Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (23 page)

FIRST, FOR DOWD, there was Janszen, who said he was letting this all spill out because Pete owed him many thousands of dollars (a life savings’ worth by Janszen’s lights) and also because he had bookies after him for other money that Pete owed. This on top of the trouble he’d already gotten into, the steroid dealing and his conviction for tax fraud. Janszen didn’t know what else to do but come out with all the stuff about Pete, he said; he was at the end of his rope and needed to turn his life around. Janszen had called in so many bets for Pete, so many baseball bets among them, and he had been so close with the guy for a while; all in all he provided the investigation with many reams of details. Janszen’s girlfriend Danita Jo Marcum also spoke under oath with Dowd and she too talked about placing bets on the Reds for Pete.

Janszen led to Peters and to more specifics and clarity and corroboration. Peters said he had a code name set up for Rose (the cute though barely disguising “14”) but that Rose never actually used it. Usually someone else phoned Peters to bet on Rose’s behalf and on the rare occasions when Rose himself called, at least as Peters told it, he just announced, “This is Pete.” No code, no disguise. There was another convicted bookmaker who turned up early in the investigation, too, a guy named Joe Cambra out of Massachusetts, who’d hung around at Rose’s house in Florida, visiting. Of interest to Dowd, among other things, was that Pete had given Cambra two sizable checks (Rose put the value at $19,800) for what the two men described as a real estate deal that never came through.

Dowd’s team talked with Don Stenger and Michael Fry, the guys who were moving the cocaine out of Gold’s Gym. There were other witnesses whom Dowd and Hallinan sat down with on the record, and others still who came forward but were turned away, Dowd believing their testimony too vague or circumstantial to rely on—for example, more folks who’d overheard Gioiosa on the phone at Gold’s talking loudly about placing bets for Pete.

Gioiosa himself never sang, never showed up even after Hallinan sent him a plane ticket to fly in for some discussions. It was only later, after Pete had been banned and Gioiosa sat in Boone County jail starting his sentence for conspiracies to distribute cocaine and to defraud the IRS—the latter related to winnings from a 1987 Pick-Six horse racing bet that Rose had been in on—that Gioiosa too began to open up about Pete’s betting on the Reds.

Turned out Dowd and Hallinan didn’t need Gioiosa. Within two weeks of landing in Cincinnati, Dowd had nine people who said Rose had bet on baseball. Then he had a dozen. And the hard physical evidence was starting to come in. Rose’s handwriting on betting slips. (His fingerprints all over them too.) Canceled checks. Phone records. “Like shooting fish in a barrel,” Dowd says. “In terms of getting information this was as easy as could be. There were so many people out there.”

One of them was Mike Bertolini, a massive young man—obese or close to it—with a truly glorious mouth: He was out of Brooklyn, full of charisma, and you could hear the
fuhgeddaboutit
in everything he said. The first time Hallinan and Dowd met with him, in a diner, Bertolini ordered up six hard-boiled eggs to snack on. While the order was in, though, the three men got to talking and Bertolini began to grasp the depth of what Dowd and Hallinan already knew, started to get a clear picture of what was at stake and what could happen. When those hard-boiled eggs came to the table, Bertolini didn’t eat a single one.

In Dowd’s offices he and the other lawyers sometimes listened to the tape of Bertolini and Janszen for pure amusement. “We were rolling on the floor, the way this guy talked!” says Dowd. Bertolini couldn’t say hello without a four-letter word attached, and the conversation was soaked with exchanges like:

As entertaining as the dialogue was—a dash of salted Runyon, a heap of Paulie Walnuts—what really got Dowd and Hallinan’s attention were the weightier parts, the passages when Janszen and Bertolini talked about money that they say Pete owed:

And a little later:

And:

And later still, Bertolini saying of the debt Pete was in: “Then it got so high and shit and fuck’n, you know, it was like he said, man no matter how good I do, it’s like I never go down.”

There was also another Janszen tape, of a phone call with a guy named Steve Chevashore that had a lot of betting discussion on it and which appeared to trace money that Pete owed back to bosses in New York. When Hallinan and another investigator met face-to-face with Chevashore, he seemed very nervous, they say, and reluctant. And when they tried to get to him again a few days later he wouldn’t talk anymore—he was suddenly suffering from a broken arm. “Playing baseball,” Chevashore said in explaining how he’d broken it, although he also allowed that he had not played baseball in many years.

“There was no doubt in our minds that these bets were ending up with organized crime,” said Hallinan. “There was a connection there that you could not miss.”

Things turned up about Pete’s being near the cocaine dealings and about all kinds of undeclared cash and about the depths of his bookie betting. Lead after lead after lead. The investigation could have gone on and on. And it was everywhere, in the news, bigger than anything happening on the baseball fields. The media milked every drop of information. Reporters followed Dowd and his team into hotel lobbies. They lurked around the Cincinnati airport. They showed up at restaurants. When Dowd and Hallinan came out of the MLB offices on Park Avenue, they sometimes saw rows of TV trucks idling three deep in the street— and then suddenly had microphones in their faces. Hallinan started slipping out a back door when he left.

Dowd seemed confident, undeterred. He zeroed in on the baseball betting and went after particular dates, in 1987 mainly, and concentrated on putting it all together as neatly and quickly as he and his team could. Baseball’s club owners wanted the Rose thing out of the headlines. Dowd answered to everyone in some sense—to Giamatti, the owners, the public, Rose’s counsel—but, truly, he answered to no one but himself. He steered the ship in the manner he saw fit, through foul winds and fair.

“I’d worked with U.S. attorneys,” says Hallinan. “I’d worked with Frank Hogan”—the longtime New York D.A. famed for his incorruptibility—“I’d worked with enough attorneys to fill a ballpark, and I’ll tell you that John Dowd had all the qualities you could want for this job. Brilliant, driven, committed, honest. A man’s man. And I was not easily impressed. I’d seen them come and go. There was so much pressure on this case, and Dowd never blinked.”

Media folks were all over Rose too, of course, wearing at him every damned day as he plowed ahead, pestering him with questions, questions, questions, on the field or in his office or in the parking lot before he got into his Porsche. Reporters showed up at the house in Indian Hill. He didn’t talk about the investigation with his players in the clubhouse—“Not once,” says reliever John Franco. “He was all business about managing the team”—but Rose grew edgier, more brusque and more defiant with each passing day.
Sports Illustrated
kept breaking big news out of the case, and
The New York Times
dug stuff up too, and so did the newspapers in Cincinnati and in Dayton. Pete showed up on the TV news just about every night.

He couldn’t understand how unyielding the media was, how they had pressed him so hard from the moment the investigation was known. Reporters Rose had been acquainted with for so many years, along with the many newer faces suddenly assigned to his case. Why couldn’t they all just lay off him some? And how could they believe what they were hearing from other people and doubt him? Didn’t those reporters owe him something for all the years he had been so good to them, win or lose, good times and bad, filling every notebook with his candor, his insight, his humor, his inimitable talk?

Pete’s family felt it, too. Pete Jr., playing minor league ball, could barely breathe from the heckling. Fawn heard it at graduate school. Karolyn, tending bar at the Wagon Wheel Cafe, shook her head and barked back when customers brought up Pete. (Which they did and did and did.) Carol looked out the windows before she and Tyler left the house each day, checked her rearview mirror when she pulled out onto Given Road. LaVerne was living in Delhi on the West Side, refusing all requests to talk specifically about the case involving her son. She had a two-bedroom apartment where she lived by herself and she hadn’t gone to the ballpark to see Pete manage the Reds for a couple of years. LaVerne told people that Pete was not the tough guy he was being made out to be in the papers, that he had really been a mama’s boy. And when someone asked why she didn’t have a single picture, or even a news clipping, of Pete any-where around her place, she cackled and said in her twinkling rasp: “I don’t need pictures, I know what that brat looks like!”

Dave Rose was working his short order job at Gold Star Chili and just about every time he left work, someone followed him—a baseball investigator or an FBI guy or a reporter. Sometimes all three. They thought they might see Dave run a bet, or go meet a bookie on Pete’s behalf. No one got anything by trailing Dave, though. He didn’t have anything to give. “I was completely out of the loop,” he says. “Not that I wanted to be. I just never knew what Pete had going on. He didn’t even tell me what he wanted me to say when baseball came to talk to me, which they did a few times. The Dowd thing, the betting, this wasn’t something I could even ask Pete about. He was not open to it. He told the papers he did not bet on baseball, and that’s what I believed.”

When Dave was working the chili kitchen, he sometimes heard customers talking about Pete (a large photo of him hung on the wall by the counter), with some of them speaking approvingly and defiantly on Pete’s behalf and others saying nasty things, saying how he should be kicked out of the game. If a customer got a good sight of Dave, though, that talk usually quieted or stopped—he looked so much like Pete with that barrel chest and the mouth, and Dave could cut you with a glance.

The hounding by reporters meant that when Dowd and Hallinan sat down to talk with Rose, to get him on the record, they had to find someplace out of the way to do it. They couldn’t just get together in Katz’s office in Cincinnati, say, or call Rose to New York in the middle of the season. You might as well just order the circus into town. That’s how the deposition ended up taking place in a convent in Dayton, in the cafeteria of a little Catholic school where the press never found them. “Which one of us is doing God’s work?” one of Pete’s lawyers joked, observing the surroundings. There were 10 people in the room: Dowd and two other lawyers from his D.C. law firm; Hallinan and Daly; a court reporter; a paralegal and Pete Rose with his counsel, Robert Pitcairn and Roger Makley.

The deposition started on the late afternoon of a late-April off-day for the Reds. The team had gotten back to Cincinnati that morning on the redeye, after playing the Dodgers in L.A., and Makley asked right away for Dowd to forgive Pete if he was a little weary, being as he had only slept for about three hours. “An hour and a half,” Rose interjected.

Dowd started by asking Rose to lay out who he was and where he was from, the details of his baseball career and his position as manager of the Reds—basic material for the record. Then he asked about the bookmaker Joe Cambra, and Rose said that he had gotten a chunk of cash from the guy, cash back from those checks for the soured real estate deal. “And what did you do with the cash?” Dowd asked, and Rose responded, “Put it in my pocket.”

They talked about a recent winning Pick-Six ticket from Turfway Park, worth more than $250,000 and why Rose as one of the winners hadn’t cashed it himself, or ever reported the income. Rose said how his pal Arnie Metz, a stadium ops guy for the Reds who so often went to the track with Pete and ran bets up to the window for him, had signed for the ticket, really as a matter of convenience. Pete said that he himself had gotten $109,000 in winnings, and that another bettor on the ticket, Turfway Park owner Jerry Carroll, had gotten about that same amount and that Arnie had gotten some of the rest, as a tip. That was one of the other aspects of that Pick-Six ticket—that Carroll was on it. Some people around Cincinnati wondered whether a track owner winning big like that signaled something fishy. Some people thought that Carroll shouldn’t be betting like that, Rose said, “because he could have five out of six and go down in the jocks’ room and tell them who should win the sixth race.”