Interference (5 page)

The legendary Jim Thorpe, whose mentor had been coach Glenn “Pop” Warner, was elected the first president of the association. Four years earlier, while Thorpe was playing for the Canton Bulldogs, he and a fan of the rival Massillon Tigers had a heated exchange about which team was better. Just hours before a game between the two teams, Thorpe slapped down a blank check and filled it out for $2,500, challenging the fan, a wealthy local businessman, to respond in kind.

A local newspaper, which reported the betting incident, took the matter in stride. “Massillon had plenty of money to stake on the outcome of the game,” the paper reported, “while many of the Canton bugs were rather shy. They evidently feared the hoodoo which Massillon has been in former years. Now that the jinx has been chased the wagering in years to come is likely to be more lively.”

One of Thorpe's star Bulldog players, Joe Guyon, recalled, “Gamblers tried to buy us off. They would approach us at the hotel, where we stayed on the weekend … They didn't fool with
me … But there were guys who took their money … We had one guy. Oh, he was a high traveler. A halfback. We saw his contacts at the hotel. Then we saw his play. He was detailed to cover a man, and when he didn't, why, we said it was an accident. But the second time, it was too obvious. I said, ‘What the hell is going on?' I went over to the bench and said, ‘He didn't cover his man, Jim. This guy is not covering his man.' Jim braced him right there. He fired him.”
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Thorpe was replaced as the president of the professional football league in 1921 by Joe Carr of Columbus, Ohio, a highly respected sports reporter and promoter. Perhaps his greatest contribution was his crusade to prevent NFL teams from snagging college players for pro ball until they had graduated.
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In 1922—the year that the APFA changed its name to the National Football League—a scandal involving the year-old Green Bay Packers erupted. The team's owner was disciplined by Carr for hiring college athletes who used aliases and were paid for playing in NFL games during the 1921 season.
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With the Packers' ownership in deep financial trouble in the wake of the scandal, local businessmen in Green Bay purchased the team for $2,500 and made it a public, nonprofit corporation in 1923. Citizens purchased stock in the team for $5 a share. Today, the Green Bay Packers are still the only team owned by the citizens of the city that it represents.

Most of the early owners were viewed as “sportsmen” who gambled heavily on horse racing, baseball, and any other sporting events available. Gambling was widely practiced and accepted, particularly in those early days of professional football when the fledgling sport wasn't thought to be in the same league as professional baseball.

Wagering at baseball games had become a part of the ballpark spectacle. It was common knowledge that bookmakers usually operated in the right-field bleachers of nearly every stadium in the country.

Halas said, “Fans bet heavily, but I forbade my players to gamble on any of our games. Betting on one's own team to win may not be harmful, because one player cannot make a team win.

“One player can make a team lose, however, by fumbling or missing a pass or failing a tackle. Although players have a sixth sense for detecting when a teammate is not doing his best, there is a terrible temptation to bet against the team. No gambler has
ever approached me. Perhaps the word got around that gamblers would, at best, be wasting their time.”
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In the early days of professional football, an NFL owner had to have what was then an enormous cash flow, over $100,000 a season. Generally, only gamblers and robber barons had that kind of money. Unfortunately, the names of the sports gamblers and bookmakers with whom the “sportsmen” did business were unknown to most sports fans—whose loyalty to the home team was usually backed up with their wagered cash.

“You always used to hear this game or that was fixed,” a longtime amateur sports gambler told me. “If a name like Al Capone or Arnold Rothstein or even some big-name player wasn't involved, it really wasn't something you'd worry about. You might wait and watch, but when things blew over you placed your bet on the next game.”

Feared by the public and protected by Tammany Hall, Rothstein had been the most successful bookmaker in the country during the early part of the century. Along the way, he was thought to have committed numerous other crimes, including extortion and murder. During his career, Rothstein gambled and did business with, among others, Julius Fleischmann, the heir to U.S. Steel; Canadian distiller Joseph Seagram; U.S. Senator Edward Wolcott of Colorado; and Percival H. Hill of the American Tobacco Company.

With the advent of Prohibition in 1919, Rothstein had already solidified his power and served as an intermediary for the new Mafia families emerging in New York. Bootleggers crawled out from under every rock and began to make their fortunes. And organized-crime figures who engaged in the illegal liquor business, like Rothstein, also became involved in other rackets, including sports gambling.

By allegedly fixing the 1919 World Series in the Chicago “Black Sox” scandal, Rothstein established himself as the all-time king of notorious sports gamblers. A larger than life American figure in the eyes of some, Rothstein was the inspiration for the character Meyer Wolfsheim in F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby
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Ralph Salerno, New York's former supervisor of detectives, told me, “It was the White Sox players' idea to do the fixing, but Rothstein was behind the fix. There's no doubt about that. Everyone was coming to him, trying to get him to finance the whole
deal. But Arnold, who didn't want to have direct responsibility, sat back and sent out his beard, who met the players and made the deals. It was no wonder that the players were cheated out of their money, and Rothstein made an untraceable fortune. And, best of all, Rothstein could deny any involvement.

“His beard was indicted. But being the only man who could implicate Rothstein, he left the country. As the case was coming to court, the prosecution's evidence just disappeared while its witnesses developed amnesia or simply vanished.”

The case was eventually dropped—with no official court record that the 1919 World Series had ever been fixed. Nevertheless, Rothstein became even a larger legend. But he, too, overestimated his own power and invulnerability. In 1928, he was shot to death upon the orders of a rival mobster.

The 1919 scandal forced baseball team owners to hire an outsider to administer league policy and to police baseball personnel. He was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was honest, distinguished, and grandfatherly. Judge Landis's job was to clean up the image of baseball and bring wholesome family entertainment back to the game.

Landis decreed, “No player that throws a game, no player that entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooks where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”

As major-league baseball had, the NFL added a rule to its charter prohibiting gambling by any owner, coach, or player. But, as in baseball, gambling in football would continue to flourish.

Meantime, in September 1931, three years after Rothstein's murder, the traditional Sicilian Mafia became Americanized; thus, disorganized crime became organized crime, which included a cadre of Jewish gangsters. A national crime syndicate was established by twenty-nine-year-old Meyer Lansky of New York and Chicago mobster Johnny Torrio. As part of the plan, the United States was divided into twenty-four subdivisions, each controlled by the most powerful Mafia families in these various geographic areas. Nine of the leaders of these twenty-four crime groups were selected to sit on a national crime commission that would settle jurisdictional disputes.

The crime syndicate was created to stop the infighting among the crime families, which interfered with the mob's primary goals—to make money and to stay out of jail. With the increased stability and decreased exposure, mob financiers like Lansky were free to find legal and illegal moneymaking ventures, raise the necessary capital from participating crime families, launder funds through “friendly” banks, buy political protection, and oversee the fair distribution of profits from these activities.

Professional sports, particularly the NFL, would be among the underworld's biggest money-makers.

3 The Old Days with the Old Gang

INHERITING ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN'S BOOKMAKING empire—with the approval of Meyer Lansky and New York Mafia figure Frank Costello—fell to New York's Frank Erickson. Ralph Salerno told me, “Erickson met Costello and Lansky through Rothstein. The estate Rothstein left his family was peanuts, but the empire he left his criminal friends was enormous and taken up by the guys who worked for him. Rothstein had recruited Erickson. And after Rothstein was murdered, Lansky and Costello went to Erickson and said, ‘We'll be partners, but you run the bookmaking on the day-to-day basis.' Meanwhile, Lansky and Costello were running the casinos in upstate New York, Miami, and New Orleans. They were all partners in all of their gambling operations.”

Born in 1895, the pudgy Erickson maintained his headquarters in New Jersey while continuing to live in New York. He had his gambling contacts in all forty-eight states. Federal investigators estimated that he handled between $20,000 and $40,000 a day in betting action. In the ten-year period between 1933 and 1943—while serving as a banker for other gamblers as well—Erickson netted an estimated $22 million, and split it with Costello, Lansky, and other mobsters in the growing national crime syndicate.

It was during Erickson's reign that fast-money sports rigging became widespread, particularly at the racetrack. Because thoroughbred horses couldn't testify before federal grand juries, they
were often the targets of illegal doping. Heroin, in fact, received its street name, “horse” because it was the early drug of choice by corrupt horsefixers.

Soon after George Halas bought the Chicago Bears, a large and tough New York bookmaker and boxing promoter with close ties to Erickson and the Tammany Democratic machine, bought an NFL franchise. Thirty-nine-year-old Tim Mara paid $500 for the New York Giants in August 1925. His team played its games at the Polo Grounds, the home of major-league baseball's New York Giants.

Mara's gambling operations were semilegal, and he was known for having booked bets beneath a striped umbrella at New York racetracks. After dropping out of school when he was thirteen, he became a runner of Rothstein associate Thomas “Chicago” O'Brien, a major New York gambler. Mara delivered newspapers and worked in a book bindery by day; by night he made pickups and deliveries for O'Brien. He later opened up his own book bindery company, which fronted for his own bookmaking operation. Soon, Mara worked his way up to his own enclosed space at Belmont Park and became a member of the local racing association. He handled as much as $30,000 in wagers in a single day.

“Mara was a bookmaker when it was legal at the racetrack to be a bookmaker,” says Salerno. “The law prohibited betting away from the track, but you could go there and bet with a bookmaker. They actually had slate chalkboards on which they would post and change the odds. Gamblers would be running from one bookmaker to the next, trying to get the best odds.”

At the time Mara bought the Giants, he had never even seen a football game. “But the promoters of the [NFL] knew that bookmakers were a type extremely susceptible to new forms of investment,” according to one report. “They offered Mr. Mara the franchise.”
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During the Giants' first season, Mara was already facing financial difficulties and his team was verging on collapse. But all was well after seventy-three thousand fans jammed the Polo Grounds to see New York lose, 19-7, to the Chicago Bears, who had signed running sensation Red Grange earlier that year.
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Gate receipts produced enough money to help the Giants' franchise to survive. The team won its first NFL championship in 1927.

Active in politics, Mara, a Roman Catholic, was a major supporter of the 1928 presidential campaign of Democratic nominee Al Smith, the first Catholic to seek the presidency.

Mara's office was later raided by agents from the U.S. attorney's office in New York, which alleged that Mara and his employees had been scalping tickets to the Giants games. But Mara, who still had good political contacts, was not indicted. He insisted that the sale of thousands of tickets at the higher price was “nothing worse than an error in making change.”

The passage of the Beer-Wine Revenue Act in March 1933—which amended the Volstead Act to legalize beer and wine—served as the prelude to the Twenty-first Amendment and the repeal of Prohibition on December 5, 1933. According to the FBI, “The resulting end of their bonanza caught mob leaders with large hordes of wealth, vast fleets of trucks, and whole armies of trained gunmen at their disposal. Most branched out into other fields of criminal endeavor (such as gambling, loan sharking, narcotics, labor racketeering, etc.), whereas quite a few added to their flow of illicit wealth by investing their funds in legitimate investments, ranging from real estate and manufacturing plants to hospitals and theatrical agencies. It was also at this time that many racket leaders tried to play down their past histories and adopt an air of pseudorespectability in their local communities.” Through front men and associates, the mob's influence also moved in to sports.

Charles W. Bidwill, a bootlegger, gambler, racetrack owner, and an associate of the Al Capone mob in Chicago, bought the Chicago Cardinals in 1933 for $2,000 in cash.
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In order to purchase the team, he had to give up his minority interest in the Chicago Bears, where he also served as a vice president under Halas.