-Caveat Lector-
3
The Old Days with the Old Gang
INHERITING ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN'S BOOKMAKING empire—with the approval of Meyer
Lansky and New York Mafia figure Frank Costello-fell to New York's Frank
Erickson. Ralph Salerno told me, "Erickson met Costello and Lansky through
Rothstein. The estate Rothstein left his family was peanuts, but the empire
he left his criminal friends was enormous and taken up by the guys who worked
for him. Rothstein had recruited Erickson. And after Rothstein was murdered,
Lansky and Costello went to Erickson and said, 'We'll be partners, but you
run the bookmaking on the day-to-day basis.' Meanwhile, Lansky and Costello
were running the casinos in upstate New York, Miami, and New Orleans. They
were all partners in all of their gambling operations."
Born in 1895, the pudgy Erickson maintained his headquarters in New Jersey
while continuing to live in New York. He had his gambling contacts in all
forty-eigllt states. Federal investigators estimated that he handled between
$20,000 and $40,000 a day in betting action. In the ten-year period between
1933 and 1943—while serving as a banker for other gamblers as wellErickson
netted an estimated $22 million, and split it with Costello, Lansky, and
other mobsters in the growing national crime syndicate.
It was during Erickson's reign that fast-money sports rigging became
widespread, particularly at the racetrack. Because thoroughbred horses
couldn't testify before federal grand juries, they were often the targets of
illegal doping. Heroin, in fact, received its street name, "horse" because it
was the early drug of choice by corrupt horsefixers.
Soon after George Halas bought the Chicago Bears, a large and tough New York
bookmaker and boxing promoter with close ties to Erickson and the Tammany
Democratic machine, bought an NFL franchise. Thirty-nine-year-old Tim Mara
paid $500 for the New York Giants in August 1925. His team played its games
at the Polo Grounds, the home of major-league baseball's New York Giants.
Mara's gambling operations were semilegal, and he was known for having booked
bets beneath a striped umbrella at New York racetracks. After dropping out of
school when he was thirteen, he became a runner of Rothstein associate Thomas
"Chicago" O'Brien, a major New York gambler. Mara delivered newspapers and
worked in a book bindery by day; by night he made pickups and deliveries for
O'Brien. He later opened up his own book bindery company, which fronted for
his own bookmaking operation. Soon, Mara worked his way up to his own
enclosed space at Belmont Park and became a member of the local racing
association. He handled as much as $30,000 in wagers in a single day.
"Mara was a bookmaker when it was legal at the racetrack to be a bookmaker,"
says Salerno. "The law prohibited betting away from the track, but you could
go there and bet with a bookmaker. They actually had slate chalkboards on
which they would post and change the odds. Gamblers would be running from one
bookmaker to the next, trying to get the best odds."
At the time Mara bought the Giants, he had never even seen a football game.
"But the promoters of the [NFL] knew that bookmakers were a type extremely
susceptible to new forms of investment," according to one report. "They
offered Mr. Mara the franchise."[1]
During the Giants' first season, Mara was already facing financial
difficulties and his team was verging on collapse. But all was well after
seventy-three thousand fans jammed the Polo Grounds to see New York lose,
19-7, to the Chicago Bears, who had signed running sensation Red Grange
earlier that year.[2] Gate receipts produced enough money to help the Giants'
franchise to survive. The team won its first NFL championship in 1927.
Active in politics, Mara, a Roman Catholic, was a major supporter of the 1928
presidential campaign of Democratic nominee Al Smith, the first Catholic to
seek the presidency.
Mara's office was later raided by agents from the U.S. attorney's office in
New York, which alleged that Mara and his employees had been scalping tickets
to the Giants games. But Mara, who still had good political contacts, was not
indicted. He insisted that the sale of thousands of tickets at the higher
price was "nothing worse than an error in making change."
The passage of the Beer-Wine Revenue Act in March 1933—which amended the
Volstead Act to legalize beer and wineserved as the prelude to the
Twenty-first Amendment and the repeal of Prohibition on December 5, 1933.
According to the FBI, "The resulting end of their bonanza caught mob leaders
with large hordes of wealth, vast fleets of trucks, and whole armies of
trained gunmen at their disposal. Most branched out into other fields of
criminal endeavor (such as gambling, loan sharking, narcotics, labor
racketeering, etc.), whereas quite a few added to their flow of illicit
wealth by investing their funds in legitimate investments, ranging from real
estate and manufacturing plants to hospitals and theatrical agencies. It was
also at this time that many racket leaders tried to play down their past
histories and adopt an air of pseudorespectability in their local
communities." Through front men and associates, the mob's influence also
moved in to sports.
Charles W. Bidwill, a bootlegger, gambler, racetrack owner, and an associate
of the Al Capone mob in Chicago, bought the Chicago Cardinals in 1933 for
$2,000 in cash.[3] In order to purchase the team, he had to give up his
minority interest in the Chicago Bears, where he also served as a vice
president under Halas.
Among Bidwill's holdings were the majority interest in Hawthorne racetrack in
Chicago, dog tracks in Jacksonville, Miami Beach, and Tampa, as well as a
string of Chicago apartment houses. He also owned stock in a large printing
company that published the programs and eventually the pari-mutuel tickets of
America's racetracks.
Another new owner entered the league in July 1933. Thirty-two-year-old
ex-amateur boxer Arthur J. Rooney bought the Pittsburgh Pirates-renamed the
Steelers in 1940—for $2,500. The team was operated out of the Fort Pitt Hotel
in downtown Pittsburgh.[4] Like Halas, the quiet and stocky Rooney was a
former baseball player who turned to football after a career-ending injury.
Born in 1901 in Coulterville, Pennsylvania, Rooney came from a family of
steelworkers and coal miners. The Rooney family had moved to Pittsburgh in
1903 and opened Rooney's Saloon on the city's North Side. The Rooneys' tavern
became a renowned hangout for sports fanatics and those who booked their
bets. The bar also became a favorite retreat for local politicians and led to
young Rooney's flirtation with politics. A staunch Republican who attended
Duquesne and Georgetown universities, he once ran for local registrar of
wills and lost.
Another big-time gambler who allegedly became the most powerful layoff man in
Pittsburgh, Art Rooney once hired a coach for the Steelers because he owed
Rooney money from gambling. The coaching job was to help work off the debt.
Remaining a heavy gambler while an NFL owner, Rooney, like Bidwill, later
purchased several horse- and dog-racing tracks.
Rooney reportedly once won $256,000 after two days of betting at Empire City
and Saratoga racetracks. Recounting the story of that now-legendary day of
gambling, Rooney once told columnist Red Smith, "I had Tim Mara's figures but
sometimes I'd see something the charts didn't see, like a change of jockeys
or post position, and I'd use my own judgement [sic]. I was betting with
Peter Blong, who was working in the ring for Frank Erickson that day ... If
Erickson had been there I'm sure he would have kept taking my action. Anyway,
I came close to sweeping the card."[5]
So close were Art Rooney and Tim Mara that Rooney and his wife named one of
their sons Timothy in honor of Mara.
"Bookmakers in those days were such a different brand of people from what
they are today," Rooney told reporter Myron Cope. "They were great people.
They had class."[6]
On July 9, 1933, the day after Rooney purchased the Steelers, his close
friend deBenneville "Bert" Bell, another racetrack gambler with ties to the
Erickson gambling syndicate, bought the Frankford Yellow Jackets in
Philadelphia and changed the name to the Philadelphia Eagles. Bell and his
partner, Lud Wray, paid $4,000 for the club; Bell became the team's coach.
Five feet eight and 195 pounds, Bert Bell was a star quarterback for the
University of Pennsylvania in 1916 and 1917 before leaving school to work in
an army hospital in France during World War 1. He returned to Penn after the
war and became the captain of his college team. He remained on as the
backfield coach at Penn after graduating with a bachelor's degree in English.
He served under head coach John Heisman, for whom the Heisman Trophy-the
annual award for the best college football player—is named.
Bell coached at Penn until 1928. He then operated the family-owned
Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia for two years before leaving to resume
coaching at Temple University. While at Temple, Bell and Wray got together
and decided to buy a professional football franchise in 1933. Bell had
already married Francis Upton, a popular musical-comedy star and member of
the Ziegfeld Follies, who gave him the money to buy the Eagles.
"Bert Bell was born to great wealth," his son Upton Bell told me. "But he chos
e both sides of the track. He was just as comfortable with Alfred Vanderbilt
as he was with Al Capone. Oh, sure, he knew Al Capone.[ 7] He knew all the
gamblers because he was a gambler himself at one time. He was a young man
during Prohibition. All the rich people in those days knew all the gangsters.
He knew those people, and they trusted him.
"Before he married my mother, he was engaged to a society woman. My
grandfather, who was extremely wealthy, tried to talk him into settling down
with this woman and gave him fifty thousand dollars. My father took the money
and lost it all in one day at Saratoga racetrack. When my father came back,
he said that he was sorry that he had lost the money, and that he was not
going to marry the woman. My grandfather banished him from the house and cut
him out of the will."
In June 1934, the NFL team, the Portsmouth Spartans, was sold for $21,500 to
Detroit investor George "Dick" Richards, a former automobile dealer and
another heavy gambler, who then moved the team to his hometown and renamed it
the Detroit Lions. Although it was against the league rules for any member of
the NFL-owner, coach, or player-to gamble, Harry Wismer, a radio announcer
and onetime part owner of the Lions, wrote, "Everyone knew Richards gambled,
as did many of the other owners. They always bet on their own team, and in
those days odds, not points, were used to indicate the difference between the
teams. In the letters he had foolishly written ... Richards revealed that he
had bet heavily on a number of the Lions' games
and called for everyone's best efforts to win for him.[8] He once claimed to
have bet $50,000 on a single NFL game.
The famed Earl "Dutch" Clark, one of Richards's star players, talked about
the owner's gambling habits. "[Richards] liked to bet on the Lions and he
would get some of the players to go in with him ... Richards figured they'd
play twice as hard to win twenty-five bucks, or maybe fifty bucks. So he got
them going along with him."[9]
Richards sold the Lions in 1940, after he was caught paying off a college
player to play on his professional team. He sold out for $225,000 to Fred
Mandel, who owned a Chicago department store.
Three years earlier, in 1937, a group of investors organized the Cleveland
Rams, selling the team in 1941 for $100,000 to twenty-nine-year-old New York
businessman Dan F. Reeves, a very slight and fine-boned little man who was
the son of the founder of a chain of grocery stores based in New York. Young
Reeves became the heir to the family business, which sold its six hundred
stores to Safeway in 1940 for $11 million. An officer in the Army Air Force
in World War II, Reeves suspended play by the Rams in 1943 while he was in
the service. When Reeves returned from the war, he bought a seat on the New
York Stock Exchange.
Later, in 1946, Reeves moved his stock brokerage firm to Beverly Hills and,
with his NFL team in tow, created the Los Angeles Rams. After suffering
losses of over $200,000 from his football investment the following year, he
took on four partners, one of whom was entertainer Bob Hope.[10] Each of the
partners bought in for a mere $1—with the proviso that they share in the
losses of the team. It would be one of the worst deals Reeves ever made
because the Rams rarely lost money after that. Meantime, he had given away
two thirds of the team for a total of $4.
When Rooney sold his Pittsburgh team in 1940 to Alexis Thompson, a New York
drug manufacturer, he became Bell's partner in the Philadelphia franchise.
Rooney and Bell then swapped teams with Thompson the following year-with
Rooney regaining the Steelers. And then, because of the war, the Pittsburgh
and Philadelphia teams merged and became the PhilPitt Steagles. This hybrid
team played together only for the 1943 season.[11] However, Bell remained
with Pittsburgh, serving as the team's president and general manager.
pps. 45-50
--[notes]—
CHAPTER 3
1. The New York Times, 17 February 1959.
2. Halas had actually violated the NFL's rules by signing Grange before he
had graduated from the University of Illinois. However, considering the
revenues produced by Grange, an exception was made. Halas made his deal with
Grange through the player's agent, C. C. "Cash 'n' Carry" Pyle.
Grange's "barnstorming" across the country provided the impetus for the
big cities with major colleges and big-time college sports to accept
professional football.
However, professional football was still not receiving respect. When Halas
and Grange were introduced as members of the Chicago Bears to President
Calvin Coolidge, the President replied, "I've always enjoyed animal acts."
Coolidge thought that these Bears were part of the circus.
3. The Chicago Cardinals became the St. Louis Cardinals in 1960 and the
Phoenix Cardinals in 1988.
4. In 1938, Rooney hired his first, big star player, Byron "Whizzer" White,
an all-American halfback from the University of Colorado. White was later
appointed as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court by President John
Kennedy.
5. Red Smith, The Red Smith Reader (New York: Random House, Inc., 1982), p.
107.
6. Myron Cope, The Game That Was: The Early Days of Pro Football (New York:
World Publishing Co., 1970), p. 122.
7. Regarding Capone, Upton Bell told me, "When the Lindbergh baby was
kidnapped, Bert Bell was one of the people the police talked to to see if he
could go to Sing Sing and talk to Capone to find out if it was an underworld
murder. The story is my father did go and talk to Capone. And within
twentyfour hours, without ever removing himself from prison, Capone found out
that the Mafia was not involved."
8. Harry Wismer, The Public Calls It Sport (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965), pp. 25-26. The college roommate of future Florida
senator George Smathers and Washington Post publisher Phil Graham, Wismer was
principally a sports broadcaster. His first wife was Betty Bryant, the niece
of Henry Ford; and Wismer's second wife was Mary Zwillman, the widow of New
Jersey Mafia figure, Abner "Longy" Zwillman—who had been part of a conspiracy
in the 1930s to take over the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage
Employees union, which became the largest union in Hollywood. Zwillman had
also bankrolled studio mogul Harry Cohn in his takeover of Columbia Pictures.
The mobster was later found hanging from a water pipe in his basement.
Zwillman's widow's lawyer was Sidney Korshak, the Chicago Mafia's liaison to
the Hollywood film industry.
9. Cope, Game That Was, pp. 91-92.
10. Reeves's other partners were Fred Levy, Edwin W. Pauley, and Hal Seley.
Levy had bought the Rams with Reeves in 1941 but sold his interest to his
partner two years later.
11. The Philadelphia Eagles regrouped in 1944 and resumed play under
Thompson. However, Pittsburgh merged with the Chicago Cardinals for the 1944
season, forming Card-Pitt. After a 0-10 year, both teams went back on their
own in 1945.
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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