The Fix Is In, page 10
Meanwhile, out on the playing field, those same White Sox—led by seven of the indicted eight from the previous year (Chick Gandil retired after the 1919 season, perhaps thanks to the extra $35,000 he pocketed from the fix)—were again winning the American League pennant. Under intense scrutiny and pressure, Comiskey finally took a belatedly hard stand and suspended those players until their names were cleared. The White Sox lost the 1920 pennant by just two games to the Indians.
It was not until July of 1921 that the eight White Sox players stood trial. Amazingly, the players’ signed confessions disappeared from the Illinois state attorney’s office in the midst of the trial. It was rumored that gambler Arnold Rothstein (the mastermind behind the fix) paid $10,000 for the written confessions to disappear. Later, under oath, these same players claimed that they never signed such a confession. Also surprising is that the players’ defense was funded by none other than Charles Comiskey himself. Why would Comiskey do such a thing? In the ensuing attempt to clean up the game since the scandal erupted, the owners hired a commissioner to rule over the game, with his judgments being absolute and final. The newly appointed Kenesaw Mountain Landis promptly placed all eight White Sox on the ineligible list. Therefore, Comiskey stood to lose nearly his entire team if the eight White Sox were convicted.
During the trial, Comiskey must have wondered what he got himself into. Part of the defense’s argument was that the players never signed a contract that obligated them to attempt to actually win ballgames, but just to show up and play (which, sadly, is as true then as it is today). The jurors were then instructed to find the players guilty not only if they threw ballgames, but if they had attempted to defraud the public in the process. The jurors took a whole two hours to find the eight White Sox not guilty. The jurors then proceeded to carry the players around the courtroom on their shoulders. However, Commissioner Landis cut the celebration short two days later as he banned the eight White Sox from baseball for life with the words, “They can’t come back. The doors are closed to them for good. The most scandalous chapter in the game’s history is closed.” Landis went further with his ruling, basically spelling out baseball’s current anti-gambling rule, “No player who throws a ball game, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player that sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a ball game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”
Not forgotten in this whole mess was Claude Hendrix, the Cubs pitcher whose foolish telegram launched the whole affair off the ground. Hendrix was released by the Cubs after the 1920 season, and as a result of the ensuing investigation both he and another Cubs pitcher, Paul Carter, were found to have been involved in fixing games during that 1920 season. Commissioner Landis banned them for life as well.
As harshly as Landis came down on the eight White Sox and two Cubs, he looked the other way when another gambling scandal took place in 1919. This one involved two of baseball’s legends, Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker.
The story didn’t surface until some years later, when a former teammate of Cobb’s sought revenge against the Georgia Peach. “Dutch” Leonard was a pitcher for Cobb’s Detroit Tigers in 1919. Late in the season, the Tigers were set to face the second-place Cleveland Indians in what seemed to be a meaningless game. Yet, if the Tigers won, they would finish third, giving all their players a $500 salary boost. So player-manager Cobb and Leonard met with player-manager Tris Speaker and pitcher “Smoky” Joe Wood of the Indians (who were former teammates on the Red Sox in 1912 when they allegedly threw Game Seven of the World Series) under the stands in Detroit to work out a deal. The four agreed to throw the game in the Tigers’ favor, plus put some money down on the game with a gambler to boot. Indeed, the Tigers triumphed over the Indians that day 9-5. After the season ended, the players sent each other letters to settle up the agreement that was reached before the game.
In ensuing years, Leonard came to despise Cobb. To seek some measure of revenge against him, in 1926, Leonard attempted to sell the letters regarding the final payouts from the fix to the press. He found no takers. So he took the letters to AL president Ban Johnson. Johnson, not wanting to cause another gambling scandal, met with Speaker and Cobb confidentially and convinced them both to “retire” from their player-manager positions. In exchange, the whole thing would be forgotten. The two agreed and stepped down, thinking that was the end of that. But it wasn’t.
Commissioner Landis got wind of the whole affair. Since as commissioner he felt he ruled over Johnson and should’ve been consulted in the matter, Landis brought Leonard’s accusations to the press, publicly opening up the whole affair. Johnson quickly changed his mild-mannered tune and announced that both Cobb and Speaker would never return to the American League because of their actions. Needless to say, this didn’t sit well with Cobb or Speaker. They had been betrayed, and now had to deal with Commissioner Landis.
Landis held a hearing on the matter in which everyone—Cobb, Speaker, and Wood—admitted to nothing. Armed with only the seething words of Leonard and the letters, Landis then sat on his final ruling for two months. Why so long? It was because Cobb threatened to really blow the lid off of gambling in baseball if Landis decided to banish him from the game. Knowing Cobb was a vengeful prick and knowledgeable enough to do so, Landis safely ruled that Cobb, Speaker, and Wood were not guilty of gambling on or fixing a ballgame. As perhaps an added slap to baseball’s face, both Cobb and Speaker then returned to the field for the 1927 and 1928 seasons. After retiring, neither was offered another job in baseball.
Remarkably, even with baseball’s hard and fast anti-gambling rule now in place, trouble was still brewing out on the diamond throughout the 1920s.
1921 - New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays is best known for having killed the Cleveland Indians Ray Chapman with a fastball to the head in 1920—the only player death to have occurred in a major league game. While Mays is often remembered for that, few recall that Mays might have fixed a few World Series games in the early 1920s. While the top pitcher for the rising 1920s Yankees dynasty, Mays’ reputation came into question during the 1921 World Series. In Game Four, he blew an eighth-inning shutout, as well as the game, 4-2 to the rival New York Giants. Then Mays dropped Game Seven by the score of 2-1 (even though only one of the Giants’ runs were earned and Mays failed to walk a batter). New York sports reporter Fred Lieb got wind that Mays may have dumped Game Four, taking the complaint all the way up to Commissioner Landis’ office. The resulting investigation turned up nothing of note. In the 1922 World Series, again against the New York Giants, Mays took the hill only once and lost 4-3 in Game Four. Perhaps even Yankees officials were themselves beginning to wonder about Mays as in 1923, though healthy, Mays didn’t make a single appearance in the 1923 World Series. After the season, Mays was cut by the Yankees only to be picked up by the Reds where he posted a 20-9 record in 1924. No solid evidence outside of Lieb’s story ever came to light regarding Mays tanking games.
1922 - Just as the Yankees may have had their issues with pitcher Carl Mays, their crosstown rivals the Giants soon found that they had their fill of pitcher Phil Douglas. “Shufflin’ Phil” was a decent pitcher but an even better drunk. However, in 1922, he had managed to stitch together an 11-3 record before his career went drastically south. After dropping a game to bring his record to 11-4, Douglas took the loss personally and went out on a bender, disappearing for several days to both his wife’s and his team’s dismay. Giants’ detectives finally located Douglas and relegated him to a sanitarium to dry out. Once sober(ish) and free to go, Douglas wasn’t happy to find that the Giants had sent him a bill to cover his stay in the hospital. On top of that, the team had fined him for missing so many games. Douglas fired off a letter to St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Leslie Mann saying with the right encouragement, he’d disappear again, thus hurting his team while helping the then second-place Cardinals beat the Giants out for the pennant. Mann, for his part, apparently didn’t find Douglas’ offer too appealing and turned the letter over to the commissioner. It only took a short time for Commissioner Landis to give Shufflin’ Phil the old heave-ho out of baseball for good.
1924 - Prior to that day’s game, Jimmy O’Connell of the New York Giants sauntered up to Philadelphia Phillies shortstop Heinie Sand to offer him a $500 bribe to go easy on the Giants. The Giants needed the win to stay atop Brooklyn for the NL pennant, and O’Connell thought $500 was enough to buy Sand’s loyalty, if for only nine innings. Sand refused the offer and went to manager Art Fletcher with the story. Fletcher in turn went to the commissioner. Soon, O’Connell found himself in hot water and promptly started pointing fingers at one of his coaches, Cozy Dolan, as well as teammates Frankie Frisch, George Kelly, and Ross Youngs whom O’Connell claimed were all in cahoots together in offering Sand the $500 payoff. Upon hearing all the evidence (including Dolan’s persistent answer of “I don’t remember” to every question asked of him) and just prior to the start of the 1924 World Series between the Giants and the Washington Senators, Landis banned both O’Connell and coach Dolan from the game for life. The Giants went on to lose the Series to the Senators four games to three.
1927 - Rogers “Rajah” Hornsby posted a lifetime .358 batting average by collecting more hits in his career than games played, but he was also a notorious horse race enthusiast. Apparently, Hornsby liked to play the ponies, but he wasn’t one for ponying up the cash when his horse didn’t come in the money. In 1927, a gambler sued Hornsby for not paying the nearly $100,000 owed from horse racing wagers. The gambler lost the suit, but Hornsby lost his job with the New York Giants. He was shipped to Boston for a season, then on to the Chicago Cubs for a couple, then back to the St. Louis Cardinals for one, and finally on to the St. Louis Browns where he finished up his career. So why did the Hall of Famer get shipped to five different teams in ten years? Hornsby couldn’t stay away from the track. And while there was no rule preventing him from betting on the horses, teams and even the commissioner worried that Hornsby was gambling on more than just horses. Though no evidence ever surfaced of Hornsby betting on baseball, the fear that he may have kept him constantly on the move for the last half of his career.
1940 - Another legendary Hall of Fame member, “Joltin’ Joe” DiMaggio may have had some unsavory gambling connections. Prior to the days of sports agents, players were mostly on their own to work out their contracts. When DiMaggio’s came up in 1940, he decided to talk to Joe Gould about the negotiatio ns. The problem was, at least for baseball and the then paranoid Commissioner Landis, Gould was a boxing manager who was also well-known as a baseball gambler. Whether Landis was more concerned about Gould’s gambling history or DiMaggio’s attempt to acquire an agent, no one can say, but the investigation into DiMaggio’s connections to Gould went away as soon as the commissioner’s office learned that Gould wasn’t about to get a cut of DiMaggio’s salary.
Though Joltin’ Joe reveled in his clean and wholesome image, perhaps it was more of a façade than reality. Joe’s celebrity status and New York baseball roots brought him into contact with many disreputable men of the “goodfella” sort. After his playing days ended, the FBI interviewed DiMaggio regarding his connections with Albert “The Mad Hatter” Anastasia, a member of the Mafia’s “Murder, Inc.” DiMaggio claimed he was just introduced to Anastasia a mere two weeks before Anastasia was shot to death in a barbershop. But during that FBI interview, DiMaggio admitted to befriending two well-known gamblers including one who was a partner of mob boss Santo Trafficante. This gambler, Joseph Silesi, offered DiMaggio a chance to front a Cuban gambling operation, but DiMaggio told the FBI he turned the job offer down because he didn’t want it to tarnish his image with the youth of the nation.
1920-1950 - At the time of the Black Sox scandal, the small four- to six-team version of the NHL was the only other established major sports league in existence. The NBA wasn’t created yet, and the NFL was in its infancy. With baseball’s new anti-gambling rules attached to Commissioner Landis’s heavy-handed dictatorship over the game, MLB seemed to keep its nose clean of gambling scandals throughout the 1930s. Yet, it’s not as if gamblers stopped betting and avoided sports. In fact, many gamblers “legitimized” themselves through sports—as NFL team owners.
The NHL is not often viewed as a gambler’s sport, yet its early ownership built the league with gambling revenues. The Norris family, whose patriarch James, Sr. owned the Detroit Red Wings while son James, Jr. owned the Chicago Blackhawks, was investigated by the U.S. Senate in the 1950s for their ties to several Mafia dons, particularly Frankie Carbo.
In 1925 the New York Americans were purchased by “Big” Bill Dwyer, a mobster and bootlegger.
Conn Smythe built the Toronto Maple Leafs franchise, along with the Maple Leaf Gardens arena, out of his racetrack winnings. Smythe’s understudy was Frank Selke who shared not just his boss’ love of gambling but later became the kingpin of the Montreal Canadiens dynasty in the 1950s. The Canadiens, too, saw its ownership evolve from gambling money. In the 1920s through the mid-1930s, the three men who owned the team—Leo Dandurand, Joe Cattarinch, and Louis Letourneau—also owned a casino in Cleveland, OH and were frequent visitors at area racetracks.
While some of its history is ignored by the NHL, many of these names are not forgotten within the league. At the end of each season, the NHL awards its players trophies emblazoned with the names of James Norris (best defenseman), Conn Smythe (playoff MVP), and Frank Selke (best defensive forward).
A pertinent fact the NFL blatantly overlooks as part of its historical development is that several of its early team owners were well-known gamblers. The New York Giants’ original owner Tim Mara (whose family still owns the team) had a history as a bookmaker before and even during his ownership of the team. He wasn’t alone.
Another original owner whose family still has control of its franchise, Charles Bidwell bought the Chicago Cardinals (now the Arizona Cardinals) after relinquishing his share in George Halas’ Chicago Bears. Bidwell was not just a gambler and a racetrack owner; he was a known associate of Al Capone (they shared the same lawyer, Ed O’Hare) and a bootlegger.
Beloved Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney, Sr. was another big-time gambler who reportedly won over $250,000 over a two-day span at the racetrack. Rooney would also own pieces in several horse and dog racing tracks and reportedly hired head coach Joe Bach to work off a gambling debt he couldn’t immediately pay off.
George “Dick” Richards was known to be a heavy gambler outside of his car dealership when he purchased an NFL team, moving them to Detroit to become the Lions. In letters he had foolishly written, Richards detailed how he bet on his own team’s games, including upwards of $50,000 on a single contest prior to selling the Lions in 1940.
DeBenneville “Bert” Bell was another heavy gambler with known Mafia friends when he purchased the Philadelphia Eagles in 1933. Bell would later serve as the NFL commissioner after World War II. Another Eagles owner, Leonard Tose, had a suit brought against him by his wife asking for control over the family’s estate in part because of Tose’s heavy gambling habits.
Mickey McBride was the sole owner of the Continental wire service which was widely used for bookmaking operations in the 1940s. Together with Paul Brown, the pair formed the Cleveland Browns. When McBride sold his portion of the team, it went directly to Saul Silberman, a gambler known to wager upwards of $2 million a year while he owned Tropical Park racetrack in Florida and another racetrack in Cleveland. Silberman would later sell out to Art Modell who was a well-known sports gambler in and around New York City at the time. Modell owned the team, now known as the Baltimore Ravens, up until 2004.
1943 - Slingin’ Sammy Baugh is a Washington Redskins legend and a Hall of Fa me member. He also was perhaps the first NFL player to be investigated by the league for gambling and possibly throwing a game. At one point in the 1943 season, the Redskins were 6-0-1 having notched that lone tie against the “Steagles,” a team comprised of half of each the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles. When the two teams met a second time, the 4-3-1 Steagles dropped the Redskins 27-14 thanks in part to a Baugh interception and an attempted punt by Baugh that was blocked. After the game, two Washington sportswriters reported on rumors that members of the Redskins had fixed the game, causing Redskins owner George Marshall to respond, “Anyone connected with professional football who is gambling or has gambled on a game in our league should be thrown out immediately.”15 It was mighty bold talk for a former gambler. In fact, Marshall had only recently reformed his gambling ways upon moving the team from Boston to Washington, D.C. in the ‘30s. But he meant what he said as Marshall then offered up a $5,000 reward to anyone who could prove the allegations made in the article as true (no one—not even the reporters themselves—ever collected).
Despite Marshall’s threatening words, he knew there were kernels of truth in the reported gambling story. Baugh was admittedly a known associate of Pete Gianaris. Gianaris was a convicted bookmaker and reportedly won big on the 4-to-1 underdog Steagles in the game in question. Also, Marshall himself secretly hired an investigator who recorded conversations between Baugh and bookmakers the very week the story broke in the newspaper. So did Baugh fix the game? NFL commissioner Elmer Layden and Marshall issued a joint statement declaring their investigation turned up nothing noteworthy. Baugh remained adamant that he never gambled or fixed a game in his life.
1943 - Not to be outdone by its growing rival the NFL, baseball, too, had a gambling scandal to deal with at the end of 1943. Only this one didn’t involve a player. William Cox was the owner of the Philadelphia Phillies. Just one year after purchasing the team, Cox came under scrutiny after it was alleged that Cox had placed around 20 bets on the Phillies during the course of the 1943 season. Cox first claimed not to have made any bets on his Phillies. Then he claimed he didn’t know gambling on baseball was against league rules. Then he found himself kicked out of the game for life by Commissioner Landis. It was never discovered if Cox ever made large wagers on his team, but even the $100 wagers he made were too much for baseball’s liking.
