Interference (14 page)

The new commissioner, who was married and had a sixteen-month-old daughter, was given a three-year contract that paid
him $50,000 a year—$20,000 more than the league's highest-paid player. After he moved the league's front office from Philadelphia to New York, Rozelle's initial problems with managing the NFL had to do with questions of expansion and the league's own television rights.

Rozelle advocated that the NFL sell its television rights to a single network, and that the money from these rights be evenly divided among the NFL teams. Rozelle's attempts to make such a deal with CBS were struck down by two federal court decisions. However, after Congress passed and President Kennedy signed the Sports Broadcasting Act in September 1961, permitting these kinds of single network arrangements, the NFL signed the first such deal with CBS the following year. The NFL received $9.3 million for two years; each team received nearly $332,000.

“It was like fate,” said Art Rooney. “I don't know of any commissioner in sports who could have done a better job with television and the league as a whole.”
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Rozelle's popularity was well deserved. He was making the NFL owners extremely wealthy as he embarked upon a plan to share the wealth among all the teams. According to Rozelle's “revenue-sharing” program, which was loosely based on the AFL's policy, the NFL owners divided television revenues and league promotional activities evenly; gate receipts for preseason games were split fifty-fifty; revenues for play-off games were equally shared; and gate receipts of regular season games were divided sixty-forty between the home and visiting teams.
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The result of this was that a team with a losing record would still make nearly the same money as the league champion made.

Acting quickly on rumors of corruption in the NFL, Rozelle had investigators probe a 1960 game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Washington Redskins—because of a reported sudden and dramatic change in the point spread. The week before the game, the Steelers were favored by seven points and then suddenly dropped to only one point, forcing bookmakers to take the game off the boards. The game, played in Washington, ended in a 27-27 tie. Those who had placed money on the Redskins and had been given one or more points won their bets.

The results of Rozelle's investigation showed that during the week prior to the game a photograph had been published across the country of Steelers quarterback Bobby Layne—who was holding up his injured passing arm. It was determined that
Layne's well-publicized injury had caused the line to change so dramatically.

The incident contributed to the institutionalization of a new NFL policy—initially begun informally under Bert Bell—which forced NFL teams to file injury reports to the league's front office every Tuesday and Thursday during the football season. As soon as these reports were collected and organized, they were released to the public. Later, NFL teams were required to describe player injuries under one of four categories: probable, questionable, doubtful, and out.

A top NFL official told me, “It's just a matter of making sure that the gamblers and the bookmakers don't have a monopoly on this kind of information. We publish the injury reports so that it becomes common knowledge, taking the edge away from the professional gamblers.”

Also two days after Rozelle became commissioner, the NFL admitted two new teams, the Dallas Cowboys and the Minnesota Vikings, the latter of which had earlier been slated to become an AFL franchise but withdrew when the NFL slot was offered.

In response to the Vikings' action, the new league immediately filed a $10 million antitrust suit against the NFL, which the AFL later lost. Also in 1960 the AFL sold a new franchise, the Oakland Raiders, to an eight-man partnership headed by Y. Chet Soda.
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11 Murchison, Modell, and Ford Buy In

THE FOUNDER OF THE Dallas Cowboys, Clint Murchison, Jr., who wore a crew cut and spectacles, paid $550,000 for the team and selected former Rams general manager Tex Schramm as the architect and general manager of the new franchise. The Cowboys' owner was the son of another wealthy and outspoken Texas oilman.

Murchison's father had been expelled from Trinity College for gambling. Soon after, he became a wildcatter who struck it rich during the Texas oil boom of the 1920s. Murchison Sr. is famous for his observation: “Money is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good. But if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell.” He once bet a million dollars on a single flip of a coin—and lost.

The Murchisons were enthusiastic supporters of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt and major backers of Vice President Richard Nixon in his 1960 presidential campaign against John Kennedy. After Nixon lost the election, he bought a lot from the Murchisons in Beverly Hills for the bargain price of $35,000.

The Nixon property was a part of the exclusive Trousdale Estates, which had been developed by the Murchisons—with the help of a $6.7 million loan from the Teamsters' Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund on February 26, 1959.
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A successful businessman like his father, Clint Murchison, Jr., was also a heavy gambler. The Murchisons operated the Del Mar
racetrack in Southern California. In 1954, profits from the track were diverted to Boys, Inc., a nonprofit corporation to help homeless boys which had been created by the Murchisons and their business associate Sid W. Richardson, another high-stakes gambler.

In 1959, the Murchisons and Richardson were investigated by the California state legislature for allegedly using Boys, Inc. as a vehicle for the racetrack owners to evade taxes. When the investigation was concluded, both the state and the IRS began to levy taxes against Boys, Inc. Later, a federal court overturned the rulings and Boys, Inc. was again exempted from federal taxes.

An annual guest of the Murchisons' nearby Hotel Del Charro in La Jolla, California, was J. Edgar Hoover. A horse-racing fan and another big gambler, Hoover had made a ritual of checking into the Del Charro during the racing season at Del Mar. When the Murchisons and Richardson found themselves in trouble over Boys, Inc., Hoover stepped forward in the midst of the controversy and said, “I know Clint Murchison quite well and I think he would be the last person in the country to use such a plan as a clever tax or business subterfuge. In fact, I spoke to Murchison about ten years ago about devoting some time and help to youth work and the charitable corporation of Del Mar is one of his answers. This work helps directly in making the nation sturdy, for communist penetration is currently directed mainly at labor organizations and youth organizations.” Hoover also described Murchison as “the type of rugged individualist that made this country great.”
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Young Murchison had been a short but tough, 120-pound halfback at a New Jersey prep school. He did his undergraduate work in electrical engineering at Duke, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, and received his master's degree in mathematics from MIT. By the time he bought the Cowboys, the personal wealth of his family was estimated as being more than $2 billion—which, in Texas, was second only to their longtime rivals, the Hunt family.

The owner of a labyrinth of businesses, the highly secretive Murchison was investigated by no fewer than nine federal agencies and two congressional committees during a ten-year period beginning in 1955. The Senate Commerce Committee wrote that Gerardo Catena of New Jersey, a top-ranking member of the
Vito Genovese crime family, “allegedly owned almost 20% of all the production of Murchison Oil Lease [Company], Oklahoma” during the early 1950s.

Murchison was also involved in business partnerships with numerous associates of Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, the most feared Mafia boss in the South. And Murchison personally had real estate and banking ties with Marcello. Although Murchison had always denied knowing Marcello, he did admit that he occasionally had dinner at the Plantation, Marcello's New Orleans restaurant.
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Joseph Campisi was a close friend of Murchison. Campisi, the owner of the Egyptian Lounge in Dallas, was associated with numerous underworld figures, particularly Joseph Civello, the head of the Marcello-controlled Dallas Mafia. Campisi has never been convicted of any crime but was arrested in 1944 for murder. The case was dismissed when the county grand jury determined that he had acted in self-defense. However, he has been linked by law-enforcement agencies to Marcello and “with both gambling and bookmaking activities in the Dallas area.”
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An employee of the Dallas Cowboys told my associate, William Scott Malone, “Joe Campisi comes by the office on a regular basis. And whenever he does enter the [headquarters] of the Dallas Cowboys, everyone seems to bow to him … He can go in and out of any office he wants. And everyone is just sort of thrilled to see him …

“During draft time, he brings by dinner because everyone works late getting ready for the draft. He supplies pizza and so forth for the general office staff. He is considered part of the Cowboy family.”

Murchison also hired Washington lobbyist I. Irving Davidson to handle public relations for one of his companies. Davidson had often boasted that he was a “door opener and arranger” for Marcello.
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Prior to buying the Cowboys, Murchison had considered buying the San Francisco 49ers and, when that failed, made George Marshall a bid for the Redskins. Marshall opposed Murchison's attempt to purchase any NFL team. But he relented after Murchison bought the rights to the Redskins' fight song, which had been obtained by Marshall's ex-wife as part of their divorce settlement. Consequently, Murchison refused to give Marshall the right to use the song. Soon after, Murchison bought
the Cowboys with no opposition—and Marshall got his fight song back.

Featured, along with his brother, on the cover of the June 16, 1961, issue of
Time
, Murchison told the magazine, “Some people say we are gamblers, but that isn't true. In gambling, you are betting on Lady Luck; in speculating, you have your mind to help you, and you are betting on yourself.”

Also in March 1961, thirty-five-year-old Arthur B. Modell bought the controlling interest in the Cleveland Browns. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Modell quit school in the tenth grade to get a job and help his family through the Depression. He later finished high school at night and then joined the Army Air Force in 1943. After the war, he studied broadcasting in New York and became a producer/director for a daytime television program.

In 1954, he slid out of television and into the advertising game, joining the L. H. Hartmann Company, which had primarily handled ads for liquor companies since the repeal of Prohibition. Because of his business savvy, Modell soon became a partner in the firm. One of the companies with which Hartmann did business was Tele King Corporation, a television company founded and owned by syndicate figure Meyer Lansky.

L. H. Hartmann also introduced Modell to Ben Marden, a former bootlegger and casino operator in Havana who was associated with Lansky. “He was a great friend,” Modell said of Marden in an interview with reporter Peter Phipps of the
Akron Beacon Journal
. “He had one of the first casinos ever in Fort Lee [New Jersey] in the 30s … I was a friend of his long after it closed down.”

Modell also had ties to several bookmakers and gamblers. For instance, after buying the Browns, he became a partner in a horse-racing stable with Youngstown native Morris “Mushy” Wexler, who had been named by the Kefauver Committee as one of the “leading hoodlums” in McBride's national wire service.
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A truck driver for McBride during the Cleveland newspaper wars, Wexler, who was linked to Dalitz's Mayfield Road Gang, ran the Empire News Service and was one of McBride's twenty-four “distributors,” handling business throughout the states of Ohio and West Virginia. During Wexler's tenure as the head of Empire News, Youngstown, which experienced considerable political corruption, became a safe haven for bookmakers, gamblers, and
the mobsters with whom they did business. He had been arrested no fewer than four times for gambling and bookmaking—but each time the charges were dismissed.

The way the bookmaking worked at Empire was described by Eliot Ness, who had become the director of Cleveland's Department of Public Safety after his racket-busting days with “the Untouchables” in Chicago. Ness wrote in 1940, “The entries, odds and results of the races come to the Empire News Service Company via teletype over the Western Union Telegraph lines and are then sent out over Ohio Bell Telephone Company's lines to the numerous bookmaking establishments by a party operating a switchboard in the offices of the Empire News Service Company.”

Joe Nellis, the assistant counsel of the Kefauver Committee, told me, “Mushy Wexler was Mickey McBride's man. Wexler owned a restaurant called the Theatrical Grille in Cleveland where all the ‘boys' used to gather. Wexler was an inveterate gambler, and he had even been in business in Covington, Kentucky, with bad guys like [Cleveland Mafia figures] Al Polizzi and Jimmy Licavoli. Wexler was a bookmaker, and his restaurant was a known hangout for the Cleveland gambling and bookmaking crowd.” Among Wexler's most frequent patrons was his old friend Art Modell.

Bernie Parrish, a former Browns defensive back, wrote in his autobiography that Louis “Babe” Triscaro, a Cleveland Teamsters official and underworld figure, had told him that Modell had paid Triscaro $1,900 to steal “a police file investigation of Arthur B. Modell's background and possible connection with old-time Mafia figures.” Modell has admitted to having been a friend of Triscaro but described Parrish's charge as “unadulterated garbage.” Parrish also described Modell as “a rabid sports-fan gambler.”
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When Modell married actress Patricia Breslin, the ceremony was held at the Las Vegas home of William Weinberger, who owned a restaurant near Wexler's saloon. Weinberger also was one of Modell's closest friends and became the president of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. One of Weinberger's top executives at Caesars was Jerome Zarowitz, who was convicted for attempting to fix the 1946 NFL championship game.