-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Interference
Dan E. Moldea�1989
William Morrow and Company, Inc.
New York, NY
ISBN 0-688-08303-X
-----
51
Crime and Punishment
AN IMPORTANT THIRTY-TWO-PAGE special report on gambling was featured in the
March 10, 1986, issue of Sports Illustrated.
The report made several specific disclosures about NFL personnel, which
included
* Charges that John Shaw, the vice president of finance of the Los Angeles
Rams and a close confidant of Georgia Frontiere, had "gambled excessively
over the last several years" with major Southern California bookmakers. This
statement was corroborated by other sources. But Shaw denied any wrongdoing,
and no action against him was taken by the NFL.[1]
* a statement from a former NFL Security consultant that several Cleveland
Browns players received drugs in the early 1980s from Frank Sumpter and his
son Michael. Frank, who died in 1983, was ... a major bookmaker and gambler.
Michael is now serving a thirty-year federal prison sentence for drug
trafficking. He is also said by authorities to have been a heavy gambler."
* a confession from former Miami Dolphins defensive back Lloyd Mumphord, who
revealed that while he was an active player during the 1970s he established a
relationship with a convicted felon Raymond L. Capri. Mumphord told SI that
he and several other Dolphins "partied at Capri's house and that they were
supplied cocaine by Capri. [Mumphord said] that Capri listened to the players
discuss team injuries and that [Mumphord] believed that Capri passed this
information along to gamblers." Confronted by SI, Capri admitted giving coke
to the players and listening to their injury reports; however, he denied ever
using the information for gambling purposes.
The SI story even ran a short sidebar about the Computer group. Thomas Noble
of Las Vegas, the FBI's agent in charge of the Computer investigation, said
that the case "is not going to go away. It's big and the federal government
moves slowly." However, after the SI piece ran, the Computer group
investigation began to go awry. Noble was reassigned to Chicago. The slowness
of the government had turned into total paralysis.
Special agent Charlie Parsons, formerly of the Las Vegas office, told me,
"Noble was right out of Quantico [the FBI academy]. He was a brand-new agent.
Because of the [Computer case], the normal rotation was held up for Tom until
he could bring that case to its conclusion."
However, another source close to the investigation says that the case was
nowhere near completion when Noble was transferred. "This whole thing started
out as being an investigation of some computer guys making some bets on some
college and professional football games," the justice Department source told
me. "The problem is that the justice Department knows it's an organized-crime
operation, with some embarrassing links to major celebrities in the worlds of
sports, politics, and entertainment. This whole investigation has been
stalled for political reasons.
Morris Golding of Boston-the attorney for the Computer group's mastermind,
Dr. Mindlin�denied that the case was organized-crime-connected or dropped for
political reasons; but Golding refused to comment about what celebrities were
involved in the Computer operation. "We were hopeful that the case was going
to be dropped," he told me, "because we persuaded the government that there
was no crime. Gambling is a very widely accepted pastime that involves a lot
of people."
Among those investigated for alleged involvement in the Computer group was
Mervyn Adelson, the head of Lorimar Telepictures Corporation, which has
produced such television programs as Eight Is Enough, The Waltons, Dallas,
Knott's Landing, and Falcon Crest, among other popular shows.[2] Adelson is
also the husband of ABC News reporter Barbara Walters.
Adelson, a longtime business associate and friend of Moe Dalitz and other
underworld figures, was the former co-owner of the Colonial House casino in
Las Vegas, along with his partner, Irwin A. Molasky, a vice president at
Lorimar. The two men had met soon after Adelson moved to Las Vegas in 1953.
They were introduced to Dalitz by Allard Roen, who was then the manager of
the Desert Inn, which at that time was owned by Dalitz and the Mayfield Road
Gang.
Adelson also has the distinction of being the signator for receipt of one of
the first loans from the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund in 1959,
specifically for the Sunrise Hospital, near the Strip. The $1 million loan
was made through A & M Enterprises, which was owned by Adelson, Molasky,
Dalitz, and four of their business associates who also had alleged ties to
Meyer Lansky. Another partner in Sunrise was New York attorney Roy Cohn, who
also did some of its legal work. The hospital was managed by Nathan Adelson,
Mervyn's father. Through Dalitz, Adelson had met on several occasions with
Jimmy Hoffa to discuss the loans. Adelson has insisted that he was unaware of
Hoffa's criminal associations at the time.
La Costa Country Club of Carlsbad, California, which has often been referred
to as "the playground for the mob," had been owned by Dalitz, Adelson[3]
Irwin Molasky, and others. Adelson had also developed the property, and, in
1968, he hired Wallace Groves of the Bahamas to handle La Costa's land sales.
An FBI report had previously alleged that La Costa "is used as a
clearinghouse for bookie operations. The phones are used to receive the
incoming lay-off bets." Neither Adelson nor any of his partners was accused
of any wrongdoing. Also, La Costa has since been sold to a Japanese business
concern.
Neither Adelson nor Molasky has criminal records. However, government records
show that both have close personal and business ties to major organized-crime
figures.
A top gambling figure in Las Vegas told me, "Adelson and Molasky became
beards. They were moving money for the Computer guys. Instead of betting
themselves, the Computers went to guys like Adelson and Molasky and said, 'We
have some great games to bet on.'" Attempts to interview Adelson for this
book were unsuccessful.
In my February 1988 story, "The NFL and the Mob: Pro Football's Dirty
Secret," in Regardie's, a Washington-based business magazine, I charged that
"the inquiry into the Computer group has stalled. More than 50 people were
investigated, but no indictments were brought. The FBI agent who was running
the investigation has been reassigned ... This is pretty much the way that
investigations of gambling in the NFL tend to go; just as the connections
begin to be made and the picture begins to take shape, the inquiry is
abruptly called off. There's always a 'good' reason for it."
The Computer group investigation was under the jurisdiction of Michael
DeFeo, the chief of the Strike Force's Western Division and OCRS chief Dave
Margolis's top deputy. DeFeo�nicknamed Iron Mike because of his toughness as
an organizedcrime prosecutor-had been in charge of the Justice Department's
investigations during the 1970s of corruption in the Bahamas and the
Caribbean gambling industries in Operation Croupier. Further, he was
responsible for the prosecution of those involved with skimming at the
Stardust in the Operation Strawman/Argent case�for which he received rave
reviews.[4]
However, his handling of the Computer case has gone unexplained by the OCRS,
which refused comment officially about the matter.
Further, the OCRS's handling of the latter stages of the Dominic Frontiere
case has also raised legitimate suspicions that the federal government pulled
its punch. The Frontiere case is among the most recent illustrations of what
has happened to so many government investigations involving corruption in the
NFL.
Frontiere began serving his sentence at the federal minimum-security prison
in Lompoc, California, on January 5, 1987. He was released in September 1987,
five months early. Lawenforcement officials in Los Angeles told me that
federal prosecutors were considering giving Frontiere immunity from
prosecution before his release and forcing him to testify on a case involving
the NFL. But the immunity question, too, became a political football among
federal law-enforcement agencies.
During my interview with Salvatore Pisello�who has been identified in court
as a Mafia soldier but vehemently denies ithe said that he had known
Frontiere at Lompoc. "Dominic told me that he was a victim and was innocent,"
said Pisello, who was also serving time for income-tax evasion in connection
with a case involving MCA, the Hollywood conglomerate. "When he said that,. I
said, 'Then why are you here?"' Pisello added that Frontiere received
everything he wanted in prison and had easy jobs. Pisello also said that he
never heard Frontiere complain about government pressure on him to turn
state's evidence.
"It's something that's been debated behind the scenes by the IRS, the FBI,
the Strike Force, and just about every other lawenforcement agency," a top
justice Department official told me. "I think the punch was pulled after
Dominic alone was indicted. If he was going to get immunity, he should have
received it before he copped his plea. There are a lot of people who are
afraid of what he could've said, and whom he could implicate. And the politics
that have been played with this decision are making the whole system look
bad."
Richard J. Leon, prosecutor in the Frontiere case, told me, "Indictments in
criminal tax cases are reviewed up the linewithin the tax division and in the
U.S. attorneys offices, as well as the justice Department. At the tax
division, you have assistant chiefs, section chiefs; then at justice you have
deputy assistant attorney generals, and assistant attorney generals. And then
on the U.S. attorneys' side, you have the chief of the criminal section, the
first assistant, and the U.S. attorney himself. There are all kinds of people
who were involved in the Frontiere case."
Georgia Frontiere still owns the Rams but divorced her husband after his
release from prison. According to several sources close to the Frontieres,
Dominic received a settlement of between $2 million and $4 million from his
wife. If he did take a fall, she made it worth his while.
Another case may have been spiked by Margolis and DeFeo.[5] This
investigation concentrated on MCA, which had permitted Sal Pisello to become
a top executive in the company's record division. "In the end," Pisello told
me, "I took the fall for the whole company. I was prosecuted and convicted
twice for income-tax evasion while MCA got off scott-free."
The president of MCA's record division is Irving Azoff, who also manages
special events at the Los Angeles Coliseum, the home of the Los Angeles
Raiders. The chairman of the board of MCA is Lew Wasserman, a close friend of
Rozelle. Wasserman had served as Ronald Reagan's Hollywood talent agent.
A familiar name was responsible for helping to get MCA off the hook: William
Hundley, the former director of NFL Security. In September 1987, Hundley and
his law partner since 1969, Plato Cacheris, dissolved their partnership.
Hundley then joined
the Washington, D.C., law firm-Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. This firm,
which includes former Democratic National Committee chairman and MCA board
member Robert S. Strauss of Texas, has been on the NFL's payroll for years
and coordinated the league's lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. Hundley was
also involved in the defense of Drexel Burnham Lambert, which had retained
the firm, during the 1988 federal investigation of the brokerage house.
Hundley told me that soon after joining Akin Gump and taking the MCA case, he
had a meeting with Margolis, who has a picture of Hundley hanging in his
office. "I said, 'Look, we're going to cooperate in any organized-crime
investigation,'" Hundley explained to me. "'Whatever you want from the
corporation: You want to talk to people? You want documents? Get in touch
with me. I'll see you get them in a hurry."'
It was the same "we're open, we're honest" strategy Hundley had used with
investigators while he was with NFL Security.[6]
Immediately after Hundley met with Margolis, the Los Angeles Strike Force
office issued a letter informing MCA that it was not a target of the federal
government's investigation of Pisello. However, Marvin Rudnick, the Strike
Force attorney-who had prosecuted Pisello�refused to relent and continued to
pursue MCA as the target of his investigation. Soon after, Rudnick was
summoned to Washington and met with Margolis and DeFeo. A justice Department
official told me that at that meeting Rudnick was ordered to confine his case
to Pisello and not cause MCA "any embarrassment." During the meeting,
Margolis pointed to Hundley's picture and told Rudnick, "That's Bill Hundley.
If he starts complaining about you, you've got problems." Later, DeFeo
recommended Rudnick's dismissal from the Strike Force.[7]
On March 30, 1989, Rudnick was suspended after nearly eleven years as a trial
attorney with the Justice Department. At the time of his dismissal, Rudnick
was trying to convince Dominic Frontiere's friend, the imprisoned Daniel
Whitman, to turn state's evidence in return for a reduction in sentence.
The evidence is clear that there has been a cabal among some past and present
officials of the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering
Section and some of its Strike Force offices. And the NFL, through its
long-term sweetheart relationship with a variety of law-enforcement agencies,
particularly the OCRS, has been a direct beneficiary of this situation�which
raises serious questions about possible conflicts of interest, as well as
activities that border on sheer political corruption.
However, the problem of the OCRS and the Strike Forces is a two-headed
monster. In fact, over the years, since its creation under the OCRS during
the mid-1960s, the Strike Force program, conceived by Attorney General Robert
Kennedy, has compiled an extremely impressive record in combatting organized
crime. Its top prosecutors have been men of high integrity who were given, by
law, the independence to conduct their investigations and prosecutions. They
have been protected public servants, and their jobs are not contingent upon
who is in the White House.
During the mid- 1970s, there was a serious effort to eliminate the Strike
Forces, which was led by Richard Thornburgh, the chief of the justice
Department's criminal division under President Gerald Ford's attorney general
Edward Levi. Thornburgh's actions were supposedly based on the resentment of
the Strike Force concept by U.S. attorneys-who are political animals and
nominated by the incumbent president. These political appointees were
threatened by the fact that the Strike Force could drop an indictment in
their laps and ask for their signatures-without the U.S. attorneys being a
part of their investigations. Strike Force advocates charged that decisions
made by U.S. attorneys regarding its investigations were sometimes determined
on political grounds rather than on the merits of the cases.
At first, Thornburgh, a former U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh who had chaired a
department committee to investigate the matter, had advocated that Strike
Force offices around the country be accountable to the U.S. attorneys in
their jurisdictions. But after becoming the chief of the criminal division in
1975, Thornburgh actually began dismantling several Strike Force offices,
starting with Baltimore and San Diego, and ran squarely into a confrontation
with William S. Lynch, then head of the OCRS and director of Operation Anvil
during the early 1970s. However, Lynch lacked the political clout to stop
Thornburgh. Soon after, Lynch was removed as the head of the section and
replaced by Kurt Muellenberg, who didn't want the job under those
circumstances�but was encouraged by Lynch to accept it.
Muellenberg told Thornburgh that he would agree to take the job if the Strike
Forces were preserved. Thornburgh agreed, according to Muellenberg. "Three
days later," Muellenberg told me, "he came along and shut down the Strike
Forces in St. Louis and New Orleans. That son of a bitch lied to me. It was
not something that was decided overnight." Soon after, Thornburgh merged the
Manhattan Strike Force into the U.S. attorney's office in New York's Southern
District and then wiped out the Strike Force office in Pittsburgh.
Muellenberg continued, "At that time, Thornburgh already had political
ambitions about being the governor of Pennsylvania. The thing about
Thornburgh is that he eaves in under political pressure. When the U.S.
attorneys told him, 'Look at this Strike Force shit. We really don't need
them. We can do it ourselves,' you knew it was going to go. He will kiss the
asses of the U.S. attorneys because they will always have some kind of
political power. That's much more important to him.
"Thornburgh always has his eye on the next thing he wants to do. And to piss
off a few career prosecutors? So what? What can they do to him?"
When the bloodbath was completed, only fourteen of the original Strike Force
offices remained in the major cities, along with a dozen suboffices in
smaller cities.
Aaron Kohn, the managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New
Orleans, told me, "We had to save the Strike Force here. Thornburgh had wiped
it out, and then we revived it after about a year by lobbying with Congress
and the Carter White House."
However, only the New Orleans office remained open; the others boarded up by
Thornburgh remained closed. More cuts would have occurred had Ford defeated
Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election. It was understood that Ford
planned to retain Thornburgh, who did return to Pennsylvania and was elected
governor of the state. The Carter administration saved the Strike Forces, and
the war on organized crime continuedthen under Carter appointees Benjamin
Civiletti as attorney general, William Webster as director of the FBI, and
Margolis, who replaced Muellenberg as OCRS chief. All three of these
appointments were made in 1978. With these three men, the mob was again under
a genuine siege by the federal government for the first time since the
Kennedy administration.
When Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in 1980�the Republicans ludicrously
charged that Carter was soft on crime�the war against syndicate crime ended.
The victories against organized crime claimed by the Reaganistas�like
Operation Strawman/Argent, Brilab, Pendorf, and the prosecution of Tony
Salerno and the heads of the other four crime families in New York," among
many other cases-had been initiated during the previous administration or by
individual state agencies, like the New York Task Force Against Organized
Crime, which was headed by Ronald Goldstock. Nevertheless, Reagan and his two
attorney generals, William French Smith and Edwin Meese, shamefully took the
credit.
On January 20, 1988, Attorney General Meese sent a memorandum�entitled "New
and Expanded Initiatives in the Federal Organized Crime Effort"�to the OCRS,
all U.S. attorneys, and Strike Force chiefs. In this letter, Meese wrote: "In
order to maximize the benefits to be derived from a close working
relationship and coordination between the United States Attorney as the chief
federal prosecutor in each District and the Organized Crime Strike Force
Chief, and in order to capitalize on our recent successes against organized
crime, the Department will implement the following initiatives . . ."
Despite Meese's attempt to sugarcoat the bad news, the action was nothing
more than a sleight-of-hand move. Essentially, Meese reinstituted the policy,
previously advocated by Thornburgh, to compromise the independence of the
Strike Forces. By again attempting to make the career prosecutors of the
Strike Force accountable to the politically appointed U.S. attorneys,
dissension was renewed within the justice Department.
Immediately after Meese released his memo, Margolis threatened to resign.
Comparing the Meese action with that of Thornburgh over a decade earlier, the
chief of the criminal division under Meese, William Weld, who later resigned
in protest of Meese's overall pattern of unethical behavior, told me, "It was
almost much worse. I threw my body in the middle [of Meese and Margolis] to
prevent the total merger of the Strike Forces into the U.S. attorney's
offices."
Weld said that a compromise was finally reached when it was decided that the
U.S. attorneys would be the rating officials in personnel terms for the
Strike Force chiefs-but that the chief of the criminal division would become
the reviewing official with the power to overrule decisions by the U.S.
attorneys.[9]
In August 1988, Meese resigned as attorney general. For his successor,
Reagan appointed Richard Thornburgh, who was later retained by President
George Bush.
Predictably, in mid-March 1989, Thornburgh announced that all of the Strike
Force offices would be disbanded.
Later that same week, on March 22 at the NFL owners' meeting in Palm Desert,
sixty-three-year-old Pete Rozelle, with two years left on his contract,
resigned as NFL commissioner. While leaving the room after telling the owners
of his decision, Rozelle was embraced by Al Davis. Later, at a press
conference, Rozelle told reporters, "You go through life once ... I wanted
more free time ... time to travel and do other things."
In a moving tribute to Rozelle, Joe Gergen, a columnist for The Sporting
News, wrote, "Perhaps Rozelle should have taken his leave when he was still
trim and full of what Kennedy called vigah. But say this about Rozelle: He
was a man for his age. The NFL was no Camelot. Don't let it be forgotten,
however, that once it was a mighty little kingdom governed by a wise man."
Earlier, on August 13, 1988, Edward Bennett Williams, the former president of
the Washington Redskins and the owner of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team,
died after an eleven-year bout with cancer. He was sixty-eight years old and
took numerous secrets about the sweetheart relationship between the federal
government and the NFL to the grave with him.[10]
Twelve days after Williams's death, eighty-seven-year-old Art Rooney, the
patriarch of the Pittsburgh Steelers, died at Mercy Hospital in his hometown
after suffering a stroke in his office at Three Rivers Stadium. The funeral
mass was held at his 150-year-old parish church, St. Peter's on Arch Street,
near Allegheny Center and the stadium on the city's north side. The church
was also a short walk from his Victorian house, which he and his wife had
purchased in 1933 for $5,000. He had spent half that much for the Steelers
that same year. At the time of his death, Rooney was the only owner to have
won four Super Bowl championships.[11]
Eleven hundred mourners attended the services to honor Rooney. Those who
could not get into the church watched on closed-circuit televisions set up in
the nearby church hall. Overshadowed by the solemnness of the funeral mass
were rare hand shakes between Pete Rozelle and Al Davis, as well as between
members of the NFL Management Council and the NFL Players Association. Nearly
every NFL owner was in attendance at the church, as well as numerous players
and Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder,[12] who said that he had known Rooney for
fifty-three years. Also in attendance was former Pennsylvania governor
Richard Thornburgh, who had replaced Meese as attorney general earlier in the
month.
"He [Rooney] was a man who belonged to the entire world of sports," Rozelle
told reporters. "It is questionable whether any sports figure was more
universally loved and respected."
Bishop Vincent Leonard, a longtime friend of Rooney, delivered the eulogy,
telling the crowd that there was no public clamor to have the Steelers' owner
canonized. If they tried, the bishop said, "the devil's advocates would have
a field day for the likes of a man who, on his honeymoon, took his wife to
the racetrack."
Rooney was buried in a Catholic cemetery next to his wife, who had died six
years earlier. As his body was being lowered into his grave, his beloved
Steelers players were preparing for a preseason game with the New Orleans
Saints in Louisiana.
The bet was even-money that Art Rooney was there in spirit, cheering them on.
pps. 411-421
-----
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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