Interference (47 page)

Howard Cosell recalled, “The funeral was not exactly … well, funereal. In questionable taste, it was conducted as a celebration … Winters told jokes at which the audience uneasily laughed, brought on a couple of Carroll's favorite singers and a guitar player, and called upon a mix of Rosenbloom's friends to speak—as though it were a roast and toast.”
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In the wake of Rosenbloom's funeral, numerous questions arose about the circumstances of his death, which have challenged the contention that he drowned by accident. It was suggested by some that Rosenbloom might have been murdered.

At the time of his death, Rosenbloom was still the second-largest individual stockholder in Warner Communications, owning 223,146 shares of stock worth nearly $11 million. However, in April 1979, the corporation was in the midst of its biggest crisis: Several of its top executives were being investigated for their ties to major East Coast Mafia figures.
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Also, Rosenbloom would later be cited by the LAPD as having been a possible link in a major West Coast sports-gambling operation with his bagman Victor Weiss, who was murdered two and a half months after Rosenbloom's death. And Weiss had been implicated with Tony Spilotro and the Stardust crowd in Las Vegas, as well as in reports of the mob's alleged fixing of referees—which was investigated by the FBI and the IRS in 1979—while Rosenbloom's football team was failing to cover the spread in two thirds of its 1978 games.

Could Rosenbloom's death have been anything but an accidental drowning? If it was not, there was a whole cast of characters who would have had the means, opportunity, and motive.

“I don't believe that his death was accidental,” Rosenbloom's son Steve told my associate, William Scott Malone. “And I know other people in the family have discussed it with me and feel the same way, as do many other people who knew my father well. Why would a man who had a healthy respect for the water and never went in it by himself, go in on that day when the water was extremely rough with a strong undertow?”

However, regardless of Rosenbloom's son's suspicions, his father did go into the water despite the conditions that day.

Alexander Papp, a maintenance supervisor for Eastman-Kodak of New York, was the last-known person, other than Tanguay, to have seen Rosenbloom alive. Mary Papp, Alexander's widow, told me in 1988, “We had a place on Golden Beach about four doors down from where the man [Rosenbloom] and his family were staying. My husband was taking a walk on the beach when he saw this man going into the ocean. And it was a very, very bad morning. My husband yelled to him, ‘Hey, mister, you better not go into that water because it's really bad.' The man said, ‘Oh, don't worry about it. I'm a very good swimmer.' When my husband came back from his walk, the man was already dead on the beach, being attended to.”

Nevertheless, the rumors of foul play persisted. The top individual stockholder in Warner Communications, Morris Mac Schwebel, told me, “I saw Carroll shortly before his death, and he was walking, running, and playing tennis. He was as healthy as any man could be.” Schwebel adds that he, along with Rosenbloom's sister Mildred and Rosenbloom's personal accountant, believe that Rosenbloom was murdered.

San Diego Chargers owner Gene Klein agrees with Schwebel and told me, “Carroll had had open heart surgery and as part of his therapy he had to exercise. One of the best exercises is swimming. But Carroll was not a good swimmer, and I distinctly remember that he wanted somebody around when he went into the pool.

“I had used Carroll's home at Golden Beach when the Chargers played Miami. I spent a week there. So I am familiar with the neighborhood, and I am familiar with the beach and the water. I find it very difficult to believe that Carroll—who was walking on the beach or whatever—would go in the water when there were storm warnings out. I find it very difficult to believe that it was an accident.”

Howard Cosell says, “Because everyone knew C.R. …would not have been foolhardy enough to risk his life, rumors began to circulate that indeed Rosenbloom was the victim of a foul act. Such an act, some whispered maliciously, was engineered by Georgia, the inheritor of her husband's fortune. Others focused on Rosenbloom's fondness for the heavy wager and theorized about alleged debts to the mob.”
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Rosenbloom's close friend Senator Ted Kennedy—who had
come to Los Angeles to comfort the Rosenbloom family the day after Carroll's death—stood up during Senate proceedings in Washington and paid tribute to Rosenbloom. “He was familiar to generations of football players and lovers of the sport as a person with an extraordinary sense of excellence and leadership, and with a deep commitment and dedication to his teams and players.”

There was irony that Rosenbloom had died in the sea. In 1976, he had told
Los Angeles Times
sportswriter Bob Oates, “The ocean does for me what the desert does for others. They like the stillness. I never tire of listening to the ocean or looking at it … I play those records that have nothing but the sound of the ocean washing up on the beach.”

Rosenbloom left the bulk of his $300-$500 million estate, including 70 percent of the ownership of the Rams, to his fifty-one-year-old wife, Georgia. He was expected to have been succeeded as chief of the Rams by his thirty-three-year-old son Steve, who had been left 6 percent of the team, the same percentage that had been left to his other brothers and sisters.

Referring to his son in his will, the elder Rosenbloom stipulated, “I direct my Executor to retain my son, D. Stephen Rosenbloom, who I consider to be an outstanding football man, as Football Manager, for as long as my Executor, in his discretion, shall determine. The Football Manager shall have the power to make all managerial and operational decisions with respect to all football and football related activities carried on by the Los Angeles Rams Football Company …”

According to a codicil to Rosenbloom's will, filed six months before his death, Georgia and Hugh Culverhouse were named as two of the three executors of his estate. Rosenbloom's personal lawyer, E. Gregory Hookstratten, was the third. Hookstratten, described as “a kingmaker,” had included among his clients Tom Brokaw, Bryant Gumbel, David Merrick, Elvis Presley, and Vin Scully.

However, within a week of her husband's death, Georgia Rosenbloom appointed herself the president of the Rams. And she soon became the queen of professional football.

39 Cobra in a Sunbonnet

IN JULY 1980, NFL Security chief Jack Danahy, after nearly twelve turbulent years with the league, retired from the NFL and soon after opened his own private security firm in Manhattan, Intercon Special Service, which he started with two other former FBI agents.
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Finding a replacement for Danahy was no small task. “They had a little problem finding a successor to me,” Danahy told me. “The problem was age. We had two pension plans, and the insurer of the pension plan told the league after I retired that they had to find someone who was under age fifty to balance the books. There were a lot of FBI agents retiring, but they were retiring after age fifty. So Pete had a problem.”

Eventually, he hired former FBI special agent Warren Welsh, who told me, “I was a brick agent in Miami who primarily worked on gambling—the Lefty Rosenthals, the Elliot Paul Prices, the Gil Beckleys. A friend of mine headed the Beckley investigations.

“In 1968, when I was still in the bureau, they [NFL Security] brought down Paul Hornung to appear secretly before the grand jury that was tied in with Beckley. They were going to introduce the commissioner and the owners to a new concept for security … They were going to regionalize the program. Evidently that didn't fly. And then Jack Danahy came aboard and pretty much started the system that other sports leagues have adopted: having security representatives in the league cities.

“When Jack started, [NFL Security reps] were, more often than not, retired FBI agents … Among the things we added were three former DEA agents to our cadre, which none of the other sports leagues had done. In addition, we had the traditional security rep network—twenty-eight teams in twenty-six cities.

“We have a very small staff. My title is director and then there is an assistant director, Charlie Jackson. He came aboard in 1975. He has worked drugs his entire law-enforcement life.”

Welsh, who became the fourth and current head of NFL Security, immediately had his trial by fire.

Georgia Rosenbloom is a former Miss St. Louis, a former professional singer, and an ex-Las Vegas chorus girl. The five-feet-three beauty, a believer in astrology and numerology, had long been in show business. “I found that Georgia would perform anywhere, anytime,” quipped Gene Klein. “When she opened the refrigerator and the light went on, she started singing.”
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A busty blonde, she, accompanied by Rosenbloom, occasionally sang for Joseph P. Kennedy at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port. When the elder Kennedy was ailing, she reportedly even cut a record for him. Rosenbloom was Georgia's sixth husband. Her first marriage was annulled. Her second husband was hit by a bus and killed. She left her third husband for the chorus girl job in Las Vegas. Her manager there became her fourth husband—in less than a week after her divorce from her previous husband. She divorced number four in 1958 because he could not support her financially. While she was working as a weather forecaster on a Miami television station, then hosting her own talk show, she met her fifth husband, who was also a Miami television personality. After a brief marriage and quick divorce, she moved to New York and began doing the weather report on NBC's “Today Show,” then hosted by Dave Garroway. The weather gig lasted only two weeks.

In August 1979, four months after Carroll Rosenbloom's death, Georgia fired her stepson as the head of the Rams and also dismissed twenty-six other team employees, including Harold Guiver, a trusted associate of her husband.
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She later gained full ownership of the Rams by buying out her children and stepchildren.

Steve Rosenbloom was bitter about his firing and became the general manager of the New Orleans Saints in December 1979.
He questioned the ethics of Hugh Culverhouse, the owner of the Tampa Bay NFL team, because as one of Rosenbloom's executors he was making managerial decisions about the Rams. Georgia said that the decision to fire her stepson had been made by all three of her husband's executors, including attorney E. Gregory Hookstratten, who pushed hard for the dismissal, and Culverhouse, who, in the end, spent fourteen months settling Rosenbloom's estate. Remarkably, the NFL saw no need for anything more than a
pro forma
investigation of Culverhouse's possible conflict of interest.

In early news releases, Georgia's public-relations flacks boasted that she had been her late husband's partner in running both the Colts and the Rams. However, in reality, he had always forbidden her to sit in the owner's box during either Colts or Rams games. Nevertheless, everyone who knew the Rosenblooms had confirmed that he was crazy about her and that their life together was idyllic.

Prior to her husband's death, Georgia Rosenbloom had become a close friend of musician Dominic Frontiere, a two-time Emmy Award-winning composer, whom she had hired as her “personal lyricist.” He escorted her to Rams games, with the permission of Rosenbloom, who had reportedly invited Frontiere to accompany them on his fatal holiday at Golden Beach; Frontiere had decided not to go. Georgia later asked Frontiere to arrange the music for her husband's memorial service. Soon after, Georgia and Dominic began having frequent lunches, and then he moved into a guest house on the Rosenblooms' Bel Air property. Frontiere had divorced his second wife, Cicely, just the previous year.

On July 21, 1980, fifty-two-year-old, once-annulled, twice-widowed, thrice-divorced Georgia Rosenbloom married the forty-eight-year-old Frontiere in Jacksonville, Florida, at the home of Culverhouse—who, as a Florida notary, performed the ceremony. Among the sixty-two guests were Irv Cowan, Pete Rozelle, Art Modell, Tex Schramm, William Sullivan, Leonard Tose, and Max Winter. John Wayne's son Michael was the best man; Cowan's wife was a bridesmaid.

After their European honeymoon, the Frontieres participated in the gala opening of the Rams' new home at Big A Stadium in Anaheim in August.

But soon the honeymoon was over. A Los Angeles organized-crime
figure, Jack Catain, had reportedly been trying to convince Georgia to sell the Rams to him, according to a police report of an LAPD surveillance at the Indian Wells Country Club in Palm Desert, California. Dominic reportedly told her, “You'd better listen to the man. He's connected.” Both of the Frontieres have denied that this conversation ever took place. However, federal prosecutors told me that Dominic had personally known Catain long before his marriage to Georgia, and that Catain had a pretty unsavory reputation.

Gerald D. Petievich, a special Secret Service agent who was investigating a counterfeiting operation in which Catain was involved, wrote in an affidavit, “I have reviewed the official files of other law enforcement agencies which reflect that Jack Catain is a major organized crime figure and has been known in the past to deal in stolen securities as well as other various crimes.”

The LAPD also was looking into murdered car dealer Vic Weiss's connection to a Super Bowl ticket-scalping scheme being operated by an associate of Catain. Investigated by federal law-enforcement agencies for his ties to Las Vegas mobster Tony Spilotro and the Chicago Mafia's underboss, Jackie Cerone, Catain was forced out as president of his business, Rusco Industries, by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But, apparently, neither Catain's corrupt activities nor his associations repelled Georgia and Dominic Frontiere.

In December 1980, Catain and Georgia Frontiere were implicated in several California news reports in a Super Bowl XIV ticket-scalping operation from the previous January. Playing in the game at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena were the Rams and the Pittsburgh Steelers. The ten-point favorite Pittsburgh team won, 31-19.