Interference (70 page)

11
.  In 1950, the Los Angeles Rams became the first professional football team to sell its exclusive television rights and have all its games broadcast. The following year, in order to increase home attendance, the Rams permitted only the televising of road games.

CHAPTER 7

1
.  Briefly, after the AAFC-NFL merger, which was announced on December 11, 1949, the joint league was called The National-American League. That lasted just over two months.

2
.  Gene Klein and David Fisher,
First Down and a Billion: The Funny Business of Pro Football
(New York: William Morrow and Co., 1987), pp. 75-76.

3
.  The boys in the Rosenbloom family were Isadore, Hess, Ben, Leon, Harry, and Carroll; the girls were Rose, Ethel, and Mildred.

4
.  In May 1949, Blue Ridge moved its executive offices to Lynchburg, Virginia, about thirty-five miles east of Roanoke. At the time, Blue Ridge and its subsidiaries had twenty-four manufacturing plants in twelve states, including Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. In 1952, Blue Ridge purchased another large overalls firm, Big Jack Manufacturing Company of Bristol, Virginia, for $3 million. The purchase of Big Jack increased Blue Ridge's annual revenues to nearly $70 million. Blue Ridge continued to do work for the United States government and received a huge contract from the Armed Services Textile and Procurement Agency the following year. The order was for 1,424,120 pairs of U.S. Navy dungarees.

5
.  Rosenbloom was named as the president of the Colts on February 4, 1957.

6
.  Rosenbloom's partners were former Colts directors, local businessmen, and racehorse owners, including Zanvyl Krieger, Bill Hilgenberg, Tom Mullan, and R. Bruce Livie.

CHAPTER 8

1
.  Paul Brown with Jack Clary,
PB: The Paul Brown Story
(New York: Atheneum Pubs., 1979), p. 232.

2
.  Bernie Parrish,
They Call It a Game
(New York: Dial Press, Inc., 1971), p. 186.

3
. 
Speaking of fixing games during the 1950s, Don Dawson told me, “In those days, maybe you'd find a couple of bookmakers in Cleveland or Detroit or Buffalo or Cincinnati or Miami or Dallas or Houston or L.A., wherever it was. Most of them were regular guys, not mob guys. But in order to move any big money, they'd have to go to the mob to get it approved.”

4
.  On August 12, 1957, just prior to the opening of the NFL season, the Lions' head coach Raymond “Buddy” Parker suddenly resigned, saying, “I'm quitting. I can no longer control this team. And when I can't control it, I can't coach it. I don't want to get involved in another losing season, so I'm leaving Detroit,” Parker was replaced by assistant coach George Wilson.

Piersante, who says he had heard about the alleged fixes, told me, “The Detroit team management broke up the operation. The way it was broken up was Bobby Layne was sold to the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1958 during midseason.”

5
.  Layne died of cardiac arrest on December 1, 1986, in Lubbock, Texas. Dawson told me that he decided to reveal his on-field business relationship with Layne because, “Bobby got to be a bad boy. There were people back in Detroit that he owed. He'd borrow money and would not pay it back. He didn't have any regard for anybody. When he died, he owed me money—money I bet for him on games, even after he quit football.”

CHAPTER 9

1
.  Baltimore, in 1958, had the second worst field goal percentage in the NFL, 35.7 percent, making five of fourteen attempts. On the other hand, Unitas, in 1958, had thrown 263 passes but had only 7 intercepted for a 2.7 percent interception rate, the best in the NFL. And Alan Ameche, in 1958, had fumbled only once in 171 carries; he was second in NFL rushing that year with 791 yards and a 4.6 average per carry. However, during the third quarter of the championship game—with the Colts leading 14-3, and on the Giants one yard line and fourth down—Ameche, after two previous carries on first and second downs, was thrown for a four-yard loss, allowing the Giants to roar back into the game and take the lead, later forcing Myhra to send the game into sudden death.

2
.  Kay Iselin Gilman,
Inside the Pressure Cooker: A Season in the Life of the New York Jets
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1974) p. 29. Gilman also is the daughter of Phil Iselin, who later became the president of the New York Jets.

3
.  Courtney's real name is Morris Schmertzler and Ritter's alias is Red Reed.

4
.  The three communities were Port Charlotte, Port Malabar, and Port St. Lucie.

5
.  The syndicate later purchased the pre-1948 film library of Twentieth Century-Fox. Along with the Warner Brothers deal, the Chesler-Rosenbloom-Schwebel group owned 340 motion pictures.

6
.  In 1956, Adams became locked in a scandal involving Bernard Gold-fine, a close friend, and was forced to resign from his post. A wealthy industrialist
from Boston, who had major ties to organized-crime figures and their racetracks, Goldfine had operated a political slush fund and was caught paying off Adams and a U.S. senator. After refusing to testify about his activities, Goldfine was indicted for contempt of Congress and pleaded guilty. Soon after, he was charged with income-tax evasion. In that trial, he was represented by attorney Edward Bennett Williams, who successfully had Goldfine ruled to be mentally incompetent to stand trial. Later, when the court ruled him competent, he pleaded guilty to the tax charge but received a suspended sentence because of his physical health. Goldfine died from a heart attack in 1967.

Rabb later became the chairman of the board of the International Airport Hotel Systems, Inc., in which Meyer Lansky was a major stockholder. Under President Ronald Reagan, Rabb was appointed as the U.S. ambassador to Italy.

7
.  In 1948, Dalitz left Cleveland and, after a brief stay in Newport, Kentucky, moved to Nevada, where gambling had been legal since 1931. The earliest Nevada casinos appeared in Reno. Dalitz and several members of the Mayfield Road Gang bought the controlling interest in Las Vegas' Desert Inn hotel/casino, which opened in April 1950.

In 1959, the Teamsters Union, headed by general president Jimmy Hoffa of Detroit, began making huge loans from its Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund to several Nevada casinos. Among the biggest beneficiaries was the Desert Inn. In all, for the Desert Inn, the Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas, and his La Costa Country Club in Carlsbad, California, Dalitz, a longtime ally of Hoffa from their early days in Detroit, received well over $200 million from the fund.

8
.  Chesler's bookmakers—Courtney, Ritter, and Brudner—were also employees of the Havana casinos.

9
.  Charles Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Vito Genovese, among other mobsters, had cooperated with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the U.S. Navy in World War II—after the war began to turn against the Axis powers, which the Mafia had initially supported. Luciano, who was in prison during the war, received a pardon in 1946 in return for his cooperation. However, he was immediately deported to Sicily. He and another deported mobster, Frank Coppola of Detroit, a top ally of Jimmy Hoffa, began manufacturing heroin in Sicily and exporting it to Montreal, through a gang of French Corsicans, who then distributed it to their underworld contacts in New York and Detroit. This was the earliest version of the
French Connection
.

Needing a southern route into the United States, Luciano went to Cuba in or about 1947 and created a major narcotics ring on the island. Lansky moved his operations from New York to Miami to oversee the Cuban operations, which also included gambling. Lansky was also responsible for greasing Cuban political leaders whose job was to protect the underworld's interests.

By the mid-1950s, Lansky's protégé, Santos Trafficante, the Mafia boss of Tampa, and Carlos Marcello, the Mafia boss of New Orleans, were running, respectively, the bulk of the mob's gambling and narcotics businesses, in concert with other crime families, that had invested in Cuba.

10
.  The Castro betrayal led to the CIA/Mafia plots to assassinate the Cuban leader, which were arranged as early as December 1959 and were well under way during the summer of 1960.

11
. 
After the sale of Blue Ridge, Rosenbloom continued as the chairman and president of Blue Ridge and of Imperial Shirt Company. The following year, he yielded the presidencies of both companies—but continued to serve on their corporate boards. Another member of the Philadelphia & Reading board of directors was Laurence A. Tisch, who later became the chairman of the board of the Columbia Broadcasting System.

CHAPTER 10

1
.  Wismer hired Sammy Baugh as the first head coach of the New York Titans.

2
.  Harry Wismer,
The Public Calls It Sport
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965), p. 66. H. L. Hunt died in November 1974.

3
.  Don Kowet,
The Rich Who Own Sports
(New York: Random House, Inc., 1977), p. 81.

4
.  Conrad Hilton died in 1979 at age ninety-one. He had named Barron Hilton the chief executive officer of the hotel chain in 1966.

5
.  Nicky Hilton died of cardiac arrest at age forty-two in February 1969.

6
.  Casino gambling would later account for 40 percent of the Hilton empire's operating income. By 1972, Hilton had the controlling interest in two Las Vegas hotel/casinos, which later became the Las Vegas Hilton and the Flamingo Hilton.

7
. 
The Wall Street Journal
, 27 March 1987.

8
.  Involved with the major players in the extortion of Hollywood's motion picture studios during the late 1930s and early 1940s, Korshak had been described by Chicago Mafia figure Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe as “our man.” Gioe, who was among the six Chicago mobsters indicted, told a corrupt Hollywood union official, “I want you to do what he [Korshak] tells you. He's not just another lawyer but knows our gang and figures our best interest. Pay attention to him, and remember, any message he may deliver to you is a message from us.”

9
.  Howsam lasted only one year. After a 4-9-1 premier season, he sold his interest in the Broncos to Cal Kunz and Gerald Phipps. Phipps, the son of a wealthy and respected Denver family, bought out Kunz in 1965. After a 3-11 sequel in year two, Filchock was gone, as well.

10
.  The Boston Patriots became the New England Patriots in 1971.

11
.  Jack Mara died in 1965, leaving his interest in the Giants to his own son but granting the operation of the team to Wellington.

12
.  Bell's heir apparent going into the first ballot was Marshall Leahy, a San Francisco attorney who wanted the NFL headquarters to be in his hometown. Leahy had to have eight votes among the twelve NFL teams to be elected but could never muster up more than seven. He was opposed by interim commissioner Austin Gunsel, who had received his support from the older owners but could not get as many votes as Leahy could. Wellington Mara asked Dan Reeves of the Rams if he would be interested in the job. He replied that he wasn't—but that his general manager, Pete Rozelle, might be. Mara and Paul Brown then went to Rozelle.

13
. 
Reeves won the long ownership battle and bought full control of the Rams. For what had been a $4 total investment by his partners in 1947, Reeves paid them $4.8 million in 1962.

14
.  William Henry Paul,
The Gray-Flannel Pigskin: Movers and Shakers of Pro Football
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1974), p. 274.

15
.  NFL owners were not forced to split revenues derived from parking and concessions, among other stadium moneymaking enterprises. Therefore, it was in the owners' best interests to seek out new stadiums with more lucrative facilities.

16
.  Soda and four other partners sold their interests in the Raiders to the remaining partners—Ed McGah, Wayne Valley, and Robert Osborne—in January 1961. Osborne was bought out by his partners the following year. The Oakland Raiders became the Los Angeles Raiders in 1982.

CHAPTER 11

1
.  Nixon's purchase of his house in Trousdale Estates was first reported by
Los Angeles Times
reporters Gene Blake and Jack Tobin on May 17, 1962.

2
.  This comment from Hoover was made during an interview with Oscar Otis of
The Morning Telegram
and is quoted in Hank Messick,
John Edgar Hoover
(New York: David McKay Co, 1972), p. 147-48.

3
.  According to federal agents, evidence produced by government wiretaps in the FBI's Brilab sting operation in 1978 showed a clear and direct long-term business relationship between Marcello and Murchison. The two men had engaged in negotiations after Murchison had expressed an interest in buying a portion of Marcello's Churchill Farms estate in New Orleans.

4
.  Appendix to the Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, 95th Cong., 2d sess., March 1979, vol. 9, p. 335. Campisi was also known as being a friend of Jack Ruby, the murderer of John Kennedy's assassin. Ruby had dinner at Campisi's restaurant the night before the President's murder. Also, five days after Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald, he called Campisi and asked to see him. Campisi, his wife, and Ruby met privately in the Dallas County Jail on November 30, 1963.

5
.  Davidson told me that he had been first introduced to Marcello during the early 1950s by attorney Jack Wasserman, who represented the mob boss during the federal government's attempts to deport him.

Davidson also admitted that he was a major gunrunner to dictator Fulgencio Batista prior to the Cuban Revolution. “I sold a tremendous amount of tanks and whatnot to Batista in 1958,” Davidson told me. “About two months before Batista fell, I delivered a big package to him.” Earlier, Davidson had arranged for Murchison's principal corporation, Tecon Corporation, to construct several large military housing projects in Cuba.