Interference (37 page)

Although Glick had represented these investments as simple tax shelters, most investors involved with Saratoga lost money. One of the partnerships, Hudson Properties—which included players Hudson, Hadl, and DeLong, among others—immediately lost $3 million, despite the fact that Glick had obtained a $13 million loan from the Teamsters' pension fund to develop Hudson's properties in downtown Austin.

Glick told me, “The [NFL] partners made a small amount of profit, although Saratoga didn't. Hudson Properties was owned by Hudson, and I don't know what it made yearly or lost.”

Hudson confirms the $3 million loss, the sum his company had loaned to Saratoga. He adds, “There was bitterness,” but said that he preferred not to elaborate. Hadl told me, “We were minority partners in Hudson Properties. But I lost money in that deal, too. That was in 1973 when everybody got killed. Interest rates went to twenty-two percent. They called in all the notes, and they didn't have that kind of money.”

Alworth simply told me, “When Saratoga went down, Allen Glick was the only one who stood up and was counted. He tried to get all the investors back their money.”

Glick's business ties with the NFL personnel were extremely complicated. Most of his dealings with them were through Saratoga and its twenty-four subsidiaries. In May 1975, to add to the chaos, Glick's Saratoga Development Corporation went bankrupt. When Saratoga went under, its 419 creditors claimed debts totaling $15 million more than Saratoga's actual worth. Dennis Wittman had resigned as Saratoga's president just days before the legal papers were filed.
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However, Al Davis, who was involved in one of the Saratoga partnerships, had one sweet deal with Glick that remained intact
. In 1974, Davis became Glick's personal business partner after he paid $5,000 for a 25 percent share of the Eastmont Shopping Center, a $25 million mall in Oakland that also had been financed by the Teamsters' pension fund.
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Glick describes Davis's role in the project, saying, “Davis received an interest because of his commitment to be involved in the center and to use his good name in Oakland to make the shopping center successful. The project had been in bad shape for the lender, who had foreclosed on it, and our newly formed partnership acquired the project for assumption of the debt. No money was paid up front, so no money was needed from the partners. Davis paid for his shares as I did. The purchase was with a new partnership.”

While these deals were being made, the NFL was fully aware of what was going on—but never tried to interfere. In a December 1975 interview with reporter Joe Hughes of
The San Diego Evening Tribune
, NFL Security chief Jack Danahy said, “Mr. Glick is legally licensed to operate hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. The league has found no involvement by Mr. Glick in illegal sports activity.” When asked specifically about Davis's relationship with Glick, Danahy replied, “That is the subject of much legal involvement.” He refused to say anything more about the subject.

Concerning Glick, Davis stated in a sworn deposition, “The way I understood it, Allen was an attorney. He was a war hero, decorated with honor—and was [a] very bright land developer and tax attorney. Now, whether he was or not, I don't know, but this is what the young people who came to me, who I had coached, recruited, learned to live with, love … assured me.”

In outlining his business relationship with the casino operator, Davis, who said he, too, had met Glick through players Alworth and Hadl, added, “I formed a limited partnership with several owners in the National Football League. We invested in the deal with Wittman and Glick … Then that deal became a very profitable situation for us, so in 1972 we formed another partnership. We invested somewhere between one million and two million dollars. Again I brought in several owners and coaches in the National Football League, and Carroll Rosenbloom was obviously one because one of his players, John Hadl, was working for these people. In fact, Carroll negotiated with them contracts and might have gone into business with them separately. I know the Rams coaches did.”

Davis added that in 1974 Glick came to him and asked him to invest in the Eastmont mall. “I thought it was fantastic,” Davis testified. “And so I went in with him as a limited partner, with no management affair in the business. They thought by bringing me in in Oakland it would somehow or other bring image or stature to the shopping center … It was the most expensive shopping center built in the United States.”
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Davis said that he had recommended black NFL players to serve as Glick's “unpaid advisers” for the mall to handle occasional community-relations work, like signing autographs and shaking hands. Two of the players involved were Gene Upshaw and Clement Daniels, both of whom played for the Raiders. Upshaw, who owned a bar, Gene Upshaw's Patio, near the mall, had been the NFL's “Man of the Year.” He later became the president and then executive director of the NFL Players Association.

Upshaw told me, “Al Davis asked me—as a member of the team and also as a member of the community—if I would participate in the mall as a community-relations guy. And that's what I did. It was myself and Clem Daniels. We shared an office together at the mall.

“The mall was located in a totally black area of town, and it had had a lot of problems. Davis thought that if Clem and I got involved it could add some credibility to it. And we were willing to do it. We weren't being paid for it. We appeared at store openings. We were at security meetings to try to help with things we saw in the area. That mall was very important to East Oakland. It was the only facility in which the blacks could come and shop. And we wanted to see quality stores go in. We didn't want to see it run down and return to the condition it was in when Davis and the others took it over.”

Regarding Glick, Upshaw told me, “I knew Allen Glick, but I never invested any money with him. There were no documents signed. My business was not located in the mall. Gene Upshaw's Patio was six blocks away. I had no business in the mall at all.”

29 Foreshadowing a Drug Problem

IN JULY 1974, THE NFL notified the New York Giants that the team's orthopedic surgeon since 1964, Dr. Anthony Pisani, was under investigation and could be named in an upcoming indictment, along with two New York bookmakers, Thomas Musto and Michael Astarita. Musto was identified as a soldier in the Vito Genovese crime family.
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Pisani immediately resigned as team doctor.

On August 20, the forty-count indictment was handed up after a two-year investigation into gambling in New York. The two bookmakers were charged for their roles in a $26-million-a-year bookmaking operation. Pisani was named in the indictment but not charged for agreeing to provide them with inside information on the Giants players' injuries prior to the last four games of the 1973 NFL season—which came in the midst of the Giants' seven-game losing streak. Pisani reportedly cooperated with the Manhattan district attorney's office during the probe. Both of the indicted men had been his patients.

In one telephone conversation on October 4, 1973, cited by law-enforcement authorities, Pisani gave the two bookmakers a detailed description of an injury sustained by the Giants' star running back, Ron Johnson. In another conversation, Musto refused to discuss the line or handle a bet until he received his inside information. “I want to speak to the doctor first to find out what he knows about injuries,” Musto said during the monitored conversations.

During the four weeks of communication between Pisani
and the bookmakers, the Giants never covered the point spread. The bookmakers won money from each of the four games by taking the opposing team and giving points to the Giants. The D.A.'s office stated that they handled over $100,000 in gambling action during that period.

New York Times
columnist Neil Amdur reflected, “The most painful lessons to emerge from the Tony Pisani case are that team physicians are almost as crucial to the function of a professional football team as a good chef is to the cuisine at a French restaurant, and that doctors, like players and fans, are only human. They bear the same scars and frailties that show up on Sunday afternoon when a cornerback feigns a limp to the bench after having been beaten by a wide receiver for the game-winning touchdown.”
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Another team doctor had earlier produced a major drug scandal within the San Diego Chargers. The case began when Houston Ridge, a defensive lineman, filed suit against the Chargers, claiming that prior to an injury of his hip in a 1969 game against the Miami Dolphins, he was fed nine pills, including three amphetamines and three muscle relaxants. With the pain deadened by the drugs, Ridge continued to play and was even more severely injured. The injury ended Ridge's career. Doctors determined he had been permanently disabled and was forced to begin walking with a crutch. In his lawsuit, Ridge alleged that the Chargers dispensed as many as ten thousand pills to its players in a single year. Ridge eventually won a $295,000 settlement from the team.
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The San Diego County district attorney's office, which also investigated the Ridge case, charged that the team had engaged in the “indiscriminate use” of drugs from 1966 to 1974. The Chargers team, owned by Gene Klein, was fined $20,000 for “supervisory omissions”; head coach Harland Svare was fined $5,000; and eight players were fined $1,000 to $3,000 each.
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Houston Oilers general manager Sid Gillman, the former Chargers' head coach, was placed on probation by the NFL for forcing his Chargers players to take drugs. Also, punished for prescribing excessive amounts of amphetamines was Dr. Arnold J. Mandell, who was fired as the team psychiatrist but was not charged with any crime.

Mandell, the cochairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, wrote, “I had already been privy to a lot of the players' personal drug information. I
had begun to educate them on an individual basis about the use of drugs—their actions and side effects, approximate doses, advantages and disadvantages. It was straight information. As good and fair as I could make it. For some of the veterans with eight-to-ten-year pre-game amphetamine use, I had already given prescriptions. I had begun to negotiate the doses downward and toward stability. Away from weird mixes and street stuff.”
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In December 1973, a few months before the Chargers' drug scandal exploded, Klein had sold his four hundred thousand shares in National General for a reported $20 million to American Financial Corporation, a Cincinnati-based holding company.
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“There were two considerations in my decision to sell,” Klein told me. “First, I had taken this piece of shit and turned it into a helluva corporation. We were a billion dollars in assets. So I sat down and said to myself, ‘Now what are you going to do? Go for two billion dollars? Four billion dollars? What the fuck do you want to do?' I said, ‘I want to run my football team.' I thought that would be great fun.”

At that point, Klein turned all his attentions to the Chargers. He moved from his Bel Air mansion to the La Costa Country Club in Carlsbad, California.
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The Chargers' offices are in nearby La Jolla.

But when the San Diego drug case broke open, Klein discovered that operating a football team wasn't as much fun as he thought. Klein told me, “At the time of the depositions [in the Houston Ridge case], charges were made that the Chargers were handing out amphetamines—openly in the locker room. And I put a fucking stop to that. I had absolutely no knowledge of that. I am the most antidrug person around. I said, ‘This will stop. We will not give anybody amphetamines.' I told the doctors, the trainers, ‘That's out; there's no way.' I changed coaches. I fired Gillman and I hired Svare.

“I talked to my son, whom I have great respect for. I said, ‘Mike, what the hell do I do? How do I fight this son of a bitch? It's a bitch of a problem.' He said, ‘Why don't you get a shrink?' I said, ‘That's not a stupid idea.'

“Well, he knew Dr. Mandell, and he introduced me to Arnie Mandell. And I met with him, and I talked to him about the drug problem. And I said, ‘How the hell do we fight this? How do I make sure this never happens again?' And this was all a direct result of the Houston Ridge thing.

“We got friendly. He said, ‘Let me hang around the team
and look.' I said, ‘All right. You're on your own. You're not on the payroll.' Mandell was also very friendly with Svare. And he got interested in football. So he would come down to training camp. He started giving talks, telling how bad drugs were. I sat through the talks. And that was the way I had hoped to do something constructive.

“Then it turns out that that dirty son of a bitch was prescribing amphetamines. One day I am confronted with evidence that he had written hundreds of prescriptions. I was in shock. I said, ‘What the fuck are you doing, Mandell?' And the league found out about it. And the league comes to me, and Rozelle wants a fucking hearing. Mandell says, ‘They're out on the black market getting pills. I know the stuff I give them. I know what it is.' I said, ‘That's a pretty fucking poor excuse.'

“So I fly in my airplane with Mandell and my lawyer, and we go before Rozelle in New York. And, also at that time, they had some evidence of marijuana smoking at the training camp at Irvine. So we went before Pete and laid the whole thing out. And then Pete meets with me privately. He says that it was gross negligence on the part of Svare for not knowing this, and that Mandell is a disaster. I said, ‘Mandell is gone. This is just bullshit with all these prescriptions. He's out.' Pete says, ‘I want you to fire Svare.' I said, ‘I won't do it. He goofed. He didn't know, and I can't believe he was involved. He's a very honest, legitimate guy. I'm not going to fire him.' Pete says, ‘If you don't fire him, I'm going to fine you twenty thousand dollars.' I said, ‘Fuck you, fine me twenty thousand dollars!' So I didn't fire him, and I was fined twenty thousand dollars by the NFL. And I paid the fine. The players were fined two thousand dollars each.