Interference (73 page)

Promuto told me, “Edward Bennett Williams talked me into going to law school. When I graduated, I went to work for the government. There, I infuriated a lot of people. I was kind of a maverick. I'm not a perfect person, but I never did anything wrong. I never leaked any information about gambling or that kind of stuff. Hey, they called me a $500-a-day gambler. I still don't bet five cents. I laugh at my wife when she goes to bingo. I'm really proud that I worked as hard as I did in the government. I would do the whole thing over again.”

A Justice Department investigation also looked into the charges against Bartels and Promuto. That probe was conducted by a three-man team headed by government attorney Michael DeFeo, one of Hundley's protégés and later a top official with the OCRS.

Bartels, who had attempted to quash the Promuto probe, resigned under pressure from Attorney General Edward Levi in May 1975. Promuto was reassigned to the DEA's New York office. Neither Bartels nor Promuto was charged with any crime.

CHAPTER 19

1
.  Klein adds that he had not yet met Carroll Rosenbloom at the time of his attempt to purchase Warner Brothers-Seven Arts.

2
.  Kinney's chief executive officer was Caesar P. Kimmel, whose father, Emmanuel Kimmel, was a major syndicate gambler. A former FBI special agent says of Kimmel's business, “At one time, it was a front and the bankroll of one of the biggest sports books in the country.” Another law-enforcement official alleges, “National Kinney was mob-linked. Fat Tony Salerno laundered money from one of his sports-bookmaking fronts through Kinney.”

However, when Kinney purchased the film company, Caesar Kimmel made a strong denial during an interview with
Forbes
that his company had any ties to the underworld. “I've lived with this over the years—the charge that we are run by the Mafia. It just isn't true. We don't wear shoulder holsters. We've never been under the influence of any underworld group … To put it bluntly: I am not my father's keeper. He has his world—he was born about 1898—and I have mine.”
Forbes
added that it had “been unable to find a shred of solid evidence to support [the charges linking Kinney to the Mafia].”

3
.  Another new member of the Seven Arts board of directors was Alfred Bloomingdale, who was the grandson of the founder of Bloomingdale's department stores and a member of Ronald Reagan's “kitchen cabinet.” Reagan had been elected governor of California in 1966. Bloomingdale later was placed on the board of the Los Angeles Rams by Carroll Rosenbloom.

4
.  During the Watergate investigation, Murchison was accused of personally delivering a $5,000 campaign contribution to President Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, and then left without getting a receipt. In 1968 alone, Murchison and his brother contributed $50,000 to Nixon's presidential campaign. After the election, Nixon and Murchison remained close friends. At the Washington Redskins-Dallas Cowboys game in November 1969, Nixon sat
with Murchison in seats provided by General Dynamics, the military hardware firm with which Murchison did business.

5
.  The Mary Carter Paint Company became the new power in the Bahamas gambling operations in 1967. The origins of the paint firm—which was based in Tampa but had its factory in New Jersey—are fuzzy, but it was taken over in October 1958 by the Crosby-Miller Corporation. The company had been formed by businessmen James Crosby and Jack Miller earlier in the year. Among the investors was former New York governor and defeated presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey. Another investor was author and television personality Lowell Thomas.

In 1960, Crosby's brother Peter was convicted in New York of securities fraud in a case involving stock in the Texas Adams Oil Company, which was owned by the family of Houston Oilers owner, Bud Adams.

6
.  Specifically, Hartford told me that financier Robert Vesco later laundered $250,000 from the Castle Bank through a casino on Paradise Island and then gave the money to Nixon's political fixer, Murray Chotiner. Hartford also alleges that Nixon had made three deposits totaling $35,883,070, between October 21, 1971, and June 11, 1972, in the Cosmos Bank in Zurich, Switzerland. Hartford says that Nixon's account was under the name of the Zephyr Group, #47932608ZRA. Attempts to confirm Hartford's claims have been unsuccessful.

7
.  At the time of Groves's deal with Mary Carter, he was working for the CIA. The April 18, 1980, issue of
The Wall Street Journal
quotes a “Secret” memorandum from Covert Security Approval, dated December 30, 1965. The memo stated that Groves “will be used as an advisor and possible officer for one of [the CIA's unidentified] Project entitles …”

8
.  On January 18, 1966, Bob Peloquin and David P. Bancroft, U.S. Strike Force attorneys, wrote a memorandum to Bill Hundley, who was in his final days as the chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section before becoming the head of NFL Security. Peloquin had been working with the IRS in Operation Tradewinds, a highly secret probe that concentrated on illegal money-laundering operations in the Bahamas. The memorandum to Hundley was based on an interview the two attorneys had had with Huntington Hartford in Nassau.

Peloquin and Bancroft concluded in their memorandum to Hundley that Hartford could be “easily [developed] into a good informant who would be in a position to supply accurate information as to the Lansky-Groves-Chesler gambling operations … Mary Carter Paints will be in control of Paradise Island with the exception of the Casino which Groves will control.

“The atmosphere seems ripe for a Lansky skim.”

9
.  Mastriana also charged that he had been approached by McLaney and Elliot Roosevelt, the former mayor of Miami Beach and the son of the late president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and “asked if I would take a contract on Lyndon O. Pindling, and I said I would if the price was right. I was asked what I wanted and I said $10,000 in advance and $100,000 when the hit was completed.” Mastriana added that he received the $10,000 but never did the job. Another underworld figure, Patsy Lepera, confirmed Mastriana's story. Both Mastriana and Lepera were convicted stock swindlers. Both Roosevelt and McLaney denied the charges.

10
. 
McLaney lost his libel suit against
Life
. He had denied being “in business” with Lansky. However, he did admit contributing the use of three airplanes, a boat, and a helicopter to Pindling's campaign. The estimated worth of these contributions was $60,000.

In 1980, McLaney chartered one of his planes, usually used for gambling junkets, to Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign staff.

11
.  McLaney was ordered to leave the Bahamas. He then moved his gambling operations to Haiti, where he operated with the cooperation of the country's dictator, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, to reopen the Casino International in the Royal Haitian Hotel in Port-au-Prince.

12
.  Commission report, p. 92.

13
.  Among the guests at the 1967 opening of Mary Carter's first casino was Richard Nixon, who soon after announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Mary Carter chief James Crosby did much of his banking with Nixon's closest friend, Bebe Rebozo, who introduced Crosby to Nixon earlier in the year. Crosby became a close friend of Nixon and contributed no less than $100,000 to Nixon's 1968 campaign.

Also in 1968, Bebe Rebozo, the president of the Key Biscayne Bank, was asked to arrange a loan on behalf of an Atlanta businessman, who put up nine hundred shares of IBM stock as collateral. In the midst of a background check of the applicant, Rebozo called on Crosby, the chairman of the board of Resorts International, based on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. After the loan was granted, the stock was identified as being stolen. Rebozo claimed to have no knowledge about the matter, according to a sworn deposition he filed.

Later indicted for the theft were Gil Beckley, who was then operating out of Atlanta, and Beckley's banker, Tony Salerno.

14
.  On June 5, after winning the California primary for the Democratic nomination for president, Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down after his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. His murderer, Sirhan Sirhan, was a hot walker at Santa Anita and Del Mar racetracks—with ties to a New Jersey organized-crime figure Henry Ramistella, who had a criminal record in Florida. Kennedy's assassin lived on a horse farm in Southern California with Ramistella until shortly before the murder.

15
.  Intertel was responsible for Hughes's midnight departure from his Desert Inn hotel/casino in Las Vegas in late November 1970. Hughes, who was carried out by stretcher down the back stairs of the hotel, was immediately flown to the Bahamas and placed in the Britannia Beach Hotel. This incident caused Hughes's final break with his longtime confidant, Robert Maheu. Hughes died on April 5, 1976. Intertel continued to handle security for his company's casinos.

16
.  In February 1978, Peloquin was forced to respond to charges by Boston-mobster-turned-government-witness Vincent Teresa that he had attempted to bribe Teresa in 1972. Teresa alleged that Peloquin wanted him to recant his testimony against Resorts International in return for a $100-a-day job with the company. Peloquin admitted meeting with Teresa and offering to help find him employment, but “at no time did I in any manner indicate to Teresa that I desired him to change any testimony he might have given or planned to give. At no time did I tell Teresa that I would give him a job if he perjured
himself. I did indicate to Teresa that if I learned of any job opportunities I would communicate same to him.”

17
.  Both the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968 and the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 resulted from the work of the 1967 President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice.

CHAPTER 20

1
.  Jimmy the Greek with the editorial assistance of Mickey Herskowitz and Steve Perkins,
Jimmy the Greek by Himself
(New York: Playboy Press, 1975), pp. 145-46.

Snyder, whose real name is Dimetrios Georgos Synodinos, is a tenth grade dropout from Steubenville, Ohio, and the son of a grocer in a local ma-and-pa store. The Synodinos family had been victimized by a severe act of violence. Snyder's uncle murdered Snyder's mother, his estranged wife, and then himself during a shooting rampage when Snyder was only nine.

Snyder pleaded no contest to interstate transportation of bets and wagering information in 1963. He was fined $10,000 and placed on probation for five years. He received a full and unconditional pardon from President Gerald Ford in December 1974. In his autobiography, Snyder wrote that he had met Ford while he was still a congressman, at the home of Robert Maheu, the liaison between the CIA and the Mafia in the Castro assassination plots (p. 238).

Snyder insisted that he had not made a bet on any sport, other than horse racing, since 1961.

2
.  Larry Merchant,
The National Football Lottery
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1973), pp. 265-66.

3
.  Dawson finished his nineteen-year career, still with the Kansas City Chiefs, in 1975. At the time of his retirement, he had earned an 82.6 passing rating—which, according to the NFL, “is based on performance standards established for completion percentage, interception percentage, touchdown percentage, and average gain. Passers are allocated points according to how their marks compare with those standards.” Only one NFL quarterback had done as well by 1975: Sonny Jurgensen, who also had an 82.6 rating and had retired in 1974.

4
.  Kemp left the Steelers at the end of the 1957 season and joined the Los Angeles Chargers in the first AFL season in 1960. He went to the Buffalo Bills in 1962 and played there until 1969.

5
.  As Kansas City had in Super Bowl I, the Oakland Raiders lost to the Green Bay Packers, 33-14, in the second AFL-NFL World Championship Game. The game produced a $3 million gate, which was then the largest in sports history.

6
.  Nolan was sentenced to prison in October 1970. He fled the country the following month and lived in fifteen countries. Finally, after fifteen months on the run, Nolan surrendered and went to jail. There, he told me, he later became a good friend of convicted former U.S. attorney general John Mitchell. Nolan was released in August 1978.

7
.  The four games were LSU vs. South Carolina, September 17, 1966; LSU
vs. Texas A & M, October 8, 1966; LSU vs. Kentucky, October 15, 1966; and LSU vs. Florida, October 22, 1966.

8
.  Nolan—through one of his younger brothers Charles—had become a friend of several other local sports stars, including fullback Jim Taylor, who later played for the Green Bay Packers; halfback Billy Cannon, who later played for the Houston Oilers; and basketball player Bob Petitt, who later played for the Boston Celtics.

“I used to keep away from Bob,” Nolan says. “He never had a shadow on him. He's the all-American-type. And I like him. But I used to stay on the other side of the room if we were in the same place—because I gambled and he was a professional athlete.

“One time, Jimmy Taylor came up to me and grabbed me around the neck and said, ‘What's the matter with you? Why aren't you speaking to me?' And I said, ‘Oh, Jimmy, I'm gambling, and you're playing football.' He said, ‘I've known you all my life. You mean we can't even talk?'“ Nolan described Taylor as “the cleanest man I ever knew.” He added that Billy Cannon was “lily-white.”

Cannon completed his career with the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970. In 1983, Cannon, by then a successful Baton Rouge dentist, pleaded guilty for his role in a $6 million counterfeiting scheme. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Earlier in the year, Cannon had been selected to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. However, his induction was withdrawn after his conviction.