Interference (15 page)

Before his marriage to Breslin, Modell reportedly dated the daughter of Carroll Rosenbloom's business and gambling partner
Lou Chesler. Modell has denied this and insisted that he had met Lou Chester only once. However, according to Tex McCrary, “Art was a great friend of both Carroll Rosenbloom and Lou Chesler. His advertising firm represented the General Development Corporation,” which was run by Chesler.

Modell left the Hartmann agency and joined Kastor, Hilton, Chesley, Clifford & Atherton, which was where he was employed when he bought the Cleveland team. The firm was the source of his seed money to buy the Browns. Modell and his partner Rudy Schaefer of New York, the owner of Schaefer Beer Company, purchased the team for $3,925,000, splitting the stock and with Modell holding the controlling interest. The two men reportedly had been total strangers before the Browns deal. Modell and Schaefer raised $1.4 million in cash with the help of a dozen smaller investors, including a group from the Atlantic City Racing Association. Prodded by department store tycoon Robert Hays Gries, who had been McBride's onetime partner in the Browns, Cleveland's Union Commerce Bank lent the group $2.5 million. Gries and his heirs later became Modell's principal partners.
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After buying the Browns, Modell, who had been viewed by local fans as a carpetbagger, said, “I came to Cleveland as an out of towner and purchased one of the great loves of this community. I think I understand that responsibility and I'm thankful for the support the people of this area have given me and my family.” Within three years of his purchase, Modell shocked the Cleveland fans by firing the team's longtime coach and namesake Paul Brown.

A third management change occurred in 1961. The new president of the Detroit Lions, William Clay Ford, was the vice president of product design for the Ford Motor Company and a member of its board of directors. He was also the son of the company's founder, Henry Ford. In 1964, Bill Ford bought the Lions for $6.5 million.
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Although Ford's older brother, Henry Ford II, became involved in casino gambling operations on St. Maarten island, there is no evidence that his gambling ties or Henry Sr.'s little-known underworld contacts were handed down to William Clay Ford.
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The NFL has never disclosed any investigation it has done on Ford or his family's gambling businesses.

12 The Gambling Scandal Erupts

CARROLL ROSENBLOOM WAS FLYING high. By 1962, he, Morris Mac Schwebel, and Lou Chesler were still the three largest stockholders in Seven Arts, which had already purchased the film libraries of Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century-Fox. Also that year, Seven Arts purchased the film library of MCA/ Universal Pictures for $21.5 million with a down payment of $7.5 million.
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Since the back-to-back NFL championship seasons in 1958 and 1959, Rosenbloom and his Baltimore Colts had barely played .500 ball but were doing so in front of large, enthusiastic crowds. Rosenbloom was making a fortune on his team.

Three of the members of that Colts team—Alan Ameche, Joe Campanella, and Gino Marchetti—had come to Rosenbloom to borrow $100,000 to help them finance a local small restaurant. Without flinching, Rosenbloom loaned them the money. It was another good bet. The little restaurant became the first of the Gino's national fast-food franchises. Seeing how successful the experiment was, Rosenbloom continued to loan his players money when they wanted to start their own businesses. Of course, Rosenbloom became a major stockholder in their companies.

“Our objective is to help all our players invest their money well,” Rosenbloom told reporter Bob Oates. “I don't believe the bromide: ‘The only good ball player is a hungry ballplayer.' I don't want any hungry athletes around me. The way to win
games and titles is with 40 players who are free to give their undivided attention to football because they don't have a worry in the world.” He also saw to it that his players were perennially among the highest-paid in the NFL.

Rosenbloom was a close friend of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and his son Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts, a member of the Senate Rackets Committee who had become the President of the United States in 1961. Young Kennedy was one of Rosenbloom's golf partners.

According to author Doris Kearns Goodwin, on the day Kennedy was elected, Rosenbloom was out on the lawn of the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, playing touch football with Kennedy friends and family. At dinner on election night, Rosenbloom was one of only three friends present and had flown in a bushel of hard-shell crabs from the Chesapeake Bay for the occasion.
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Kennedy family spokesman, Steve Smith, who was also present at the election night dinner, told me that he did not recall Rosenbloom's being there. He did, however, say that Rosenbloom and Joe Kennedy had been members of the same country club in Palm Beach, Florida. “There was never any business relationship between Rosenbloom and any member of the Kennedy family that I'm aware of. He was a friend, and the family liked him,” Smith said.

Rosenbloom had given Robert F. Kennedy a game ball signed by the members of the 1958 World Champion Colts. Kennedy kept the ball in his office when he became U.S. attorney general under his brother.

“Rosenbloom was a great, great friend of Joe Kennedy,” says Rosenbloom's longtime friend and business partner Tex McCrary. “And he was a great friend of Jack Kennedy. Carroll worshipped Jack Kennedy. And he used to love quoting old Joe. He used to love telling a joke Joe Kennedy used to tell him: ‘Never trust an Irishman with a bottle of booze or a Jew with a pack of matches.'”

Ironically, in April 1962, four insurance companies initiated lawsuits against Rosenbloom, charging that he had filed false reports about a fire at his Margate, New Jersey, house on September 5, 1950. The companies hired a Miami private investigator, Sam Benton, to look into the charges that Rosenbloom had hired an arsonist to burn down his house in order to collect the fire insurance. The companies charged that Rosenbloom had received
$152,529 on the basis of the false reports. The companies accused Rosenbloom of making “false statements intending to deceive and defraud” them. The suit demanded repayment of the amount given to Rosenbloom, along with 6 percent interest and $500,000 in punitive damages.

And that was only the beginning.

Rosenbloom's old friend Mike McLaney still had been experiencing severe financial troubles a year after Castro took over Cuba and closed down the casinos, which cost McLaney and his two partners, Rosenbloom and Chesler, a fortune. Rosenbloom and Chesler could afford it, but McLaney could not.

In the wake of the fall of Cuba, McLaney claimed that Rosenbloom had reneged on a deal to permit him to repurchase his stock in Universal Controls at the original sale price. Consequently, McLaney sued Rosenbloom in September 1960 for $4.25 million. U.S. District Judge Joseph Lieb of Miami dismissed McLaney's suit and sealed all the evidence in the case, which included a series of damaging affidavits and depositions filed against Rosenbloom.

In October 1962, private investigator Benton, a close friend of McLaney, went to Rozelle with a new, reconstructed version of the sealed material against Rosenbloom. The documents had been obtained while Benton was working for the insurance companies that had accused Rosenbloom of fraud.

On December 6, 1962, in the midst of Rozelle's cursory investigation of Rosenbloom, the Colts' owner authorized his attorneys to turn over the remaining sealed documents in the case to Rozelle for a private review. However, Rosenbloom's attorneys warned that the public release of the documents “would be scandalous in nature.” Rosenbloom threatened a $7.5 million lawsuit if they were revealed. The figure was based on the 1963 estimated worth of the Colts. Rosenbloom believed that McLaney's charges could jeopardize his ownership of the franchise.

Nevertheless, believing that Rozelle was not taking the evidence seriously, and in defiance of Rosenbloom's threat, Benton and McLaney then circulated forty copies of the affidavits and depositions at the annual meeting of the NFL owners at the Kenilworth Hotel in Bal Harbour in January 1963.
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Among these depositions was one filed by Miami restaurant owner Charles Schwartz, who had known Rosenbloom for twenty years and had been McLaney's operating partner in the
Havana casino. Schwartz stated that he had received a telephone call from Beldon Katleman, the owner of the El Rancho Vegas, a casino in Las Vegas. Katleman had won “a lot of money” from Rosenbloom playing gin rummy and had called Schwartz to complain that Rosenbloom had been avoiding him. When Schwartz called Rosenbloom and gave him Katleman's message, Rosenbloom replied, “Oh, I was playing gin, and I had to make a plane, and we never finished the game. It's an unfinished game, and we are supposed to continue it.”

Eventually, the two men settled the debt. Rosenbloom in his 1960 deposition confirmed that he had owed the money to Katleman and that McLaney and Schwartz had served as intermediaries. He said that he settled with Katleman for $25,000 and added that the original debt was $600,000—but that they had been playing “for fun.”

McLaney, who was having additional financial difficulties at the time of his suit against Rosenbloom and was claiming nearly $164,000 in debts, also filed more serious charges against Rosenbloom, alleging that the Colts' owner had bet against his own team in a 1953 game between Baltimore and the San Francisco 49ers.

In a pretrial deposition in his case against Rosenbloom, McLaney said of his business relationship with the Colts' owner, “One of the other transactions was my betting knowledge and background, and a business relationship was formed for the purpose of betting large sums of money on football games … On some occasions we would not be equal partners because Mr. Rosenbloom had much more money than I had and was able to bet higher. On one occasion, for instance, he bet as high as fifty-five thousand dollars against his own team, the Baltimore Colts, against the [San Francisco 49ers].”
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How credible was McLaney's statement? Robert J. McGarvey was an eleven-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department and Rosenbloom's personal aide from 1951 to 1954. McGarvey claimed, “After Mr. Rosenbloom purchased the Baltimore Colts … one of the services I performed for him during 1953-54 was placing his bets, or assisting in the placing of his bets on professional football games. During this period Mr. Rosenbloom bet frequently and in large amounts … Mr. Rosenbloom wagered to win and, when he felt his own team would not win, bet against the Colts on such occasions.

“I remember that in the last game in the 1953 season, when
his Colts were playing the Forty-niners on the West Coast, Mr. Rosenbloom bet a large sum of money against his own team and won.”

In another affidavit, Larry E. Murphy, a former caddy who had met Rosenbloom and McGarvey at the LaGorce Country Club in Miami Beach, confirmed this and also stated, “I know that he frequently bet on professional football games and many times bet against his own team.”

In still another affidavit, Florida businessman Richard Melvin, a golfing partner of Rosenbloom and the husband of bandleader Tommy Dorsey's widow, said, “I distinctly remember that during one professional football season he made nine straight winning bets on professional football games.”

The Colts and the 49ers game in question was played on December 13, 1953, at San Francisco's Kezar Stadium. The Colts, who were twenty-three-point underdogs, lost the game, 45-14. It was the last game of the regular season for both teams. The Colts' record that year—Rosenbloom's first in the NFL—was three wins and nine losses.

In the Colts' first possession of the game, Buddy Young, fielding a punt, ran ninety-two yards for what appeared to be the first score of the game. But the play was called back because Baltimore had too many men on the field. The twelfth man was not identified by officials. In its report on the game,
The San Francisco Examiner
wrote: “That delay by the Colts' unidentified twelfth man in clearing the premises, and the loss of the squirming
[sic]
touchdown could have altered the course of the game. It might have set the Colts afire for an upset.

“However, that was only a longshot possibility because of the Colts' lack of man power.” The Colts racked up only two yards passing and twenty-two yards rushing in the first half. Down 31-7 at halftime—and 31-30 against the spread—the Colts totaled only 136 yards for the entire game. The 49ers completely out-manned the Colts and dominated the contest.

McLaney had charged that Rosenbloom had intentionally “decided to leave several of his fine players at home.”

In fact, the Colts played the game without their starting quarterback, Fred Enke, and their best running back, George Taliaferro, as well as other starters.

However, in Rosenbloom's defense, Taliaferro told me, “There was Fred Enke, Dick Flowers, and Jack DelBello. Those were the quarterbacks. They couldn't play. Each of them was
injured. That prompted Keith Molesworth, the Colts' head coach, to ask me if I could play quarterback. But I had never taken a snap directly from the center—where I had to put my hands right under his hind end.

“So I played quarterback when the Colts played the Los Angeles Rams in Baltimore, two weeks before the Forty-niners game. We lost that one, twenty-one to thirteen. The week before the Forty-niners game, we played the Rams again—this time in Los Angeles. During that game, I snapped the cartilage in the interior portion of my right knee.
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There was no way that I could play in the Forty-niners game. Fred Enke was not able to play either.

“Molesworth was so desperate for a quarterback that he just asked everyone, ‘Is there anyone on this team who can throw a football?' So we had a small halfback. He was the guy who played quarterback in the San Francisco game. He had never played quarterback in his life. But we didn't have anyone else.”