Interference (42 page)

Tampa Bay owner Hugh Culverhouse was retained as the DeBartolos' tax attorney for the 49ers' sale. At that time, NFL Security reportedly could find nothing in the DeBartolos' background to prevent them from buying the team.

However, when I asked NFL Security chief Jack Danahy about that report, as well as the nature of the senior DeBartolo's background, Danahy replied, “I'm not going to discuss that one.” It was the only time during my interviews with Danahy that he refused to answer a question.

Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis stated in a sworn deposition that he, too, was directly involved in the sale of the 49ers to DeBartolo. “The selling group, I guess, was the San Francisco 49ers consisting of the two Morabito women,
³
[and] Lou Spadia, and Frank Mieuli
⁴
would stay on with his—I think he had ten percent. The DeBartolo family would be buying ninety percent of the 49ers with options from Mieuli if he wants to sell or if he wants to buy another five percent. I think they gave him a right based on his preemptive right not to let them buy.”

“And you also represented the buying group and that was the DeBartolos?” asked the attorney questioning Davis.

“I represented the buying group to the DeBartolos. I didn't represent the 49ers group. I kind of brought them all together and kind of advised both of them what I thought was fair and et cetera, like that, yes.”
⁵

In return for his role as intermediary, Davis reportedly received a “finder's fee” of $100,000, paid by the DeBartolos. However, Davis has been coy about the figure, indicating it was probably much higher.
⁶

Soon after the DeBartolos bought the 49ers, an FBI wiretap picked up Los Angeles mobster Jimmy Fratianno discussing a
meeting with New Mexico criminal lawyer William Marchiondo to be held in San Francisco. The transcript of the conversation stated:

“Fratianno: Hey don't forget now: when the Miami Dolphins play, you're going to come over here. See, I got it arranged so you're going to sit with this guy, the owner of the 49ers.

“Marchiondo: Well, I want to talk with this guy, but that's a bad time for me to leave …”

Fratianno explained the conversation to my associate, William Scott Malone, “I arranged through this friend of mine [Youngstown Mafia figure Ronald Carabbia] for an attorney in New Mexico to sit with DeBartolo in the press box. They wanted to talk some kind of business. I don't know what it was. So I arranged a meeting.”

Fratianno added that DeBartolo Sr. was “very friendly” with Carabbia.
⁷
He also said that the two men “used to go on junkets to the Tropicana [in Las Vegas]. And [DeBartolo] was a pretty heavy gambler. He would lose a lot of money. He had a pretty good line of credit in Vegas.”

Ronald J. Parr, a racetrack owner and a respected government informant, who once wore a wire during an investigation of DeBartolo, told Malone that he had come to know the shopping mall king well. “DeBartolo is a heavy, heavy gambler,” Parr alleges. “I mean, he bets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars on the outcome of a football game. When you have a guy like that owning a football team, it makes you very nervous.”

The DeBartolo racetrack ownership issue also posed a striking difference of the required standards demanded by officials of the NFL and major-league baseball. Jack Danahy told me that racetrack ownership by NFL team owners “didn't bother me. That was a legitimate enterprise. There's no prohibition against owning a racetrack.”

Consequently, while DeBartolo was being turned away by professional baseball for his racetrack ties, he was embraced by
the NFL. And DeBartolo's situation in the NFL was not unlike that of the Rooney family of Pittsburgh.

In addition to the Steelers—which Art Rooney's son Dan operated—the Rooney family owned Yonkers Raceway in Yonkers, New York, and the Liberty Bell Raceway in northeastern Philadelphia, both of which were harness-racing tracks.
⁸
The Rooney family also bought the Continental racetrack, a thoroughbred
track in Philadelphia, and the Palm Beach Kennel Club, a Florida dog track. And they owned Shamrock Farms, a thoroughbred stable in Winfield, Maryland. The family's sports operations were consolidated under the Ruanaidh Corporation.

Author William Henry Paul notes, “While Art gambled on horses, his sons gamble on the tracks where they race. Art says the family borrowed to the hilt to swing the purchase of Yonkers Raceway in 1972 for $45 million in cash plus assumption of $7 million in liabilities. ‘Sometimes I wonder whether we're stretching ourselves too thin,' he says, shaking his head slowly.”
⁹

At the same time that DeBartolo faced repeated humiliation trying to buy a professional baseball team, the Rooneys purchased another racetrack, Green Mountain in Pownal, Vermont—with no complaints from the NFL, despite evidence of organized crime's past involvement with the track. Raymond Patriarca, the boss of the New England Mafia, had been involved in some of the decisions made by the previous Green Mountain management.
¹⁰
The former president of Green Mountain was a close associate of Patriarca, who had a hidden interest in Berkshire Downs, along with New York Mafia chief Thomas Lucchese.

Pownal reporter Helen Renner questioned Art Rooney's son John Rooney, the president of the Vermont track, “as to organized crime at Green Mountain.” Rooney replied that he did not “feel major criminal elements had any foothold here. He pointed out that any large enterprise, financially attractive, will have its hangers-on of petty rascals, but there is no evidence of serious problems here.”

34 The Quiet Man

MIAMI OLDSMOBILE DEALER AND high-stakes gambler Richard Fincher is a former Florida state senator with ties to major organized-crime figures and narcotics dealers. Federal investigators have identified Fincher as “the center of a major bookmaking ring, which operates through a labyrinth of automobile dealerships [throughout] the country.”

Fincher is truly a man of mystery who, somehow, seems to show up everywhere and knows just about everyone. For instance, Fincher has been a longtime friend of Mike McLaney, who had operated a casino in Havana in cooperation with Carroll Rosenbloom and Lou Chesler.
¹

Fincher had also been a business partner of President Nixon's banker/friend Bebe Rebozo, and Michael O'Neil, the owner of General Tire and Rubber Company, in the development of Lummus Island, a subsidiary of Fisher Island, Inc. in south Florida. Responsible for building a causeway between Fisher Island and the Florida mainland was Clint Murchison, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys.

Fincher's name appeared in Gil Beckley's coded address book in 1966, and several law-enforcement authorities say that Fincher fronted for Beckley in his national gambling operation. Fincher has admitted only knowing Beckley and occasionally doing business with him.
²

“Dick used to bet with us when I was with Gil,” a former Beckley associate told me. “If Gil bet on a game, he would put
Dick Fincher down for whatever it was he bet. He would call Dick and tell him, ‘You got the Bears minus three for a thousand.' And once in a while Dick would want to bet on a game on his own.

“I feel sorry for Dick. He could've been governor of Florida if he hadn't been screwed up with us.”

Another name that appeared in the book was ex-Green Bay Packers star Paul Hornung, and Fincher was close to him too. Both Fincher and Hornung were known associates of Kentucky Governor John Y. Brown—the former owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Kentucky Colonels of the American Basketball Association. Brown was also a heavy gambler and in close contact with numerous bookmakers in his state. Fincher admitted that he was responsible for introducing McLaney to Brown.
³

An underworld figure in Las Vegas says, “Dick Fincher was moving the money. He was running the sports offices from Miami. He was very, very close to Lefty Rosenthal, and they have been in business together for a long time. In the layoff, Fincher worked for Lefty, just as he had done for Gil Beckley.”

During a 1977 investigation of a Florida drug dealer with whom Fincher had been linked, state law-enforcement officials reviewed Fincher's telephone toll records. They show that Fincher called, among others, associates of Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante—and numerous car dealers, Las Vegas casino operators, racetrack owners, bookmakers, narcotics traffickers, and arms dealers.

Fincher also called John Y. Brown, who Florida law-enforcement agents described as “an associate of organized crime and heavily involved in gambling,” and “James George Synodinos [Snyder], aka Jimmy the Greek.”

In the world of football, calls from Fincher's phone went to New Orleans Saints head coach Hank Stram, former University of Texas head football coach Darrell Royal, and University of Alabama head football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, as well as three former members of the Green Bay Packers: Paul Hornung,
⁴
tight end Ron Kramer, and Max McGee, a wide receiver who was the Most Valuable Player in Super Bowl I between the Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. The report also notes that Billy Quinlan, another former Packer, was Fincher's frequent houseguest.

Explaining his relationship with Fincher, Stram told me, “Dick was a great friend of mine through the University of
Miami.” The coach added that, as was the case with Radio Winer, he was completely unaware of Fincher's gambling activities. “I met Dick through Andy Gustafson [the head coach of the university's football team] while I was an assistant coach there in 1959. Fincher would provide a car for Andy and his coaching staff on occasion.”

In 1977, Fincher was implicated in a federal and state investigation of the WFC Corporation, a shady investment company founded by a Cuban refugee. The investigation of WFC began when Fincher, who was also the co-owner of a Miami pest control company, was probed for being involved in the trafficking of millions of dollars of marijuana and cocaine. According to a confidential report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, “WFC Corporation is a cover for the largest narcotics operation in the world.” Law-enforcement agency documents also stated that WFC had been heavily influenced by Florida Mafia boss Santos Trafficante.

A 1979 report of the FDLE states that the Florida comptroller's office was investigating “what appears to be spurious loans made by the WFC Corporation from its Grand Cayman Island subsidiary, through the Metropolitan Bank and Trust Company of Tampa, a banking institution whose majority stockholder is Edward J. DeBartolo [senior].”
⁵
According to bank sources, the law firm of Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Hugh Culverhouse represented Metropolitan.

While Fincher faced government probes, NFL owners DeBartolo and Culverhouse could laugh their problems off because no one, especially the NFL, was going to lay a glove on them. However, Dallas Cowboys owner Clint Murchison was not so carefree. He, like Fincher, was either a subject or the actual target of several federal probes.

In a report of an investigation being conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) of the Department of the Treasury, special agents had learned “that Murchison was ‘fronting' for O/C [organized crime] out of Florida at Tony Roma's Place for Ribs in Dallas.”

The ATF reported that “Murchison is indeed partners with Tony Roma, real name Anthony LoPresti, and past manager of Playboy Clubs in Chicago and Montreal, Canada.” Roma had been registered at Acapulco Towers at the same time that the 1970 mobster conference was being held there. The report also
linked Murchison with Ettore Zappi, a capo in the Carlo Gambino crime family in New York.

“From data presently available,” the ATF report concluded, “it appears that Murchison is firmly entrenched with individuals who are proven national Mafia figures.”

Murchison's name was also dragged into a major financial scam in which $2 million in Teamsters' insurance premiums were diverted to several organized-crime operations. Among those insurance companies implicated in the scheme was National American Life Insurance Company. The owner of the firm was a close business associate of Carlos Marcello.

Murchison was later named as a member of National American's board of directors, along with Joseph Hauser, a convicted insurance swindler who was trying to secure a major insurance contract with the Teamsters' Central State Health and Welfare Fund. Also implicated in the scheme was Washington lobbyist and Marcello associate I. Irving Davidson. On October 31, 1977, Davidson gave a sworn deposition in the case. His attorney was Plato Cacheris, the law partner of former NFL Security chief Bill Hundley.

Davidson explained that he and Murchison, with whom he had been a good friend for “about twenty years,” were partners in Burbank International, along with Thomas Webb, a former FBI agent and administrative assistant to J. Edgar Hoover, who had originally introduced Davidson to Murchison. Explaining the connection between Hauser and Murchison, Davidson said: “I was going to try and get Mr. Hauser's computer business for a firm owned by Mr. Clint Murchison called Optimum Systems.”

Davidson added, “I called Clint and told him Tom [Webb] was standing with me, and that we had been working with this man Hauser, who we thought could get a lot a business for several companies that Mr. Murchison owned, ran, and operated. And we thought it would be a good idea if he got on the board of this new company. Clint says, ‘What do you know about Hauser?' We said, ‘We think he is okay.' He says, ‘Let me talk to Tom.' Tom said that same thing to Clint. He [Murchison] said okay. And that's the way it ended. He is a very short man on the telephone …”

However, when the federal investigation was completed, Hauser was indicted for his role in the operation.

As part of a secret plea-bargaining arrangement, Hauser
agreed to become a federal witness and wear a wire against several organized-crime figures, including Marcello. For cover, Hauser and two FBI undercover agents created a dummy insurance company in Beverly Hills.