Interference (29 page)

On June 5, Namath agreed to sell.

But, Danahy continues, “Namath ran into sports announcer Howard Cosell, who talked to him. They were drinking, and they wound up at Joe's apartment. And Cosell gave him his best legal knowledge about his rights and privileges as a free American boy. And the next thing, going contrary to the recommendations of his lawyer, Namath decided that he wasn't going to sell. He was going to fight the league. About this time, I was sort of an irritant on the thing, the hard-nosed guy, and so Pete asked me to step aside, which I did.”

The twenty-six-year-old Namath called a press conference at Bachelors III to announce his retirement from football. “I'm not selling. I quit,” he tearfully told reporters. Namath later said, “I hadn't done anything wrong. I hadn't bet with bookmakers on football games one way or the other. I'd never lost a game on purpose or tried to shave points. I admit I had deliberately given information to gamblers to affect their bets: Before the 1969 Super Bowl, I'd guaranteed that we'd win the game.”
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Soon after, Rozelle held his own press conference, expressed his regret at Namath's decision, and hung tough. The commissioner said solemnly, “It is obviously impossible for a player to be aware of the background and habits of all persons to whom he is introduced. However, continuation of such associations after learning of a person's undesirable background and habits is a cause for deep concern. Such conduct gives the appearance of evil, whether or not it actually exists, and thereby affects the player's reputation, the reputation of his fellow players, and the integrity of his sport.”

Namath said that after refusing to sell, he was accused of fixing games, particularly two games in 1968 in which he threw five interceptions in each and lost both contests. Denying any fix, he wrote, “Hell, you'd have to be an idiot to make it that obvious. If you want to throw a game, you don't have to allow a single pass to be intercepted. You just screw up one or two handoffs, and the running back can't handle them, and he fumbles the ball, and he takes the blame. Then maybe you throw a critical third-down pass a little low, and you let the punter come in and give the ball to the other team. You don't give it away yourself.”
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On July 18, after a four-hour meeting with Rozelle, Namath relented; he again agreed to sell his interest in Bachelors III and to return to his team. “I'm happy to announce Joe will be back with the Jets,” Rozelle said. “He and I have privately reached total accord. He is selling his interest in Bachelors III, and we consider the entire matter closed.” Rozelle added that Namath would not be disciplined in any way.

The whole matter dropped. Namath wasn't punished. The wiretap transcripts taken over the telephones at Bachelors III were never released. And the grand-jury investigation of the links between gambling and professional sports never got off the ground.
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Danahy disagrees with Bill Hundley that Len Dawson was “the most controversial man ever to play the game of professional football.” He says, “Bill was wrong about that. It was Namath. Joe liked hoodlums.”

One of the consequences of the Namath situation was felt by the NFL early during the 1969 season—when a Jets game went off the boards on September 26, 1969, because of rumors revolving around Namath. Danahy told me, “In my twelve years with the league, it only happened about four or five times. I remember one specific incident in the fall of 1969. The Jets had won the Super Bowl, and they were scheduled to play the Chargers in San Diego. They were actually in the air, flying out there, when I received a call from one of my security reps in the Midwest. He told me that the San Diego-Jets game had gone off the boards. And that rang all sorts of bells. Then, in a short period of time, I received calls from three or four other reps in other cities, like Chicago, Detroit, and Buffalo. The rumor was spreading.

“They all went to work to find out the reason that the game went off the boards. And they all came up with the same answer:
that Joe Namath would not be playing because he had sprained his thumb in practice on Thursday.

“By the time the Jets' plane landed in San Diego, I had my man right there to see the coach, Weeb Ewbank. We washed the thing right out. The whole thing was strictly b.s. The following day, Pete issued a statement that there had been a false rumor, and that there was no problem. Joe Namath would be playing. The game immediately went back on the boards.

“This is how we attributed it. Somebody was trying to affect a gambling coup by starting a rumor. When the price changed, they tried to middle. And they went a little too far.”

Numerous attempts to interview Namath for this book were unsuccessful.

While Namath was in the midst of explaining his gambling associations to NFL officials, Leonard Tose, the owner of Tose Trucking Company of Bridgeport, Pennsylvania, bought the Philadelphia Eagles for $16.1 million from bankrupt developer Jerry Wolman on May 1, 1969. Tose, who had been outbid for the Eagles by Wolman in 1963, borrowed most of the purchase price from banks, using his trucking firm and soda-canning business as collateral.
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The dapper Tose had started out as a driver in the family trucking business founded by his Russian immigrant father. A 1937 graduate of Notre Dame with a degree in business, Tose had also served in the Army's military police in Puerto Rico. He had left Tose Trucking in 1956 to go to work as a top executive for Highway Trailer Industries of New York and soon developed K. S. Canning, which manufactured and distributed flattop cans.
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He returned home after his brother's 1963 death. His father died two years later. Len Tose then took over the firm, brought his fleet up to nearly nine hundred trucks, and began raking in $15 million in annual revenues.

As one of the largest trucking companies on the East Coast, Tose had to deal directly with the Teamsters Union and sat on several negotiating councils with union representatives, including Jimmy Hoffa, who was the subject of some of his most repeated stories. Perhaps by coincidence, Tose's major competitor was hit with a wildcat strike during the mid-1960s, during which time Tose's company reportedly tripled its revenues.

Not surprisingly, Tose was also a heavy gambler, who reportedly bet money on everything from card games and horse races
to golf and football. “It was not uncommon for him to bet $10,000 on a gin game or a round of golf. At the racetrack, the Eagles owner was known to lose money hand over fist.”
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Tose told reporter Barry Rosenberg that he used to gamble on football games but stopped after buying the Eagles. “A thousand [dollars]. Maybe two. Maybe three. But that's all. I guess I wasn't very good at it, I didn't win very often. Besides I've cut all that out.”

According to his ex-wife, Tose had bet “between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand dollars a year” on NFL games.

“We did do an investigation of Tose,” insists Danahy. “He admitted that he was a gambler. Several owners have admitted that they had a tendency to gamble. But they all agreed to take the pledge [that they would not gamble while owning NFL teams]. There was no problem about Tose's gambling because that was a pretty well-known fact. Our biggest concern with investigating Tose was establishing that he had the financing. Tose had it.”

Tose had really moved into the ground floor of the new NFL. Five months after the 1969 Super Bowl, as the NFL and the AFL began to create divisions in the new merged league, the Baltimore Colts agreed to jump to the new AFL-team-dominated American Football Conference, along with the Cleveland Browns and the Pittsburgh Steelers. The other traditional NFL teams remained in the new National Football Conference. Of course, there was some incentive. The owners of those three defecting teams—Carroll Rosenbloom, Art Modell, and Art Rooney—all received $3 million in indemnity fees for their “sacrifice.” It was thought that the three owners would lose at the box office because of the switch. In the end, because of the enthusiastic support for the NFL and all its old and new teams, no one even noticed.

Regarding Rosenbloom's decision to jump conferences, Colts personnel director Upton Bell told me, “Carroll felt that with the merger, he could finagle his team to go over to an easier conference with teams he thought he could beat. He got himself out of the NFL's Western Division, which was the Rams, Lions, Packers, Bears, Vikings, and Forty-niners. There was never a conference that strong.”

23 Lenny Dawson on the Brink

DURING THE 1969 NFL season, after four more of the Kansas City Chiefs' games were taken off the boards by Las Vegas bookmakers,
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Len Dawson became a target of an IRS investigation that concentrated on Detroit gambler Donald Dawson, who was no relation to Len but had supposedly made calls to the Chiefs quarterback.

Len Dawson told me that he suspected that something was going on on January 4, 1970, the day the Chiefs defeated the Oakland Raiders, 17-7, for the AFL crown and the right to play the NFL-champion Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV. “We were staying at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, getting ready to play the Raiders in Oakland,” Dawson says. “And there was a note in my box for me to call Pete Rozelle. And I said, ‘What the hell does he want to talk to me about?' That Sunday, I got ahold of him, and he said, ‘Oh, nothing. I just wanted to wish you luck.' Well, I was thinking about the game, but it struck me kind of funny. Why would he call to wish me luck? That was the first inkling I had that something was going on.

“Then on the flight back to Kansas City after the game, Hank [Stram] said that there might be some sort of inquiry from league officials.”

Stram told me that prior to the Chiefs' game with Oakland, “The NFL intercepted me at the airport. Mark Duncan [the assistant supervisor of NFL personnel] took me in his car and said, ‘I have some terrible news. Len Dawson's name is being
mentioned with Don Dawson, and the story is going to break soon.'” Stram says that he later discussed the matter with his quarterback, who admitted meeting the gambler while he was with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Len Dawson insisted that Don Dawson had called him only twice since those days. Stram was completely satisfied with Dawson's response.

Soon after, Stram was contacted by Duncan again. “Duncan told me, ‘Don't worry about it [the gambling probe]. We squelched the story, and everything is fine.'”

But the NFL had “squelched” the story only temporarily.

The roots of the IRS investigation of Don Dawson, who had ties to Gil Beckley, began when federal agents discovered that baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Jerome “Dizzy” Dean, formerly of the St. Louis Cardinals, was a close friend of a high-stakes gambler Howard Sober, a wealthy Michigan trucking executive. At the same time, the agents alleged that Sober, another big-time gambler, had lost nearly a million dollars in bets to Don Dawson, who had introduced Sober to Dean.

In June 1969, Sober was rushing, trying to make a flight connection at an airport and gave an airport employee $50 to make a call for him to place an $800 bet. The employee called the FBI instead. A federal agent told him to make the call while agents listened on an extension. No wiretap was involved.

After the call was made, federal agents determined that Sober's bookmaker was Dawson. Checking Dawson's telephone records, the IRS compiled a list of nineteen hundred calls Dawson had made to gamblers, sports figures, and other bookmakers. During telephone calls monitored—but also not wiretapped—by the IRS,
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Dawson had once complained that he had lost “a bundle” on the New York Jets' 13-6 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in their 1969 divisional play-off game.

According to IRS documents, Don Dawson stated that his “man with K.C. had certainly done his job,” but that “Namath should have at least tied the game … I'm going to contact my man with K.C. and see what he says; we've got to come back after being a big winner. Now, I'm a loser.”

The original probable cause for wiretaps stemmed from statements by IRS agents who had witnessed the Detroit gambler giving money to an unnamed former member of the Detroit Lions.

A top IRS official directly involved in the investigation was
more specific, saying that the affidavit requesting wiretaps on the telephones of the principal targets of the investigation came after federal investigators discovered Don Dawson meeting and giving money to Dick “Night Train” Lane, formerly of the Detroit Lions, who had been polygraphed and cleared during the 1963 players-gambling scandal.

Lane told me, “Don Dawson had a cousin named Dawson Taylor, who had a Chevrolet dealership. I started working for him in 1962. There were a lot of players who worked for him. I was married to [the popular jazz singer] Dinah Washington, and she had put three songs Taylor wrote to music. He was grateful, so he gave both of us a new car every year.

“We were working on a base salary and percentage of what we sold [at the car dealership]. Don Dawson asked me if I'd sold anything that month. I told him, ‘Not too many. One or two.' He said, ‘Well, I want to get my daughter a car, and so I'll let you get it for her. I'm going to put a down payment on it, and let her keep it up.' He gave me eighteen hundred dollars in cash.' That's the only money I ever got from him.” Lane says that he gave Dawson a receipt for the cash.

Don Dawson insists that he never gave Lane any money. “Why would I go to my cousin to buy a car when my dad was in the same business? I never gave him eighteen hundred dollars. I have given a lot of the other players money, but I never gave Night Train any.”

Based on the alleged Dawson/Lane transaction, the IRS special agent in charge of the investigation, Herbert Hinchman, who filed a thirty-page affidavit, wrote, “Donald Dawson of Birmingham, Michigan, is engaged in the business of accepting wagers on sports and horse races; that Dawson also lays-off some of the large wagers accepted by him to other bookmakers in the Detroit area and also to other bookmakers throughout the United States.” Dawson was also part owner of the Fox & Hounds Restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a popular spot for local sports figures and celebrities.