Interference (30 page)

Another top IRS official who was involved in the investigation told me, “It was a bookmaking and layoff investigation. We put a request in for wiretaps in June 1969 on Sober, Dawson, and several college coaches. We also had the probable cause for Santa Anita racetrack and some hockey bookmakers in Toronto. We went to the IRS commissioner and requested them. We had the
authority for Title Three at the time if the commissioner approved it. He declined after months of negotiations. He wanted us to work with the FBI and bring them into the case.
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“We agreed and went to the FBI for the wiretaps. Bill Lynch [the head of the Strike Forces] and his deputy, Ed Joyce, went to the bureau as our liaison. J. Edgar Hoover said, ‘Yeah, we'll take the case, but we want all the information and for the IRS to back off.' I told the FBI they'd have to shove it. We wanted their cooperation, a joint effort. I wasn't about to give the FBI the case we'd been working on. So the FBI refused to cooperate.

“We decided to go with the probable cause we had. And we would have to give up the coaches, Santa Anita, and some bookmaking on hockey. Professional football, we had cold. It was clear to us that games had been fixed by players [who were] shaving points in cooperation with several organized-crime-connected bookmakers.”

In early January 1970, after an eight-month investigation by the IRS, federal agents arrested fourteen people in a series of raids in Detroit, New York, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Biloxi against a nationwide sports-betting ring. Among those arrested was the forty-eight-year-old Don Dawson. At the time of his arrest, Dawson, who had been the principal target of the probe, was found with over $450,000 in cashier and business checks in his possession.

James Ritchie, the head of the Detroit Strike Force Against Organized Crime, said at the time of the raids, “Statements made by some of those arrested and seized records indicate a national scheme involving famous figures in baseball and football.” Ritchie described Don Dawson as “one of the largest bookmakers in the Midwest.”

There was more. NFL players had reportedly received telephone calls from Don Dawson. Besides Len Dawson, others receiving calls included quarterback Bill Munson of the Detroit Lions, quarterback Karl Sweetan of the Los Angeles Rams, and at least four other big-name players.
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Munson told me that he had first met Don Dawson in 1967 in Milwaukee while the Rams were preparing to play the Green Bay Packers for the divisional title. “He sort of acted like he was an intermediary for Bill Ford [the Lions' owner], but I think that was bullshit. He was real smooth, and I couldn't figure him out. See, I was playing out my option and trying to get traded, and
he seemed like he was laying some groundwork for me to come to Detroit. Anyway, I met him that morning on the Saturday before the game and had coffee with him.”

Dawson approached Munson again, this time in Miami, just before the Rams played the Cleveland Browns in the Playoff Bowl, which featured the runners-up in each NFL division. “I still couldn't figure this guy out,” Munson continued. “We were talking, and he was trying to get close. I didn't know what he wanted. I think I gave him my phone number because he was coming to California. We decided we'd have dinner.

“Before I was traded to Detroit [in May 1968], he called me, and we had dinner in Beverly Hills. During the dinner, Dawson told me, ‘You know, you can make a lot of money in Detroit outside of football.' I just walked away and acted like I didn't know what he was talking about. I didn't say anything.”

Munson says that he ran into Dawson one final time at the Red Run Golf Club near Detroit. Munson was playing a round of golf with former teammates Ron Kramer and Dan Currie when they ran into Dawson on the course. Munson insists that he never saw him again, adding that he never bet with him. “I wasn't nuts enough to do something like that and get suspended for a year. And I had no urge to do it.”

Munson says that he was never interviewed by federal agents about his relationship with Dawson—but has been audited by the IRS every other year since then.

Speaking of Len Dawson, Don Dawson told me, “When Lenny played for the Cleveland Browns [in 1960-61], I got acquainted with him. He was Milt Plum's backup man. Lenny and I got to be pals and I knew his wife, Jackie. Her father was a car dealer in Shaker Heights [a Cleveland suburb]. I got to be friends with her dad and her mother because I came to Cleveland all the time. Lenny was a very shy young man. It was Jackie and I who got him to get the guts to go in and tell Paul Brown, ‘Either start me next year or trade me.' Well, they wound up trading him to the Chiefs.”

Don Dawson adds, “When Lenny was at Cleveland, he gave me information, and I made some small bets for him. He was on the bench. Nothing more than a hundred dollars. Just a token bet. Nothing big.

“When he got with the Chiefs, I never heard from him, but I knew he was doing a lot of gambling over there. In Kansas City,
the Civellas were betting really big money. Some of these people got ahold of Lenny, and they made a shithouse full of money. I got wind of it through another Detroit bookmaker. But I never contacted Lenny or said, ‘Let me in with a play. I know what you're doing.' Who knows? The Civellas might have said, ‘Hey, this guy is muscling in on our territory.'
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So I had not talked to Lenny since 1968-69, when the Chiefs were off the boards.”

During my interview with Len Dawson, he flatly denied ever betting with Don Dawson or having any business dealings with the Civella crime family, adding, “I met Don while I was with Pittsburgh. I understood him to be from a wealthy family in Detroit. He was a friend of Bobby Layne, and I met him through Bobby.

“My wife didn't know Don Dawson except through me. Her father worked for Ford for a lot of years. He got tired of traveling, so he bought into a Ford dealership. Then he moved back to Cleveland and got into [another] dealership there.”

Len Dawson told me that Don Dawson had nothing to do with his confrontation with the Browns' head coach. “Paul Brown ruled with an iron fist. He could bring a guy to his knees with a few words faster than anybody I'd ever seen. In those days, they didn't have agents. They just sent you a contract and said, ‘Sign it.' I hadn't signed it by a certain time, and he wanted to know why. I said, ‘I'm not very happy about not getting an opportunity to play.'”

When I specifically asked Len Dawson whether he had ever been approached by Don Dawson to fix a game while he was with either Pittsburgh or Cleveland, the quarterback replied, “No. I don't know why he would. I never played. In Pittsburgh, Bobby Layne played all the time. I think in the five years that I played for Pittsburgh and Cleveland, I think I threw maybe forty-five passes.”

IRS agents also said that Don Dawson had called at least two college head coaches: Bob Devaney of the University of Nebraska and Frank Kush of Arizona State University, who had been especially plagued by longtime allegations of associations with gamblers. Kush denied any relationship with Don Dawson, insisting, “I never met Don Dawson. I don't know who he is.”

Dawson told me that he had never talked to Devaney, a former coach at Michigan State. “He was a good friend of Howard Sober,” Dawson says, adding, “I never met any of them,
except Frank Kush. We had dinner together in Phoenix, along with Howard and my wife. But Kush never called me, and I never called him.”

Lions coach Joe Schmidt, who had been disciplined by the NFL for gambling in 1963, admitted knowing Don Dawson, but denied having seen him “for years.” Alex Karras, who had been suspended for a year for betting, also admitted knowing Dawson—but told reporters that he had advised players, like Munson, to stay away from him.

There were other complications. On January 5, 1970, Bill Matney, a reporter for
NBC News
, broke a story on NBC's
Huntley-Brinkley
nightly news program, announcing that the grand jury was planning to subpoena NFL personnel. Among those to be called before the twenty-three-member federal grand jury in Detroit, according to the report, was the thirty-four-year-old Len Dawson, who was in New Orleans, preparing to play in Super Bowl IV, in which Kansas City was playing the Minnesota Vikings.

Matney told me that the source for his story was an official with the Strike Force in Detroit. After receiving his information about the grand-jury probe, he checked the official out with a respected federal judge in Detroit, who vouched for him. “To be doubly certain,” Matney says, “NBC sent one of our top field producers to Detroit to validate my findings. The producer actually met the [Strike Force] source. So he was an additional witness. In fact, we met the source at the Howard Johnson's in downtown Detroit, and he watched the story we filed on
The Huntley-Brinkley Report
. After we watched it, the source said, ‘You're right on the money.'”

Len Dawson recalls, “Stram told me that they were going to break a story on
NBC News
. I was up in Hank's suite because he said that the NFL Security people wanted to talk to me. I was trying to rest because I did have a game to play. The NFL people were trying to make a determination as to what to say to the press and what to release. They brought in some sportswriters from Kansas City and other cities. They were trying to get their opinions on what to say to the wolves [news reporters] out there. Finally, I just told them, ‘Why don't we just tell the truth. I do know the person. I've only seen him a couple of times in my life. The truth is, I did talk to him on the phone.'”

Dawson remembers, “I thought, ‘What the hell is going on?
Why me?'” He adds that he did not see the news report but knew that no specific allegations were made against him or any other player mentioned in Matney's story.

“I'll tell you what happened in Detroit,” Jack Danahy says angrily. “There was a Strike Force in Detroit. They were particularly unimpressive, and they were dying for publicity. They got a search warrant on Don Dawson. Len Dawson was probably one of a hundred sports figures whose names were in a telephone directory that Don Dawson had assembled over a period of years. The week before the Super Bowl—the big football event of the year—they made a sneak release to NBC. And that's when it hit the fan.

“I was down in Miami with all my security people, having a security conference the week before the game. I sent the guys from Detroit back to Detroit to get the story there. We sent our representatives out to interview all the NFL players whose names were in the book.

“I flew over to New Orleans, and I met Lenny Dawson at the Fontainebleau. Mark Duncan was with me. I talked to Lenny for about an hour and a half. It was very open. He admitted knowing Don Dawson. He recounted to me the various occasions that he had talked to Dawson. The last time he had talked to him was when Lenny's father died.
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“I wrote up a signed statement for [Len] Dawson in longhand. Dawson had had a tough day. He had had practice, and then the press was all over him as a result of this news report. By the time I finished writing up his story, I looked up and Lenny was sound asleep in his chair. So I woke him up. He read the statement and signed it.

“We went back to the Royal Orleans Hotel where Pete Rozelle was, and I gave him the statement. Pete asked me, ‘Do you buy it, Jack?' And I said, ‘I sure do.' He asked why. And I said, ‘I've taken signed statements from a lot of guys—murderers, spies, you name it—but this is the first one who ever went to sleep on me.'

“Dawson had also offered to be polygraphed again, but we decided that there was no basis for it.”

The following day, at a crowded press conference, Len Dawson faced reporters and read the statement Danahy had written for him: “My name has been mentioned in regard to an investigation being conducted by the Justice Department. I have not been
contacted by any law-enforcement agency or been apprised of the reason my name has been brought up. The only reason I can think of is that I have been a casual acquaintance with Mr. Donald Dawson of Detroit, who I understand has been charged in the investigation. Mr. Dawson is not a relative of mine.

“I have known Mr. Dawson for about ten years and have talked to him on several occasions. My only conversation with him in recent years concerned my knee injuries and the death of my father. On these occasions, he contacted me to offer his sympathy. His calls were among the many I received. Gentlemen, this is all I have to say. I have told you everything I know.”

When a reporter immediately asked whether he and the gambler had ever had any personal meetings, Dawson replied, “Are we going to get into all this?”

“Gentlemen,” the Chiefs' head coach, Hank Stram, interrupted, “Len has made his statement. Now we would like to discuss the football game with you if you have any questions about that.”
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Running back Ed Podolak, who was a rookie with the Chiefs at the time of the Super Bowl, told me, “We had a team meeting and coach Stram told us that there was an effort to do anything possible to take our concentration off the game. Here was a chance for the AFL to defeat the NFL two years in a row, and that would absolutely destroy the myth of the NFL's superiority over the AFL. So we were told to put all of this behind us and not to worry about it. Coach Stram said that it didn't affect anybody; that the allegations were untrue.”

Pete Rozelle was annoyed that Len Dawson had admitted knowing Don Dawson. The commissioner told
The Detroit News
, “I'm sorry he said it. I'd have preferred it would have come later.” Rozelle also called the news reports on the investigation “totally irresponsible … While the entire matter has been under investigation by our security department for several days, we have no evidence to even consider disciplinary action against any of those publicly named.”

Rozelle chose that moment to reveal that Len Dawson had voluntarily taken the polygraph test in 1968 and passed. “More than a year ago, during the 1968 season, rumors were circulating regarding [Len] Dawson. At that time, Dawson and his attorney cooperated fully with our office and Dawson volunteered to take a polygraph examination to establish his innocence in regard to
the rumors. The test and our independent investigation proved to our satisfaction that the rumors were unsubstantiated.”