Interference (26 page)

Dawson told me, “I started two games in five years in the NFL, but I never started and finished a game. I don't think I ever played in two games in a row for any amount of time in those five years.

“My first year at Pittsburgh was the year Buddy Parker quit at Detroit, and Art Rooney talked him into coaching the Steelers. Walt Kiesling drafted me. He was the head coach. Walt had some health problems, and Art didn't want to subject him to what was looking like another losing season. So he brought Buddy over. I was the number one draft choice. Teddy Marchibroda and Jack Scarbath were the other quarterbacks. He traded those guys and he got Earl Morrall, who was with the Forty-niners. He also brought Jack Kemp in, who was a rookie, like me. Kemp had been released by the Lions, so Buddy brought him over to the Steelers.
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So the three quarterbacks in my first year were two rookies, Kemp and I, and Earl Morrall, who was in his second year.

“After the second game of 1958, Buddy traded Earl Morrall to Detroit for Bobby Layne. And he was the quarterback. I was at Pittsburgh for 1958 and 1959, and then I got traded to Cleveland.”

In 1962, Dawson jumped leagues to join Lamar Hunt's Dallas Texans, which became the Kansas City Chiefs in 1963.

According to FBI records, nearly twenty games played by the Kansas City Chiefs over a period of two and a half seasons, 1966-68, were the targets of unnatural money. In a vast majority of these games, the side where the unnatural money turned up was the winner.

During that period the Chiefs won the AFL Championship in 1966 with an 11-2-1 record but lost the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game (which became known as the Super Bowl in January 1969) to the NFL's Green Bay Packers, 35-10, on January 15, 1967. During the 1967 regular season, the Kansas City team slipped to 9-5 and did not make the AFL play-offs.
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According to NFL Security chief William Hundley, the numerous Kansas City games were taken off the boards because gambling interests in Louisiana had been killing the big bookies by betting on the Chiefs. “A Baton Rouge bookmaker had beat the spread on the Chiefs something like thirteen weeks in a row,” Hundley told me.

In 1968, as the bookmakers began to loosen up the freeze on Kansas City's games, the FBI concentrated its investigation of Eugene Nolan, a Baton Rouge bookmaker who was associated with Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, the boss of the Louisiana Mafia.

“We're in the same area,” Nolan told me, speaking of Marcello. “One time, there were some kidnappers from Chicago who wanted a piece of my action. And I wasn't going to give it to them. So they were coming to get my daughter, who was then a baby. And my father-in-law found out about it. He sent my wife, my daughter, and me to New York and put off-duty police officers in the house. It cost me six hundred dollars a day. The only people these cops threw off were the FBI and the IRS, who were staking out my house.

“So I called that man [Marcello] and told him what was happening. He called back and said, ‘You can come home.' I went to see him. He threw down some pictures of the guys who were after me and said, ‘These are the motherfuckers that wanted to do it. They said they wanted some money. I told them, “If you want some money, take mine.'“ He told me to go to Chicago and tell them that I already have a partner. ‘You tell them it's me,' the man [Marcello] said. ‘And I guarantee you that when you leave, they'll be kissing your ass.'

“So I went to Chicago, and I told them just that. And they said, ‘If you have him as a partner, you don't need us.' And everything was okay. But I haven't been back to Chicago since.”

Nolan was born in 1930 in Baton Rouge. After high school, he tried to get into Yale but did not score well enough on his college boards. He then attended Tulane but ended up at Louisiana State University, where he received his degree with honors in accounting. Through his participation in the ROTC program in college, he became an officer, first in the National Guard, followed by twelve years in the Army Reserves.

“As far back as I can remember, I've been gambling,” Nolan told me. “I started shooting craps when I was a child during World War II. When my high school football team had its picture taken, I wasn't there for it. I was dealing blackjack someplace. I gambled forever, and I just got to be good.

“A brother-in-law of mine had dealt with Gil Beckley and introduced me to him right after I graduated from LSU in 1953. Gil, who was about twenty years older than me, got me to come to Newport, Kentucky, to visit with him. We later shared an apartment together in a hotel for six months. I was dealing coast to coast, but I was primarily betting. I would take a bet on occasion, but that wasn't my business.”

Nolan had been indicted with Gil Beckley and others for gambling violations in 1967 in New York's Nassau County. He
later pleaded guilty and received a one-year suspended sentence. Nolan was also convicted in Oklahoma for conspiring to use a telephone to carry on an illegal gambling operation. His appeals were turned down; his attorney was Washington Redskins president Edward Bennett Williams.
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Like Beckley, Nolan also enjoyed a relationship with the NFL. Nolan says, “Gil told me that if anything ever happened to him, he wanted me to call the NFL twice a week to tell them if any unusual money was showing up. Hundley was his man, and I was around Hundley a lot.”

Federal agents investigating the Kansas City Chiefs were interested in Gene Nolan because his brother Joseph Lee had been convicted in 1968 for participating in a conspiracy to bribe football players at Louisiana State University to fix four LSU games.
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The case became the first successful use of the Federal Sports Bribery Act of 1964. “Jo-Jo” Nolan was to have paid the LSU players off in up-front cash—through a middleman—and lay down bets for them.

An FBI source in New Orleans told special agents that Gene Nolan had been doing business with the Kansas City Chiefs, particularly Johnny Robinson, a 1960 LSU graduate and a teammate of the legendary all-American halfback Billy Cannon, who had been playing for the Houston Oilers and later the Oakland Raiders before he joined the Chiefs.
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Robinson, who is now the director of Johnny Robinson's Home for Boys in Monroe, Louisiana, denies that he knew Gene Nolan. “We happened to be from the same town [Baton Rouge],” Robinson explained to me. “I just never knew the guy. I only ran into him maybe once or twice someplace. I never knew him on a personal basis.”

Dawson told me that he did not know Gene Nolan at all.

Essentially, Nolan agrees with Robinson and Dawson. “I don't think I've been around Johnny more than three times,” Nolan told me. “I don't remember speaking to him but once. And, emphatically, I don't know Len Dawson at all.”

Nevertheless, the FBI took the New Orleans source particularly seriously because members of the Kansas City Mafia often visited New Orleans to make deals with Marcello. “The New Orleans family is like a big brother to the Kansas City mob,” a Strike Force attorney says. “Kansas City won't do anything in a big way without Marcello's permission.”

Aaron Kohn, the head of the New Orleans crime commission
, was more specific, saying, “There is constant travel back and forth. The Kansas City mob leaders were down here constantly. They always made their first stop at Marcello's office in the Town & Country Motel in Jefferson Parrish to pay their respects to Marcello. One of the sons in the Civella crime family was married to the daughter of a New Orleans family that was in the chicken and egg business—the principal owner of which was the Marcello mob.”

The head of the Kansas City Mafia was Nick Civella. Backed by Marcello and his gang, as well as by the Chicago Mafia, Civella took power after the Kefauver Committee hearings had been eclipsed by Senator Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting barrage. Civella's territory covered all of eastern Kansas and western Missouri. He was backed by his ruthless brother Carl Civella. In 1966, the Civellas, through their middlemen, received a $5.5 million loan from the Teamsters' pension fund for the purpose of completing construction of the Landmark hotel/casino in Las Vegas, in which the family had a hidden interest.
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Meantime, the New Orleans informant insisted to the FBI that the September 15, 1968, game between the Chiefs and the New York Jets was being fixed for the Jets, and that the big money that would be bet on the Jets was coming from Nolan's Baton Rouge operation.

The FBI immediately opened another sports-bribery investigation with Nolan, Robinson, and Dawson as its targets. Consequently, Nolan and both players were placed under surveillance, according to the FBI. An FBI official says that the investigators received “absolutely no cooperation from the NFL.”

The Jets, who were six-point underdogs, won the game, 20-19.

Nolan, Robinson, and Dawson all flatly deny that they had been working together in this or any other game. And evidence I have collected from numerous sources in the gambling underworld and a variety of law-enforcement agencies clearly indicates that there was no conspiracy among Nolan and the two players, all of whom were unaware that the investigation was even going on.

Thus, in this investigation, the FBI was simply off the track. Meantime, the Chiefs continued going off the betting boards.

After defeating the twenty-one-point-underdog Denver Broncos, 34-2, on September 22, the 3-1 Chiefs were preparing
to play the 1-3 Buffalo Bills on October 5, 1968. Both teams had been impressive the previous week—with the fourteen-point-favorite Kansas City defeating Miami, 48-3, and Buffalo narrowly defeating the Jets, 37-35. Because the Bills' regular quarterback, Jack Kemp, had been injured and lost for the season, the Bills coaches were experimenting at quarterback and decided to start rookie Dan Darragh against Kansas City. Consequently, the Chiefs, led by veteran Len Dawson, were heavily favored, at first, by as many as eighteen points.

However, according to FBI documents, a tremendous amount of unnatural money again began to pour in on the Bills. The amount was so great that the spread dropped from eighteen to thirteen and even to twelve in some parts of the country. The Chiefs won the game by eleven points, 18-7; those who had bet on the Bills and taken the points won. The small and middle-size bookmakers were reportedly furious because many of the bets were placed at the last minute and could not be laid off.

After the Buffalo game, Kansas City was off the boards again in Las Vegas for its 13-3 victory over the Cincinnati Bengals on October 13. While the Las Vegas bookmakers were conducting their blackout of Kansas City's games, the Chiefs played the Oakland Raiders on October 20. It proved to be another bizarre game, because the Chiefs, led by Dawson, one of the greatest passers of all time, threw the ball only three times, the fewest passing attempts for a single game since 1950. Nevertheless, despite the lack of an aerial attack, the Chiefs won, 24-10, and upped their record to 5-1.

The Chiefs remained off the boards the following week when they defeated San Diego, 27-20. The Chiefs went back on the boards the next week as two-point underdogs against the Raiders. The Chiefs lost that game, 38-21.

Consequently, the Chiefs went off the boards for the next five weeks in their games against Cincinnati, Boston, Houston, San Diego, and Denver. Kansas City won all of these games.

But, back on the boards again on December 22 as three-point favorites in their divisional play-off against the Raiders, the Chiefs were slaughtered, 41-6. Dawson completed seventeen of thirty-six passes for 253 yards and had four interceptions.

The NFL concluded that the Chiefs' games had been taken off the boards because the team was “too unpredictable” in 1968. NFL executives failed to note that during the 1968 season, the
Chiefs had compiled a 12-2 record, which was the best in the AFL that year.
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Hundley denies that the NFL ever attempted to influence the government's investigation of the Chiefs and says that his own investigation had cleared Len Dawson and Johnny Robinson. Hundley told me, “I was convinced that neither Dawson nor Robinson had ever fixed a game or shaved points.” However, Hundley does describe Dawson as “the most controversial man ever to play the game of professional football.”

At Hundley's request, Dawson and Robinson were questioned and passed polygraph examinations in which they denied having any associations with bookmakers.
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Recalling the experience, Dawson told me, “It happened after practice one day. It wasn't like I knew three days in advance that these people were coming. Hank [Stram, the Chiefs' head coach] just said, ‘There're some people from the league office down there, and they want to discuss something. I don't know what it's about. A commercial or something. You're supposed to meet them at seven.' I really didn't ask any questions. Little did I know how it was going to end up.

“We met downtown at the President Hotel. And we drove out to the Best Western motel out in Overland Park on the Kansas side. When I got there, Johnny Robinson was there. And I said to myself, ‘Something's going on here.' The NFL people were talking about somebody [Gene Nolan] whom Johnny had known in college. I had never heard the guy's name; Johnny never mentioned him.

“They put me in a motel room with a guy with the [polygraph] machine. I was very apprehensive when they wired me up. I'd never been attached to one of those things before. He apparently had the questions written down. He asked me my name and basic questions. ‘Now are you familiar with [Nolan]? Did you ever meet him? Did you ever talk to him? Did you shave points? Did you try to fix games?' I passed the test. I never bet on anything but cards or a golf game in my entire life.”

Dawson adds, “Up to that time, I had no idea that there was an investigation going on. I was pissed because it was just thrown on me. I was upset with Stram because he didn't give me a hint as to what was going on.”