Interference (75 page)

Ironically, McLain was the first pitcher to win thirty games in a single season since it had been done in 1934—by Dizzy Dean.

CHAPTER 24

1
.  Osadchey was fingered by the Kefauver Committee as being closely associated with Kansas City's “Five Iron Men,” who were five of the most vicious racketeers in the region and controlled gambling operations in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.

2
.  Klein had also been part owner of the Seattle SuperSonics of the NBA, along with Sam Schulman, his onetime partner in the San Diego Chargers.

3
.  Lansky offered $1 million to any country that would give him sanctuary. No one would, so, in November 1972, he returned to the United States where he was arrested and charged with federal income-tax violations, conspiracy, and skimming. U.S. District Judge Roger Foley later ruled that Lansky was too ill to stand trial, and the charges against him were dropped.

Marjorie Everett—the daughter of Chicago racetrack overlord Ben Lindheimer, who once owned the Los Angeles Dons of the AAFC—was responsible for exposing the underworld links to Acapulco Towers. Philip Levin had given her a long-term contract to remain as the executive director of the two racetracks. However, Levin squeezed her out early in the contract period. She was so angry that she hired a private investigator to investigate Levin, a partner in Acapulco Towers.

4
.  Aside from Klein, Korshak, Levin, and Morton, the other partners in Acapulco Towers were Hollywood attorney Greg Bautzer; Parvin-Dohrmann chief Delbert Coleman; City National Bank of Beverly Hills president Alfred Hart; businessman Gerald Herzfeld, who had considerable interests in hotels and casinos; investor Alfred Lushing; Helen Morton, Moe's wife; actress Donna Reed's husband, Tony Owen; and Bautzer's law partner, Eugene Wyman, a top official in California's Democratic party.

5
.  Levin had been the largest stockholder in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. Levin had sold his stock in the film company in 1968 and invested it in Gulf & Western. G & W founder and chairman Charles Bluhdorn, who also purchased Paramount Pictures in 1966, then named Levin as president of G & W real estate.

Levin's first purchases were the two racetracks owned by Marjorie Everett. He merged these two tracks with the Madison Square Garden Corporation, another G & W subsidiary. Levin, who purchased Acapulco Towers on behalf of G & W in 1970, immediately appointed Korshak as house counsel.

Korshak had personally engineered a $16 million loan for Levin and his new company, Transnation Development Corporation, from the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund for a construction project that was owned by G & W's Madison Square Garden Corporation. Through his holdings, Levin exercised considerable control over the New York Knickerbockers of the NBA, the New York Rangers hockey team, and Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island.

Sonny Werblin, the former owner of the New York Jets, took over the Madison Square Garden Corporation in 1978.

CHAPTER 25

1
.  The legislation permitting the wiretaps was Title III of the June 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which permitted court-authorized electronic surveillance
if
the alleged crime, the targets, the location of the taps, and an explanation of what types of discussions are expected accompany the request. Also, law-enforcement agencies must show that all other means of investigative procedures have been exhausted. However, federal authorities could not place bugging equipment in bedrooms or record conversations between targets and their attorneys. As a result, whenever possible, mobsters began holding business meetings in their bedrooms or in their attorneys' offices.

2
.  Clark Mollenhoff,
Strike Force: Organized Crime and Government
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972), p. 184.

3
.  Ironically, also in April 1971, while Sklaroff was having all his legal difficulties, the New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation, which had been promoted by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, went into business and began accepting bets. All wagers were limited to horse racing and had been legalized by the state legislature the previous year. Connecticut followed suit in May 1976.

Also in 1971, Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder began syndicating his line in daily newspapers through Field Enterprises. He was given his first column by Hank Greenspun, the editor of
The Las Vegas Sun
. By 1978, Snyder was appearing in over 150 newspapers, including
The Atlanta Constitution, The Miami News
, and
The Washington Post
.

4
.  Goldstein pleaded guilty to federal gambling violations in 1972.

5
.  In the midst of the grand-jury investigation, a new book
They Call It a Game
was published by former defensive back Bernie Parrish of the Cleveland Browns. A stunning but sometimes acrimonious indictment against the professional football establishment, the book was Parrish's effort to take off the gloves and examine the league as no one had ever done before. In his preface, Parrish writes, “This book is intended to drive Pete Rozelle, Arthur Modell, Carroll Rosenbloom, Tex Schramm, Clint Murchison … and the other so-called sportsmen-owners out of professional football. They are my enemies and they know it.” Parrish was among the first witnesses to testify before the grand jury.

6
.  The committee's focus had concentrated on corruption in the racing industry. The principal target was the Buffalo-based Sportservice Corporation, aka Emprise, a nationwide sports concession conglomerate, which had been convicted in 1972 of racketeering and serving as a front for several Mafia families in their hidden ownership of the Frontier hotel/casino in Las Vegas.

7
.  The first story of the attempted fix with no names mentioned was reported by Clark Hoyt of
The Miami Herald
on December 2, 1972. Sturm was first identified as the player who received the bribe offer in a story by Dave Brady of
The Washington Post
on July 5, 1973. Donnie Stone was first
identified as the man who had allegedly approached Sturm in an article by Bill Guthrie, the sports editor of
The New Haven Register
in Connecticut on July 8, 1973.

CHAPTER 26

1
.  U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Testimony of Aaron Kohn, “Organized Crime in Sports (Racing),” Hearings before the U.S. House Select Committee on Crime, 92d Cong., 2d sess., 1972, pt. 2, p. 956.

2
. 
Ibid
., pp. 893-94.

3
.  Sarkowsky was replaced by Nordstrom's son John as managing general partner in 1982.

4
.  Irsay remained with his company until 1978 when he organized Colt Construction and Development Company.

5
.  Rosenbloom accepted personal responsibility for paying Unitas $250,000 in retirement benefits. Unitas left the Colts at the end of the 1972 season and played his final season with the San Diego Chargers in 1973.

6
.  In 1972, Warner Communications purchased the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League (NASL) for $25,000. Warner's chairman, Steven Ross, reportedly had wanted his company to buy an NFL team—but was prevented from doing so because of NFL rules that forbid corporations from becoming team owners.

Although Rosenbloom wasn't affected by Warner's ownership of the NASL team, Rozelle was already on record in his opposition to cross ownership of professional sports teams. On May 25, 1972, the NFL adopted a policy stating that no NFL owner could have a majority interest in another major sport team. However, instead of requiring those who did to divest themselves, it simply asked that their present interests not be increased.

Among other owners in violation of the resolution, Lamar Hunt of the Kansas City Chiefs owned the majority interest in the Dallas Tornado of the NASL and was half owner of the World Championship Tennis tour, which he founded. He also owned an 11 percent share of the Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association.

It was an easy problem to get around. The NFL owners who engaged in cross ownership simply could place the majority of shares in their other sports ventures in the names of members of their families.

7
.  Carroll Rosenbloom had toyed with the idea of giving the Colts to his son Steve and buying the Rams for himself. However, Pete Rozelle quickly scotched that idea because of the inherent conflicts of interest.

8
. 
The Gold Sheet
, 2 November 1974.

CHAPTER 27

1
.  Although, at the time, gambling was the underworld's biggest revenue-producing operation, by 1982 its biggest money-maker clearly and indisputably had become drugs, particularly cocaine.

Interestingly, in the midst of Operation Anvil, several states began to debate the pros and cons of legalizing professional football lotteries. Among these states were Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Montana, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. Montana was the only state where the issue made significant progress. The NFL appeared to be adamant in its opposition.

2
.  Sklaroff was again indicted for nine counts of interstate gambling in April 1974 and again pleaded not guilty. On March 12, 1975, Sklaroff was convicted on all nine counts. He was sentenced to four years in prison.

Later in 1975, all questions about Sklaroff became moot when the forty-three-year-old bookmaker died suddenly of natural causes in jail after being asked to testify against Salerno during a federal grand-jury investigation. According to a confidential Justice Department memorandum, just before his death, “Sklaroff had been offered the opportunity to cooperate with the Government and testify against Salerno and in turn he would be relocated with a new identity. However, Sklaroff is so scared of Salerno that he has refused to cooperate.”

3
.  It is also important to note that during the Nixon administration, particularly in its second term, the sincere crime-fighting prosecutors and investigators had been totally demoralized by the behavior of two attorney generals—John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst—both of whom had broken the law and were later convicted; and by the White House, which, during the Watergate cover-up, had engaged in a sweetheart relationship with the Teamsters Union that resulted in dramatic punch pulling in the federal government's war against labor racketeering and organized crime.

In addition, Nixon had been employing the traditional tools used against organized crime, such as wiretapping, not against the mob but against his political enemies.

4
.  Rosenthal had attracted the attention of Meyer Lansky. As an indication of how well Lansky liked Rosenthal, the mobster tried to interest Rosenthal in marrying his niece—but Lefty declined.

5
.  The hidden owners of Caesars Palace included Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana of Chicago, Raymond Patriarca of Boston, and Genovese members Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, Gerardo Catena, and Tony Salerno. All these mobsters participated in the casino's illegal skimming operations.

6
.  The SEC filed a complaint against Lum's in 1971, charging that the company had provided false information to potential investors in an effort to manipulate the price of its stock. Among the executives named in the action by the SEC was William Weinberger, one of Art Modell's closest friends. Without being forced to admit or deny guilt by the SEC, Caesars executives were slapped on the wrist and ordered never to violate securities laws in the future. The consent decree forced settlement of Lum's stockholder suits.

In addition, Zarowitz was found to have owned 2 percent of the stock in the Golden Nugget in 1972. Also, Price was convicted in 1979 of fixing no fewer than twenty races between August 1974 and August 1975 at tracks in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.

7
.  In July 1970, just five months before the raids, the Nixon administration—through Attorney General Mitchell, who had been pressured by an Italian
defamation group—ordered that the words
Mafia
and
La Cosa Nostra
be stricken from the vocabulary of all federal employees.

8
.  The circumstances revolving around the wiretap authorization remain a mystery. What is known is that in 1972 a Florida defense attorney spotted two different signatures for the Justice Department official who had authorized the electronic surveillance. A check of Attorney General Mitchell's public schedule showed that he had not been available to initial the authorizations—a procedure that is required under Title III. As a consequence, nearly seven hundred federal indictments, which had been based on wiretaps, were summarily dismissed. It was one of the worst setbacks ever in the history of the war against organized crime.

Without the wiretaps, Judge Foley said, “The government represents it does not have sufficient evidence to proceed.” Foley had previously attempted to dismiss the case on the basis of other issues regarding the wiretaps in May 1973—but was overturned by the U.S. court of appeals.

9
.  Don Kowet,
The Rich Who Own Sports
(New York: Random House, Inc., 1977), pp. 175-76.

CHAPTER 28

1
.  Glick would later receive a $7 million loan (at an incredible 4 percent interest rate) from the Teamsters' pension fund for the purchase of the 375-acre Beverly Ridge Estates, which was a real estate development in Los Angeles. The previous owners of Beverly Ridge had received a $13.5 million loan from the union but defaulted in 1970 when the company folded. Several executives of the company were indicted and convicted for bankruptcy fraud, including Irving Davidson, Carlos Marcello's front man. Upon acquiring the property, Glick changed the development's name to Beverly Summitt.

2
.  At the time, Hughes owned the Desert Inn, Sands, Castaways, Frontier, Silver Slipper, and Landmark in Las Vegas and Harold's Club in Reno.

Also, in 1973, the year before Glick's purchase of the four casinos, Las Vegas's gaming industry reported net profits totaling over $761 million.