Interference (48 page)

According to NFL rules, the league office receives 15 percent of the total allotment of tickets for the Super Bowl. The competing teams split 45 percent, the team hosting the Super Bowl receives 10 percent, and the remaining NFL teams equally divide 30 percent. In 1980, the Rams Club, as player and host, received over 30 percent of the total allotment, twenty-seven thousand tickets for Georgia Frontiere.

Mrs. Frontiere had allegedly sold a thousand $30 tickets for the 1980 Super Bowl XIV for $100 each, but she insisted, “I have never scalped a ticket in my life.” Yet, the charges of scalping were supported by depositions filed by Raiders owner Al Davis;
Mel Irwin, Carroll Rosenbloom's personal assistant; and Harold Guiver, a former Rams executive.

The ticket-scalping controversy began as a result of Al Davis's $160 million lawsuit against the NFL, which had prevented him from moving his Oakland team to Los Angeles.
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The charges appeared in Davis's deposition taken in the midst of his antitrust suit against the NFL. He had wanted to move his Raiders team from Oakland to the Los Angeles Coliseum, which had been vacated by the Rams. Davis's move was being met with heavy resistance from Rozelle and other NFL owners, particularly Georgia Frontiere, who didn't want to share the local spotlight with Davis.

Davis said in his sworn statement that he was considering selling Super Bowl tickets to at least five casinos in Las Vegas: the Aladdin, Caesars Palace, the Hilton, the Riviera, and the Sands. “I called several other owners in the League and asked them what they thought about it, and they told me they were all doing it.” Specifically, Davis fingered Carroll Rosenbloom, Max Winter of the Minnesota Vikings, Lamar Hunt of the Kansas City Chiefs, and John Mecom of the New Orleans Saints.
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In return for the tickets, NFL players were “comped” and received complimentary rooms and meals at the Las Vegas hotels. “A lot of our players liked to go to Las Vegas,” Davis said.

Davis explained that the issue of scalping Super Bowl tickets had been discussed since 1974. The owners complained that the price of the tickets was too low. Davis stated, “[T]he commissioner [Rozelle] would always give some far-out answer about ‘We don't want to gouge. We don't want to give the country the feeling that we are trying to take advantage of them.' And then [owners would] stand up and say, ‘Yes, but we are not gouging—but everyone else is making a fortune on the sale of these Super Bowl tickets from money above the face value of the tickets …' I remember Lamar Hunt standing up and saying we are selling a twenty-dollar ticket that should be fifty dollars. And I remember asking one owner in the League, ‘Why the hell doesn't he [Hunt] do it?' And he made the statement to me, ‘Are you kidding? That is how he makes his big score.'”

Davis continued that he had received a telephone call in 1976 from Rosenbloom who asked him what he was going to do with his Super Bowl tickets. Davis replied that he was going to sell them at face value. Rosenbloom said, “Look, I have a guy who
knows how to … market these tickets, and we could make a fortune on the tickets above the face value.” Davis insisted that he refused to get involved.

Davis discovered that Rosenbloom's “guy” was Harold Guiver, the Rams executive who was later fired by Georgia. There is no California law against ticket scalping—unless it is done on the premises where an event is taking place. According to Guiver's attorney, “At that time, he was actually an authorized ticket broker and authorized by law to sell tickets in excess of their value as long as it went with the travel package, etc.”

Davis also added in his deposition that Pete Rozelle “knows what is going on. He knows about the scalping … He has never done a thing about it with all the security agents he has around the country, and with all the supposed investigations of irregularities and illegalities in the league.”

Chuck Sullivan, the chief executive officer of the New England Patriots, joined the Davis-NFL fray by alleging that Davis's attorney, Joseph Alioto, had issued “threats of blackmail” against Rozelle and the NFL—if it did not permit the Raiders to move. “If you owners don't let Al move to Los Angeles,” Sullivan quoted Alioto, who is also Sullivan's brother-in-law, “we are going to expose a Super Bowl ticket [scalping] conspiracy which could send Georgia to jail. We are going to involve Rozelle in this thing.”

In denying Davis's charge and any knowledge of widespread ticket scalping in the NFL, Rozelle told Neil Amdur of
The New York Times
, “I think he [Davis] knows that the league as a whole does not like distasteful publicity. It's a form of intimidation. He figures that the league will get so tired they'll say, ‘Al, you go to Los Angeles without a court case.'”
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However, former Rams employee Harold Guiver further added to the controversy by accusing Jack Catain of threatening him. Catain had apparently served as an envoy from the Rams' management to discuss Guiver's compensation upon leaving the team to become assistant general manager of the New Orleans Saints under Steve Rosenbloom.
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According to Guiver's deposition, Catain, accompanied by one of his leg breakers, met with Guiver at the Los Angeles Hilton and instructed him to keep his “mouth shut about what [I] knew about the Los Angeles Rams.” Catain also told Guiver to give the same message to Steve Rosenbloom.

Regarding the situation, Catain agreed to talk to Los Angeles
attorney Carl A. “Tony” Capozzola, who represented Steve Rosenbloom, Guiver, and former Rams coach George Allen. Capozzola says, “Jack indicated that he was offered tickets in a lump sum. He was to take the tickets and distribute them to various brokers, and when he received the money on that, which would [include] money in excess of face value, he was then supposed to split that amount. Just consider ten thousand tickets for a Super Bowl. If those tickets are sold at a hundred dollars over face value, there's one million in cash.

“According to Mr. Catain,” Capozzola continues, “Dominic had requested his services. Harold Guiver told me that Mr. Catain had made it very clear it was not in [Guiver's] best interest to say one more thing about the ticket scalping or any other derogatory thing about the Rams. And, in fact, not only Harold Guiver, but Steve Rosenbloom would be in some sort of jeopardy if they continued to say anything about that. And I think it was a huge concern, and that was what prompted me to notify the NFL top management. Mr. Rozelle expressed his concern, said that he would like to know if the matter was not resolved and that he planned to notify the appropriate people in the NFL Security, etc. I never heard from anybody from the NFL.”

When asked in his deposition who had been making the profit from the scalped tickets, Guiver replied, “Georgia Rosenbloom.” He added that she was responsible for setting the $100 price on the thousand $30 tickets. Guiver was to have sold the tickets because he knew how to market them.

After selling the tickets, Guiver gave Georgia Frontiere the $30,000 face value. However, when rumors about the ticket-scalping operation began, Guiver placed the remaining $70,000 in a trust account. Georgia denied any role in the scalping of Super Bowl tickets but admitted charging Guiver $100 for each of the thousand tickets she gave him. She insisted that Guiver owed the Rams organization, by coincidence, $70,000 for past expenses—which he claimed had been waived in writing by Carroll Rosenbloom before his death.
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With information that the total income from the sale of the tickets had not been reported, the IRS launched an investigation of the matter. Although it is also not against U.S. tax laws to scalp tickets, it is against the law not to report the income derived from the activity. The target of the investigation became the Rams' front office.

In December 1981—while the ticket-scalping matter
stewed—Catain was indicted for being involved in the counterfeiting scheme that the Secret Service had investigated. Catain described the charges against him as “total bullshit.” He had been named in the crime by his unindicted coconspirator, Ray Cohen, already a convicted counterfeiter and the second man with Catain when they had visited and threatened Guiver.

Cohen, who turned state's evidence, also told investigators that he and a third coconspirator, Arthur Howard, had been given large blocks of Super Bowl tickets to sell to ticket brokers throughout Southern California. He reportedly sold the $30 tickets for between $180 to $200. The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles also entered the investigation because it had received information that the underworld, represented by Catain, had no fewer than three thousand Super Bowl tickets for sale—all received from the Los Angeles Rams.

Legal pressure then began to fall on the Frontieres, especially Dominic, who had begun to play a more prominent role in the operations of the Rams while the team's general manager, Don Klosterman, was being systematically stripped of his power.
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40 At War: Rosenthal and Spilotro

BY APRIL 1979, THE month Rosenbloom drowned, the investigation of Allen Glick and Argent had escalated dramatically. A year-long joint investigation by the FBI, IRS, OCRS and its Strike Forces, and the Kansas City Police Department had accumulated four thousand hours of court-authorized electronic surveillance. Federal agents alleged that $1,336,242 in revenues from Argent's sports-betting operation, as well as $7 million in slot-machine revenues, had been skimmed or embezzled under Rosenthal's management of the casino. There was also a separate investigation of the Las Vegas sports books amidst charges that they were serving as layoff operations for illegal bookmakers outside Nevada.
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Meantime, Tony Spilotro, who lived modestly with his family, had actually been conducting surveillance on FBI agents and various federal, state, and local law-enforcement officials. A raid on his house in 1978 yielded confidential FBI reports on him and Rosenthal as well as other sensitive documents. It turned out that Spilotro had a connection within the Las Vegas police who allegedly supplied him with a list of FBI informants and grand-jury transcripts, among other records.

The yield from the raid included stock certificates from Major Realty in Florida, as well as evidence that he was “a financial backer of a major bookmaking operation in Las Vegas, which was disseminating line information on sporting events to other parts of the country and which presently accepted bets and lay
off wagers on college and professional football games,” according to an FBI affidavit. Soon after, the state's gaming officials barred Spilotro from all Nevada casinos.

In July 1979, Allen Glick was stripped of his Nevada gaming license and fined over $500,000 for a variety of alleged improprieties. Soon after, Glick sold the Argent Corporation and his casinos for $70 million to Allan D. Sachs, the owner of Trans-Sterling, Inc. and the former president of the Stardust.

However, the FBI believes that Sachs and one of his partners were “figureheads for the Chicago mob responsible for providing skim monies” from Las Vegas casinos.
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According to federal agents, the mob's skim of the Stardust continued under Sachs, who was a close friend of Rosenthal.

In June 1980, the SEC filed a complaint against Glick, on grounds he had allegedly filed false statements about his business activities at the time of his purchase of Recrion and his creation of Argent. Glick told me, “The SEC suit dealt with personal loans I had to help in the Saratoga bankruptcy and the method they were reported since the bonds of Recrion were publicly traded but my company was privately held.”
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After taking the Fifth Amendment before three federal grand juries, Glick turned state's evidence against his onetime partners.
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“I was never threatened with prosecution in any case,” Glick told me, “nor did I fear it. I was a victim and ultimately the government was able to acquire credible evidence of its own and came to this conclusion. I refused to answer government questions on advice of counsel until it was clear the government had the correct facts, verified by others, that I was innocent.”

However, Joe Yablonsky, the chief of the FBI office in Las Vegas at the time, had different feelings about Glick and told me, “He's a guy who rode the fence and came out looking like the victim.”

The investigation of the Argent Corporation had caused chaos within the Chicago Mafia, particularly in its Las Vegas operations, where a power struggle was building between the brains and the muscle of the NFL's outlaw line: Lefty Rosenthal and Tony Spilotro.

According to federal prosecutors, in 1980 Spilotro began to exercise his independence from Rosenthal by having an affair with Rosenthal's wife, Geri, a former dancer and cocktail waitress
at the Tropicana in Las Vegas. Just the previous year, Rosenthal had been placed in Nevada's “Black Book,” the list of undesirable people forbidden to enter any casino in the state.

Spilotro appeared to use the affair as a show of power over Rosenthal, who had always been loyal to him. Despite the long friendship between the Rosenthals and the Spilotros, the affair was not kept secret—because Geri Rosenthal flaunted her relationship with Spilotro. The entire mess culminated on September 8, 1980, when an intoxicated Geri, who had been out all night, confronted her husband with a gun on the front lawn of their house. Although she was disarmed and no one was physically injured, Lefty filed for a divorce a few days later.

Soon after, Spilotro starting getting really crazy. According to statements made by one of his longtime associates, Frank Cullotta, Spilotro plotted in 1981 to murder an entire seventeen-member grand jury in Las Vegas that was investigating his activities. His method was to poison the food the grand jurors were to be served by a local caterer.

On October 4, 1982, at 8:30
P.M
., fifty-three-year-old Lefty Rosenthal, who had begun to fear for his life, was having drinks with three old friends—Marty Kane, Sam Green, and Reuben Goldstein—at the Clint Murchison-owned Tony Roma's restaurant on East Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas.