Interference (22 page)

“It was just a matter of finding enough bookmakers around the country where he could get different prices. Really, Gil was more like a broker than a bookmaker. I saw him in situations where he wouldn't actually be making the bet, but he actually acted as somebody's beard.”

By betting heavily on one team, Beckley was able to manipulate the point spread and create a differential as much as six points. He would then bet on the other team with another bookmaker at a more favorable spread. Beckley hoped to “catch a middle”; that is, he hoped that the final score would come down the middle, so that he would win both bets.

“Let's say a team received one and a half [points],” Beckley's associate explains. “He loved those one and a half games. This was his big money because he ended up playing the middle. Let's say Gil had two hundred thousand dollars from the New England area, say, from Raymond Patriarca [the boss of the New England Mafia] or his man. Patriarca would call Gil and say, ‘I got two hundred thousand dollars minus one and a half on Washington.' So Gil would say, ‘I'll get right back with you.' Then he'd call San Francisco or some other end of the country, and say, ‘I can get you a half a point.' Then he would try to sell that new line.

“So Gil would have at least a point. Now this was great when the Los Angeles Rams played a New York team. At both ends of the country, the bookmakers would be betting in opposite ways. So Gil would take one and a half from the guy who just laid it off to him, to laying a half a point the other way, or more if he could get it. Gil didn't care who won, plus he got the ten percent on the one who lost. Middling. He sometimes got up to two and three points, particularly if the spread was big, like fourteen. He got a lot of the big spreads there. When he laid that line, he was forcing people to bet against the winner.

“But Gil didn't rip off the smaller bookmakers. He was accepting their action, because they were loaded up. They got to balance their books with the layoff to Gil and keep their ten percent on the losers.”

Speaking of “catching a middle,” another bookmaker says, “Bookmakers cannot afford to move a game two or three points. They're apt to get middled when they go across a key number. When you open a game at six, and you go to seven and a half, you're only moving it a point and a half, but you're moving it across a key number, which is seven, a touchdown and an extra point. It's the same as when you open a game at two, and then move it to three and a half. That's across a key number, three, a field goal. When we're getting these numbers, a bookmaker will not move from one side of a touchdown and field goal to the other unless he is very financially sound on the game.”

Bookmakers view the key betting numbers as: three, six, seven, and ten. These numbers hold the greatest risk and effect for them and their businesses.

To provide some idea of the national scope of Beckley's layoff operation, another member of Beckley's bookmaking network, Elmer Dudley of Atlanta, says, “I had a pool of fifteen people, and
I could get together fifty thousand to seventy thousand dollars in bets [on a single game]. You multiply that by sixteen cities, and it adds up to a lot of money.”

According to both underworld and government sources, Beckley often found “cooperative” players to help secure his wagers. They provided him with good inside information or even shaved points and fixed games. Other personnel who were helpful to him included team owners, coaches, and trainers, as well as their families and even the janitors in the locker rooms. Those who cooperated were well paid.

When I asked Gene Nolan whether Beckley was actively fixing games, Nolan replied, “He wouldn't tell me because I was betting too much. But, hell, I'm not blind. I don't know that he did the fix as much as he just found out which way the players were going to go.”

On January 8, 1966, Beckley's apartment in Miami Beach was raided by federal agents. They seized his copy of
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
which was filled with the coded names of some of the most prominent figures in business, entertainment, labor, politics, and sports. Government investigators believed that some of the people whose names were in the book had been Beckley's clients. Among those named were gamblers Frank Erickson and Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal; political fixer Bobby Baker; Carroll Rosenbloom's business partner Lou Chesler; casino operator Wilbur Clark; former boxer Billy Conn; Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa; the owner of the San Diego Chargers, Barron Hilton; entertainer and onetime Los Angeles Rams partner Bob Hope; Green Bay Packers star Paul Hornung; oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, Jr.; Florida state senator Richard Fincher; entertainer Ted Lewis; former heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano; actor George Raft; restaurateurs Toots Shor and Sam “Radio” Winer, who was also a bookmaker; entertainer Frank Sinatra; and composer Jules Styne.

“The book itself was not a gambling book,” says Brian Gettings, who was the chief prosecutor in the Beckley case. “But by matching the book with the gambling records, we were able to show that the gambling records were accounts for many, many of the people who were in the book. I don't know why [Beckley] did this, but there were people who were listed in the book who there were no accounts for. Why he put them in there, I don't know. Beckley never explained it.”

Gene Nolan told me, “When the government got that address book, they found out that Gil kept everybody he ever met in that book—even if there wasn't anything to it. They weren't all just his clients. Some of them were people he just knew.”

Marty Kane agrees with Nolan, “Gil was a very complex man. His greatest asset was his charm. He was the most charming man I've ever met. He had more legitimate people who loved him and loved to be around him. He was self-educated. If he had had the opportunity to go to school, he would have ended up a respected businessman.”

Beckley's records showed that he had handled more than $250,000 on the day of the federal raid, which came the week after the NFL and AFL championship games were played. Of that sum, $129,000 was profit. Had the raid occurred a week earlier, the haul would have been considerably more.
¹⁰

Significantly, the same year as the raid, Beckley was spotted at the Kentucky Derby as the guest of Paul Hornung, a native of Louisville and in his final year with the Green Bay Packers. Just two years earlier, Hornung's suspension for his association with a West Coast gambler and his own gambling activities had been lifted. “I won't bet, you know that,” Hornung told
The Miami Herald
. “I just met him [Beckley] a few times … and I took care of his wife when they came up to the [Kentucky] Derby. It was all personal—no business.”

Another associate of Beckley's told me, “Paul Hornung and Gil Beckley were good friends. I went to dinner with them one time. Paul was there with twenty-nine gamblers.”

Marty Kane says, “Beckley and Hornung were drinking buddies, and they were friends. All the time I knew Gil, we never, ever thought anything strange was going on with a Green Bay game. I think Hornung has gotten a bad rap. He was a fifty-dollar bettor who mostly bet on other people's games.” Kane added that he believed that Hornung had been betting for his teammates at Green Bay and had taken the fall for all of them.

Hornung repeatedly refused to be interviewed for this book.

According to several of Beckley's associates, another professional football player with whom the bookmaker was allegedly acquainted was the legendary quarterback/placekicker George Blanda, the number one leading scorer in the history of professional football.
¹¹
A twenty-six-year veteran of several teams—the Chicago Bears, Baltimore Colts, Houston Oilers, and Oakland
Raiders—Blanda angrily told me during a telephone interview, “I'm not going to answer any of your questions when you talk about gambling. I'm not going to be involved pro or con in anything that you might suggest about gambling, period.”

When I specifically asked Blanda whether he knew Beckley, the NFL great replied, “You don't have to ask me anything, because I'm not answering. I'm sorry you called.” Blanda then hung up.

Beckley was indicted by a Miami grand jury in May 1966, and two days after that he was arrested for violating federal gambling laws. He was later found guilty. Also indicted and convicted were Martin Sklaroff and Marty Kane.

Five months after the release of Beckley's coded address book, Barron Hilton, who was among those listed, sold 70 percent of his ownership in the San Diego Chargers to a twenty-one-man syndicate headed by Eugene Victor Klein, a former used car salesman, for $10 million. Hilton, who became the chief executive officer of Hilton Hotels that year, retained 30 percent of the team. It is not known whether the NFL forced Hilton to give up control of the team because of his alleged association with Beckley.

The new managing general partner, forty-five-year-old, six-feet-five Eugene Klein was a native of the Bronx, who, like Hilton, had dropped out of college after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He began as an aviation cadet in the ATC—the Air Transport Command, which Klein likes to call the Army of Terrified Civilians—during World War II. He retired from the Army Air Force as a captain in 1946 after flying non-combat missions over India, Africa, China, and the South Pacific.

Klein returned from the war with $2,000 to establish an automobile dealership. In a unique marketing ploy, Klein sold cars by the pound, advertising them as “cheaper than hamburger.” By 1959, he had become the first distributor of Volvos in the United States. He later purchased a large amount of stock in National Theatres & Television, Inc., formerly a subsidiary of Twentieth Century-Fox.

In 1961, National Theatres became the National General Corporation. Klein told me, “It was a company whose basic purpose was to enhance the value of the stock and to make money. We ended up making a lot of money. We had the second-largest
theater chain in the country. We produced motion pictures and distributed motion pictures for CBS and ourselves.”

National General became one of America's first conglomerates, and it attracted considerable controversy. It was fined by the state of New York's insurance department for questionable business practices.
Business Week
wrote that its deals “smacked more of ‘cronyism and self-aggrandizement,' as one broker puts it, than of real interest in the stockholders.” Klein still denies those charges and says, “Who responds to bullshit?”

At the time of his 1966 purchase of the Chargers, Klein also had ties to the same major organized-crime figure as Hilton had: attorney Sidney Korshak.

Klein told me, “I've known Sidney Korshak for twenty, twenty-five years. I was introduced to him by my late, great friend Gene Wyman [a powerful Los Angeles attorney and the head of California's Democratic party]. He and I were as close as brothers. I hired Sidney Korshak for National General as a labor negotiator. He was terrific. He got things done. I paid him a retainer, fifty thousand dollars a year. Whenever we had any labor problems, I picked up the phone and called Sidney. Whatever he did, it was done.”

When I asked Klein whether Korshak had done any work for the Chargers, Klein replied, “Yeah. At the stadium, there was a labor problem with the ushers. That was the only time I used Sidney [with the Chargers], and he handled that problem, too.”

18 Bill Hundley and NFL Security

INCREDIBLY ENOUGH, GIL BECKLEY'S conviction was bad news for some top NFL officials. In fact, they did everything they could to keep him out of jail. The reason? Beckley had also been working for the NFL.

As the prelude to Beckley's work with the league, the highly respected NFL Security director Jim Hamilton had died in 1966 after a long illness. Following a lengthy search for his successor, he was replaced by William G. Hundley, another man of impeccable credentials and reputation.

Hundley grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. After high school, he enlisted in the Army and was decorated with a Bronze Star for heroism during World War II. A 1950 graduate of Fordham Law School, Hundley was recruited by the Justice Department in 1951. Soon after, in the wake of the Kefauver Committee hearings, he was prosecuting alleged Communists for alleged Smith Act violations.

Until September 1966, Hundley had been the head of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section in the Justice Department. Hundley was the attorney who “handled” Joe Valachi, climaxed by the mobster-turned-informant's sensational televised testimony before the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the fall of 1963. Kennedy had described Valachi's testimony as “the biggest intelligence breakthrough in organized crime yet in the United States.”

When he resigned from the Justice Department in 1966,
Hundley went into private practice. With the death of Jim Hamilton, Rozelle was searching for a replacement. The commissioner then turned to Hundley, and the NFL became his first major client.

“They brought Hundley in for two reasons,” Ralph Salerno told me. “One, they needed a replacement for Hamilton. Two, the NFL already had high-priced attorneys, but they needed an attorney with some good Justice Department friends and contacts. The NFL and the AFL were going through a merger, and they didn't want to run afoul of the federal antitrust laws.”

On March 8, 1967, the same month as Beckley's federal conviction in Miami, William Cahn, a Nassau County, New York, prosecutor, met privately with Hundley. A few weeks earlier, Cahn had indicted Beckley, Marty Sklaroff, Gene Nolan, and nineteen others. The indictments followed a massive investigation of a $100-million-a-year bookmaking operation in the New York metropolitan area.

The probe began after several unnamed NFL players were found to be living in a Nassau County apartment house in which two known bookmakers also lived. Cahn received wiretap authorizations against the bookmakers and discovered that they had links to gambling syndicates in Canada, Las Vegas, Miami, New Orleans, and on the West Coast. Other top sports figures had been implicated in the bookmaking operation, but none of them was named in the indictment. Cahn said that they had been part of an “information network” for bookmakers.