Among City College students, the range of emotions provoked by the first arrests—shock, bewilderment, anger—had after Floyd Layne’s arrest given way to sadness and resignation, feelings that were less sharp but somehow darker. They could not help but feel foolish as well, thinking of how fervently they had cheered for Floyd at the team rally and at the Lafayette game, how they had carried him off the court on their shoulders, the memories shot through now with bitterness and regret, like those from a relationship betrayed and brought to an end, and the understanding that the joyful sounds of that game, the shouts and the cowbells and most especially the deep-throated Allagaroo, would not be heard again anytime soon. So no objections were raised when—only half an hour after Floyd was taken away by the detectives—CCNY president Dr. Harry N. Wright issued a statement saying that “in view of the more recent developments” City College was canceling its final two games of the season and reevaluating its future involvement with Madison Square Garden. The students would continue to press for the academic reinstatement of the suspended players, but they would no longer flock to the Garden to watch their team play; everyone understood that this portion of their lives, and of the life of their school, had come to end. The final sentence of the Observation Post editorial about Floyd Layne’s arrest was simply: “As for now, the roof has caved in.”
Nat Holman’s wife, Ruth, had recently been ill, and he was sitting at her bedside in Mount Sinai Hospital when Sam Winograd called to tell him the news of Floyd Layne’s arrest. The Post basketball writer Sid Friedlander called shortly afterward, and it was all Holman could do to murmur, “It’s a tragedy, a horrible tragedy.” Listening to him, Friedlander was struck by how different he sounded—like a man saved from drowning, his voice low and choked, his thoughts muddled. “I can’t make sense of it,” he was saying. “I can’t find words to tell just how I do feel.”
Before long, however, Holman’s sadness had evolved into anger, fueled by a sense of personal betrayal. “What the hell has a guy like Holman got to say, when a thing like this happens to a coach!” he exclaimed to David Eisenberg of the Journal-American, referring to himself, as he often did, in the third person. “Here are four fellows, and a coach is breaking his neck to put a team on the floor. It’s a terrible thing.”
Nat Holman had devoted himself to the City College basketball program for thirty-two years, and the scandal broke just as he reached the pinnacle of his profession. That very month Sport magazine had named him its Man of the Year in Sport, hailing him as the “master coach,” the “basketball genius” who had brought unparalleled success to City College. “True, it was the players themselves who had scored the baskets,” the article acknowledged, “but everybody knew that Nat Holman was behind every shot, every defensive move, every surge down the court.” Wherever he went, people stopped him on the street, wanting to talk, to congratulate him, filling him with a glow that he thought of as “that God-bless-America feeling, the top of the heap.” Day after day he received letters of praise, invitations to speak to civic and business groups, to conduct basketball clinics around the country and around the world. Now, he recognized, his reputation would be forever tarnished; people would believe what they wanted to believe, and some of them would always believe that he had known his players were on the take—that he must have known, that “Mr. Basketball” was too astute not to have noticed when a player wasn’t giving his all. And of course he could tell when a player wasn’t shooting well or was committing foolish fouls on defense. That was part of the game; even the best players had off nights every now and again. But these outsiders didn’t understand that although a coach could observe performance, he could not discern motivation, could not tell what was in a boy’s heart. It wasn’t his job, in any case, to teach them right from wrong, and if a young man arrived at City College without a firm sense of personal morality, then there was really not much he could do about it. Besides, he had warned the players about consorting with gamblers. They knew where his office was. Why had they not come to him?
Scarcely a month after Layne’s arrest, Nat Holman had taken action: He announced that in the future, members of the City College team would be banned from participating in Catskills summer basketball. In his announcement Holman referred to the hotel teams as “schools of crime,” but City College, like the other big-time college programs, had encouraged its players to work in the hotels, because they provided the toughest basketball competition to be found anywhere; as Ben Gould of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted, “Coaches have favored their boys working in these spots because they improved tremendously after two months upstate.”
By this time President Wright had recommended to the Board of Higher Education that City College should withdraw from Madison Square Garden and return its games to the campus gymnasium. Though Holman himself had long opposed this idea, he refused to comment on Wright’s recommendation, other than to affirm that he would continue to coach the Beavers regardless of where the games were played. “I wouldn’t leave at a time like this,” he said. “I think the college needs me now more than ever.”
Shortly after the arrests of the three City College players, the members of the Bradley University basketball team held a meeting at which they voted to reject any future invitations to play in Madison Square Garden; the decision was widely seen as an assertion of the solid Midwestern values of Peoria against the corrupting influence of New York City. On the day after Floyd Layne’s arrest, the Daily Compass sportswriter Stan Isaacs included a blind item in his column, one that did not name names but was so patent in its implication of Bradley and its All-American guard Gene Melchiorre that it scarcely merited the term: “There’s the Midwestern school which at this very moment is righteously casting aspersions at the Garden and the whole Eastern basketball set-up. Yet this school, which built its name on the strength of its basketball teams, has a star player (an All-American) who is as much involved as any of the local players.”
A few days later, the Eagle’s Ben Gould added his own spin to the story: “Would you be surprised to know that a certain team doesn’t want to return to New York for any post-season event because its standout cager is afraid some gentlemen will meet him at Penn Station?”
Not long after the first three City College players were arrested, a group of CCNY alumni raised the funds to hire them a new attorney. His name was Jacob Grumet, and he was the epitome of politically well connected. A Republican, he had served as an assistant district attorney under the Democrat Frank Hogan; now in private practice, he had recently finished a term in the Court of General Sessions, and though he was known to his friends as Jack he preferred his clients to address him as Judge. Grumet was tall and slim with dark hair and a large-featured face—he had a long, fleshy nose, protruding ears, and exceptionally arched eyebrows, set off by a pencil-thin mustache, which together gave him the intimidating, slightly dyspeptic look of a banker father-in-law in a Hollywood romantic comedy. He was himself a graduate of the College of the City of New York, and he felt deeply for the institution as well as for the players. “This is a particularly heartbreaking experience for me,” he told reporters upon announcing his appointment. “It is one of the saddest cases I have ever undertaken.”
Grumet explained to the players that in his opinion their most advantageous strategy was to cooperate fully with the district attorney. Frank Hogan had indicated that he intended to bring multiple counts against each defendant, including bribery and conspiracy. The bribery charges were especially serious (they each carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison), but Grumet knew Hogan well and did not believe that he was inclined to put college basketball players behind bars. If the players would agree to testify against Salvatore Sollazzo, he was sure the district attorney would drop the bribery charges and ask for suspended sentences on the conspiracy. He advised them, “Tell the authorities everything they want to know.”
Ed Warner, though, seemed troubled by something, and finally he admitted to Grumet that he had a juvenile arrest record. It was only one incident, he explained, a gang scuffle in Harlem when he was fifteen years old. In Children’s Court he had been found guilty of fighting and released on probation, but the judge had warned that the conviction would remain on his record and could be used against him if he were ever to be arrested again.
Jacob Grumet told Warner not to worry about it. “Trust me, young man,” he said, “you’ll never go to jail.”
Eddie Roman, too, was troubled, and later he would ask for a private meeting, at which he told Grumet that he had been thinking about the need to tell the authorities everything. The thing was, he explained, the games with Sollazzo hadn’t been the only ones in which they had shaved points—there had been three other games during the previous season, handled by a fixer named Eli Kaye. He hadn’t wanted to say anything, Eddie admitted, because it involved other teammates of his, guys not yet implicated in the scandal. Grumet listened carefully, and when Eddie was done he pointed out that sixty-eight detectives were working on the basketball case full time; eventually they would discover what had happened the year before, and he was sure they wouldn’t look kindly on him if they decided he had been holding out. He had already scheduled a session for Eddie later that month with the district attorney; that would be the perfect opportunity to unburden himself of all that he knew.
These days Eddie was back living at home, after getting away briefly to a friend’s house to avoid the presence of newsmen. Reporters from the Journal-American and the Daily Mirror had shown up on the front porch of the house as soon as Eddie was released on bail. He had told them each the same thing, which was that he couldn’t talk until he had spoken to his lawyer, although he did volunteer a single rueful sentence: “I’ve been a sucker.”
One evening a week after the arrests, Sam Winograd and his wife unexpectedly came to the house. Eddie’s parents showed the Winograds into the living room, where they were joined by his two brothers and his sister-in-law. Winograd explained that he was “very much troubled,” as he put it, and that he had come to see Eddie that night because he wanted to ask him a question: “What did we do in City College that might have caused you to do what you did—to bring such grief upon you and your family, and everybody connected with the college and your fellow students?”
The question was unexpectedly hostile, and Eddie struggled with what he could say to make Winograd understand. In the end he simply replied that he could not think of anything specifically, other than that some promises had been made to him before he came to City College, but at the same time he didn’t want to rationalize—that was the word he used—and say that that was what had caused him to do what he did.
Winograd persisted. Who, he wanted to know, had made the promises?
Eddie indicated that he didn’t want to name any names, but he explained about the student job he had been given, how everyone had said it was just a make-work job they gave to the school’s athletes, and though he worked more than the other students did, one day out of the blue they cut his pay and he had been angry about that. He did not mention the job that had been promised to his father—for Julius, after all, was sitting right there, and discussing it in front of the rest of the family would only be an additional and unnecessary humiliation for him. So Eddie just noted, as though serving as a character witness for himself, that he had always taken his academic work at the college very seriously, and that he thought he had done well. He did not point out that he had reluctantly agreed to give up his preferred major, chemistry, because it interfered with basketball practices. Nor did he mention that he knew that Winograd, who in the summertime ran the athletic program at the Young’s Gap Hotel in the Catskills, personally paid the hotel’s college players out of the money collected for the basketball gambling pools; or that he knew that Winograd had taken money to play semipro ball while he was a City College student in the 1930s, using an alias like a common criminal; or that he knew about the shady deals for the college’s athletic equipment that Winograd made with a friend of his who ran a local sporting goods store.* As much as Eddie might have wanted to get some of this off his chest, he recognized that it could not possibly help the situation, that if anything it would only turn Winograd further against him at a time when he hoped to be granted reinstatement to City College, and so he simply shook his head and mumbled again uselessly that no, he could not explain why he had done it, and Sam Winograd and his wife left shortly afterward.
Those first days after the arrest were the ones when Eddie most desperately wished that he could somehow rewind his life, run it back to an earlier, better moment, as though it were one of those game films they used to watch over and over at the beginning of the practice season, trying to identify and learn from their mistakes. The lawyer he had met with briefly before Grumet had advised him to go about his “routine, normal life,” but that was a preposterous notion—his normal life consisted of school followed by basketball practice, both of which were forbidden to him now. He lived those days in an agony of waiting, punctuated by occasional moments of acute humiliation and shame. The scandal was in the papers just about every day, in the news section, the sports section, the editorial cartoons, the op-eds, the letters to the editor; everybody, it seemed, had an opinion. One letter to the New York Post noted that Eddie was beloved among the students at Taft High School, that he had often taken the time to come back and visit, and that a recent issue of The Taft Review had even voted him number one on a list of Taft students who had made good; having said that, the writer went on to wonder how those high school students were supposed to feel now that “a friend has stabbed them in the back.” In another letter, a pair of writers provided the pithy observation that while some of the local college basketball teams would be depleted for the coming season, “the Sing Sing team’s chances are looking better than ever.”
The Post was actually one of the more sympathetic of the daily papers. The dean of their sportswriters, Jimmy Cannon, wrote several impassioned columns about the players he termed “the tall children of basketball.” “They are amateurs exploited by a commercial alliance of culture and commerce,” he wrote. “As much as $1,500 apiece was given them to throw a game. It is an immense fortune to kids who check coats at the Garden to pick up two dollars. But it is a miser’s sum when you compare it to the enormous profits made from television and ticket sales at the Garden.” The most left-wing of the city’s newspapers, The Daily Compass, ran a three-part editorial that went so far as to advocate that college athletes should be paid. The amateur rule, editor Ted O. Thackrey asserted, served mostly to allow arena owners to obtain skilled players at “bargain basement prices”: “One fact we refuse to face is that there are no amateurs in big-time college sports: there are only underpaid professionals.”
In March the Senate Crime Investigating Committee (popularly known as the Kefauver Committee after its chairman, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee) decamped from Washington to New York to take testimony on the infiltration of the city’s politics by organized crime. The featured witness was the crime boss Frank Costello. Costello’s attorney had demanded that his client not be televised, arguing that the image of him conferring with his lawyer during questioning would prejudice popular opinion against him. The television networks interpreted this as a directive against showing Costello’s face, so they trained their cameras instead on his hands; for hours on end a rapt audience watched those hands twitch and gesture, tapping on the witness table, twisting a handkerchief, reaching for a glass of water, as off-camera Costello described his longtime friendships with many of New York’s most powerful politicians.
Within the week the city’s former mayor, William O’Dwyer, was called back from his ambassador’s post in Mexico City to testify before the committee. In response to questioning, O’Dwyer admitted to having met Frank Costello, and he further acknowledged that one of the most important fundraisers for his 1945 mayoral race, a shirt manufacturer named Irving Sherman, was a collector for Costello in the garment district. Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire noted how popular Costello seemed to be among the city’s politicians, and then asked, “Mr. Ambassador, what do you consider the basis of Costello’s appeal?”
Replied O’Dwyer with admirable candor, “It doesn’t matter whether it is a banker, a businessman, or a gangster—his pocketbook is always attractive.”
It was the age of investigation, of official efforts to root out corruption in social institutions, to expose intrigue and thwart conspiracies. All of these things were happening at the same time in New York: In the Federal Building on Foley Square the former mayor, William O’Dwyer, testified to dealings with known gangsters (while nearby Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went on trial for passing atomic secrets); in the Municipal Building in Brooklyn the bookmaker Harry Gross was detailing his payoffs of policemen and politicians; and in the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building a parade of college basketball players began to appear before Frank Hogan’s grand jury.
The ballplayers, of course, had their own story, their own motivations; yet for the general public the temptation was very strong simply to blend them in with the others, the gangsters and the machine politicians and the crooked cops, to remove any complicating issues of power or exploitation and view them as just another example of municipal corruption. The case of the City College players was an especially heartbreaking example, because they were young and had achieved such glory, and because they had seemed to represent so much of what was good about New York and attended a school that occupied a cherished place in the life of the city. Wrote Max Lerner in the Post, “The corruption in this case…touches the one team that last year brought basketball to a degree of frenzy it will probably never again achieve, and turned thousands of fans into whirling dervishes. It involves the very men who had become the core of a hero cult.” The players had betrayed the public’s trust, had sold out to criminals, dispensing favors for money. That might have been expected from a cop walking the beat or a political functionary on the city payroll; it was far worse when the guilty party was a star player on the hometown team, who had stood and received the cheers of the crowd.
Thus fame was transmuted into notoriety; thus sports heroes turned suddenly, shockingly, into fallen idols.
The Sporting News made the connection between organized crime and basketball fixing explicit in an editorial that declared, “Honesty must be restored as the first principle of living and its precepts so thoroughly planted in the minds of all that there can be no more 1919 World Series and basketball scandals, no more necessity for Kefauver Senate crime investigations, no violations of the public trust.” The linkage was further emphasized by Estes Kefauver himself, who announced to reporters that his Crime Committee had been investigating the fixing of basketball games “for some time.” District Attorney Hogan laughed when he heard about that. “It’s a surprise to me,” he said.
On March 24, however, the Kefauver Committee did expand its inquiries into basketball game fixing, calling a Milwaukee gambler named Sidney Brodson to testify. Brodson told the committee that he wagered about a million dollars a year on college basketball and football games. However, he had long sensed something “abnormal” about basketball in Madison Square Garden—the tip-off was the rapid fluctuation in point spreads just before a game, which led him to conclude that insiders were placing large sums of money on teams they regarded as a “sure thing”—and as a result he refused to bet on games played in the Garden.
Two days after Brodson’s testimony, the presidents of St. John’s University, Manhattan College, and New York University announced that they would continue to play basketball in Madison Square Garden; the deal had been negotiated with Garden promoter Ned Irish over dinner in department store magnate Bernard Gimbel’s apartment.
The following night, March 27, Herb Cohen, Irwin Dambrot, and Norm Mager were picked up by detectives working for the Manhattan district attorney. They were interrogated for more than twelve hours, at which point they were charged with violating Section 382 of the Penal Code. Cohen was a junior at City College; Dambrot attended Columbia Dental School; Mager played with the Baltimore Bullets of the National Basketball Association, but the season had recently ended and he was back in Brooklyn. The three had not been together since the tournament celebrations of the previous year; the unwished-for reunion could be seen in the photographs that appeared in the papers the next day: exhausted players standing before the police desk, surrounded by detectives.
The entire starting five of the City College double-championship squad had now been arrested, along with the top two reserves. The shame of the team was complete.