37 The Bagman

VICTOR J. WEISS, WHO had been implicated in the FBI/NFL referee game-fixing probe was also believed by the Los Angeles police to have been Carroll Rosenbloom’s bagman. But before he could be questioned, Weiss was found murdered on Sunday, June 17, 1979. His badly decomposed body was discovered wrapped in a yellow blanket in the trunk of his maroon-and-white Rolls-Royce, which had been parked in the lot of MCA’s Sheraton-Universal Hotel in North Hollywood. The fifty-one-year-old Weiss, who had been missing for four days, was found with his hands tied behind his back and shot twice in the head. His body was so badly decomposed that the police could identify him only by analyzing his fingerprints.

Weiss was last seen on Wednesday, June 13, at the Beverly Comstock Hotel in Los Angeles, meeting with Jack Kent Cooke, who was the owner of the Washington Redskins football team, and Jerry Buss, who was purchasing Cooke’s California Sports Incorporated operations, which included the Los Angeles Lakers, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, the Los Angeles Forum, and a thirteen-thousand-acre ranch. The total sale price was $67.5 million.1

Weiss had been serving as an agent for Jerry Tarkanian, the head basketball coach at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and had reached a tentative agreement with the Lakers for his client to replace head coach Jerry West. Weiss had the papers for the deal in his pocket when he was killed. Tarkanian and Weiss had been close friends since they were at Pasadena Junior College.2 After Weiss’s body was found, Tarkanian withdrew as a candidate for the coaching job; Jack McKinney, an assistant coach for the Portland Trail Blazers, was later selected.

Neither Tarkanian nor Cooke was under any suspicion and both cooperated fully with the murder investigation.

Born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1912, Jack Kent Cooke had been brought up in a home of comfort and great wealth. However, after the stock market collapse in 1929, his life of leisure ended. With his family financially wiped out, Cooke quit school and went to work selling encyclopedias and soap. After buying into a chain of Canadian radio stations, which became the foundation of a communications empire, he again became wealthy and moved some of his operations to the United States.

Cooke bought his 25 percent interest in the Redskins for $350,000 from former Detroit Lions part owner Harry Wismer, who had been the longtime broadcast announcer for Redskins games, in 1960. Wismer had earlier become the majority owner of the New York Titans, later the New York Jets, in the AFL.

After buying the Lakers from Robert Short for over $5 million in 1965, Cooke was responsible for signing Wilt Chamberlain, who led the team to the 1972 NBA championship. The Lakers’ owner later brought in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to fill the large void left by Chamberlain when he left the NBA.

While Edward Bennett Williams was operating the Redskins as the executor of the estate of George Preston Marshall, who had died in 1969 after a long illness, Cooke, already a one-quarter minority owner of the club, bought an additional 60.3 percent of the team stock in 1974 and became its majority owner. Williams owned the remaining 14.7 percent.

Cooke was also a fight promoter. He had handled the 1971 brawl between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, perhaps the greatest boxing match of all time, in which Ali lost his heavyweight crown. Cooke introduced the world to the concept of closed-circuit television; fans who could not be present at the fight could buy tickets and see it in their own towns at theaters licensed by Cooke’s company. He also owned a minor-league baseball team and attempted but failed to buy the Detroit Tigers.

Cooke was also a horse-racing fan who patronized Hollywood Park in Los Angeles, which was directly across the street from the Forum. An accomplished yachtsman, “he was on one of his yachts in Havana Harbor when he heard what sounded like firecrackers but was in fact the beginning gunfire of Fidel Castro’s revolution,” according to reporter Robert Pack. Cooke was also deeply involved in California politics, with friends ranging from California governor Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican, to former governor Pat Brown, a liberal Democrat.

Between 1976 and 1979—while Cooke attempted to salvage his troubled Teleprompter Corporation, a major cable television firm plagued by SEC investigations3—he lived in Las Vegas, reportedly in an effort to reduce his personal taxes and to avoid attempts by his estranged wife to serve him with papers for their divorce.⁴ It was after the divorce from his first wife that Cooke sold his California holdings to Jerry Buss. That same year, Cooke bought the Chrysler Building in New York for a reported $90 million.

Cooke left Las Vegas and moved to Middleburg, Virginia, near Washington, after the sale of his Los Angeles sports interests. Cooke immediately began squeezing out Redskins president Williams, who, in late 1979, bought the Baltimore Orioles professional baseball team.⁵ By the 1980 season, Cooke was in full control of the NFL team. However, Williams retained his financial interest in the Redskins.

During the investigation of Weiss’s murder, Cooke, who had been a neighbor of Carroll Rosenbloom in Bel Air, told the police that he and Buss had met with Weiss for an hour. During their conversation, Weiss reportedly left the meeting to make a telephone call. He called a real estate agent who was selling a house he was supposedly interested in buying. Cooke said that he walked Weiss to his car in the parking lot of the hotel at a little after 5:00 P.M. on the day he disappeared.

Weiss mentioned that he was going home, would later have dinner with Tarkanian, and was expected in Las Vegas the following day to meet with Gerald Cutter, Weiss’s partner in Gateway Ford and Riviera Rolls-Royce in Van Nuys, just north of Los Angeles. They also were reported to be partners in Prestige Motors in Las Vegas.

Married four times and the father of eight children, Weiss, at the time of his disappearance, was rumored to have been carrying as much as $38,000 in cash in a briefcase and was also wearing an expensive diamond pinkie ring and a $6,000 gold-and-diamond-studded Rolex watch. No briefcase, no $38,000, and no Tarkanian contract were found when Weiss’s body was discovered. But the ring was still on his finger and the watch was still on his wrist, causing the police to rule out the possibility that Weiss had been killed in the midst of a robbery. The police also noted that his address book was missing.

The friendly, round-faced, round-bellied, spectacled Vic Weiss was born in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, in 1928. He grew up in Beaver Falls, where he was a childhood friend of future NFL quarterback Babe Parilli. An avid, lifelong football and boxing fan, Weiss was a close friend of Sugar Ray Robinson and had purchased the contract of a young contender for the welterweight crown. He was known as an occasional gambler. When Weiss’s body was found, the Los Angeles Police Department said publicly, “As far as we know, Weiss had no connections with organized crime … and he had no criminal record.”

However, the LAPD questioned Weiss’s widow about her husband’s alleged association with Lefty Rosenthal and Tony Spilotro. She replied that her husband did not discuss his business dealings with her, and she had never heard of the two men. The police also discovered that Weiss had been arrested no fewer than three times from 1958 to 1964 for battery, petty theft, and auto theft.

Weiss’s public image was that of the friendly, generous man-about-town who had plenty of money and threw it around. But, as the investigation proceeded, it became apparent that Weiss was leading a double life. He was hardly wealthy and heavily involved with the underworld and sports gambling.

In reality, Weiss owned only a vacant lot; his Encino house was owned by his “partner,” millionaire Gerald Cutter; and his Rolls-Royce was a company car. Weiss owned no life insurance and had never bothered to draw up a will.

Like Weiss, Cutter had also been mentioned in the 1979 FBI internal report. “One car dealer in Las Vegas, Nevada, last name possibly Cutter, is also allegedly involved in this scheme … Cutter had a life insurance policy on Weiss’ life and also held the mortgage on his house,” the FBI report stated.

Also, instead of being Cutter’s partner, Weiss had been only an employee of Cutter’s agencies. Cutter had been the brains behind their string of car dealership operations, which had branched out to Honolulu and Las Vegas over the years.

Detective Leroy Orozco of the Los Angeles Police Department told me, “Weiss was just a front man. He was not financially in the company. His name would appear in documents, but he had no interest in any of the car dealerships. He was kept on because he had all the contacts with the Hollywood and sports crowds. He made the company look good.”

When Cutter was interviewed by the police, he admitted that Weiss’s interests had shifted to sports, but he was adamant that his employee had no association with the underworld. At the time of the Weiss murder, Cutter had been living in Las Vegas for six months. He had moved there just after his wife’s bizarre accidental death at their house in the San Fernando Valley.6

The police linked Cutter to a major mob-controlled bookmaking operation in St. Louis. Police officials also did checks on Cutter’s first cousin David Alexander Cutter, also from St. Louis, who had been identified as a key figure by the IRS in an illegal million-dollar sports-bookmaking ring in Las Vegas. David Cutter had been convicted of gambling and had been sentenced to fifteen months in prison in 1968 for federal gambling violations. In a search of his room at the Aladdin Hotel, a briefcase filled with cocaine was seized by federal agents.

Also, David Cutter’s father, Michael Cutter, had been the onetime manager of the Stardust in Las Vegas. David Cutter had told the FBI “that he did not have a good credit rating and therefore had to put most of his assets in his father’s name,” according to an FBI document.

Gerald Cutter had been reportedly waiting for Weiss in Las Vegas on June 14, the day after he disappeared. He had expected to be at a meeting with Weiss at 9:00 A.M. Weiss was supposed to fly to Las Vegas with Cutter’s son, Nick, and they were going to discuss a possible land development deal in Lake Tahoe.

For reasons unknown, James Henderson, the Los Angeles chief of the U.S. Strike Force Against Organized Crime, refused to allow the police to question protected federal witness Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno about the Weiss murder. The police had uncovered evidence of a relationship between Weiss and two of Fratianno’s associates, San Diego mobster Frank Bompensiero and Los Angeles hit man Michael Rizzitello.

Although the Weiss murder remains officially unsolved and no arrests have been made, detective Orozco of the LAPD says that there were “reports that Weiss was involved in a major West Coast layoff gambling operation, and that he had been placing large bets on NFL games.”

Another law-enforcement official said, “In the evening hours at the auto shop where Weiss worked, an individual, unknown, would come in and leave a large brown paper bag filled with what an informant believed was money. This money was left for Vic. The next morning when Vic came in, he would take this bag and usually as near as everybody could tell, he would make a trip to Vegas. It was over to Vegas and then back the same day.”

“Vic placed a lot of bets,” says another LAPD official. “And we found some items in Vic’s writing that indicated that he kept a record of NFL games, what the line would’ve been for the games, certain numbers and notations after the odds that would indicate that he is betting either for himself or for someone else. They were heavy wagers in sports bookmaking, particularly the NFL.”

Orozco continues, “Weiss was definitely a bagman for some of the Vegas people. Weiss came up on some phone records at a place called the Gold Rush, a little jewelry shop in Circus Circus, a casino in Las Vegas. The Gold Rush was run by Tony Spilotro.”

When I asked Orozco who Weiss’s contact in the NFL was, the detective replied, “Weiss and Carroll Rosenbloom were definitely associated. Rosenbloom trusted Weiss, who had what appeared to be a close relationship with the Rams. He used to spend Sundays at the home games either with Rosenbloom or in the Rams press box. It was common knowledge that his wife’s carrot cake was a favorite among the press members up in the box. We know Rosenbloom was gambling, and we believe that Weiss played some role in that.”

Orozco added that several Rams games during the 1978 season were suspect. “We found that the Rams had very low-scoring games, which was an advantage to the bettor.”

In fact, the Rams, which were 12-4 during the 1978 regular season, were 5-11 against the point spread, which was the worst in the NFL that year. Although the Rams were Western Division champions, the team lost the conference championship to the Dallas Cowboys, 28-0. The Rams had been only five-point underdogs.

A Chicago bookmaker, who is also a federal witness, says, “Weiss was Rosenbloom’s bagman. He had held out some money on some games they were doing business on. He was $200,000 in debt from the previous year and was skimming. The problem was: Rosenbloom wasn’t running the show. Other people were involved, too. And most of them were from Vegas.”

When I gave that information to Orozco, he agreed, saying, “Weiss was skimming, was warned, and got hit.”

The bagman was last seen near the hotel where his body was found in the company of two males. One was a large, six-feet-seven blond man, and the other was short, dark-haired, and much older. Both of them were dressed in three-piece suits and were wearing dark glasses. “We have been told that both these guys were killed,” Orozco told me.

Carroll Rosenbloom couldn’t be questioned either. Just two and a half months before the Weiss murder, the Rams’ owner drowned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.