The Fix Is In, page 14
Amazingly, all of this—the dice games, the FBI investigation, the allegations of point shaving/game fixing—occurred during the Pistons’ championship season of 1989-1990. Ten years later, Thomas would be elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame.
1989A
“Before [Pete] Rose was even halfway to Cobb’s hit record, the office of baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn had identified him as a problem gambler, and a probable violator of the game’s rules against gambling ‘associations.’”39 While that was certainly true, Rose had actually been known as a gambler since his rookie year in 1963. Originally he wagered only on horse races, often catching the matinee prior to playing a night game, but soon he was betting with bookies on various sports, against baseball’s well-established anti-gambling rules. According to the book Hustle, Rose had the dangerous habit of losing his bets and then not paying off his debts. He’d pay off maybe half and let the rest hang on the bookie because, you know, he was Pete Rose. As a former Cincinnati Reds general manager was once quoted as having said, “Pete’s legs may get broken when his playing days are over.”40
So as “The Big Red Machine” of the 1970s was steamrolling through the majors, both the Reds and Major League Baseball knew Pete Rose was gambling. The Reds, not wanting to lose just a great ball player but a fan favorite in Rose, simply stuck their collective heads in the sand and let Pete be Pete. MLB, slightly to its credit, went a step further. It actually investigated Rose starting around 1970, just after Denny McLain was suspended.
Baseball’s lead investigator at this point was Henry Fitzgibbon. Straight out of the FBI, Fitzgibbon was hand-picked by J. Edgar Hoover himself to head baseball’s security office. Yet as quoted in Hustle, perhaps his loyalty to the game went a little too deep, having said, “We would try, if possible, to avoid giving the game a black eye.”41Fitzgibbon met separately with both Rose and Commissioner Kuhn on several occasions regarding Rose’s gambling throughout the early 1970s. Because Rose often bet through “beards,” a third party who would actually place the bet with the bookie but in Rose’s name, Fitzgibbon didn’t have enough solid evidence to urge Commissioner Kuhn to press things further. When Fitzgibbon met with Rose, in a habit that would stretch over another 25 years, Rose would outright lie to him. After 10 years of this back-and-forth, eventually the investigation faded away, yet it would never completely close.
Come 1989, baseball was still keeping a watchful eye on Rose. Yet it wasn’t an unpaid bookie that brought Rose down, it was a steroid dealer. Rose had a buddy who was a lousy drug dealer. He was subsequently picked up by the feds and turned informant. During that investigation, baseball was alerted that Rose’s name came up repeatedly. When baseball dug into it for itself, it realized Rose was gambling through the dealer, and using him as a beard to place bets. Commissioner Ueberroth and soon-to-be new commissioner Giamatti brought Rose in for another sit-down. They asked Rose, now manager of the Cincinnati Reds, if he’d been gambling on baseball. Rose, as usual, lied and said “no.” But baseball had the goods on him this time. Besides informants, they had telephone records, betting sheets, fingerprints, banking records, everything needed to take him down. And surprisingly, they did. As MLB’s special counsel to the Commissioner of Baseball John Dowd wrote in his report, “The testimony and the documentary evidence gathered in the course of the investigation demonstrates that Pete Rose bet on baseball, and in particular, on games of the Cincinnati Reds Baseball Club during the 1985, 1986 and 1987 seasons.” Rose, backed into a corner by the mountain of evidence against him, agreed to sign the paper that would ban him from the game for his gambling.
Foolishly, Commissioner Giamatti had given Rose two outs in that signed agreement. The first was the chance to apply for reinstatement after one year. Needless to say, Rose has never been reinstated (nor should he be). The second was a line that read, in part, that nothing in the agreement “shall be deemed an admission or a denial” that Rose bet on baseball games. But immediately after both sides signed that agreement, Commissioner Giamatti turned around and told the press that, as far as he was concerned, Rose had indeed bet on baseball. Suddenly stung by the league that made him a highly-regarded superstar. Rose quickly claimed Major League Baseball had jobbed him. Thanks to the wording of the agreement, he was free to do so.
Unfortunately for the fans, they were now subjected to nearly 20 years’ worth of denials and lies. Rose would claim he never bet on baseball. Then he would make the dramatic statement, accompanied by the spotlight and interviews, that yes, he did bet on baseball, but never on his team, the Reds. In 2007, perhaps in a desperate attempt to save himself and his reputation while clinging to hopes of still being elected to the Hall of Fame, Rose came clean and admitted he bet on the Reds while he was their manager—to win, of course—every night. All of which was printed in plain and clear English in the Dowd Report. So it took Rose almost 20 years before he could publicly admit the obvious, and for many people to believe it. And yet, to this day, Cincinnati still has the street outside its baseball stadium named Pete Rose Way.
1990 - Less than a year after purchasing the Yankees in 1973, George Steinbrenner pleaded guilty to 14 felony counts of illegal contributions to then President Nixon’s reelection campaign. Commissioner Kuhn suspended Steinbrenner from baseball for two years for his behavior. He was allowed back in after nine months.
Steinbrenner’s second suspension from baseball came about when he was caught red-handed having written a $40,000 check to a gambler. The gambler in question was named Howard Spira, and he had dirt on one of Big Stein’s newest acquisitions, Dave Winfield. As part of Winfield’s contract with the Yankees, Steinbrenner had agreed to give a yearly contribution to Winfield’s personal charity foundation. According to Spira’s story, Winfield was skimming funds from that charity. Yet after Steinbrenner handed the $40,000 check over to Spira for the scoop, Spira turned around and demanded more cash. Steinbrenner scoffed at the demand and went to the feds crying blackmail.
For Steinbrenner, that move wound up being a double-edged sword. Spira’s home was raided by the feds and he eventually was tried and convicted on extortion charges. Yet for Steinbrenner, the case raised the collective eyebrows of those in MLB’s front office. In meeting with new commissioner Vincent, Steinbrenner faced the music. Baseball had the $40,000 check and Spira was a known gambler. The biggest problem was Steinbrenner kept changing his story regarding the payoff, thus making the deal between the two seem ever the more suspicious. Commissioner Vincent felt he had little choice, and the two hammered out an agreement. Steinbrenner would admit to his indiscretion, not file suit against MLB for its decision, give up majority ownership of the Yankees, and accept a lifetime ban from dealing with the new majority owner of the Yankees which was to be his son, Hank. Steinbrenner signed his name to the agreement and was out of baseball on July 30, 1990. He agreed to this deal because he and his lawyers were allowed to control the wording of the agreement. Two years later, Steinbrenner was back in baseball and once again lording over the Yankees.
Who might have really slipped the noose in all of this was future Hall of Fame member Dave Winfield. MLB never investigated him for his role in the whole affair, which is strange considering Winfield had a closer association to Spira than Steinbrenner ever did. Spira worked for Winfield and even received a questionable $15,000 loan from him. On top of that, Spira was right about Winfield and his charity. Steinbrenner later sued Winfield for mismanagement of his charity. The case was settled out of court.
1990 - Philadelphia 76ers’ Charles Barkley and New York Knicks’ Mark Jackson decided during a January 1990 game that the action on the court simply wasn’t enough for the two of them. They decided to make wagers against each other during the game. With only about 23 seconds left in the game, Barkley bet Jackson $1,000 that he’d make the two free throws he had just been awarded. Barkley then promptly sunk them both. But their betting wasn’t finished. Literally seconds later the two bet that Jackson couldn’t sink a game-tying three-pointer. He did.
During a post-game interview, Barkley related the story that occurred out on the court. Barkley then added that this evened the two of them up as Barkley had lost a bet to Jackson over the playoff game between the two teams the season before saying, “We bet $500 in the playoffs and I won it back tonight. I want my money.” Amazingly, Jackson confirmed the whole to-do by saying, “He owes me from the playoffs and he never paid me, so we’re even.”
On the surface, it appeared to be good-natured fun, until the NBA caught wind of it. Commissioner Stern promptly fined both players $5,000. The 76ers’ general manager John Nash was quoted as saying, “Charles says outlandish things all the time…but my suspicions are that neither guy intended to pay the other. When players play the game of Horse they often make references to ‘I’ll bet you $1’ or ‘I’ll bet you $1,000.’ No one ever pays off; they are more statements than bets. I don’t think money ever changes hands.” Sounds an awful lot like the claims about Wilt Chamberlain, doesn’t it?
What was perhaps just a friendly wager with no real substance turned out to be something more for Sir Charles. In 2007, Barkley admitted to having a gambling “habit”—one that once cost him $2.5 million in about six hours. One that he claimed cost him some $10 million since leaving the game. But it’s not really a “problem” Barkley has because “The problem is when you can’t afford it. I can afford to gamble. I didn’t kill myself when I lost two and half million dollars...I like to gamble and I’m not going to quit.” And being somewhat true to that word, Barkley got into a little hot water in early 2008 when the Las Vegas casino The Wynn called in a $400,000 marker Barkley “forgot” to pay back. Ultimately Barkley did settle up with the casino, but it took the threat of a criminal complaint being filed to spur him into action. Afterwards, Barkley vowed not to gamble for “the next year or two.”
1991 - Lenny “Nails” Dykstra not only played center field for the Philadelphia Phillies, but played in several high-stakes poker games that got him in trouble with MLB. Commissioner Vincent assigned investigator John Dowd (of Pete Rose fame) to Dykstra’s case. Dowd would find that Dykstra was “drowning in debt”42 at the time that he wrote some $78,000 in checks to cover his poker losses. Dykstra was forthcoming with baseball, admitted his wrongdoing, and never bet on baseball. He was given a one-year probation by MLB for the incident.
However, Dykstra’s name wasn’t quite cleared. In 2005, a civil suit was brought against Dykstra by a former business partner. This partner alleged that Dykstra told him to bet thousands of dollars with a bookmaker on several Phillies games during the 1993 season. Coincidently, in 1992 both Commissioner Vincent stepped down from his post and Dykstra’s probation period came to an end. 1993 happened to be the year the Phillies won the National League pennant, but lost the World Series to the Toronto Blue Jays four games to two. Dykstra denied the allegations against him and MLB reportedly never investigated the former business partner’s claims. Dykstra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009 reportedly having no more than $50,000 in assets against anywhere from $10 to $50 million in liabilities.
1991-1993 - Michael Jordan once said “I’m no Pete Rose.” By that I think he meant Pete Rose could hit a curve ball while Jordan couldn’t, because Jordan surely couldn’t have meant that he didn’t have a love of gambling.
Michael Jordan always craved competition. That is what drove him to be the tremendous player he was on the court. But it was also that passion that fueled his compulsive gambling. He gambled on just about anything (much like Wilt Chamberlain). While at North Carolina, he used to bet fellow players sodas or small amounts of money on free throws or games of Horse. Although definitely not sanctioned by the team, it went largely ignored. Those activities carried on into his time with the Chicago Bulls, and with the huge influx of money, the stakes steadily increased. He played poker with his teammates on road trips and was known to be quite the shark. Bulls coaches would warn the younger players not to play poker with him. He was that good. He even gambled on the outcome of video games.43 It was golf, however, his second passion, which proved to be his downfall.
He began betting small, maybe $100 on a hole or a putt. As his confidence on the golf course grew, so did the amounts wagered. In 1991, Jordan and a group of friends went on a week-long gambling spree at his Hilton Head home in North Carolina, golfing all day and playing poker all night. By the time it ended, Jordan was into James “Slim” Bouler for $57,000 and Eddie Dow for $108,000. This in and of itself wouldn’t have been such a big deal except for the fact that Bouler was a convicted cocaine dealer and had two probation violations for carrying semiautomatic weapons. On October 21, 1991, Jordan paid the $57,000 to Bouler who turned around and placed the money in an account for the “Golf-Tech Driving Range.” The IRS quickly seized it, believing the funds may have been ill-gotten since Bouler was again under investigation for dealing cocaine.
Now the trouble really began for Jordan. In the wake of these dealings coming to light, Jordan told the press that the $57,000 was merely a loan to a friend to start a golf range. That lie carried a lot of weight. So much so that U.S. District Court Judge Graham C. Mullen ruled that the IRS violated Bouler’s rights in seizing the $57,000 check. Judge Mullen admitted that he based his ruling on Jordan’s claims that the money was a loan even though he never actually questioned Jordan.44
That seemed to suffice, for a while. Then in February of 1992, Jordan’s gambling associate Eddie Dow was robbed of $20,000 and murdered just outside his home. In Dow’s belongings they found photocopies of three checks that totaled $108,000, the exact amount Jordan had lost to him months earlier. Two of the checks were from Jordan’s personal account. The third was a cashier’s check made out by Jordan.
Then, almost one year to the day after originally paying Bouler the $57,000, Michael Jordan was in court at Bouler’s trial for drug and money-laundering charges. Under oath, during a nine-minute testimony, Michael Jordan admitted that the $57,000 was not a loan but indeed a gambling debt. Maybe Jordan is more like Pete Rose than he’d like to imagine. With the trial of Bouler over and done with, it should’ve put an end to the public side of Jordan’s gambling.
In June of 1993, another Michael Jordan gambling story broke. This one hovered around the book Michael & Me: Our Gambling Addiction…My Cry for Help!, written by San Diego businessman Richard Esquinas. In that book, Esquinas claimed that during a 10-day period in 1991, Jordan had lost $1.25 million to him gambling on golf. No one initially believed his story until Esquinas produced the correspondences with Jordan and the canceled checks to back it.
Starting in early 1992, Esquinas contacted Jordan several times asking Jordan to pay off the bet. After a few token payments (some sent to Esquinas by Jordan’s wife at the time, Juanita) and many broken promises, Esquinas offered Jordan an out. Jordan agreed to settle his debt with a $300,000 payoff. In March of 1993 Jordan had Chicago attorney Wayne A. McCoy send Esquinas $100,000. Then in May of that same year, McCoy sent Esquinas another $100,000. By then, Esquinas had lost his patience waiting for his money and he published the book.
Jordan didn’t lie this time. Instead, he issued a statement. “I have played golf with Richard Esquinas with wagers made between us. Because I did not keep records, I cannot verify how much I won or lost. I can assure you the level of our wagers was substantially less than the preposterous amounts that have been reported.”45
Even with that admission of guilt, Jordan managed to deny any sort of problem. He told playerfriendly NBC reporter Ahmad Rashad “If I had a [gambling] problem, I’d be starving. I’d be hocking this watch, my championship rings, I would sell my house. My kids would be starving. I do not have a problem. I enjoy gambling.”46 For a man who made hundreds of millions of dollars to claim that “if” he had a gambling problem he’d be “star ving” is quite laughable. He went on to say to Rashad, “My wife, if I had a problem, would have left me or certainly would have come and said seek help…my wife never said anything, and she’s the chief of finances in our household.” It’s obvious she must have known something since she’s the one who originally paid Esquinas. And later, she did divorce MJ.
During the time this story broke, Jordan decided to make an ill-advised trip to Atlantic City right in the middle of the 1993 playoff series against the New York Knicks. Jordan claimed to the media that he was gone before midnight the night before Game Two in New York; however, he was seen in the casino well past midnight and into the wee hours of the morning. That was the last time Jordan would do that during the playoffs. It has been reported on more that one occasion that when Jordan played in New York or New Jersey he’d venture down to Atlantic City, or if he were in Los Angeles or Utah he’d likely make a pit stop in Las Vegas.
The day after this new gambling story broke about Jordan and Atlantic City, NBC announcer Bob Costas had a halftime interview with NBA commissioner David Stern. During that interview, Costas badgered Stern about the story much to the disdain of NBA Sports president Dick Ebersol who was screaming in Costas’ earpiece to lay off and switch subjects.47 Costas, much to his credit, did not back down and asked the tough questions that should have been asked, but to little avail. NBC muffled the story from that point onward. Jordan became quite tight-lipped as well. He stopped talking to the media. Even though such silence, especially during the playoffs, is a fineable offense in the NBA, Jordan never received a single fine. For Stern and the NBA, Jordan’s silence might have been a blessing in disguise.
