At 9:30 P.M. on February 22, as Floyd Layne was thrilling City College basketball fans in Madison Square Garden, New York’s new police commissioner, Thomas F. Murphy, was being interviewed on the radio about the point-shaving scandal. “I share the resentments of all New Yorkers who have been revolted by this outrage,” Murphy said, adding for good measure, “New York City, despite its physical size and teeming population, is one of the cleanest cities in the country, has the best Police Department, and its vigilance is never relaxed, even for an instant.”
Earlier that day a story had broken in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle that called those confident assertions into question. The Eagle, of course, had prompted District Attorney Miles McDonald’s bookmaking investigation with Ed Reid’s eight-part exposé that linked police officers to organized crime. In recent months, a young basketball writer named Ben Gould had been breaking stories about point-shaving in college basketball on what seemed an almost daily basis; later that year Gould would receive the George Polk Memorial Award for distinguished achievements in metropolitan journalism. Time and again the Eagle had demonstrated that its reporters had cultivated invaluable contacts inside the worlds of sports, gambling, and law enforcement—and on February 22, bringing those three elements together, the paper published what might have been its most spectacular exposé of all.
For more than a year, the Eagle charged, the New York Police Department had possessed “detailed evidence of a gigantic college basketball ‘fix,’ involving every metropolitan team that played in Madison Square Garden.” The evidence came in the form of forty wiretap recordings that the department—then under the leadership of Police Commissioner William P. O’Brien—had made before and during the 1949–50 college basketball season; the recordings “were said to involve players from every big-time team in and around New York,” the corruption apparently so widespread that “publication of this data…would result in driving every college team in the city out of the Garden.”
The information, however, had been suppressed by the police—Commissioner O’Brien had the recordings, but he had not acted on them on the order of a “higher authority.” The allegation was nothing short of stunning, and it provoked an immediate denial from O’Brien, who stated, “To my knowledge no recordings were ever made. Positively none were ever called to my attention.”
In the wake of the Eagle’s article, Commissioner Murphy announced that he was launching an internal search of the Police Department’s files. Murphy, a civilian, had been hired by Mayor Vincent Impellitteri for the express purpose of cleaning up the Police Department amid the Harry Gross scandal. And yet the police official he assigned to search the police files was none other than Chief Inspector August Flath: the very same man whom Mayor O’Dwyer had sent to Miles McDonald’s office with a request that the Police Department oversee his rookie squad; the very same man whom Commissioner O’Brien had placed in charge of an official investigation—never actually undertaken—to probe “possible police involvement with graft.”
Though Commissioner Murphy assured the public that the search for the alleged wiretap recordings should require no more than two days, the week passed without word of the results. Not until March 9, more than two weeks later, did Murphy announce that Inspector Flath’s search had failed to locate any records of telephone conversations regarding basketball fixes. There the matter ended—though by this point confidence in the results could not be assured. After all, the city’s parallel gambling scandal, featuring Harry Gross, had shown that evidence involving bookmakers was not necessarily safe inside the New York Police Department.
Eight months later, Chief Inspector August Flath would submit his resignation from the police force. In his statement the fifty-three-year-old Flath explained, “There is a limit to human endurance—for me to remain longer would seriously impair my health.” Not long afterward, Harry Gross revealed that for a period of about two years he had been giving Flath $200 a month in payoffs. Among the various other gratuities Flath received was a seat at a hundred-dollar-a-plate benefit dinner for the Brownsville Boys Club in Brooklyn. Nine more police officials sat at the table that night alongside Harry Gross and his friends; one of them was William P. O’Brien, shortly to be named police commissioner of the City of New York.
Floyd Layne was the thirteenth player to be arrested, including six from Long Island University, four from City College, two from Manhattan College, and one from New York University. The scale of the point-shaving scandal was growing ever larger, and around the city, rumors were rampant that another college would soon become involved. The New York World-Telegram and Sun advised: “A university thus far not mentioned may be included in the ever-broadening inquiry.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle likewise reported that the district attorney’s investigators were closing in on three players from “a college not yet implicated in the bribe scandal.”
The DA’s investigators were said to be especially interested in the New Year’s Eve party that Salvatore Sollazzo had thrown at the Latin Quarter nightclub in Manhattan. According to the Eagle, Sollazzo and his wife, Jeanne, had been joined by five “guests of honor,” four of them former or current basketball players: Eddie Gard, Connie Schaff of New York University, an unnamed player from a college in Manhattan, and a player “of All-America standing at a school not previously named in the fix investigation.” The identity of the fifth person was not revealed.
His name, as it turned out, was Meyer Alexander, known to all as Mendy. Though Mendy Alexander had been sought by Hogan’s investigators, it was Eagle reporter Ben Gould who managed to track him down in Miami, where he had fled after the arrests of the Manhattan College players. Alexander was a close friend of Eddie Gard’s who was said to have served as a liaison between gamblers and the LIU players; as such, the Eagle dubbed him “Mr. Go-Between.” In the course of a long-distance telephone conversation, Gould persuaded Alexander to return to New York to speak to Frank Hogan; his testimony, Gould reported, in accordance with the recent conjecture in the press, “would involve at least one player from a school that has not yet figured in the investigation.”
On March 6, Mendy Alexander arrived back in Brooklyn after a frenzied all-night drive from Miami. The next morning, accompanied by an attorney, he appeared at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan, prepared to tell all he knew. Frank Hogan, however, ended up speaking to Alexander only briefly before dismissing him. “He is,” Hogan declared, “of no aid in the investigation.”
Two days later, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle published on its front page a photograph that had been taken by the Latin Quarter’s house photographer on New Year’s Eve. Captioned “ ‘Fixer’ Throws Party for the Boys,” the photo shows four figures engaged in holiday revelry. In the forefront, grinning as he holds up a woman’s hat, is Mendy Alexander. Behind him is Alexander’s pal Eddie Gard; standing beside Gard, a bejeweled Jeanne Sollazzo beams as she waves at someone in the distance, looking like a movie star at a premiere; smiling beside her, tall and handsome in a dark suit, is Bob Zawoluk of St. John’s (the player the Eagle had earlier identified as being “of All-America standing at a school not previously named in the fix investigation”).
Perhaps hoping to counter the public association of Bob Zawoluk with the fixer Salvatore Sollazzo, the Reverend Dr. John A. Flynn, president of St. John’s University, invited several newspaper reporters to interview Zawoluk that afternoon in his office. Earlier that same day, Manhattan district attorney Frank Hogan issued a statement clearing Zawoluk and his friend Jim Brasco of New York University of any involvement in the scandal. “We questioned Zawoluk the night of February 17,” Hogan affirmed. “He denied any implication whatsoever and we have every reason to believe he is telling the truth.”
To meet the reporters, Zawoluk was accompanied—as he had been for his questioning by the police—by New York Supreme Court justice Henry Ughetta, identified as “a legal advisor of the university and a personal friend of Dr. Flynn.” The interview lasted about twenty minutes, and several times, as Zawoluk was about to respond to a reporter’s question, Ughetta interrupted to caution him, in the manner of an attorney advising a client at a deposition, “Wait a minute, Bob—and think.”
The story Zawoluk recounted for the reporters was an anodyne one: the story of a shy, sheltered young man apparently too naïve to comprehend what was going on all around him. He had known Eddie Gard for a long time and liked him, Zawoluk said; he had never heard any game fixing stories about Gard, though, and he insisted, “I never suspected him.” The two, of course, had spent the previous summer working together at Grossinger’s Hotel and Country Club, at the very moment when Eddie Gard met Salvatore Sollazzo and began developing his point-shaving scheme. Gard’s primary role in the operation was to entice top-rank local players; eventually he would draw in Connie Schaff of NYU and Sherman White, Adolph Bigos, and Leroy Smith of LIU—all of whom also played basketball at Grossinger’s that summer—and it is unclear why he would not likewise solicit the leading scorer for one of the most important college teams in the city. All the rest of the hotel’s starting squad ended up involved in the scheme, and Gard, who was renowned for his inability to keep his thoughts to himself, even introduced him to his coconspirator Salvatore Sollazzo during the summer; yet apparently Zawoluk alone was unaware of Gard’s activities.
Zawoluk said that he met Sollazzo again not long afterward, in September, when he and Gard were walking together on Broadway and the two of them, seemingly by coincidence, ran into him. (The chance encounter seems to have been something of a modus operandi for Gard, as on the night he happened to meet Ed Warner and Floyd Layne after a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden—an encounter that quickly turned into a joint effort to persuade Layne to join their game fixing scheme.) It was especially fortuitous that the St. John’s center would cross paths with Gard and Sollazzo at the very time they were putting their point-shaving plans into place; even so, the two fixers chose not to avail themselves of the opportunity that fate had provided them. Zawoluk recalled of the meeting, “He was introduced to me as just plain Tarto and nothing else”—Tarto was the nickname used by Sollazzo’s friends—and after a few minutes of casual conversation “we went on our way.”
About a month later, Gard was with Zawoluk and NYU star Jim Brasco when Gard suggested that they all go up to Sollazzo’s apartment on Central Park West because he wanted them “to meet some friends of mine.” It was, to be sure, an unusual suggestion, as this would now be the third occasion on which Zawoluk had “met” Sollazzo, after the previous encounters in the Catskills and on Broadway. The two players agreed, and Gard took them to the Majestic Apartments (where presumably the doorman announced him not as Eddie Gard but as Mr. Logan, an oddity that seems not to have registered on Zawoluk).*1 Salvatore Sollazzo turned out not to be at home; Jeanne, however, was there, and according to Zawoluk they all “spent about forty-five minutes watching a television program,” at which point the players decided to leave.
Zawoluk told the reporters that this was the only time he ever visited the Sollazzos’ apartment. Yet only a year later, in an adulatory profile in Sport magazine that was clearly informed by extensive conversations with his subject, Milton Gross wrote: “On several occasions, Zawoluk visited Sollazzo’s luxurious Central Park West apartment.”
The next acknowledged encounter with Sollazzo came on New Year’s Eve. Once again Gard was with Zawoluk and Brasco, in the gym of the Williamsburg YMHA, and at the end of the workout he asked them, “What are your plans for tonight?” Remarkably, neither of the two college basketball stars yet had New Year’s plans, and Gard invited them to a party that Sollazzo was throwing at the Latin Quarter nightclub near Times Square. When the two players arrived that night they found Gard sitting at a table with Mendy Alexander, Salvatore and Jeanne Sollazzo, and two other couples whose names Zawoluk never learned. Everyone had a good time drinking and eating and watching the floor show; Salvatore was sitting next to Zawoluk at the table, and as the evening went along they talked about a number of light, inconsequential matters, not basketball related, until at some point Sollazzo grew more serious and made his pitch. St. John’s, he noted, would be playing City College two days later. “I’ve got a good-sized bet on the St. John’s–City College game,” he said, and he was interested in having City College lose “by a large score.” If Bob could help make that happen, Sollazzo told him, “I might give you a present.”
Zawoluk did not specifically state what his response to this was, other than to indicate that he didn’t ask what the present would be and Sollazzo never volunteered the information. When a reporter asked him what he had thought about Sollazzo’s offer, Zawoluk replied simply, “He had a few drinks in him and I paid no attention to his remark.” The conversation moved on to other subjects. Zawoluk listened to the music of the Art Laner Orchestra, danced with Jeanne Sollazzo, and left the club at about 2:30 in the morning. He had, he said, not seen Sollazzo since.
Unlike Junius Kellogg of Manhattan College, who would trigger the point-shaving scandal when he informed his coach about the bribe offer from his former teammate, Bob Zawoluk did not report the offer to his coach, Frank McGuire, or, for that matter, to the police—his uncle, after all, was a police officer and Zawoluk had grown up surrounded by cops. Not only had he not volunteered the information, he had publicly denied ever receiving an offer from Sollazzo, or even having met him. As was pointedly noted by one of the reporters in the university president’s office that day, “Zawoluk apparently experienced a change of heart, because several weeks ago he repeatedly denied reports that he ever had been approached by Sollazzo. He told the World-Telegram and Sun flatly that he had never had any contact with him, even though reports persisted that he and Sollazzo had met at least once.”
Thus: He had met Sollazzo in the mountains; he had been introduced to him on Broadway; he would be taken to “meet” him in his apartment; he had been to Sollazzo’s apartment once; he had been there on several occasions; he had been approached by Sollazzo to fix a game; he had never been approached by Sollazzo. It was a constantly shifting story that Zawoluk told about his contacts with the Sollazzos—not just with Salvatore, but with Jeanne as well.
In the university president’s office, Zawoluk indicated that he had first met Salvatore and Jeanne Sollazzo the previous summer while they were staying at Grossinger’s, the introduction having been arranged by Eddie Gard. The reporter from the Journal-American—perhaps sensing that something was amiss—paid a visit to Zawoluk at home later that night, at which point he presented a rather different story, in which he and Eddie Gard had socialized with Jeanne Sollazzo outside Salvatore Sollazzo’s presence; according to Zawoluk, the two players “had been out on dates in the Catskills with Mrs. Sollazzo before he even knew she was married.”
Apparently the Journal-American reporter did not pursue that line of discussion; it isn’t exactly clear what “dates” means in this context, nor what is implied in the notion that Zawoluk and Gard had gone out with Jeanne Sollazzo socially—apparently more than once—without ever learning that she was married. This seems unlikely (especially as her husband was the man with whom one of them concocted a large-scale scheme to fix college basketball games), but it may comport with the belief that was widely, if privately, held among many of the local players: that Bob Zawoluk was having an affair with Jeanne Sollazzo.*2
When the reporter from the Journal-American asked about her, all Zawoluk would say of his time with Jeanne Sollazzo was this: “She had class, was a wonderful dresser and a nice girl, and she certainly knew how to entertain.” To that the reporter simply noted, “Mrs. Sollazzo, in previous interviews, indignantly denied she had entertained the college basketball players who were on her husband’s payroll.”
The Outline of Proof as to Various Counts of the Indictment, compiled by the Manhattan district attorney’s office in preparation for possible trial, contains a statement given to detectives by Bob Zawoluk’s friend Jim Brasco of New York University. In the statement Brasco says that he had been to Sollazzo’s apartment on two occasions—once with Eddie Gard, and once with Gard and his NYU teammate Connie Schaff. Neither incident, of course, includes any mention of Zawoluk, despite the fact that Zawoluk himself acknowledged having visited Sollazzo’s apartment with Brasco and Gard. Brasco’s statement mentions Zawoluk only once, in passing, when he attests that he had gone to the Latin Quarter on New Year’s Eve with Zawoluk and Mendy Alexander; this itself is a small but telling deviation from Zawoluk’s own account, in which he claimed to have gone to the Latin Quarter with Brasco alone, thus downplaying his involvement with “Mr. Go-Between,” Mendy Alexander (whom Ben Gould of the Eagle had earlier reported would inform District Attorney Hogan about “at least one player from a school that has not yet figured in the investigation”).
Like Jim Brasco, Bob Zawoluk was never charged with any illegal activity. He, too, was questioned and released by the district attorney’s investigators the night of the original City College arrests; he, too, was said to have turned down a bribe offer from one of the defendants. No statement from Zawoluk, however, is contained in the Outline of Proof—nothing about the offer made by Sollazzo at the Latin Quarter, nothing about Eddie Gard’s effort to introduce him and Brasco to Sollazzo. Yet the Outline of Proof contains statements from witnesses as tangential as a woman who worked briefly as a housekeeper for the Sollazzos, whose only contribution to the case was to attest that on one occasion she had seen Sherman White in the Sollazzos’ apartment.
Even more striking, the Outline of Proof as to Various Counts of the Indictment discusses in some detail the money paid by Salvatore Sollazzo to the City College players after the Washington State game, including statements from both Al Roth and Ed Roman describing the conversation with Sollazzo that led to his offer; about the St. John’s payment, however, there is nothing at all.
In his autobiography The Fastest Kid on the Block, radio announcer Marty Glickman recalled a conversation he had on the team bus with a member of the St. John’s starting five at the height of the point-shaving scandal. Noted Glickman, “He looked awful.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Well, there’s a detective waiting for me at the Garden.”
“Is there something for you to worry about?”
“Shit, I don’t know.”
That was it. A guy who was in the clear wouldn’t have been that worried. He was white as a sheet. He was sick. Was St. John’s involved? Nobody from St. John’s was ever implicated, but there were stories about the district attorney’s office being sympathetic to St. John’s. I recall only the sick look on that young man’s face. He was never charged.
The former police commissioner, William P. O’Brien (who had been commissioner when wiretap recordings implicating every major college in New York were allegedly made), was among St. John’s coach Frank McGuire’s closest friends. According to Frank Mulzoff, the St. John’s cocaptain during the 1950–51 season, O’Brien and McGuire had ongoing contact as the point-shaving investigation proceeded, and the information received from O’Brien was in turn passed on to the players. “The contact was very important,” says Mulzoff, “because we gained a lot of warning about what was going to happen. Frank McGuire warned the team ahead of time about what was coming down. We all just assumed that the coach’s friendship with the commissioner did it. I’m sure there were a lot of times when Frank and the commissioner were sitting together having a beer and the commissioner said to him, ‘Hey, Frank, there are serious things going on. Take care of your boys.’ I remember going to school one day, and the athletic coordinator said to me, ‘Listen, there’s a big problem—something’s about to break about gambling in college basketball.’ We all knew about it beforehand.”
When Bob Zawoluk was called for questioning at the DA’s office he arrived accompanied by an attorney, a clear indication that the college had been notified ahead of time. Frank Mulzoff also remembers detectives questioning certain members of the team not in a police station or the district attorney’s office but on the campus itself—a courtesy not accorded the players of any other school.
Eddie Roman was especially close with Zawoluk, his former roommate at the Waldemere Hotel in the Catskills; in the words of Leonard Ansell of the Sun, it was “one of Roman’s most cherished friendships.” Among his family, at least, Eddie spoke openly about Zawoluk’s involvement; recalls his brother Richard, “Eddie said he knew that St. John’s was doing business. He was glad that Zawoluk didn’t get busted—he really liked him—but still, St. John’s got buried.”
“We knew about St. John’s,” Bobby Sand told an interviewer near the end of his life. “It was no secret….Bob Zawoluk and Eddie Roman were playing together in the Borscht Circuit, and he was telling Eddie what he was getting paid.”
Discussing the scandal decades later, City College player Herb Cohen—who shaved points during the 1949–50 season—referred to a pair of players on St. John’s as “the two biggest ganefs,” a Yiddish word meaning a thief or otherwise dishonest character. “St. John’s,” he insisted, “did the same thing we did.”
The son of one of the arrested City College players tells a story of sitting with his father many years later as they watched a member of the St. John’s team discussing the point-shaving scandal on television, when his father exclaimed: “I can’t believe he’s talking like this—he was in it up to his eyeballs.”
In the coming months the point-shaving scandal would stretch beyond the city, involving some of the most prestigious college basketball programs in the nation. In New York the scandal touched City College, Long Island University, Manhattan College, and New York University. Among the city’s major basketball programs of the time, only one emerged unscathed—St. John’s. By way of explanation, many who were there at the time use a single sardonic phrase: “divine intervention.”
In New York in the 1950s, no figure was accorded greater respect, awe, veneration, and—in more progressive circles—antipathy than Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York. Short and bald and round-faced, with dark, narrow eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles, he was routinely characterized as the second most powerful Catholic in the world, “the American pope.” “Beneath his soft demeanor, he was tough, calculating, and iron-willed,” wrote Spellman’s biographer John Cooney. “Adept at flattery and developing personal relationships, Spellman traded in favors, which he actively solicited and usually repaid in full.” Canny and charming, friendly with every important figure in town, he operated much like a Renaissance cardinal, publicly disdaining the exercise of political power while thoroughly engaged in it behind the scenes. “As far as I was concerned, he controlled Tammany Hall,” observed the well-known Catholic writer Rev. Albert Nevins. “He made judges and other appointments, but you could never prove it. There was never anything on paper in New York politics. It was always done through the back door.”
Perhaps nowhere in the city, outside the Church itself, was Spellman’s influence felt more deeply than in the ranks of law enforcement. The police force was overwhelmingly Irish Catholic, and when church workers and their friends ran into trouble with the law, the cases were routinely handled without arrests, away from public view. As John Cooney noted, “Cooperation between law enforcement officers and the Church in New York was nothing new. New York City police had long granted the Catholic Church a special status.”
Frank Hogan himself was an observant Catholic, and although he had long been known for his personal probity, in the case of the 1951 basketball scandal there seems little question that he was not especially zealous in pursuing avenues that might have led in the direction of St. John’s University, and in particular to a star player whose father was a policeman killed in the line of duty. Despite his contact with both of the fixers, Bob Zawoluk was questioned for only a short time, always in the presence of an attorney, before being released. Even as the City College players were still awaiting bail, Hogan characterized them in a press conference as “pathetic” and “dishonest”; though Zawoluk had by his own admission not reported the bribe offer from Salvatore Sollazzo, Hogan publicly attested that he was “a player with a very fine character.”
Hogan would have had little incentive to delve too deeply into the involvement of St. John’s, especially if—in the story that immediately emerged—a special request had come from the cardinal himself. Hogan had political aspirations, his name often mentioned in discussion of upcoming elections; he had been considered as the Democratic candidate for the 1950 New York gubernatorial race, and now there was talk that he would run in 1954 to succeed his predecessor in the district attorney’s office, Governor Thomas A. Dewey. As a Democrat and an Irish Catholic he could not have contemplated the possibility of success without the support of Cardinal Spellman. Recalls the veteran sportswriter Jerry Izenberg, “The story I got was that Hogan wanted to run for governor. Spellman called Hogan and said, ‘You know, I can get you every big Catholic donor. Period. But that team is not to be touched.’ ” The account of basketball writer Charley Rosen, who spoke with numerous players and coaches of the time, differs slightly; according to Rosen, “Spellman sent a Catholic detective to Hogan to [pass] the word to lay off the Catholic schools. They couldn’t risk a face-to-face meeting, or even a phone conversation.”
Unlike City College and Long Island University, which never again regained their status as major basketball powers, St. John’s continued to maintain a top-flight basketball program. In 1951 the Redmen finished the season ranked ninth in the nation and were invited to both postseason tournaments; the following year they again participated in both tournaments, losing to Kansas University in the NCAA finals. Bob Zawoluk graduated in 1952 and was drafted by the Indianapolis Olympians of the National Basketball Association; he finished his college career with 1,826 points, a three-year St. John’s record that stands to this day.