For New York’s college basketball fans, the St. John’s–City College rivalry was special in large part because the two teams were usually the strongest in New York; for the players themselves, the games had an added edge because many of them had been competing with one another for almost as long as they could remember: They had grown up playing on the same courts around the city, had worked together in the summers in the same Catskills hotels. “We were great friends with the guys from City,” says Frank Mulzoff, the St. John’s cocaptain.
The Brooklynites on the City squad, like Al Roth and Herb Cohen, often participated in the pickup games at the 108th Street playground in Far Rockaway, where the McGuire brothers (Al was a St. John’s cocaptain, and Dick, a former St. John’s star, now played for the New York Knicks) could be found almost every Sunday morning after early mass at St. Camillus. Eddie Roman, for his part, was a close friend of St. John’s center Bob Zawoluk. Eddie and Zeke—as Zawoluk was known among his friends—had been roommates at the Waldemere Hotel in the Catskills; they had waited tables and played basketball, and on amateur talent nights they donned wigs and ill-fitting skirts and put water balloons under their shirts and lip-synced to Andrews Sisters songs, an act that never failed to bring down the house.
Zeke was the same height as Eddie, six foot six, but he was lean, with a rawboned Gary Cooper quality; the famed entertainment columnist Leonard Lyons had met him in the Catskills and was so impressed by his looks that he urged him to get a Hollywood agent and take a screen test. Zawoluk was well aware that he was handsome, and he cultivated this asset much as he did his basketball ability; he preferred suits to the more casual sport jackets or cardigans most of the players wore, and in the St. John’s locker room he was notorious for the extreme care he took with his hair—his teammate Ronnie MacGilvray had timed one of his hair-combing sessions and found that it lasted a full twelve minutes. Tall and well dressed, a smooth ballroom dancer as well as a basketball star, and burdened by a tragic family history, Zawoluk was devastatingly attractive to women in a way that Eddie Roman could only dream about. As a basketball player, though, Zeke’s game was much like Eddie’s, and in the days leading up to the City College–St. John’s game, the press was full of stories comparing the two centers. The players themselves didn’t take the individual competition very seriously and often practiced together, offering each other shooting tips as they played, prompting Bobby Sand to suggest gently to Eddie that he hold off on coaching Zawoluk—at least until after the St. John’s game was over.
Once again Roman received a novocaine shot before the game, and in the first half he matched Zawoluk with twelve points apiece; in the second half, though, the pain in his toe came back full force. He hobbled around the court, couldn’t get open for a shot, and was able to manage only two points. Despite that, noted David Eisenberg of the Journal-American, Roman was “at his best in the second half,” guarding his man so tightly that for fourteen straight minutes Zawoluk was not able even to touch the ball. “Apparently there are times when the hero does not win the gal, the gold, or the gonfalon,” lamented the Post’s Sid Friedlander. “Big Ed was quite a ball player last night at the Garden, but when it was all over the best he could get was the short end of St. John’s 47–44 decision over City College.”
“To the victors it did not matter that they failed to live up to their six-point favorite’s line,” observed Louis Effrat in the Times about the St. John’s Redmen. “Their aim was victory at any score and let the points fall where they may.” Indeed, the game had turned out to be a spirited and hard-fought affair, and closer than most people had anticipated, and those who had bet on City College to cover the points went home that night especially pleased.
Sports editor Max Kase of the New York Journal-American was fifty-three years old and had been working in the newspaper business since the age of fourteen. Heavyset, with an open, jowly face, Kase was a consummate New York newspaperman, renowned for hounding his reporters to give him information about teams or players that he could include in his daily column, “Brief Kase.” As a respite from his writing and editing duties, Kase also ran a regular nighttime pinochle game in his office in the sports department; this was by no means the only gambling to be found inside the Journal-American building. “Every third guy in the joint is a bookie,” the city editor, Paul Schoenstein, liked to tell his son Ralph. “They put out the paper on the side.” In fact, sports betting was so commonplace there, and conducted so openly, that a young assistant district attorney once ordered the police to raid the newspaper office on South Street. The longtime Manhattan district attorney, Frank Hogan, canceled the operation as soon as he found out about it, and then telephoned his friend Paul Schoenstein to share a laugh about the newcomer’s overzealousness. “I’m sorry you called off the raid, Frank,” said Schoenstein. “I had thirty reporters on the scene.”
Kase had long heard rumors that certain college basketball games played at Madison Square Garden were being fixed by gamblers; as the 1950–51 season began, the rumors seemed to be growing louder, and that fall, Kase began spending time in establishments where he knew gambling went on, discreetly asking questions, seeing what he could learn. One night a source finally gave him a name, and Kase passed it along to two young basketball writers on the Journal-American staff to see if they could track down any supporting material. By the beginning of 1951 the reporters were confident about the name provided by their source, but they worried that publishing the information might disrupt an ongoing law enforcement investigation. Kase decided to hold off on publication, at least temporarily, other than to insert a suggestive blind item in his “Brief Kase” column of January 9, 1951: “Those reports of basketball fixes and dumps are much too persistent for the health of the game.”
Instead, Kase contacted the Manhattan district attorney, and the following day he and a veteran Journal-American sportswriter named Lewis Burton were ushered into the private office of District Attorney Frank Hogan on the eighth floor of the Criminal Courts Building.
Like all visitors, Kase and Burton understood that the Manhattan district attorney was to be addressed always as Mr. Hogan, never as Frank. He was a polite, formal man of forty-eight, square-jawed, with a dignified, almost clerical manner—so much so that the prostitutes who passed in and out of the nearby House of Detention would sometimes refer to him, not unkindly, as Father Hogan.
Kase explained to the district attorney his newspaper’s investigation of rumors of game fixing in college basketball. His staff had received a tip about a fixer that subsequent inquiries seemed to confirm; he suggested that the DA’s office would do well to watch the activities of a former Long Island University basketball player by the name of Eddie Gard.
Frank Hogan had long been interested in fixed sporting events at Madison Square Garden; almost exactly two years earlier, his detectives had arrested four gamblers for attempting to bribe the captain of the George Washington University basketball team to shave points in a game against Manhattan College. Hogan’s investigators had been looking into recent rumors of fixed basketball games but had not made any substantial progress, and he was grateful for the tip from the Journal-American that he subsequently described as “very, very helpful.”
He would pursue the matter vigorously, Hogan told them, but in the meantime he hoped that the Journal-American would not print any stories about it. In return, he promised that he would give the paper inside information, including exclusive interviews with him, once the case finally broke; Kase agreed to the deal.
When Kase and Burton left, Hogan immediately ordered that a wiretap be placed on Eddie Gard’s telephone, and that detectives watch him around the clock.
The following day brought another unaccountable loss for City College at Madison Square Garden, this one to the Eagles of Boston College. City had started out as an eleven-point favorite, but by game time the spread was down to seven points—a narrowing caused, perhaps, by the news that Ed Warner’s injured knee would once again prevent him from playing. Eddie Roman led the team with sixteen points but fouled out midway through the second half. Without Roman and Warner the Beavers were badly out-rebounded; Boston College scored nine of the last ten points and won the game 63 to 59.
Salvatore Sollazzo had promised Roman, Roth, and Layne $1,500 apiece for the Boston College game, and $500 for Warner even though he wasn’t going to play. When Roth met Eddie Gard afterward, though, Gard handed him an envelope containing only $1,400—thousands less than what the City players had been promised. Gard explained that bookmakers were getting nervous about handling action on games in the Garden, and some had pulled the Boston College game off the boards; Sollazzo had been able to bet only $2,500. He was giving this money to Fats as a down payment, Gard explained; Sol needed the rest of it to bet on the upcoming LIU game against Duquesne, and when he got his winnings from that game he would give them what they were owed.
Roth brought the money back to Brooklyn and put it in a safe deposit box.
During the 1950–51 season, City College lost every one of the games (against Missouri, Arizona, and Boston College) in which members of the team had intended simply to shave points. Something about point fixing apparently prevented them from playing well enough to win. Perhaps it was that unnatural sense of watching oneself at all times, having constantly to decide if this was a moment to compete wholly or instead ease up just a bit, inescapably aware of the game inside the game, all the while wondering how one’s performance looked to the coaches and the crowd and to teammates both on the take and not. Or perhaps it was simply a lingering consciousness of guilt that proved debilitating. In contrast, Eddie Gard’s former team, the LIU Blackbirds, seemed oblivious to these concerns; they possessed a remarkable ability, in the gamblers’ term of art, to “control the points”: that is, to win the game while still remaining under the point spread. Favored by seven against Kansas State, the Blackbirds had won by a single point; favored by four against Denver, they won by two; favored by eleven against Idaho, they won by two; favored by seven against Bowling Green, they won by six.
The LIU players taking money from Salvatore Sollazzo that season were the three stars of the team—guard Leroy Smith, forward Adolph Bigos, and center Sherman White. On January 6 the three had managed to bring the team in under the points against Bowling Green, as they had promised, but Bowling Green had offered very little opposition, and in order to keep the game sufficiently close they had needed to play far more poorly than normal, missing one foul shot after another and tossing passes out of bounds, the blunders so glaring that the World-Telegram and Sun reported that fans “howled in indignation.”
Afterward the three were unnerved by how transparent their artifice had been, especially when two days later head coach Clair Bee showed them an anonymous letter he had received accusing the players of shaving points. Though Bee accepted their emphatic denials, they could feel the heat beginning to rise, and before LIU’s next game against Duquesne, the three decided that they were not going to shave points any longer. When the players walked onto the court, White waved his hands at Eddie Gard to indicate that the deal was off. Gard pointed at Sollazzo, who was staring stonily at White (later White would say, “I thought it was over. I thought he was going to kill me”), but the players were resolute that they would play the game on the level. The result was a pure demolition, with Long Island University winning 84 to 52. In the stands Sollazzo watched with a growing sense of alarm: He had bet $30,000 on Duquesne to cover the points.
By now Sollazzo was into his bookies for $75,000 and was scrambling desperately to find a way to pay off the debt. Since 1934 the federal government had tightly controlled gold sales to the general public, but as a jewelry manufacturer Sollazzo was legally entitled to purchase 160 ounces of gold a day; he had concocted a scheme to sell the gold on the international black market and now he was laying off gold as fast as he could, selling his allotment each day to jobbers in the jewelry trade who were willing to handle it, while also cooking his own companies’ books, sending his young accountant out each morning to the Railway Express office to convert the jobbers’ cash into American Express money orders purportedly made out to him by out-of-state jewelry dealers whom in fact he had invented. Much of Sollazzo’s life was increasingly a fiction, including the veneer of wealth he maintained to keep his young wife happy (intent on climbing New York’s social ladder, she had recently joined the fundraising committee for the ASPCA ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, other members of which included a Rockefeller and a Vanderbilt), as well as the fantastic notion he had sold to the players: that he was flush with cash, and as long as they kept their part of the bargain his payoffs were as dependable as dividends from General Motors or IBM.
The City College players, though, had been hounding Eddie Gard for the money they were owed, and he kept putting them off with one explanation or another. While he had always been excitable, Gard now seemed simply jumpy, his entrepreneurial optimism and relentless bravado having begun to drain away, and after that catastrophic doubleheader he finally admitted to Floyd Layne: “The big boss took an awful loss and now he hasn’t got the money.”
The LIU and Manhattan doubleheader had taken place on January 16; the following day the Bronx district attorney’s office announced the arrests of two former Manhattan College players,* Jack Byrnes and Hank Poppe, along with three professional gamblers, on charges of having attempted to bribe the current Manhattan star, six-foot-eight-inch center Junius Kellogg. Byrnes and Poppe had been the cocaptains of the 1949–50 Manhattan Jaspers, but as it turned out the two had been receiving a forty-dollar-a-week retainer from a gambling syndicate during that entire season, and in addition had been paid $5,000 apiece to fix five games. Now, in his postcollege life, Poppe was awaiting a job with the New York Fire Department. In the meantime he was working for his old gambling syndicate, and he showed up at Kellogg’s dorm room one night to offer him a proposition: one thousand dollars to fix the upcoming game against DePaul.
Twenty-three years old, Junius Kellogg was an Army veteran and the first African American ever to play basketball for Manhattan College. He was there on a basketball scholarship, and he feared that he would lose his scholarship if word of the bribery offer ever got out. He told Poppe that he would consider the proposal, but instead he went to his coach, Ken Norton, who took the information to the president of Manhattan College, who in turn notified the police. Later that week Kellogg and Coach Norton met with a group of detectives at the Bronx district attorney’s office; they fitted Kellogg with a hidden wire for a subsequent meeting with Hank Poppe, in which Kellogg pretended to accept the offer. “It’s easy, Junie,” Poppe assured him. “Everybody’s doing it all over the country.”
DePaul had been favored to win, and the syndicate wanted Manhattan to lose by at least ten points. Though Kellogg was not taking any money for the game, he found (much as Eddie Roman had in the previous year’s game against Niagara) that the mere awareness of the scheme rattled him so profoundly that he could hardly play. He scored only four points while committing several fouls, and eventually Ken Norton had to pull him out; his replacement, though, shot eight for eight for seventeen points and Manhattan ended up winning 63 to 59. After the game, Poppe did not appear at the arranged-upon meeting place, Gilhooley’s bar near Madison Square Garden, to deliver the money, but he and Byrnes and three associates were arrested in their homes later that night.
The news was splashed across the front pages of all the city’s tabloids, the articles running alongside photos of the athletes and gamblers, eyes averted in shame, being hauled in to the local precinct house for booking. Prominent figures from all branches of sport vied to outdo one another in the extravagance of their denunciations: NBA president Maurice Podoloff referred to the attempted bribe as a “cancer”; Coach Ken Norton called the gamblers “termites”; in the Journal-American Max Kase condemned the players’ “calloused greed for their Judas pieces of silver.”
Sid Friedlander of the New York Post telephoned Nat Holman in Hollywood Beach, Florida, where he was vacationing during the midwinter break. Holman expressed shock at the news and said, “I don’t like to see anything happen to a great game. I don’t want to see the fans lose confidence. But I don’t believe we coaches can do any more than we are doing. We alert our kids to the dangers at the beginning of each season and we urge them to do their best at all times. I tell my boys to report to me at once anything that might not be strictly on the level.”
“It seems unbelievable,” commented Clair Bee, head coach of Long Island University, who nine days earlier had shown his star players an anonymous letter accusing them of fixing games. “I can’t even imagine such a thing.”
Only a week before the Manhattan College arrests, Stan Isaacs of The Daily Compass had written a column entitled “Oh, It’s Dumping Time Again Among the Court Hotshots,” which he began by asking a single blunt question: “Is basketball honest?”
No one can say for sure yes, and those who would know otherwise aren’t going around telling the world—at least they shouldn’t be.
Each year with the start of the mad carrying-ons in the Garden, there are rumors on top of whispers about shady developments. On the street corners, in the poolrooms, in the school yards and in the hotel lobbies—wherever basketball fans move—there’s whispering about dumps.
Like most of New York’s sportswriters, Isaacs knew many gamblers; in the wake of the Manhattan revelations he wrote a column in which he asked one of them the best way to clean up the game. The gambler replied, “They want to stop this stuff, those phony cops, I’ll tell them how. Instead of making these big raids on the bookies and talking about busting another gambling ring, why don’t they put a tail on some of these highfalutin’ college boys for a few days. They’ll find out things.”
“That may sound harsh,” Isaacs advised his readers, “but it’s a solution.” He was not yet aware that this measure—police following college basketball players suspected of taking bribes—was already well under way.
The anonymous gambler quoted in Stan Isaacs’s column was implicitly referring to District Attorney Miles McDonald’s ongoing bookmaking investigation in Brooklyn, and just six days after the Manhattan College arrests, the central figure of that investigation—Harry Gross—pleaded guilty to sixty-six counts of bookmaking and conspiracy to violate state gambling laws. His plea came shortly after Assistant District Attorney Julius Helfand revealed in court that Gross possessed the official police records for certain members of his syndicate; the records had been removed from Police Department files—presumably by cops on the payroll of Harry Gross. The revelation, noted the reporter for the Journal-American, was “startling.”
Several months earlier, McDonald’s grand jury had discovered that the taped and written records of wiretaps conducted at Gross’s headquarters, the Dugout Cafe, had routinely been destroyed. Now New Yorkers learned that police records, which might have been presumed sacrosanct, were in fact not safe: like, it seemed, so much else in the city, they could be had for the right price.