Catalog: Legalized Gambling Will Destroy College and Professional Sports
It causes a proliferation of illegal gambling and organized-crime activities
To establish my credentials for the new MOBOLOGY site on Substack, I am creating an archive of my work and detailing the research behind my books, articles, and investigations, hoping to earn the loyalty, respect, and trust of my subscribers as I present new content.
(See the catalog for my twelve-part series on the NFL, sports gambling, and the Mafia)
During the summer of 1989, my book, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football (Morrow)—which included clear evidence of mobbed-up team owners, fixed games, and quashed official investigations—was published. And, as I predicted, this 512-page work, upon release, immediately received the tar-and-feather treatment by a cadre of beat sports reporters who covered the NFL and whom I had described in my Prologue as the NFL’s “front line of defense.”
I am a crime reporter, not a sportswriter. My job is not contingent on maintaining access to and the goodwill of the personnel of any particular team or sports institution. Friends of mine who do write about sports have expressed the need “to behave” and admit that they have willingly become a part of the NFL’s sophisticated public-relations machine on occasion in order to maintain their sources of information. I believe that the need for this professional access and goodwill has prevented a fair and responsible analysis of the relationship between professional sports and organized crime by all forms of the sports media. . . .
Predictably, with the publication of this book, the league’s now-familiar tactic will be to remain aloof from the charges, deny them from afar, and then send its front line of defense, the loyal sportswriters, to attack the messenger. . . .
For the record, this book, just like my article, has been fact-checked extensively, read by sports and law-enforcement experts, and closely reviewed by attorneys. Sooner or later, the fans of honest football will be forced to enter this or a similar fray and finally demand accountability from the NFL.
In their relentless efforts to protect the NFL, the media attacks were so reckless and malicious that my attorney filed a major defamation suit in response to one of those lying reviews against my favorite newspaper, the New York Times, which created me, destroyed me, and then successfully resurrected me from the dead in a great daily review and a great Sunday review for my next book in 1995.
The review was written by a badly conflicted Times sportswriter who had covered the NFL for many years. He claimed in his review that I had said things that I never said and that I did not say things that were clearly in my book.
My libel case lasted longer than World War II. It took an unprecedented moment in American jurisprudence to wrestle away a momentary victory my attorney and I had received from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court decision—allowing a second opinion by the federal appellate court, aka “Moldea II,” to stand—essentially ended the life of my book about the NFL and the Mafia.
Significantly, Interference is listed as number three on the Forbidden Bookshelf, among the selected twenty-seven nonfiction books either suppressed or flat-out killed. Notably, two of my other books—The Hoffa Wars (#12) and Dark Victory (#22)—are also on the list.
But remarkably, despite the controversial subjects of my works, I have never been sued for any of my books. And I have worked hard as an independent investigative journalist since 1974 to establish a reputation as honest, dependable, and responsible.
In the face of all the outrageous attacks against Interference, Keith Olbermann, a top anchorman for ESPN Sports, stated: "Moldea has written perhaps the most important sports book in the history of the language."
I had admonished readers of my book that legalized sports gambling would inevitably cause a proliferation of illegal gambling and organized-crime activities. And—with the landmark 2018 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court paving the way for the legalization of sports gambling nationwide—the ruling gave me nothing less than a sense of impending doom but a heightened responsibility to defend my work nearly thirty years after its publication.
Interference stood alone to explain the corruption of the league, as well as the economics of sports gambling—the point spread, the layoff, and how they are used in the oddsmaking and bookmaking processes. Further, I trumpeted the sheer hypocrisy of the NFL which publicly condemned gambling but then cynically accepted the resulting windfall profits from both legal and illegal gambling.
In fact, I appeared on ABC’s Nightline on September 11, 1989, and predicted that, sooner or later, sports gambling would be legalized and that the NFL would embrace and attempt to control it. My prophecy in both my book and on television was met with considerable skepticism.
Then, with the 2018 Supreme Court decision, what I wrote and said twenty-nine years earlier was completely vindicated. In fact, the NFL supercharged its embrace and control of online sports-gambling operations while team owners, as I predicted, made plans to build sports-gambling facilities in their stadiums.
Consequently, as a career-long specialist in organized-crime investigations, I feared that the wholesale legalization and the institutionalization of sports gambling would lead to a national disaster and the inevitable destruction of college and professional sports.
In order to understand the present and future, we have to understand the past. And, through my ongoing role as a cold-case investigator, I am going to give Interference a second life. . . . Everything old is new again.
At a ceremony at Circa Resort in Las Vegas on August 11, 2023, the inaugural class of the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame was inducted.
During the research for Interference, I interviewed three of the inductees: Bobby Martin, Michael Roxborough, and Scotty Schettler.
And, along with questioning numerous law-enforcement officials on the federal, state, and local levels, I also interviewed several other legendary oddsmakers and bookmakers who should be considered for that hall of fame: Lem Banker, Ed Curd, Karl Ersin, Marty Kane, Gene Nolan, and Mort Olshan.
I also interviewed Don Angelini—aka “The Wizard of Odds,” a made member of the Chicago Outfit—as well as Gene Klein, the former part-owner of the San Diego Chargers.
All of these men taught me about the creation and evolution of the “point spread” and “the layoff,” as well as the “outlaw line” and their work with the NFL.
While I was doing the research for my book, one of my underworld sources took me to a bookmaking operation in Chicago where the most sophisticated piece of machinery was a hand-cranked adding machine.
Over the years—and especially since the 2018 Supreme Court decision—the Mafia has gone high-tech, online, and offshore, beyond the reach, more often than not, of the law-enforcement community.
The motive, means, and opportunity for an ongoing working alliance between the NFL team owners and the Mafia is clear and present. And, with increased gambling, the danger of on-field corruption has increased exponentially.
Here are excerpts from my 1989 book, Interference, which have been resurrected from the dead . . . just like me.
1: The Creation and Evolution of the Point Spread (pp. 60-65)
2: Don Angelini and the Angel-Kaplan Line (pp. 86-88)
3: Gil Beckley and The Layoff (pp. 150-160)
4: Bill Hundley and NFL Security (pp. 161-171, 223-224)
5: Bobby Martin and The Outlaw Line (191-193)
6: The Oddsmaker: Michael Roxborough (384-389)
7: Scotty Schettler and The Stardust (424-429)
8: On Legalized Sports Gambling (430-436)
9: A world-class prediction: Vindicated (Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer: 595-599)