Interference (52 page)

The most controversial portion of the PBS report was the claim by a bookmaker, John Charles “Butch” Piazza, that between 1968 and 1970 he had been involved in payoffs to a particular team's head coach, quarterback, and defensive captain.

“With the quarterback,” Piazza said, “if he knew the perimeters of the score that we wanted to hold … he'd throw a bad pass or throw it out of bounds and only kick a field goal. We also bagged the defensive captain, a defensive back, so he could slip and fall down and let the other team score.” The head coach was needed to guarantee that neither the quarterback nor the defensive back were pulled out of the game.

Piazza added that he had known of the fixing of four games in each of those years. He said that the players had received and split an average of $300,000 per game, plus 10 percent of what the fixers made gambling. Their biggest payoff, he claimed, was $795,000 for a single fixed game, which he had personally delivered. The money for the bets was laid off through the Beckley/ Sklaroff national gambling syndicate.

Was Piazza credible? At the time of the program, he was awaiting sentencing on drug charges and for the illegal possession of a silencer. However, Piazza—who asked
Frontline
to pay his wife's moving expenses of $10,000 in return for his cooperation—did pass a voice stress evaluation test concerning his charges. Nevertheless, the program did not name the two players and the head coach Piazza had allegedly paid off.

The PBS report also raised questions about the investigation of the accidental drowning of Carroll Rosenbloom, suggesting that he might have been murdered.

William Scott Malone located Raymond Tanguay, the French Canadian citizen who had witnessed Rosenbloom's drowning and jumped in the water in an effort to save him. Malone was aided by Edward Noel, a former sergeant in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Both men talked to Tanguay at his home in a small town outside of Montreal.

Speaking in French, Tanguay, with the RCMP officer serving as interpreter, said that he had not had a decent night's sleep since Rosenbloom's death because he had desperately tried but failed to save Rosenbloom's life.

According to PBS, Tanguay's version of what happened that
afternoon on April 2, 1979, is at complete odds with the official police version, which probably resulted from the language barrier. Then thirty-six years old, Tanguay said that he was walking up the beach, collecting seashells, when he saw Rosenbloom crossing behind him and heading toward the ocean. As Tanguay came strolling back down the beach about ten to fifteen minutes later, he heard someone calling for help. He spotted Rosenbloom thrashing about in the water about a hundred yards from the shore. Tanguay said that he dove into the water with a piece of wood for buoyancy and went after Rosenbloom—who was slowly being taken out to sea.

“As [Tanguay] approached within fifty yards,” the RCMP officer said, “he saw a black object in the water about a hundred yards from the victim. [Tanguay's] first impression was that he thought it was another person and that a boat had overturned. This object only appeared for a short period as the waves were breaking. He can only describe this object as being black, that it was partially submerged and that he thought that it was part of a person's body in a diver's suit or the bottom of a boat. One thing he is certain of is that he saw a black object.” He also noted that the object was moving against the waves in a direction opposite Rosenbloom.

Rosenbloom was motionless and floating on the surface as Tanguay got close to him. The Rams owner was frothing at the mouth as Tanguay pushed the piece of wood under Rosenbloom's body and began dragging him back to shore. “On a couple of occasions, heavy swells broke [Tanguay] loose from the victim, and finally he had to let [Rosenbloom] go and drag himself to shore in a state of total exhaustion.

“Once he reached the shore, he saw two men run into the water and drag the victim to the beach and then walk away. He could only describe these individuals as being well-tanned men who looked like ‘hoodlums.'

“Tanguay stated that the two policemen who arrived on the scene minutes later were not the persons who pulled the body out of the water. According to Tanguay, the only other witness on the beach at the time he came out of the water was a woman in her mid-fifties.”
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During my interview with William Henrikson, who was the chief of the Golden Beach police at the time of Rosenbloom's death, this mystery about the two additional men on the scene
was cleared up. Henrikson told me that he and his deputy Ron Nasca—both of whom were large and tanned men—had stripped off their clothes when they jumped into the ocean trying to save Rosenbloom. Both had passed Tanguay and instructed him to return to the shore. When the two officers recovered Rosenbloom's body and dragged him onto the beach, two paramedics arrived soon after. Both paramedics were dressed in gray uniforms.

Clearly, Tanguay, who was not familiar with the look of local police uniforms, mistook the two police officers as the well-tanned hoodlums and the two uniformed paramedics as the police. “I found no evidence of foul play,” Henrikson told me. “And Tanguay never mentioned anything about the black object at the time the Dade County detectives interviewed him after Rosenbloom's death. I certainly never saw any other objects in the water.”
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Also, during the research for this book, I found four additional photographs taken during Rosenbloom's autopsy, which had been reported to have been missing from the coroner's office. There has been considerable speculation that these four pictures may have been suppressed and would prove that Rosenbloom had been murdered.

I gave the photographs and accompanying official reports to several friends within the law-enforcement community for their analyses. Detective Joseph Quantrille of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department's homicide division was among them. He told me that the pictures showed no evidence of foul play and confirmed the reports filed by the Dade County Department of Public Safety and the original autopsy report—although he noticed evidence of trauma on the right side of Rosenbloom's chest cavity. A small clot and stream of dark blood bordered the outside rim of Rosenbloom's lung and pancreas. However, this trauma could have easily occurred during the attempts either to rescue or revive him. Others who reviewed the material came to the same conclusion.

In short, the evidence appears to be clear that Rosenbloom died in a tragic accident and was not murdered.

The
Frontline
program on the NFL received mixed reviews.
The Chicago Tribune
described it as “one whale of a report. We can only wonder why it was so slow arriving and why it finally emerged on public TV rather than one of the big, football-wise commercial networks.”

Variety
wrote, “It's even more amazing that the newspapers—seemingly less needful of league goodwill—had devoted so little space to the subject. It isn't as if they were unaware of the matter; most papers carry a betting line on Sunday afternoon and Monday night games and many handicap the games for bettors on the basis of that line.”

In the worst and most idiotic attack on the show, William Taaffe of
Sports Illustrated
wrote, “To say that PBS threw an incomplete pass with this program … isn't to say that all NFL owners have just come out of a monastery. It's also not to aver that no quarterback has ever intentionally thrown an interception or that no owner has ever bet on—or even against—his team. Betting exists. Not all mobsters sell tomatoes.”

Rozelle, who predictably called the PBS program “cheap sensationalism,” added, “The program presented by PBS Monday night was chiefly a rehash of press clippings, gossip, and rumor, some almost twenty-five years old.” The show was also criticized because two of those who appeared on camera were paid—John Piazza and bookmaker Gino Tropiano—causing cries of “checkbook journalism” from those who could not attack the program for any other reason. At a press conference after the show, Rozelle told reporters, “We are looking into the possibility of bringing suit against PBS.”

Rozelle added, “If the producers of the show and their paid informants are at all confident of their information, why don't they offer specific facts including the names of the players and the dates of the games? Without these facts, every player and coach of the period this show cited is subject to suspicion.”

Sports columnist Dave Anderson of
The New York Times
wrote that PBS had “dug up no new cadavers, only a convict's allegation that an unidentified coach, an unidentified quarterback and an unidentified team captain on an unidentified team had fixed a total of 12 unidentified games during the 1968, 1969 and 1970 seasons.”

According to the
Frontline
documents, as well as federal law-enforcement records, Piazza claimed to have seen and identified the two players who were present when the money was allegedly exchanged. His information about the head coach is secondhand.

Born in Atlanta in 1941, Piazza was known as a major bookmaker, like his father, and a drug dealer whose façade of legitimacy was his racehorse farm in Ocala, Florida, which he had
purchased in 1975 for $1.5 million. Between 1959 and 1972, Piazza had been arrested no fewer than eight times for such crimes as disorderly conduct, AWOL while in the U.S. Navy, “betting or soliciting bets on athletic contests,” conspiracy to smuggle marijuana, and aggravated assault, among other offenses. There is no record of conviction on any of these charges.

Piazza had spent much of his time in Miami during the 1970s. In 1977, he pleaded guilty to drug smuggling and was given immunity from further prosecution in return for his cooperation against his coconspirators. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison; he served only forty-two months. He was released in 1981 and placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program after he agreed to testify against Meyer Lansky, who had hatched an illegal gambling scheme. However, charges against Lansky were never brought. At that time, Piazza was living under the name “John Petracelli” in Dallas with his wife.

While in the witness program, Piazza was arrested in Miami on illegal narcotics and weapons charges. He was later convicted.

Frontline
's concerns about Piazza revolved around his background and a diverse view of his credibility by law-enforcement officials. Some flat out didn't trust him, while others, especially those who had gained important convictions from his testimony, believed him to be “extremely credible.”

During Piazza's 1980 testimony in a drug-smuggling case, Judge Norman Roettger said of Piazza, “He has admitted just about everything under the sun. I think his testimony is impeached.”

However, FBI supervisor Ralph Hill, who specialized in sports gambling, disagrees. “I came in after a given game or after a given season, so what we saw were the results. Piazza was seeing it as it was going on. So I would state that what he says bears credence.”

Between 1967 and 1970, Piazza was known by local, state, and federal officials as being heavily involved with sports gambling and bookmaking. His immediate supervisors were Atlanta's most active bookmakers, Elmer H. Dudley and Barney T. Berry, both of whom were top lieutenants to Gil Beckley in Georgia.

Dudley and Berry, who both had long police records, had been indicted along with Marty Sklaroff for federal gambling violations and forty-one counts of mail fraud in the fall of 1969, just a few months before Beckley disappeared.
⁵
Piazza was arrested
in November 1969 in connection with that case. However, the charges against Piazza were eventually dropped. Piazza's attorney was Joe Salem, an Atlanta lawyer who had also represented Beckley on occasion.

When interviewed by
Frontline
, Piazza made the following charges:

1. That from 1968 to 1970 he was involved in the Beckley/ Sklaroff bookmaking syndicate, operating under the direction of Dudley and Berry, as well as Sklaroff.

2. That he knew of numerous professional football games that had been “fixed” during those years in which his gambling syndicate worked in cooperation with players.

3. That—at the direction of Sklaroff—he had gone to Kansas City and personally delivered a $795,000 payoff which he believed was intended for three members of the Kansas City Chiefs: head coach Hank Stram, quarterback Len Dawson, and defensive cornerback Emmitt Thomas.
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4. That these people had been allegedly paid for their cooperation to “fix” the supposed last game of the 1969 regular season between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Diego Chargers, in which the Chargers upset the Chiefs, 27-24.

5. That Piazza's gambling syndicate had made between $4.5 million and $5 million as a result of having the game ensured.

6. That another game between Kansas City and the Oakland Raiders earlier in the year had also been fixed.

A spokesman for the
Frontline
program said, “We had two different versions of the show ready for broadcast. One named the players Piazza mentioned and the other did not. We went with the latter because we had no evidence of gambling associations against the third man [Thomas]. And, in the end, we simply ran out of time.”

What makes Piazza's allegations suspect is the fact that the Kansas City Chiefs did not lose the last game of the 1969 season to San Diego. In the history of the Kansas City-San Diego rivalry, there has never been a final score that ended up 27-24, regardless of who won.

In an attempt to verify Piazza's charges,
Frontline
hired the Philip Manuel Resource Group, a respected Washington consulting
firm, to conduct an investigation.
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The independent probe showed that

1. Any wiretaps supporting Piazza, particularly those targeting Sklaroff, would have already been destroyed. None of the prosecutors who was involved in the Sklaroff case could remember “any wiretapped conversation involving Sklaroff in which there was talk of a specific pro-football fix.” The prosecutors—who did recall discussions about the Chiefs' being taken off the boards—could not rule out the possibility that a transcript of such a conversation might have existed at some point. However, Manuel's investigation showed that “to date there is no corroboration of the existence of wiretap information which bears on Piazza's alleged trip to Kansas City.”