan Sports News, Inc. Angelini and Kaplan contracted with Sam Minkus, the owner of National Publications of Miami, the largest producer of football betting cards in the United States—fifty thousand a week. Government prosecutors estimated that the underworld kept 80 percent of the take through its use of betting cards—in which gamblers picked no fewer than three and as many as twenty winners from a choice of thirty college and pro football games. A three-winner bet paid 4 to 1; a twenty-winner game paid 5,000 to 1.

“Angelini was a genius at sports handicapping,” a Chicago authority on the local underworld told me. “He had the best track record around for helping the bookmakers balance their books. He knew how to set a line. He was also responsible for bringing others into the business as well.”

Martin adds that after hiring Angelini, Kaplan told him that the Angel-Kaplan line was going great guns. Kaplan told Martin, “That was the best thing I ever did. I'm making more money and have more free time than ever before.” The Chicago Crime Commission proved that Kaplan grossed “between ninety thousand and a hundred thousand dollars during the football season.” But that figure was considered quite low.

There were consequences to his newly expanded partnership
, mainly exposure. Kaplan was subpoenaed before a federal grand jury in August 1958 in Indianapolis, Indiana, that was investigating a Terre Haute gambling syndicate. Several arrests had already been made of bookmakers Kaplan acknowledged doing business with. “Sure,” Kaplan told prosecutors, “I traded information, such as handicapping, with the Terre Haute fellows. I paid them seventy-five dollars for their information, and they paid me seven hundred and twenty dollars during the football season for my service.”

Of course, these sums were small potatoes. But Kaplan had never been anything but. However, his partner, Don Angelini, had become a man to watch.

9 Winning Some and Losing Some

ON DECEMBER 28, 1958, nationally televised professional football came of age when Carroll Rosenbloom's Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants, 23-17, for the NFL championship. After missing an earlier attempt, Colts placekicker Steve Myhra booted a twenty-yard field goal with seven seconds left to play in regulation, tying the game at 17-17.

The game then went into the first sudden-death play-off in postseason play. The Giants won the toss and chose to receive. However, they failed to make a first down and were forced to punt. The Colts received the Giants' punt and marched eighty yards downfield in thirteen plays. The Colts' Johnny Unitas—a quarterback drafted and released by the Pittsburgh Steelers whom Rosenbloom signed for a mere $7,000 in 1956—completed four passes during the drive. Halfback Alan Ameche also tore off a twenty-three-yard run on a trap play.

A few plays later, with second down and goal-to-go on the Giants eight yard line—easy field goal range—the Colts gambled and elected to pass, with Unitas throwing to Jim Mutscheller who was downed on the one yard line. On third down, the Colts' bench again refused to send in kicker Myhra to end the game. Instead, Unitas gave the ball to Ameche, who plunged in for the touchdown and the championship with eight minutes and fifteen seconds elapsed in the sudden-death period.

A fourth down decision never had to be made. But, for years, rumors have circulated that the betting line influenced the final play.

Johnny Unitas told me that no one had ever told him about any bets on the game. “I called all the plays,” he says. “If there were any audibles to be done, I did those at the line of scrimmage. I was responsible for calling for the pass and for calling Ameche's number for the winning touchdown.

“Any time there is a field goal situation, the field goal team would be sent in from the bench. But they never sent the field goal team in, so my job was to go for the touchdown.”

Recalling the final moments of the game, the Colts' head coach, Weeb Ewbank, told me, “We had missed one field goal, and we had luckily gotten one to tie the game to put it in overtime. We did not have a great placekicker. I made the decision not to send the field goal team out there.

“In the closing minutes of the game, there was a time-out. John came over and asked, ‘What are you thinking?' And I said, ‘Alan is a fine ball carrier, and he doesn't fumble the ball.' But the one thing we needed was to have the ball in front of the goalposts because we wanted an opportunity to kick if we had to.

“When John faded back to pass, I was afraid that somebody would hook his arm. I have seen too many times where somebody hooks an arm, misses an assignment, or just falls down. Too many things could happen. When anyone asks me why we passed, I tell them, ‘Ask John. He was the one who called it.'”
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According to author Kay Iselin Gilman, “There was gossip among so-called Football Insiders that owner Carroll Rosenbloom had placed a mammoth bet on the game and that Weeb called for a touchdown to ensure that the Colts would beat the point spread. Weeb termed these innuendos ‘So much nonsense, I had no idea what the point spread was and I couldn't have cared less.'”
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During my interview with Ewbank, he said, “I was with the Colts for nine years, and I never talked to Carroll Rosenbloom or any of his friends during a ball game. I wasn't even conscious of what the line on the game was. Carroll never told me anything like that. He never gambled around me.”

However, later in the interview, Ewbank complained that he did have trouble with Rosenbloom because of his attempts to interfere with his on-field coaching decisions. But Rosenbloom didn't deal with Ewbank directly in these instances. “He would say it to the general manager, Don Kellett. And then Kellett would come to me. And I'd say to Kellett, ‘Do you feel that way?'
And Kellett would say, ‘No, but I have to sit up there with Carroll.'

“Of course, I would do what Carroll wanted. And then I'd get in trouble with the players because they though I had made the decision.”

However, Ewbank insists that Rosenbloom did not use Kellett as his messenger during the final minutes of the 1958 championship game.

Nevertheless, according to numerous figures in sports gambling, the decision by the Colts' management to go for the touchdown instead of the field goal was “no decision.” One major bookmaker told me, “You have to understand that a week before the game, the Colts were favored by three and a half points. So much money was coming in on them that the point spread in some places really went up to four and a half, five, and even five and a half points. The talk was that Rosenbloom and some big-time gambling buddy of his had taken the Colts and given the points and bet a million bucks. That's some serious money. If it were your team and you had that kind of money at stake, would you go for the field goal and win the game but lose the bet? Or would you risk everything, go for the touchdown to win it all?”

Once and for all, Rosenbloom did indeed bet on the game, and it was for a million dollars, which he split with a friend.

Oddsmaker Bobby Martin confirmed the wager to me. “We knew that there was unnatural money showing up and driving the spread up,” Martin says. “We ascertained that Lou Chesler and another guy were making bets for and with Carroll Rosenbloom. Chesler was known as a big gambler.”

Ed Curd also knew about the Rosenbloom bet. “[Bookmaker] Gil Beckley was one of my best friends, and he always wanted to get my opinion on things. He told me about the 1958 championship game. Carroll had done his business with Gil. And Carroll was quite a player.”

Gene Nolan of Baton Rouge, another major bookmaker and close associate of Beckley, confirmed, “Gil handled that overtime game bet.”

Also, an official with the NFL told me that Bert Bell knew about the bet and had scolded Rosenbloom for his gambling activities.

The Colts repeated as NFL champions in 1959, again defeating the Giants, this time, 31-16. It is not known whether Rosenbloom
bet heavily or not on that game. No unnatural money appeared—although, as any gambler knows, Rosenbloom could have learned his lesson and had his bookmaker lay off his large bet in small increments all over the country. Numerous people who knew Rosenbloom also knew that he gambled heavily with Chesler, his business partner.

Lou Chesler, a three-hundred-pound Toronto financier, was also a business associate of and occasional bagman for crime-syndicate financier Meyer Lansky of Florida. Chesler made his millions by purchasing Canadian mining stocks, especially Loredo Uranium Mines—through which he had met Lansky and, later, New York mobster “Trigger” Mike Coppola, a major banker in the Mafia's national bookmaking operations.

Chesler had met Coppola through Gil Beckley, who had succeeded Frank Erickson as the crime syndicate's top layoff bookmaker during the 1950s after Erickson went to prison. Chesler and Beckley had met while Beckley was operating out of New York; Chesler also made bets with Beckley's bookmaker friends Max Courtney and Frank Ritter, the founders of the Courtney-Reed Sports Service of New York and later Montreal.
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Courtney and Ritter, both former associates of Erickson and New York underworld figure Dutch Schultz, were later expelled from Canada and returned to the United States where they were joined by a third bookmaker, Charles Brudner. Everyone in the Montreal crowd worked alongside Charles Gordon, formerly of the Louisiana/Texas Gulf Coast region, who was described by the Kefauver Committee as “a main cog in a national football betting syndicate.”

In 1956, Chesler, who was then operating in the United States, became part of the investment syndicate that took over the Florida-based Chemical Research Company and renamed it the General Development Corporation, a home-building and financing firm that developed three small Florida communities.
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Carroll Rosenbloom was among the major stockholders in General Development, along with publisher Gardner Cowles and investment banker John Weinberg. Another big stockholder was Miami businessman Max Orovitz, also a longtime associate of Meyer Lansky.

Public-relations man John Reagan “Tex” McCrary, a business partner of Rosenbloom and Chesler, told me, “I knew Carroll very well. I first met him through Chesler. He was Chesler's
best friend. And they were clients of my PR firm. We handled public relations for the General Development Corporation.”

Another associate of Chesler and Rosenbloom explains, “Chesler didn't control General Development, but he brought the company the money with which it could go forward and develop these various parts of Florida. Chesler was way ahead of that parade. The trouble with Chesler was that he loved to get drunk at night, and that was dangerous.”

That same year, Chesler began to purchase failed companies and use them to obtain millions of dollars in bank loans. Along with Carroll Rosenbloom and New York attorney Morris Mac Schwebel, he rebuilt one of these companies, Universal Products, and renamed it Universal Controls—a company then listed on the New York Stock Exchange that specialized in the leasing of pari-mutuel equipment for racetracks through its American Totalizator subsidiary.

Schwebel told me, “Carroll was an extremely competent businessman. He was a man of his word. Chesler brought Carroll along as an additional investor [in Universal Controls]. I was Carroll's guest on many occasions in his box at the Colts games.”

In 1956—through another shell company renamed Associated Artists—the Chesler-Rosenbloom-Schwebel group moved into show business. Schwebel continues, “The motion picture studios did not want to invite the wrath of the theater operators if they gave movies to that horrible thing called ‘television.' There were simply no movies around for television. Through negotiations that took place between Lou Chesler, Eliot Hyman, myself, and the Warner people, we were able to buy the pre-1948 library from Warner Brothers for twenty-one million dollars. Once we got those pictures—all the Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet films—in no time did we pay off the debt incurred. And all of the shareholders made substantial profits. That was the beginning of any decent pictures for television.”
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Along with board chairman Chesler, Schwebel credits Associated Artists president Eliot Hyman with finalizing the deal. “He ended up with Seven Arts, the company that showed the cartoons on television.”

Seven Arts was founded in 1958 by Hyman and another Associated Artists board member, film producer Ray Stark. It became a motion picture production and distribution firm. The new company then purchased the rights to several movies and
cartoons from the Canadian-based Globe Film Productions—in return for nearly 350,000 shares of Seven Arts stock.

Soon after, the Chesler-Rosenbloom-Schwebel group purchased Globe's interest in Seven Arts and took control of the company. Chesler became chairman of the board of Seven Arts and its largest stockholder, the second and third largest being directors Mac Schwebel and Carroll Rosenbloom, respectively.