Interference (13 page)

Other directors of Seven Arts included Tex McCrary and Maxwell M. Rabb, a former Wall Street attorney who, from 1953 to 1958, had served as President Eisenhower's secretary to the Cabinet and a special assistant to Sherman Adams, Eisenhower's political mentor and a Washington powerbroker.
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Rosenbloom had been a close friend of Florida gambler Michael J. McLaney, a former deputy sheriff in New Orleans who had become a professional golf gambler. McLaney had first introduced the Colts' owner to Chesler, with whom McLaney had owned L'Aiglon, a supper club in Surfside, Miami. In return for that introduction, McLaney was given five thousand shares of stock in Universal Controls as an “introduction fee.”

“Rosenbloom and Chesler were both criticized for making Christmas presents and birthday presents of stock in General Development and Universal Controls,” says McCrary. “And they were accused of touting the stocks [through] the football players on the Colts.” McCrary was a regular in Rosenbloom's owner's box during Colts home games; McCrary's son had been the team's water boy.

Former Baltimore Colts offensive tackle George Preas, who described Rosenbloom “a super man, top-drawer,” told me that he had met both McLaney and Chesler through Rosenbloom. Although he says that he met McLaney only once, “Chesler traveled with the team on occasion. He was a close friend of Carroll.” Upton Bell, who later became the Colts' personnel director, says, “When I first went to the Colts' training camp, Lou Chesler and his kids were there.” Weeb Ewbank told me that he became acquainted with Chesler through Rosenbloom, too.

In September 1958, mobster Morris Dalitz and the Mayfield Road Gang offered to sell their interest in the luxurious, fortresslike, 450-room Hotel Nacional casino in Havana.
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The sale price was $800,000. McLaney was interested and he immediately went to Rosenbloom and Chesler for financing. Rosenbloom personally gave McLaney $240,000 for his share of the Nacional. To pay for
his own interest in the hotel, McLaney sold his stock in Universal for $116,000. After the sale, both Chesler and Rosenbloom began making frequent trips to Cuba.
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According to numerous government officials, McLaney had sought out and received Lansky's approval to purchase the National. The Casino operators enjoyed the cooperation of President Fulgencio Batista, who was nothing more than a Lansky puppet.
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The Nacional had been the regular meeting place for the Chicago and New York crime syndicates.

However, within three months after the sale of the Nacional, Fidel Castro swept down from the Sierra Maestras and overthrew the oppressive, Mafia-controlled Batista regime. After Castro's victory, the underworld—which had hedged its bet and provided support to both sides in the Cuban revolution—believed its investments in Cuba to be safe. However, Castro double-crossed the Mafia the following April. He shut down the gambling and narcotics operations and exiled Lansky; he boarded up the casinos and imprisoned other mobsters.
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Among the biggest losers in the wake of the Castro betrayal were McLaney, who was one of those imprisoned in Cuba, and his partners, Rosenbloom and Chesler, who were safe in the United States.

Also in April 1959, within days after Castro shut down the casinos, Rosenbloom suddenly sold off the bulk of his family's clothing businesses for $7 million in cash and $20 million in stock to the Philadelphia & Reading Corporation, which was a diversified management and holding company with subsidiaries in the apparel, toy, and electrical component industries.
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10 A New Commissioner

ON AUGUST 14, 1959, twenty-seven-year-old Texas oilman Lamar Hunt announced that what soon became known as the American Football League (AFL) had been created to rival the NFL. Hunt was the owner of the new Dallas Texans and one of three sons of H. L. Hunt, Jr., an oil-rich tycoon who was also a big-money sports gambler and a close friend of Mafia bookmaker Frank Erickson. Lamar Hunt had earlier tried and failed to buy both the Chicago Cardinals and a new Dallas franchise for the NFL but was rejected. Consequently, he decided to form his own league.

Harry Wismer—who had been part owner of the Washington Redskins and became the majority owner of the New York Titans, another AFL team—wrote that he had first met Lamar Hunt when the AFL was being formed.
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However, Wismer had previously known Hunt's father. “I first met the [elder] Hunt at a party given by Ray Ryan, an old friend of mine. Ryan [was] one of the biggest gamblers in the country and called the senior Hunt his ‘pigeon.' There was nothing phony about Hunt. He made his fortune by borrowing fifty dollars and betting he could find oil on land where the geologists said there wasn't any. H. L. Hunt's philosophy of life was that a man would succeed if he kept plugging and was willing to gamble. Ryan told me [Wismer] he thought that H.L. bet close to a million dollars a week during the football season. That's a staggering sum to most but a drop in the bucket to him.”
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Author Don Kowet reported, “Hunt's only use for money, outside of making more money, was to wager it. He employed a graduate of MIT as a full-time statistician, to compute the odds on his various bets. He placed those bets through a special communications system, installed in his office, which connected him with the major horse tracks and bookmakers around the country.”
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Bookmaker Marty Kane told me, “H. L. Hunt stiffed about four or five bookmakers for a lot of money, including Gil Beckley. Hunt just told them he wasn't going to pay. He was really a greasy son of a bitch.”

The Hunt family contained serious gamblers. However, there is no evidence that the low-key Lamar Hunt was ever a sports gambler. Yet, it is difficult to believe that he did not, wittingly or unwittingly, pass along inside information about his team to members of his family. There is little in his father's background to suggest that he was above gaining such an edge.

Another AFL team owner was Barron Hilton. He purchased the Los Angeles Chargers and moved the team to San Diego in 1961. A longtime gambler, Hilton was a top executive of the Hilton Hotel chain. He was the son of Conrad Hilton, who had built the first Hilton Hotel in 1919.
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Barron's older brother, Nicky, had been the first husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor.
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Barron Hilton, a college dropout, resisted the hotel business at first, turning down an offer at age nineteen to work for his father. Instead, he bought interests in other companies. By 1960, he had sold off his own business and returned to the family fold. He was immediately appointed by his father as a vice president for the hotel chain. While taking an active role in Hilton affairs, he helped to create the Carte Blanche credit card company and bought the Chargers of the AFL.
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Hilton told
The Wall Street Journal
that he was called into his father's office when his businesses appeared to be in trouble. “I've been reviewing the operations of the football club and I've noticed that you have a very substantial loss of about $900,000,” Conrad Hilton told his son. “And the credit card business looks to me like it's going to lose about $1.5 million. What kind of record are you trying to establish?”
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Barron Hilton later sold his interest in Carte Blanche, but he kept the Chargers.

Hilton had maintained a long-term personal and business relationship with Los Angeles attorney Sidney Korshak, according
to an official statement made by Korshak to the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. Korshak has also been described by law-enforcement agencies as “the link between the legitimate business world and organized crime.” He had been active in Hollywood since the early 1940s but had moved to Los Angeles in January 1948, beginning a new and more sophisticated era of the crime syndicate's penetration of the film industry.
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Korshak had done legal work for Hilton. He had been recommended to Hilton by Patrick Hoy, a mutual friend and a top executive with General Dynamics, the military hardware firm.

The other members of the AFL—all of whom put up $25,000 for their charter franchises, as well as “performance bonds” of $100,000—were

• Philips Petroleum heir and the AFL's cofounder Kenneth Stanley “Bud” Adams of the Houston Oilers, a close friend of the Hunt family, who owned Texas Adams Oil which distributed Philips Petroleum's products;

• minor-league baseball team owner Bob Howsam of Colorado, who purchased the Denver Broncos and immediately named Frank Filchock as his head coach;
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and

• Austrian-born Max Winter, an ex-boxing promoter and vending machine operator, who bought the Minnesota Vikings. Winter was the former owner of the Minneapolis Lakers of the National Basketball Association. The team moved to Los Angeles in 1957 and became the Los Angeles Lakers.

Two other AFL franchises were purchased in the fall of 1959.

• Detroit trucking executive and thoroughbred race horse stable owner Ralph C. Wilson, the owner of Ralph C. Wilson Industries and a onetime minority owner of the Detroit Lions, created the Buffalo Bills after unsuccessfully attempting to gain the use of the Orange Bowl for a Miami franchise.

• Pittston Corporation executive William H. “Billy” Sullivan, Jr., organized the Boston Patriots.
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World War II pilot and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Joe Foss, the former governor of South Dakota, was selected
as the AFL's commissioner. League play was slated to begin in 1960.

The owners of the AFL were nicknamed the Foolish Club. Professional football experts and the media gave the new league little chance of long-term survival.

However, there was good news for the upstart AFL in July 1960. Giving the new league a showcase, ABC bought the five-year television rights to AFL games for $10.65 million. The AFL proved its worth, producing a new, wide-open style of football featuring exciting passers and pass-receivers, as well as high-scoring contests, which caused oddsmakers to take notice and to begin setting lines on the new league's games.

On October 11, 1959, two months after the formation of the AFL, sixty-five-year-old Bert Bell died of a heart attack with six years left on his contract as NFL commissioner. Also, earlier in the year, seventy-one-year-old Tim Mara, the founder of the New York Giants, had a heart attack and died too. His team was taken over by his sons, Wellington and Jack Mara.
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Bell had actually been supportive of the entry of the AFL into the ranks of professional football and provided the new league's management with considerable advice and support. Although he may have done so for altruistic purposes, Bell was also fully aware that in Washington, D.C., Congress was in the midst of its preliminary investigation into possible antitrust violations within the professional sports world. By encouraging the AFL, Bell and the NFL had hedged their bet.

After Bell's death, NFL treasurer Austin Gunsel became the acting chief executive officer of the league. Gunsel, a former FBI agent, wanted to maintain Bell's ritual of keeping in touch with mobsters and bookmakers in order to monitor the betting line. “When my father died,” Upton Bell told me, “Austin Gunsel asked my older brother [Bert Bell, Jr.] who these people were. My brother said, ‘I don't know, and I wouldn't tell you if I did.' Bert Bell promised that as long as they gave him the information every week, he would take their names to his grave—which he did.” Consequently, Gunsel had to develop his own sources.

On January 26, 1960, thirty-three-year-old Alvin “Pete” Rozelle, who had served as the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, was tapped to succeed the seemingly irreplaceable Bell at a meeting of the NFL owners at the Kenilworth Hotel in Miami.
Rozelle was selected as a compromise candidate on the twenty-third ballot of voting.
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He was strongly supported by New York Giants owner Wellington Mara, head coach Paul Brown of the Cleveland Browns, and Carroll Rosenbloom, who placed Rozelle's name in nomination. Rozelle left the room while the vote was taken. A few minutes later, Rosenbloom came out alone and gave Rozelle the good news.

Tall and lanky, Rozelle, who was born in South Gate, a Los Angeles suburb, was a former high school basketball player and teammate of the future Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Duke Snider. After graduation, he spent two years in the Navy, serving in the South Pacific during World War II. When the war ended, he studied at Compton Junior College and then landed a job as a stringer for the sports page at
The Long Beach Press Telegram
before receiving his undergraduate degree. He also worked as Compton's athletic publicity director. That same year, the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles and set up training camp at Compton. Rozelle began working part-time for the Rams.

Encouraged by the Rams' public relations director, Maxwell Styles, Rozelle returned to college and received his degree in English in 1950 from the University of San Francisco, where he also served as athletic news director. Through his association with the university and his past contacts, Rozelle met the Rams general manager, Tex Schramm, who offered him a post as head of the team's newly vacant public relations office. Rozelle worked with the Rams until 1955 when he left the team to take a job with P. K. Macker Public Relations and Advertising in San Francisco. However, urged by Bert Bell, Rozelle returned to the Rams in 1957 to become the team's general manager, replacing Schramm, who had left in the midst of a dispute among the Rams' owners.
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As Rams manager, Rozelle was criticized in 1959 for signing Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon of Louisiana State University before he was eligible. Rozelle had slickly persuaded Cannon to sign an undated contract. However, just after Rozelle became NFL commissioner, a judge voided the contract between Cannon and the Rams and chided Rozelle for his actions. Cannon eventually signed with Bud Adams and the Houston Oilers of the AFL.