Interference (72 page)

Kintner became the chairman of NBC's board of directors in 1965—but was squeezed out within a year.

For details of the MCA antitrust case and the sweetheart relationship between MCA and NBC, see my book
Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob
(New York: Viking Press, 1986).

3
.  George Halas with Gwen Morgan and Arthur Veysey,
Halas by Halas: The Autobiography of George Halas
(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1979), p. 269.

4
.  In November 1976, Smith was fired as the chairman of his insurance company by its board of directors “because of the time required by his other business interests.” There was no further explanation. Interestingly, company earnings had been up at the time of Smith's dismissal. Smith remained as a director and continued to hold nearly a twelfth of the company's stock.

5
.  Thomas sold his interest in the Dolphins at the end of the team's first season, in which it posted a 3-11 record. Robbie had sold 10 percent of the Dolphins to Miami businessman John O'Neil; another chunk was sold to George Hamid, who operated the Hamid-Morton Circus and the Atlantic City Pier Company. In 1967, land developer Willard “Bud” Keland bought out Thomas and Hamid. Trouble developed between Robbie and Keland over control of the team. The matter went to Pete Rozelle, who ruled in Robbie's favor and ordered Keland to sell his interest in 1969. Within ninety days, five members of the Miami community came up with the cash to buy out Keland. Robbie emerged as the majority partner.

6
.  Joe Namath with Dick Schaap, I
Can't Wait Until Tomorrow … ‘Cause
I Get Better Looking Every Day
(New York: Random House, Inc., 1969), p. 153.

7
.  Halas,
Halas by Halas
, p. 270.

Interestingly, Rosenbloom also recalled that after the merger had been sealed, several owners from the meeting went to a local restaurant where they ran into New York Senator Robert Kennedy. Seeing Rozelle and the AFL and NFL owners dining together, Kennedy joked, “What's going on? This looks like an antitrust conspiracy.”

8
.  In the first NFL-AFL championship game in January 1967, the NFL's Green Bay Packers defeated Hunt's AFL Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10.

9
.  David Harris,
The League: The Rise and Decline of the NFL
(Toronto: Bantam Books, 1986), pp. 91-92.

10
.  McLaney left Las Vegas when the Carousel Club was bought by Salvatore A. Rizzo, a partner with Frank Sinatra in the Berkshire Downs racetrack. New England mob boss Raymond Patriarca was suspected to have had a hidden interest in the racetrack.

McLaney was later indicted by the IRS for criminal tax fraud. An investigation showed that he had reported no taxable income during the years 1963 to 1966, the exact period that he spent running casinos in the Bahamas and in Las Vegas. He was convicted and served eighty-three days in jail.

11
.  Bernie Parrish,
They Call It a Game
(New York: Dial Press, Inc., 1971), p. 196.

12
.  Rosenbloom's daughter from his first marriage, Suzanne, later married Georgia's younger brother, Kenneth Irwin. Thus, Irwin became both Rosenbloom's brother-in-law and son-in-law.

CHAPTER 16

1
.  Paul Brown with Jack Clary,
PB: The Paul Brown Story
(New York: Atheneum Pubs., 1979), p. 284.

Brown's book so enraged Pete Rozelle, who is a close friend of Modell, that he fined Brown $10,000. It is a violation of NFL rules for one team owner to publicly make derogatory remarks about another NFL owner.

2
.  Jonathan Kwitny,
The Mullendore Murder Case
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1974), p. 96.

3
.  For additional details about Carlos Marcello's empire, see
Life
, 8 and 29 September 1967. Also see David Leon Chandler,
Brothers in Blood: The Rise of Criminal Brotherhoods
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1975); and Michael Dorman,
Payoff: The Role of Organized Crime in American Politics
(New York: David McKay Co., 1972). Both books are excellent. Also see: U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, vol. 9.

There is considerable evidence that Marcello, along with Santos Trafficante and Jimmy Hoffa, arranged and executed the 1963 murder of President John Kennedy. See my book
The Hoffa Wars
(New York: Paddington Press, 1978).

4
.  From 1967 to 1985, while Mecom owned the team, the Saints never had more wins than losses in a single season. The team had eight wins and eight losses in 1979 and 1983.

CHAPTER 17

1
.  Also in 1961, Kennedy was furious when another point-shaving scandal had broken out in college basketball, implicating twenty-two schools and thirty- seven players who were paid between $750 to $4,500 a game not to cover the spread.

2
.  The Kennedy Justice Department's biggest law-enforcement disaster was due to a series of illegal wiretaps conducted by the FBI, most of which were targeted at Las Vegas casino operators. For fifteen months, secret FBI wiretaps that had been placed on the business telephones of five major casinos yielded an astonishing history of syndicate involvement in Las Vegas, including hidden ownerships and massive skimming operations that were being funneled into other underworld-backed activities, such as narcotics and payoffs to politicians. The intelligence was so impressive that J. Edgar Hoover, who had denied throughout his career that the national crime syndicate existed, finally agreed that it did.

However, all the taps had been installed illegally—without court authorization—and none of the data obtained could be used in court. In fact, when the wiretaps were discovered by the casino operators in Las Vegas, they filed a massive civil suit against the federal government. The suit was dropped after the government agreed to quash an IRS investigation of skimming in the casinos.

Like the Kefauver Committee a decade earlier, the Kennedy Justice Department tried but failed to legalize court-authorized federal wiretapping and electronic surveillance in 1962.

3
.  The Sports Bribery Act says, “Whoever carries into effect, attempts to carry into effect, or conspires with any other person to carry into effect any scheme in commerce to influence, in any way, by bribery any sporting contest, with knowledge that the purpose of such scheme is to influence by bribery that contest, shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years or both.” Title 18 USC, Section 224.

4
.  Some bookmakers, to increase their earnings, have moved from the 11-10 payoff to a more lucrative 6-5, which is obviously less popular among the betting public.

There are numerous complex variations of gambling, bookmaking, and the layoff. Because this is not a gambling how-to book, I refer readers to other books on these subjects, including: Mort Olshan,
Winning Theories of Sports Handicapping
(New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1975); Lem Banker and Frederick C. Klein,
Book of Sports Betting
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1986); Larry Merchant,
The National Football Lottery
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1973); Gerald Strine and Neil D. Isaacs,
Covering the Spread: How to Bet Pro Football
(New York: Random House, Inc., 1978); Bob McCune,
The Gambling Times Guide to Football Handicapping
(Secaucus, N.J.: Gambling Times, Inc., 1984); Kelso Sturgeon,
Guide to Sports Betting
(New York: Harper & Row, Inc., 1974); and Richard Sasuly,
Bookies and Bettors: Two Hundred Years of Gambling
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1982). Also see
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin
, November 1977 and September 1978.

5
. 
Erickson died in 1968 at age seventy-two.

6
.  There were two major layoff centers for the underworld during the late 1950s and early 1960s. One was Newport/Covington and the other was Biloxi, Mississippi. Combined, they handled over 90 percent of the bookmaking traffic in America.

7
.  The five-feet-five Coppola was the quintessential mob torpedo. A syndicate killer since New York's Castellammarese War in 1931, he was a top associate and trusted friend of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Frank Costello, and Vito Genovese. For years, he ran the numbers rackets in Harlem. After his wife—who had been indicted for perjury—died while giving birth to their daughter, Coppola moved to Miami Beach. At his height, Coppola had jurisdiction over sixty family “soldiers.”

Coppola's second wife, whom he had met through Beckley, informed to IRS officials about his criminal tax fraud activities and then committed suicide. Beside her dead body was a note to Robert Kennedy, which said, “Please do not lose the courage of your convictions … In my wildest dreams, I can't imagine how Washington can allow people working for cities, states, and Washington to play both ends to the middle by accepting money to uphold the law and then accepting money from gangsters to break the law. Please, Mr. Kennedy, stop this. Don't give up.” (The letter is from Hank Messich's
Syndicate Wife
(New York: Macmillan Co., 1968), p. 2.)

8
.  A close associate of the Beckley/Coppola operation was Alfred Mones, another top layoff bookmaker who operated the Metro Mortgage Company, a Miami business that fronted for his gambling activities. Mones and New York Mafia figure Charles “the Blade” Tourine had been partners in the Capri hotel/ casino in pre-Castro Cuba.

9
.  D'Agostino and the Cotronis were the underworld figures contacted by Charles Luciano and Frank Coppola during the aftermath of World War II while the two deported mobsters were creating their heroin network into the United States via Montreal.

10
.  Beckley had also been using a system of “blue boxes,” an electronic device that, when installed, can distort the telephone signal and bypass the phone company on long-distance telephone calls. The “blue box” network covered fifteen cities. One location had placed a hundred long-distance calls in a single day and not been charged for any. Beckley's gambling syndicate had used the devices as a means of illegally transmitting wagering information.

11
.  Blanda retired from the NFL after the 1975 season after scoring 2,002 points in his career.

CHAPTER 18

1
.  A Nassau County wiretap picked up one Miami bookmaker telling his New York layoff contact, “Lay the eighteen, all you can.”

“What is it all about?” the layoff man replied. “The college coach is putting up his own stuff.”

2
.  Hundley was succeeded as head of the OCRS by Henry Petersen.

3
.  In a separate memorandum on the layoff bookmaking syndicate, filed
by the FBI in Atlanta, Beckley was described as “the key figure in this organized crime operation.”

Coppola, Vito Genovese's heir apparent, had died of natural causes on October 1, 1966, in a Boston hospital.

4
.  In May 1967, a New York City police detective was dismissed for his “dealings with known criminals,” according to an NYPD report. The officer, a twelve-year veteran of the department, also had been “providing his criminal associates with “a quantity of police records.” Named by police officials as the officer's underworld contact was Gil Beckley.

5
. 
Life
, 8 September 1967.

6
.  Tameleo had also been linked by a congressional committee to Bob Cousy and Gene Conley of the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association. Cousy and Conley, along with Parilli, often patronized Arthur's Farm and another gamblers hangout, the Ebb Tide.

7
.  Williams later bought a total 14.7 percent interest in the Redskins. For an excellent biography of Williams, see Robert Pack's,
Edward Bennett Williams for the Defense
(New York: Harper & Row, Inc., 1983).

8
.  Williams's firm also represented Carlos Marcello after he slapped an FBI special agent who had been tailing him. Marcello was convicted and sentenced to six months in a prison hospital.

9
.  Peloquin had been the first head of the U.S. Strike Force Against Organized Crime in Buffalo. (The Strike Forces are the field offices under the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Justice Department.) The Strike Force concept was established to coordinate all federal agencies involved in the war against organized crime and to cut the red tape when attempting to gain authorizations from the top levels of the Justice Department. The Buffalo Strike Force was created in 1966; a second was created in Detroit the following year. In 1968, Strike Force offices were established in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Soon after, two more Strike Force offices were placed in Newark and Miami. In 1969, more were added in Boston, Manhattan, and Cleveland. In 1970, the Strike Force was expanded to include Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and San Francisco. In 1971, a Kansas City office was added followed by one in Las Vegas.

10
.  Promuto was the target of a subsequent investigation in early 1975 when the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations opened hearings into the conduct of former Newark Strike Force chief John Bartels, Jr., the Harvard-educated administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which had been created by President Nixon in July 1973 as a means to coordinate the ten federal antidrug agencies. Bartels was appointed by Nixon as the agency's first chief upon the recommendation of Henry Petersen, then the head of the Nixon Justice Department's criminal division and later Hundley's law partner.

DEA public affairs specialist Promuto, an attorney who had been with the agency since 1972, was accused of compromising DEA investigations via his links to Washington gamblers and bookmakers, specifically McCaleb, McGowan, and Corsi, among others. He was also linked to Gerald LeCompte, a Maryland-based gambler and narcotics dealer, who, according to a confidential 1971 Prince George's County police report, “provided prostitutes … to professional
football players.” Promuto vehemently denied such associations or that he compromised any law-enforcement investigations.