Interference (60 page)

Adelson also has the distinction of being the signator for receipt of one of the first loans from the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund in 1959, specifically for the Sunrise Hospital, near the Strip. The $1 million loan was made through A & M Enterprises, which was owned by Adelson, Molasky, Dalitz, and four of their business associates who also had alleged ties to Meyer Lansky. Another partner in Sunrise was New York attorney Roy Cohn, who also did some of its legal work. The hospital was managed by Nathan Adelson, Mervyn's father. Through Dalitz, Adelson had met on several occasions with Jimmy Hoffa to discuss the loans. Adelson has insisted that he was unaware of Hoffa's criminal associations at the time.

La Costa Country Club of Carlsbad, California, which has often been referred to as “the playground for the mob,” had been owned by Dalitz, Adelson,
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Irwin Molasky, and others. Adelson had also developed the property, and, in 1968, he hired Wallace Groves of the Bahamas to handle La Costa's land sales. An FBI report had previously alleged that La Costa “is used as a clearinghouse for bookie operations. The phones are used to receive the incoming lay-off bets.” Neither Adelson nor any of his partners was accused of any wrongdoing. Also, La Costa has since been sold to a Japanese business concern.

Neither Adelson nor Molasky has criminal records. However, government records show that both have close personal and business ties to major organized-crime figures.

A top gambling figure in Las Vegas told me, “Adelson and Molasky became beards. They were moving money for the Computer guys. Instead of betting themselves, the Computers went to guys like Adelson and Molasky and said, ‘We have some great games to bet on.'“ Attempts to interview Adelson for this book were unsuccessful.

In my February 1988 story, “The NFL and the Mob: Pro Football's Dirty Secret,” in
Regardie's
, a Washington-based business magazine, I charged that “the inquiry into the Computer
group has stalled. More than 50 people were investigated, but no indictments were brought. The FBI agent who was running the investigation has been reassigned … This is pretty much the way that investigations of gambling in the NFL tend to go; just as the connections begin to be made and the picture begins to take shape, the inquiry is abruptly called off. There's always a ‘good' reason for it.”

The Computer group investigation was under the jurisdiction of Michael DeFeo, the chief of the Strike Force's Western Division and OCRS chief Dave Margolis's top deputy. DeFeo—nicknamed Iron Mike because of his toughness as an organized-crime prosecutor—had been in charge of the Justice Department's investigations during the 1970s of corruption in the Bahamas and the Caribbean gambling industries in Operation Croupier. Further, he was responsible for the prosecution of those involved with skimming at the Stardust in the Operation Strawman/Argent case—for which he received rave reviews.
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However, his handling of the Computer case has gone unexplained by the OCRS, which refused comment officially about the matter.

Further, the OCRS's handling of the latter stages of the Dominic Frontiere case has also raised legitimate suspicions that the federal government pulled its punch. The Frontiere case is among the most recent illustrations of what has happened to so many government investigations involving corruption in the NFL.

Frontiere began serving his sentence at the federal minimum-security prison in Lompoc, California, on January 5, 1987. He was released in September 1987, five months early. Law-enforcement officials in Los Angeles told me that federal prosecutors were considering giving Frontiere immunity from prosecution before his release and forcing him to testify on a case involving the NFL. But the immunity question, too, became a political football among federal law-enforcement agencies.

During my interview with Salvatore Pisello—who has been identified in court as a Mafia soldier but vehemently denies it—he said that he had known Frontiere at Lompoc. “Dominic told me that he was a victim and was innocent,” said Pisello, who was also serving time for income-tax evasion in connection with a case involving MCA, the Hollywood conglomerate. “When he said that, I said, ‘Then why are you here?'” Pisello added that
Frontiere received everything he wanted in prison and had easy jobs. Pisello also said that he never heard Frontiere complain about government pressure on him to turn state's evidence.

“It's something that's been debated behind the scenes by the IRS, the FBI, the Strike Force, and just about every other law-enforcement agency,” a top Justice Department official told me. “I think the punch was pulled after Dominic alone was indicted. If he was going to get immunity, he should have received it before he copped his plea. There are a lot of people who are afraid of what he could've said, and whom he could implicate. And the politics that have been played with this decision are making the whole system look bad.”

Richard J. Leon, prosecutor in the Frontiere case, told me, “Indictments in criminal tax cases are reviewed up the line—within the tax division and in the U.S. attorneys offices, as well as the Justice Department. At the tax division, you have assistant chiefs, section chiefs; then at Justice you have deputy assistant attorney generals, and assistant attorney generals. And then on the U.S. attorneys' side, you have the chief of the criminal section, the first assistant, and the U.S. attorney himself. There are all kinds of people who were involved in the Frontiere case.”

Georgia Frontiere still owns the Rams but divorced her husband after his release from prison. According to several sources close to the Frontieres, Dominic received a settlement of between $2 million and $4 million from his wife. If he did take a fall, she made it worth his while.

Another case may have been spiked by Margolis and DeFeo.
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This investigation concentrated on MCA, which had permitted Sal Pisello to become a top executive in the company's record division. “In the end,” Pisello told me, “I took the fall for the whole company. I was prosecuted and convicted twice for income-tax evasion while MCA got off scott-free.”

The president of MCA's record division is Irving Azoff, who also manages special events at the Los Angeles Coliseum, the home of the Los Angeles Raiders. The chairman of the board of MCA is Lew Wasserman, a close friend of Rozelle. Wasserman had served as Ronald Reagan's Hollywood talent agent.

A familiar name was responsible for helping to get MCA off the hook: William Hundley, the former director of NFL Security. In September 1987, Hundley and his law partner since 1969, Plato Cacheris, dissolved their partnership. Hundley then joined
the Washington, D.C., law firm—Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. This firm, which includes former Democratic National Committee chairman and MCA board member Robert S. Strauss of Texas, has been on the NFL's payroll for years and coordinated the league's lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. Hundley was also involved in the defense of Drexel Burnham Lambert, which had retained the firm, during the 1988 federal investigation of the brokerage house.

Hundley told me that soon after joining Akin Gump and taking the MCA case, he had a meeting with Margolis, who has a picture of Hundley hanging in his office. “I said, ‘Look, we're going to cooperate in any organized-crime investigation,'” Hundley explained to me. “‘Whatever you want from the corporation: You want to talk to people? You want documents? Get in touch with me. I'll see you get them in a hurry.'”

It was the same “we're open, we're honest” strategy Hundley had used with investigators while he was with NFL Security.
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Immediately after Hundley met with Margolis, the Los Angeles Strike Force office issued a letter informing MCA that it was not a target of the federal government's investigation of Pisello. However, Marvin Rudnick, the Strike Force attorney—who had prosecuted Pisello—refused to relent and continued to pursue MCA as the target of his investigation. Soon after, Rudnick was summoned to Washington and met with Margolis and DeFeo. A Justice Department official told me that at that meeting Rudnick was ordered to confine his case to Pisello and not cause MCA “any embarrassment.” During the meeting, Margolis pointed to Hundley's picture and told Rudnick, “That's Bill Hundley. If he starts complaining about you, you've got problems.” Later, DeFeo recommended Rudnick's dismissal from the Strike Force.
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On March 30, 1989, Rudnick was suspended after nearly eleven years as a trial attorney with the Justice Department. At the time of his dismissal, Rudnick was trying to convince Dominic Frontiere's friend, the imprisoned Daniel Whitman, to turn state's evidence in return for a reduction in sentence.

The evidence is clear that there has been a cabal among some past and present officials of the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section and some of its Strike Force offices. And the NFL, through its long-term sweetheart relationship with a variety of law-enforcement agencies, particularly
the OCRS, has been a direct beneficiary of this situation—which raises serious questions about possible conflicts of interest, as well as activities that border on sheer political corruption.

However, the problem of the OCRS and the Strike Forces is a two-headed monster. In fact, over the years, since its creation under the OCRS during the mid-1960s, the Strike Force program, conceived by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, has compiled an extremely impressive record in combatting organized crime. Its top prosecutors have been men of high integrity who were given, by law, the independence to conduct their investigations and prosecutions. They have been protected public servants, and their jobs are not contingent upon who is in the White House.

During the mid-1970s, there was a serious effort to eliminate the Strike Forces, which was led by Richard Thornburgh, the chief of the Justice Department's criminal division under President Gerald Ford's attorney general Edward Levi. Thornburgh's actions were supposedly based on the resentment of the Strike Force concept by U.S. attorneys—who are political animals and nominated by the incumbent president. These political appointees were threatened by the fact that the Strike Force could drop an indictment in their laps and ask for their signatures—without the U.S. attorneys being a part of their investigations. Strike Force advocates charged that decisions made by U.S. attorneys regarding its investigations were sometimes determined on political grounds rather than on the merits of the cases.

At first, Thornburgh, a former U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh who had chaired a department committee to investigate the matter, had advocated that Strike Force offices around the country be accountable to the U.S. attorneys in their jurisdictions. But after becoming the chief of the criminal division in 1975, Thornburgh actually began dismantling several Strike Force offices, starting with Baltimore and San Diego, and ran squarely into a confrontation with William S. Lynch, then head of the OCRS and director of Operation Anvil during the early 1970s. However, Lynch lacked the political clout to stop Thornburgh. Soon after, Lynch was removed as the head of the section and replaced by Kurt Muellenberg, who didn't want the job under those circumstances—but was encouraged by Lynch to accept it.

Muellenberg told Thornburgh that he would agree to take the job if the Strike Forces were preserved. Thornburgh agreed,
according to Muellenberg. “Three days later,” Muellenberg told me, “he came along and shut down the Strike Forces in St. Louis and New Orleans. That son of a bitch lied to me. It was not something that was decided overnight.” Soon after, Thornburgh merged the Manhattan Strike Force into the U.S. attorney's office in New York's Southern District and then wiped out the Strike Force office in Pittsburgh.

Muellenberg continued, “At that time, Thornburgh already had political ambitions about being the governor of Pennsylvania. The thing about Thornburgh is that he caves in under political pressure. When the U.S. attorneys told him, ‘Look at this Strike Force shit. We really don't need them. We can do it ourselves,' you knew it was going to go. He will kiss the asses of the U.S. attorneys because they will always have some kind of political power. That's much more important to him.

“Thornburgh always has his eye on the next thing he wants to do. And to piss off a few career prosecutors? So what? What can they do to him?”

When the bloodbath was completed, only fourteen of the original Strike Force offices remained in the major cities, along with a dozen suboffices in smaller cities.

Aaron Kohn, the managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, told me, “We had to save the Strike Force here. Thornburgh had wiped it out, and then we revived it after about a year by lobbying with Congress and the Carter White House.”

However, only the New Orleans office remained open; the others boarded up by Thornburgh remained closed. More cuts would have occurred had Ford defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election. It was understood that Ford planned to retain Thornburgh, who did return to Pennsylvania and was elected governor of the state. The Carter administration saved the Strike Forces, and the war on organized crime continued—then under Carter appointees Benjamin Civiletti as attorney general, William Webster as director of the FBI, and Margolis, who replaced Muellenberg as OCRS chief. All three of these appointments were made in 1978. With these three men, the mob was again under a genuine siege by the federal government for the first time since the Kennedy administration.

When Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in 1980—the Republicans ludicrously charged that Carter was soft on crime—the war
against syndicate crime ended. The victories against organized crime claimed by the Reaganistas—like Operation Strawman/ Argent, Brilab, Pendorf, and the prosecution of Tony Salerno and the heads of the other four crime families in New York,
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among many other cases—had been initiated during the previous administration or by individual state agencies, like the New York Task Force Against Organized Crime, which was headed by Ronald Goldstock. Nevertheless, Reagan and his two attorney generals, William French Smith and Edwin Meese, shamefully took the credit.