Interference (34 page)

The Culverhouse suit was settled with the terms undisclosed. NFL sources have indicated that Culverhouse was promised the inside track on the next available NFL franchise. Pushing the deal, of course, was Carroll Rosenbloom.

Fitting into Los Angeles society like one of his designer suits, Rosenbloom, a major contributor to Richard Nixon's 1972 reelection bid, threw a party and a half for the 1973 Super Bowl VII in which the Miami Dolphins defeated the Washington Redskins, 14-7. Because the game was being played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Rosenbloom cheerfully assumed the role of host, taking thirty of his closest pals to the game on a bus after a champagne brunch at Chasen's.

Then, there was an aftergame dinner party at the Bistro restaurant in Beverly Hills, which is owned, in part, by mob attorney Sidney Korshak. Among the guests were MCA's chief executive Lew Wasserman, attorney Eugene Wyman, Ethel Kennedy, NFL owners Gene Klein and Al Davis, astronauts Alan Shepard and Gene Cernan, sports reporter Howard Cosell, ABC sports director Roone Arledge, tycoon Alfred Bloomingdale, former California senator John Tunney, singer Dionne Warwick, former New York Giants star Frank Gifford, filmmaker George Stevens, Jr., and movie stars Henry Fonda, David Janssen, and Darren McGavin.

Carroll and Georgia Rosenbloom had arrived in Los Angeles.

27 Operation Anvil

DURING JUNE AND JULY 1973, in the midst of his appeals, Marty Sklaroff was wiretapped—once again during baseball season. Federal agents discovered that Sklaroff was still bookmaking, but now he was also working in concert with two known drug dealers. According to a confidential Justice Department memorandum, in one operation alone, “surveillance of Sklaroff also indicates that he is associating with Mr. Marty Katz and Mr. Frank Balicchio, both of whom are known to the Strike Force to be heavily involved in narcotics trafficking and loan-sharking. Assistant U.S. Attorney [Marty] Steinberg feels that this is a definite indication that Sklaroff is becoming more deeply entrenched in the machinery of Organized Crime.”

Sklaroff was also taped, implicating himself in a $116,000 layoff operation financed by the Mafia. In another Sklaroff enterprise, the Strike Force discovered that his “operation was worth approximately $50,000 a day or $18,000,000 a year.”

Although Sklaroff had been rapidly losing his influence in the national gambling syndicate because of his perpetual legal problems, his activities prompted the initiation by the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section (OCRS) of the Justice Department of Operation Anvil, which had begun after Beckley's disappearance. The investigation was directed by William S. Lynch, who had replaced Henry Petersen as the new chief of the OCRS in 1969. Petersen had become the head of the criminal division under John Mitchell.

Lynch wrote, “As a result of the data accumulated during Anvil, we now estimate that a minimum of $29.8 billion a year was bet in 1973: $19.2 billion on sporting events … The LCN [La Cosa Nostra] controls 42.9% of the volume of gross wagers placed and 45.9% of the profit thus derived. In addition, they and their associates control most of the line and layoff services used by non-connected bookmakers, thus adding to their profit in this field.”

Hoping to inspire his troops, Lynch continued, “I cite these figures to emphasize the importance of gambling enforcement to the overall suppression of organized crime. And while I realize that such activity is tedious and often unrewarding in terms of sentencing, it must be continued. To that end I want you to rework, by means of Title III [the federal wiretap authorization included in the 1968 Omnibus Crime Act] whenever possible, all gambling cases that have been worked in the past five years.”
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Lynch also codified the OCRS's and the Strike Force's priorities in the war against the national gambling syndicate. “New cases involving major gambling violators should be sought out and prosecuted. For the purposes of this memorandum, an operation is considered major if:

1. It involves an LCN member or any of the more famous LCN associates (i.e., of a stature of Gil Beckley, Frank Rosenthal or Jerome Zarowitz or the equivalent) as an active participant in the operation;

2. It involves line making and dissemination;

3. It involves regional (i.e., three or more states) or national layoffs or a layoff operation essential, in your opinion, to the successful functioning of other bookies in your area;

4. It involves a numbers operation, horse book or sports book of substantial wagering volume;

5. It involves a gambling operation as to which there is substantial likelihood of developing evidence of official corruption.”

During my interview with Lynch, he told me, “We viewed the organized-crime syndicate as being the dominate force in the national gambling operations. And we found that some of the top LCN chiefs were working directly with the bookmakers and the layoff artists. Operation Anvil was really the government's fullcourt
press against the organized-crime syndicate. Our targets were the big sports gamblers and the mob chiefs who backed them.”

By the time Operation Anvil concluded its work in 1974, Marty Sklaroff was cold coffee. The federal government's effort to shut him down had been completely successful. According to a confidential report from the Strike Force in Miami, “Sklaroff was betting back into his own line of information, unknown to his financial backer, Tony Salerno. When Sklaroff would win, he failed to declare his winnings to Salerno. However, when he lost he declared the [losses] and they were absorbed by Salerno … Sklaroff is gradually becoming a ‘man on the outside' primarily due to his having attempted to conceal winnings from Tony Salerno. Sklaroff is heavily in debt to Salerno and is also becoming increasingly entangled within the workings of the U.S. Courts.”
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Another former top Justice Department official told me, “During the Operation Anvil days, the federal government was using about seventy-two percent of its electronic surveillance on gambling connections. But the cost of wiretapping is very high. You need men stationed around the clock, day in and day out, to monitor the target's calls. And that ran us at least a thousand dollars a day and sometimes a lot more. I've known of cases where month-long surveillance jobs were involved that cost us anywhere from three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand dollars.

“So what happens? The target gets indicted using all the evidence we've accumulated. And he's not a Beckley or a Sklaroff. Those kinds of cases don't come in very often. Instead the target is a midlevel bookmaker. So he comes in, plea-bargains his way out, and is, maybe, fined ten thousand dollars for his medium-size, twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-month operation. I think we just kind of looked at each other and started to ask ourselves whether all of this was worth it.”
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According to the FBI, the dissemination and enforcement of the outlaw line is a principal function of the organized-crime syndicate. During the 1950s and 1960s, the outlaw line was controlled by the New York Mafia. After Beckley's disappearance and Sklaroff's demise, the responsibility for the outlaw line was assumed by the Chicago Mafia—although other Mafia families received a share of the profits in proportion to their investments in it.

The man responsible for managing the outlaw line for the Chicago Mafia was Frank Larry “Lefty” Rosenthal. Born Norman Rosenthal in Chicago's Albany Park in 1929, he was the son of an owner of thoroughbred racehorses. An impeccably dressed, six-feet-one, trim, handsome man with blue eyes and thinning blond hair, which he fretted over, Lefty Rosenthal is a character out of a Damon Runyon story.

Marty Kane, one of his closest and most loyal friends, told me how he received the “Lefty” tag. “He was living in Miami, and he was getting raided, and he got mad,” Kane says. “And he punched through a window with his right hand. The glass cut the nerves in his hand so badly that he had to start learning how to write with his left hand. He's not naturally left-handed. That's when everyone started calling him Lefty.” Several Mafia figures had also dubbed Rosenthal as “Pazzo,” an Italian word meaning “crazy” or “deranged.”

Speaking of Rosenthal, another one of his associates told me, “This is a real dangerous character. He had swindles going on everywhere.”

Rosenthal gambled from the age of thirteen and booked bets with classmates while in high school. Rosenthal attended Wright Junior College in Chicago to study business administration but never graduated. Instead, he became a professional gambler. He befriended other famous gamblers, like Minnesota Fats and Nicholas “Nick the Greek” Dandolas, and Chicago mobsters, like Don Angelini, Frank “the Horse” Buccieri, and Joseph “Spa” Spadavecchio.

During his gambling career, Rosenthal has been arrested no fewer than fifteen times—but has never been convicted of a felony. He was first arrested in October 1953 in Evanston, Illinois, for distributing parlay-betting cards. The case was dismissed. The following year, he joined the U.S. Army, later receiving an honorable discharge.

Rosenthal returned to Chicago and opened Mutt and Jeff's, a hot dog stand that was suspected as being a front for his gambling activities. Leaving that behind in early 1957, he went to work for handicapper Bill Kaplan and Chicago Mafia soldier Don Angelini on the Angel-Kaplan Sports News, Inc. He worked as a $150-a-week-handicapper. Angelini, who had been forced on Kaplan in 1957 by Gus Alex and the Chicago Mafia, became Rosenthal's mentor, according to law-enforcement officials.

Investigators from the Chicago Crime Commission interviewed
Angelini in January 1961 and asked him about Rosenthal. According to the commission's report, “We were told by [Angelini] that Rosenthal was employed by the Sports Service from early 1957 to late 1959 as a clerk. He left of his own accord and proved to be a capable worker and one ‘who liked the work.'”

Rosenthal told reporter Jan Allyson Wilson, “You can't bet the tables (blackjack and craps) because of the PC (percentage) and the limit. The only gambling game you can beat is a game of opinion—the sporting events.” It wasn't unusual for Rosenthal to bet $100,000 on a single contest; Rosenthal once boasted of having bet $500,000 on a football game. “For Lefty to have bet that kind of money,” says a top Justice Department lawyer, “he had to know the outcome of the game in advance.”

Like Beckley, Rosenthal had a long list of team personnel who received money in return for supplying him with inside information. In 1960, while working for Angel-Kaplan in Miami, Rosenthal was charged with conspiring to fix a basketball game between New York University and West Virginia University during the regional finals of the NCAA tournament in Charlotte, North Carolina. He had offered a bribe to one of the NYU players. Rosenthal pleaded nolo contendere and was fined $6,000.

A confidential report states that one of Rosenthal's coconspirators, David Budin, told agents from the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation “that he [Rosenthal] and Gil Beckley were partners and exchanged information.”

Budin also told state agents that he “had given [the] New York District Attorney's office enough information to make a similar investigation involving football. That this would be almost as big as basketball, but that New York never did anything about this. Budin further stated that in his opinion fixes had never stopped. That this was especially true in professional football.”

“Rosenthal was always trying to fix something,” a former associate says. “I'd tell him, ‘Lefty, this team can't win.' And he'd say, ‘Just watch.' He must have had somebody on the other side. He thinks everything is crooked. He just doesn't breathe clean air.”

Two years later he was indicted for attempting to bribe Michael Bruce, a halfback for the University of Oregon, prior to a 1960 football game against the University of Michigan.

On September 23, 1960, according to Bruce, Rosenthal and an associate offered Bruce $5,000 for his help in throwing the
game—which was to be played the following day—another $5,000 for successfully soliciting the cooperation of the team's quarterback, and $100 a week for providing Rosenthal with inside information.

Bruce told his coach about the offer; the coach called the police. Fearing for his life, Bruce refused to testify in court against Rosenthal, and so the case was dropped. However, Bruce later testified about the offer before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1961. Confronted with Bruce's charges, Rosenthal took the Fifth, and he was never indicted.

Regardless of the charges, Rosenthal denies ever fixing anyone. He later would tell the Nevada Gaming Commission, “I did not in my entire life corrupt or bribe an athlete or public official. I admit I gambled illegally outside the state of Nevada, and my judgment should have been better in who I associated with … The FBI knew I was a top gambler. They wanted me to act as an informant for them—to rat on other gamblers. They said I could call my own shot.”

Only a few months after the Bruce incident, in December 1960, Rosenthal was arrested for operating a gambling establishment in his Miami apartment.
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No action was taken against him on that charge. At the moment of the raid on Rosenthal's apartment, Lefty was speaking on the telephone with Gil Beckley. However, Rosenthal was accused of attempting to bribe a police officer at the time of the arrest.

One of the police officers who had arrested Rosenthal, Martin F. Dardis, reported, “Mr. Rosenthal said he could not understand it [the arrest] because he had been paying off five hundred dollars a month not to be harassed. Mr. Rosenthal then asked me if I had been ‘shortchanged' and stated, ‘Didn't you get your piece?' … I interpret Mr. Rosenthal's comments as indicating that Mr. Rosenthal was paying money to law-enforcement officers to keep them from interfering with his gambling operation.”

Consequently, because of his alleged bookmaking activities and his boast of bribing police officials, his license from the Florida Racing Commission was revoked. Labeled as an undesirable, he was also banned from Gulfstream Park and other Florida racetracks.