Interference (32 page)

A night clerk for the hotel told the IBI that it “was never really run like a hotel.” In fact, it was a private club. It was busy for three months during the year and empty the rest of the time; and it didn't attempt to attract guests during the off-season. The IBI report stated that several Hollywood celebrities had stayed there. They included actors Tony Curtis, Cyd Charisse, Tony Martin, Kirk Douglas, and Robert Evans, the producer of
The Godfather
.

The investigation of Acapulco Towers led to the indictment of Lansky, who had been hiding out at the hotel. He had been indicted for conspiracy to defraud the federal government of taxes on income of over $36 million, particularly from money skimmed from the Flamingo hotel/casino in Las Vegas. Lansky later fled to Israel, which, after a twenty-six-month legal fight, refused to accept him as a citizen because of his criminal background.
³

Danahy told me that the NFL was completely unaware of either Klein's interest in Acapulco Towers or any of the events or principals involved with the hotel. Alexander MacArthur, the chairman of the Illinois Racing Commission, had publicly described Acapulco Towers as “a sunny place for shady people.”

Klein was one of twelve stockholders in the hotel, who also
included Sidney Korshak and Moe Morton, a major gambling figure in California.
⁴
When I asked Klein about Acapulco Towers, he laughed. “That is such bullshit. I was playing tennis with Gene Wyman at my house. He said, “Hey, how would you like to buy ten percent of a hotel in Acapulco?' I asked, ‘Who's buying?' He said, ‘I'm buying ten percent. Sidney [Korshak] is buying ten percent. Phil Levin's buying ten percent. Greg Bautzer's buying ten percent. Moe Morton, I had never met him.' I said, ‘Fine, I'll buy ten percent.' It was for a very insignificant amount of money. He said, ‘We'll have a hotel. We'll have a place to go.' I said, ‘Super! Let's go.'

“So sometime later, we pack in my jet. I take Gene and his wife. I take my late wife, and we went down to Acapulco. And we see Acapulco Towers. That was when I met Moe Morton. He ran it. He was married to some interior decorator who also had a piece of the hotel. The whole thing was no big deal. I kept it for a while, didn't make any money, and then we sold it to Phil Levin and Gulf and Western.
⁵
We broke about even.”

When I asked Klein whether he was registered at the hotel during the Lansky mobster conference, Klein replied, “I could have been registered at the hotel. We used to go down there. We used to bring our own food. We swam in the pool. We cooked hot dogs and hamburgers. We had a great time. We spent three, four days in the sun. It's not even a real hotel. It's an apartment hotel. And then we went home.

“I spent all of my time at the pool. I've never met Meyer Lansky. I never knew him. I never talked to him. I never corresponded with him. I knew who he was because of the publicity.”

A few months later, on September 21, 1970, the betting patterns of America changed dramatically as ABC-TV introduced
Monday Night Football
, an idea promoted by Pete Rozelle. As a result of the extra night of football, bookmakers rearranged their collection and payoff schedules from Mondays to Tuesdays. In the 1970 opener, the Cleveland Browns defeated the New York Jets, 31-21. There were 85,703 fans jammed in Cleveland's Municipal Stadium. The program was a ratings success and became a financial bonanza for the NFL, as well as for America's gambling crime syndicate.

25 The Heir Apparent

IN FEBRUARY 1970, AFTER the latest NFL gambling scandal flamed out and the movement to legalize offtrack betting in New York geared up, fifty-six-year-old Gil Beckley disappeared and was presumed murdered while still out on bond after his most recent gambling conviction.

“It is the opinion of many law-enforcement agencies, including representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” says Nassau County prosecutor William Cahn, “that Beckley was done away with by the top echelon of syndicated organized crime because Beckley might have been cooperating with law-enforcement agencies.”

Thought to have been behind Beckley's killing was New York mobster Tony Salerno, who had been Beckley's banker and equal partner in his nationwide bookmaking operation.

“Gil told me that he was going to make a deal with the government,” one of Beckley's top associates told me. “Gil was doing poorly before he disappeared and for a long time before that.” He adds that Beckley was a little off the wall at the end. Among other things, he was dealing in stolen clothing and airline tickets, as well as bogus credit cards. “In 1969, he couldn't pay off. He owed me over thirty thousand dollars.

“Gil was in bad shape. During the baseball season before he disappeared, Gil told me, ‘Let me give you the people who are making the plays [bets] so that I can be sure that they get paid.' In other words, Bettor A was betting with him X amount on games, and he couldn't handle it. He wanted to give me Bettor
A's business so that I could pay and collect from him. But he wanted to be the one who talked to them, to make the deal. He wanted to be my beard. He was falling down bad.”

The last known person to see Beckley alive was Elmer Dudley, an Atlanta-based member of Beckley's national bookmaking syndicate. Dudley claims that Beckley decided to flee the country to escape prison, and that Beckley had asked him to drive him to the airport in Montreal. “He had a suitcase with over a million dollars in it,” Dudley recalls. “Don't ask me where he got it from.” Dudley says that after dropping Beckley off in Montreal, he never saw him again. However, he, too, believes that he was murdered before he got away.

Another Beckley associate Mary Kane told me, “Knowing Gil as well as I did, I think it would have been impossible for him to stay hidden. Somebody would have known where he was. He didn't low-key it.”

Taking over a portion of what remained of the Beckley network was his junior partner, the thirty-eight-year-old, five-feet-six Marty Sklaroff.

Sklaroff was an only child. While he was in high school during the late 1940s, he worked as a runner for his father, Jesse Sklaroff, a Philadelphia bookmaker. “In 1948 [while a student at Temple University], I started using heroin and I became addicted,” Sklaroff wrote in a letter to his probation officer. “I was arrested in 1949 and convicted in 1950 in Philadelphia and got a one-year suspended sentence.”

After Sklaroff moved to Miami, his father opened up the Silver Dollar Bar. Soon after his 1953 marriage, Sklaroff kicked his drug habit and became a professional gambler in his own right. By 1958, Jesse Sklaroff was working for his son, who had taken over the family business. Four years later, Marty was arrested for operating a gambling house and was fined $1,000. In 1964 and again in 1965, he was arrested for failing to have a federal wagering stamp, which identifies gamblers to the IRS for tax purposes.

In 1967, he was indicted and convicted with Beckley for interstate bookmaking and was given a two-year sentence. “At the time,” Sklaroff wrote, “I was clerking for Gil Beckley, making phone calls for him in order to bet his information so that I could make bets on my own.” Oddsmaker Bobby Martin told me that he was responsible for introducing Sklaroff to Beckley.

Incredibly, a federal judge in Miami, after Sklaroff's 1967 conviction, decided that the bookmaker had been “rehabilitated” and reduced his sentence from two years to six months in an “honor prison.” The judge's decision was based on character references provided by several of Miami's top citizens. Sklaroff served only four months at Eglin Air Force Base and was released.

But on March 25, 1970, the month after Beckley's disappearance, the “rehabilitated” Sklaroff and three other men, including his father, were indicted on twenty-three counts of federal gambling violations in Miami, stemming from a series of raids in July 1969, as well as wiretaps placed on Sklaroff's telephones. All those indicted pleaded not guilty.

But the feds didn't just have Sklaroff good; they had him beautiful. Sklaroff's bookmaking operation had been receiving telephone calls at a bank of pay phones at the Miami International Airport. Federal agents found out about the system and received court authorization for wiretaps, which were monitored for six days.

The significance of this case was that, for the first time in American history, the wiretaps used were legal and admissible as evidence in federal court.
¹
Unfortunately, all the wiretapping was done during the 1969 baseball, not football, season. Nothing about football betting was even discussed. During the six days of surveillance, the Sklaroff syndicate would make “over two hundred calls and receive and furnish line information, discuss baseball activities about major league pitching, make and accept baseball wagers … lay off bets over the telephones with persons in ten major cities located outside the state of Florida,” according to the FBI.
²

On June 1, 1971, a jury found Sklaroff guilty on six counts and sentenced him to four years in prison. He immediately appealed his conviction; his appeals were later rejected.

Sklaroff was indicted again on the same charges in Atlanta, also in June 1971.
³
He was again convicted and received a three-year prison sentence. He appealed, again questioning the legality of the federal wiretaps.

Speaking of the increasing use of electronic surveillance on bookmakers, Sklaroff lamented to reporter Jim Savage of
The Miami Herald
, “It's going to put us out of business. You can't work without a telephone … I wouldn't mind going to jail so
much if they would let me have a couple of telephones in my cell. You know, so I'd have something to do.”

Marty Steinberg, the head of the U.S. Strike Force in Miami, charged that “any small bookmaker can finance his own operation. But once you've reached a certain scale, winning is fine but every bookmaker gets into a streak where he loses and when you have the type of volume that Martin Sklaroff had … if you lose, you lose big. You don't have the cash reserves to pay off all the winners. So the financial arrangement is usually made that you split your winnings fifty-fifty with your organized-crime backer and the organized-crime backer will pay all losses.”

Steinberg added that Sklaroff had an “interstate connection to obtain information about sports in various states and to obtain odds and to obtain information about teams and players. [It] is also used to fix sporting events so that bookmakers will win a large percentage and in turn split the winnings with the organized-crime figure.” Like Beckley, Sklaroff's interstate connection was Tony Salerno, who was the former employer of Sklaroff's assistant, Reuben Goldstein of Las Vegas, according to Strike Force documents. Goldstein became Sklaroff's runner.
⁴

During Sklaroff's bookmaking reign, a federal grand jury was impaneled in Cleveland in November 1970 and subpoenaed certain NFL records, as well as those of no fewer than eighteen NFL teams, The grand-jury probe had been prompted by charges made against the league by Walter Beach, a former defensive back for the Cleveland Browns. The grand-jury investigation focused on the possible impingement of players' rights by the NFL team owners.
⁵

“I testified before that grand jury,” NFL Security chief Jack Danahy told me. “There were charges that NFL Security was used to harass ballplayers, and that we never bothered the owners. It was funny. At the time, I had never given a player a polygraph. But I had polygraphed about five owners for a variety of reasons. I told the grand jury that, and they didn't want to see me anymore. The two Justice Department lawyers who were conducting the grand jury didn't want to hear about that. And so I was excused.”

When I asked Danahy whether he had polygraphed any owners for gambling, he replied, “Yeah. One owner owned a chain of restaurants, and he had a bartender who was booking in
his bar. I had notified him. I got this information from a police department source in the city in which it was occurring. After consulting with Pete—this was a ten percent owner—I told the owner that he had a bartender who had two jobs. And that he was also working as a bookmaker.

“The dopey owner took the telephone from the bar and put it back in the kitchen. That was his way of curing the situation. Of course, my source was the police officer who was sitting at the bar, listening to the guy. Now the guy was going into the kitchen to make the bets. So we really got pissed off at that.

“The owner came into New York for a game. And I invited him to stay over. And we polygraphed him to determine whether he had guilty knowledge of the guy's bookmaking—and whether he was involved with him. He wasn't. He passed the polygraph.

“Another one was Ralph Wilson from the Buffalo Bills. The general manager of his stables had sold a horse on his behalf to a mob guy in New Jersey. The Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau did an investigation. They gave their report to the steward at Saratoga, and the steward suspended Ralph Wilson.

“I went out to the thoroughbred-racing office and read the report. I then called the directors to tell them that the details of the case did not agree with the summary. They were contradictory. Ralph Wilson did not admit or have knowledge as to whom the horse was sold. So they had to retract it. To clear the air, we polygraphed Wilson on a Saturday morning in New York. He passed.”

Danahy says that other instances of polygraphing owners involved “tampering” cases—in which one owner was trying to woo either a player or a coach from another team while he was still under contract, a violation of NFL rules.

In early January 1971, in the midst of the grand-jury probe,
The Cleveland Press
reported that three NFL players had been linked to a northeastern Ohio gambling syndicate, headed by, among others, James “Jack White” Licavoli, a top figure in the Cleveland Mafia, and his chief lieutenant, John Calandra. The investigation, being conducted by the U.S. Strike Force, reportedly concentrated on allegations that NFL players were involved in widespread gambling with and the passing of inside information to underworld figures.
The Press
reported that none of the players was a member of the Browns team.