Legalized Gambling Will Destroy College and Professional Sports, Part 3
Gil Beckley and The Layoff
In this chapter, I feature the career of Gilbert Lee Beckley, once the Mafia’s most powerful layoff bookmaker, via my interviews with Chicago Outfit member Donald Angelini, oddsmaker/bookmaker Ed Curd, bookmaker Donald Dawson, former U.S. Attorney Brian Gettings, bookmaker Marty Kane, Baton Rouge bookmaker Gene Nolan, and NYPD detective chief Ralph Salerno.
This is an excerpt from my 1989 book, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football (pp. 150-160)
Attorney General Robert Kennedy had wreaked havoc on the underworld, particularly the organized gambling syndicate. While eating mobsters for breakfast, Kennedy said in 1961: “It is quite evident that modern organized crime’s commercial gambling operations are so completely intertwined with the nation’s communications systems that denial of their use to the gambling fraternity would be a mortal blow to their operations.”[1]
Prodded by Kennedy, Congress began to act. In September 1961, Senator John McClellan and his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations conducted hearings into gambling and organized crime. Among those called to testify during the so-called family-sports stage of the investigation were Don Angelini and Bill Kaplan—both of whom were associated with the Chicago-based handicapping service Angel-Kaplan Sports News, Inc.
Prior to his testimony, old man Kaplan was asked with whom he was doing business. He replied: “Somebody might drop a ton of bricks on my head if I start talking about my customers.” However, Kaplan did say that Angel-Kaplan serviced only thirty-six customers in Chicago, Montreal, Miami, and New York.
Angelini and Kaplan—along with two other associates, Sam Minkus, the owner of the Angel-Kaplan football betting card business, and Angel-Kaplan oddsmaker Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal—took the Fifth during their testimonies before the subcommittee. Rosenthal had stood accused at the hearings of fixing both basketball and football games.
At the time of the hearings, the Chicago Crime Commission stated in a confidential memorandum: “Kaplan is now about the age of 64 years and the firm employs three office clerks plus correspondents who attend college [and professional games] throughout the United States and who pass on information as to health and personal affairs of athletes. The publication is printed by a Minneapolis firm. As a sideline, Donald Angelini, alias Don Angel, sells insurance.”
The subcommittee concluded that, even though the initial line on football and other sporting events was probably based upon honest estimates, the final line was regularly manipulated through “regular consultation” with the gambling syndicate’s top layoff bookmakers.
As a result of the McClellan hearings, Attorney General Kennedy, with the support of the committee, had rammed legislation through Congress that supplemented an earlier law passed in the wake of the Kefauver hearings.
A top assistant to Kennedy told me: “By simply making the transmission of the betting line, wagers, and gambling paraphernalia across interstate borders illegal—as well as personal travel from state to state for the purpose of gambling—bookmakers had to operate completely underground. And the FBI now had jurisdiction in these cases. That was a big victory.” Those violating the new antiracketeering acts faced a $10,000 fine and two years in prison.
Don Angelini told me that the new law seriously crippled his business. “The Angel-Kaplan sports service went out of business in 1968 when the government passed a law saying that the transmission of gambling information was illegal,” he said. When I reminded him that the law was passed in 1961, not 1968, he replied, “Well, they may have passed that in 1961, but we went out of business in 1968.”
Another bookmaker lamented, “Kennedy made it illegal to make a phone call.”[2]
Later, Congress passed the Federal Sports Bribery Act of 1964.[3] New York Senator Kenneth Keating said during the debate over the legislation: “This bill would provide the authority our law-enforcement agencies need to prevent gamblers from corrupting college and professional sports. It would halt the contamination of sports by organized gambling syndicates by punishing any players or officials, as well as gamblers, who attempt to corrupt these games for personal gain. It would cover schemes to affect the point spread in a contest, as well as to throw the game entirely, and would apply to every case in which interstate facilities—such as the telephone or the mail—have been used to carry out the conspiracy.”
Because of Kennedy’s war on organized crime and gambling, bookmakers had to become increasingly creative in the operations of their businesses in order to continue making money and staying out of jail.
The basic economics of bookmaking dictate that every bookmaker will occasionally have to place a layoff wager with another bookmaker to create a more favorable balance in the bets he books and thereby reduce his risk. For example, if a Washington bookmaker has collected too much money on the Washington Redskins for an upcoming game against the San Francisco 49ers, he must either change the line in order to attract more balanced betting or lay off some of the money with a regional or national layoff bookmaker—so that he has as much money bet on the 49ers as he does on the Redskins.
“Arnold Rothstein created the first national layoff system,” Ralph Salerno told me. “He had some bookmaker friends in Baltimore, with whom he’d opened up a racetrack. He also knew bookmakers in Boston and Philadelphia and elsewhere. And they were all sitting around talking, and one of them said, ‘I had to turn down some heavy action because I was lopsided the other way. I didn’t want to be loaded on one team over the other.’ Rothstein told them, ‘Schmucks, the next time something like that happens, you go through me. And I’ll take some of your Boston excess, and I’ll match it against your Philadelphia excess. And we’ll all make money.’”
As initiated by Ed Curd, gamblers generally put up $11 to win $10 from bookmakers, who are simply interested in the 10 percent commission, or vigorish, they receive from the losing bets they book.[4] Without the layoff man, the local bookmaker could be forced out of business after a single, one-sided, big-betting game.
There are devices local bookmakers can utilize to maximize their winnings and minimize their losses. They can make individual adjustments in the line, knowing that most hometown fans will generally bet with the hometown team regardless of the spread. They can insist on winning all bets in which the spread between two teams ends in a tie. They can also circle games or take them off the boards, indicating dramatic changes in the conditions of particular games or outright suspicions of unnatural money showing up. When games are circled or taken off the boards, bookmakers can limit or completely stop accepting money on them.
The major regional and national layoff bookmakers have long been controlled and financed by the Mafia. In the 1960s, the biggest layoff bookmaker in the United States was Gilbert Lee “The Brain” Beckley, who was also called to testify before the McClellan Committee in 1961 and took the Fifth twenty-five times. “He had accounts with just about every significant bookmaker in every significant city and in every little hamlet throughout the United States—approximately a hundred and twenty of these accounts,” says Brian Gettings, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Beckley. “He might move or take a half a million dollars in bets from just one of these gamblers a week.”
Born in 1912 in New Orleans, Beckley was raised by foster parents. “He was extremely sensitive about the fact that he was a bastard,” one of his top associates told me. “He was adopted out of an orphanage. But he later found his mother and got to know her.” Beckley’s unhappy childhood was a constant topic of conversation when the bookmaker spoke to his closest friends. Characteristically, several say, he would often go into deep depressions over his mother; he would weep openly and uncontrollably.
Beckley moved to St. Louis after he dropped out of high school and began to lay off bets on horse races for Louis “Murph” Calcatera, a St. Louis mobster. He then became a protege of New York’s Frank Erickson, who was rendered ineffective after his bouts with the Kefauver Committee and his two-year imprisonment.[5]
Curd, who was one of Beckley’s partners in Kentucky and one of the top oddsmakers in the country, told me, “I did a lot of business with Frank Erickson. But he was strictly a bookmaker. Erickson didn’t have an opinion on the [oddsmaking of] ball games.
“Beckley was like Erickson. He operated on other people’s opinions. There was a long period that he relied on what I was doing. Beckley didn’t know if a game should be six or twenty points. He wasn’t a pricemaker. He was a bookmaker who got some prices. And he was a good businessman.”
Gene Nolan, another Beckley associate, told me: “Gil worked with the oddsmakers. He didn’t fix the line on all games, just occasional ones that he wanted, that he was interested in, or the ones he had [his clients] on. And he would set the line in such a way that he would entice the bettors to bet on a certain ball team. Now, once in a while, when he fouled up or couldn’t produce, he found out about it ahead of time. Say, he fixed the line at three, and it ended up going to four, four and a half, then his deal fell off. Then he’d try to recoup. Now Gil would go with the team that was giving the points, instead of the team that was taking them. Of course, his answer to the changing of the line was that ‘the money did it.’ Well, sure, but it was his money that did it.”
Beckley initiated the underworld’s gambling operations in the Midwest, eventually setting up his layoff headquarters in the Newport /Covington region of Kentucky after a brief stay in Indianapolis.[6] In Newport, one of Beckley’s top associates, Tito Carinci—a one-time football star at Cincinnati’s Xavier University—was later implicated in the frame-up of Newport’s reform sheriff candidate George Ratterman, who was drugged by syndicate figures and photographed in bed with a known prostitute in 1961. Ratterman had been a pro quarterback with, among other teams, the Cleveland Browns. With the help of Attorney General Kennedy, Ratterman was elected and cleaned up the town.
Beckley also became active in the mob’s casino operations in pre-Castro Cuba. He was directed, supported, and protected in Cuba, as well as in Newport, by Genovese crime family capo Michael “Trigger Mike” Coppola, who managed the New York underworld’s interests in Cuba and south Florida.[7] According to federal investigators, Beckley split his winnings fifty-fifty with Coppola and the Genovese group.[8]
When Castro assumed power, Beckley was expelled from Cuba and moved to Canada. While he worked in Montreal, he was protected by the syndicate of “French Connection” heroin traffickers, Antonio d’Agostino and his partners, Vinnie and Pepe Cotroni.[9] However, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) busted up the operation.
Beckley then moved to Miami and picked up a junior partner, Marty Sklaroff. Beckley moved into a condominium in Miami’s plush, Teamsters-pension-fund-built Blair House where Jimmy Hoffa also maintained his Florida residence.
No fewer than ten people would regularly give Beckley $25,000 or more a week to bet for them. According to his associates, Baltimore Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom and Dallas Cowboys owner Clint Murchison were among his biggest clients. Beckley had been introduced to Rosenbloom by Lou Chesler. Rosenbloom and Chesler had placed their million-dollar bet on the 1958 NFL championship game through Beckley.
“Rosenbloom’s numbers were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says another former Beckley associate. “Murchison was very discreet. There was a lot of action from him, too. He bet big, and, sometimes, one of his partners would call and bet for him.”
The associate alleged that Art Modell of the Cleveland Browns even came to them to bet. “Modell was not discreet. He didn’t give a shit, and I don’t think he gives a shit today. Everybody in the country knows he’s a bettor.”
Detroit gambler Donald Dawson told me: “Most of the owners played [bet on games]. The NFL owners are in there because they’re competitive. They like sports. And everyone gambles on sports.”
Marty Kane, who was indicted and convicted with Beckley for bookmaking, said that when Beckley bet on someone’s behalf Beckley would make a great deal of money. “Say, one of the clients would call Gil and say, ‘What do you see on the Miami-Cleveland game?’ And Gil would say, ‘I see five [points].’ The client would say, ‘I want to lay the five for thirty thousand dollars.’ So, Gil would start calling bookmakers all over the country, and he’d start to bet for the client. He might go to one bookmaker and find that game for four. He would move fifteen thousand dollars at four. The client would stand off his bet, and Gil would pick up whatever money he moved on four. That would belong to him.
“It was just a matter of finding enough bookmakers around the country where he could get different prices. Really, Gil was more like a broker than a bookmaker. I saw him in situations where he wouldn’t actually be making the bet, but he actually acted as somebody’s beard.”
By betting heavily on one team, Beckley was able to manipulate the point spread and create a differential as much as six points. He would then bet on the other team with another bookmaker at a more favorable spread. Beckley hoped to “catch a middle”; that is, he hoped that the final score would come down the middle, so that he would win both bets.
“Let’s say a team received one and a half [points],” Beckley’s associate explains. “He loved those one-and-a-half games. This was his big money because he ended up playing the middle. Let’s say Gil had two hundred thousand dollars from the New England area, say, from Raymond Patriarca [the boss of the New England Mafia] or his man. Patriarca would call Gil and say, ‘I got two hundred thousand dollars minus one and a half on Washington.’ So, Gil would say, ‘I’ll get right back with you.’ Then he’d call San Francisco or some other end of the country, and say, ‘I can get you a half a point.’ Then he would try to sell that new line.
“So, Gil would have at least a point. Now this was great when the Los Angeles Rams played a New York team. At both ends of the country, the bookmakers would be betting in opposite ways. So, Gil would take one and a half from the guy who just laid it off to him, to laying a half a point the other way, or more if he could get it. Gil didn’t care who won, plus he got the ten percent on the one who lost. ‘Middling.’ He sometimes got up to two and three points, particularly if the spread was big, like fourteen. He got a lot of the big spreads there. When he laid that line, he was forcing people to bet against the winner.
“But Gil didn’t rip off the smaller bookmakers. He was accepting their action, because they were loaded up. They got to balance their books with the layoff to Gil and keep their ten percent on the losers.”
Speaking of “catching a middle,” another bookmaker says: “Bookmakers cannot afford to move a game two or three points. They’re apt to get middled when they go across a key number. When you open a game at six, and you go to seven and a half, you’re only moving it a point and a half, but you’re moving it across a key number, which is seven, a touchdown and an extra point. It’s the same as when you open a game at two, and then move it to three and a half. That’s across a key number, three, a field goal. When we’re getting these numbers, a bookmaker will not move from one side of a touchdown and field goal to the other unless he is very financially sound on the game.”
Bookmakers view the key betting numbers as three, six, seven, and ten. These numbers hold the greatest risk and effect for them and their businesses.
To provide some idea of the national scope of Beckley’s layoff operation, another member of Beckley’s bookmaking network, Elmer Dudley of Atlanta, says: “I had a pool of fifteen people, and I could get together fifty thousand to seventy thousand dollars in bets [on a single game]. You multiply that by sixteen cities, and it adds up to a lot of money.”
According to both underworld and government sources, Beckley often found “cooperative” players to help secure his wagers. They provided him with good inside information or even shaved points and fixed games. Other personnel who were helpful to him included team owners, coaches, and trainers, as well as their families and even the janitors in the locker rooms. Those who cooperated were well paid.
When I asked Gene Nolan whether Beckley was actively fixing games, Nolan replied: “He wouldn’t tell me because I was betting too much. But, hell, I’m not blind. I don’t know that he did the fix as much as he just found out which way the players were going to go.”
On January 8, 1966, Beckley’s apartment in Miami Beach was raided by federal agents. They seized his copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations which was filled with the coded names of some of the most prominent figures in business, entertainment, labor, politics, and sports. Government investigators believed that some of the people whose names were in the book had been Beckley’s clients. Among those named were gamblers Frank Erickson and Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal; political fixer Bobby Baker; Carroll Rosenbloom’s business partner Lou Chesler; casino operator Wilbur Clark; former boxer Billy Conn; Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa; the owner of the San Diego Chargers, Barron Hilton; entertainer and onetime Los Angeles Rams partner Bob Hope; Green Bay Packers star Paul Hornung; oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, Jr.; Florida state senator Richard Fincher; entertainer Ted Lewis; former heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano; actor George Raft; restaurateurs Toots Shor and Sam “Radio” Winer, who was also a bookmaker; entertainer Frank Sinatra; and composer Jules Styne.
“The book itself was not a gambling book,” says Brian Gettings, who was the chief prosecutor in the Beckley case. “But by matching the book with the gambling records, we were able to show that the gambling records were accounts for many, many of the people who were in the book. I don’t know why [Beckley] did this, but there were people who were listed in the book who there were no accounts for. Why he put them in there, I don’t know. Beckley never explained it.”
Gene Nolan told me: “When the government got that address book, they found out that Gil kept everybody he ever met in that book—even if there wasn’t anything to it. They weren’t all just his clients. Some of them were people he just knew.”
Marty Kane agrees with Nolan: “Gil was a very complex man. His greatest asset was his charm. He was the most charming man I’ve ever met. He had more legitimate people who loved him and loved to be around him. He was self-educated. If he had had the opportunity to go to school, he would have ended up a respected businessman.”
Beckley’s records showed that he had handled more than $250,000 on the day of the federal raid, which came the week after the NFL and AFL championship games were played. Of that sum, $129,000 was profit. Had the raid occurred a week earlier, the haul would have been considerably more.[10]
Significantly, the same year as the raid, Beckley was spotted at the Kentucky Derby as the guest of Paul Hornung, a native of Louisville and in his final year with the Green Bay Packers. Just two years earlier, Hornung’s suspension for his association with a West Coast gambler and his own gambling activities had been lifted. “I won’t bet, you know that,” Hornung told The Miami Herald. “I just met him [Beckley] a few times . . . and I took care of his wife when they came up to the [Kentucky] Derby. It was all personal—no business.”
Another associate of Beckley’s told me: “Paul Hornung and Gil Beckley were good friends. I went to dinner with them one time. Paul was there with twenty-nine gamblers.”
Marty Kane says: “Beckley and Hornung were drinking buddies, and they were friends. All the time I knew Gil, we never, ever thought anything strange was going on with a Green Bay game. I think Hornung has gotten a bad rap. He was a fifty-dollar bettor who mostly bet on other people’s games.” Kane added that he believed that Hornung had been betting for his teammates at Green Bay and had taken the fall for all of them.
Hornung repeatedly refused to be interviewed for this book.
According to several of Beckley’s associates, another professional football player with whom the bookmaker was allegedly acquainted was the legendary quarterback/placekicker George Blanda, the number one leading scorer in the history of professional football.[11] A twenty-six-year veteran of several teams—the Chicago Bears, Baltimore Colts, Houston Oilers, and Oakland Raiders—Blanda angrily told me during a telephone interview: “I’m not going to answer any of your questions when you talk about gambling. I’m not going to be involved pro or con in anything that you might suggest about gambling, period.”
When I specifically asked Blanda whether he knew Beckley, the NFL great replied: “You don’t have to ask me anything, because I’m not answering. I’m sorry you called.” Blanda then hung up.
Beckley was indicted by a Miami grand jury in May 1966, and two days after that he was arrested for violating federal gambling laws. He was later found guilty. Also indicted and convicted were Martin Sklaroff and Marty Kane.
ENDNOTES
[1] Also in 1961, Kennedy was furious when another point-shaving scandal had broken out in college basketball, implicating twenty-two schools and thirty-seven players who were paid between $750 to $4,500 a game not to cover the spread.
[2] The Kennedy Justice Department’s biggest law-enforcement disaster was due to a series of illegal wiretaps conducted by the FBI, most of which were targeted at Las Vegas casino operators. For fifteen months, secret FBI wiretaps that had been placed on the business telephones of five major casinos yielded an astonishing history of syndicate involvement in Las Vegas, including hidden ownerships and massive skimming operations that were being funneled into other underworld-backed activities, such as narcotics and payoffs to politicians. The intelligence was so impressive that J. Edgar Hoover, who had denied throughout his career that the national crime syndicate existed, finally agreed that it did.
However, all the taps had been installed illegally—without court authorization—and none of the data obtained could be used in court. In fact, when the wiretaps were discovered by the casino operators in Las Vegas, they filed a massive civil suit against the federal government. The suit was dropped after the government agreed to quash an IRS investigation of skimming in the casinos.
Like the Kefauver Committee a decade earlier, the Kennedy Justice Department tried but failed to legalize court-authorized federal wiretapping and electronic surveillance in 1962.
[3] The Sports Bribery Act says: “Whoever carries into effect, attempts to carry into effect, or conspires with any other person to carry into effect any scheme in commerce to influence, in any way, by bribery any sporting contest, with knowledge that the purpose of such scheme is to influence by bribery that contest, shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years or both.” (Title 18 USC, Section 224)
[4] Some bookmakers, to increase their earnings, have moved from the 11-10 payoff to a more lucrative 6-5, which is obviously less popular among the betting public.
There are numerous complex variations of gambling, bookmaking, and “the layoff.” Because this is not a gambling how-to book, I refer readers to other books on these subjects, including: Mort Olshan, Winning Theories of Sports Handicapping (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1975); Lem Banker and Frederick C. Klein, Book of Sports Betting (New York: E.P. D Dutton & Co., 1986); Larry Merchant, The National Football Lottery (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1973); Gerald Strine and Neil D. Isaacs, Covering the Spread: How to Bet Pro Football (New York: Random House, Inc., 1978); Bob McCune, The Gambling Times Guide to Football Handicapping (Secaucus, N.J.: Gambling Times, Inc., 1984); Kelso Sturgeon, Guide to Sports Betting (New York: Harper & Row, Inc., 1974); and Richard Sasuly, Bookies and Bettors: Two Hundred Years of Gambling (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1982). Also see FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, November 1977 and September 1978.
[5] Erickson died in 1968 at age seventy-two.
[6] There were two major layoff centers for the underworld during the late 1950s and early 1960s. One was Newport/Covington and the other was Biloxi, Mississippi. Combined, they handled over 90 percent of the bookmaking traffic in America.
[7] The five-foot-five Coppola was the quintessential mob torpedo. A syndicate killer since New York’s Castellammarese War in 1931, he was a top associate and trusted friend of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Frank Costello, and Vito Genovese. For years, he ran the numbers rackets in Harlem. After his wife—who had been indicted for perjury—died while giving birth to their daughter, Coppola moved to Miami Beach. At his height, Coppola had jurisdiction over sixty family “soldiers.”
Coppola’s second wife, whom he had met through Beckley, informed to IRS officials about his criminal tax fraud activities and then committed suicide. Beside her dead body was a note to Robert Kennedy, which said, “Please do not lose the courage of your convictions . . . . In my wildest dreams, I can’t imagine how Washington can allow people working for cities, states, and Washington to play both ends to the middle by accepting money to uphold the law and then accepting money from gangsters to break the law. Please, Mr. Kennedy, stop this. Don’t give up.” (The letter is from Hank Messich’s Syndicate Wife (New York: Macmillan Co., 1968, p. 2.)
[8] A close associate of the Beckley/Coppola operation was Alfred Mones, another top layoff bookmaker who operated the Metro Mortgage Company, a Miami business that fronted for his gambling activities. Mones and New York Mafia figure Charles “the Blade” Tourine had been partners in the Capri hotel/casino in pre-Castro Cuba.
[9] D ’Agostino and the Cotronis were the underworld figures contacted by Charles Luciano and Frank Coppola during the aftermath of World War II while the two deported mobsters were creating their heroin network into the United States via Montreal.
[10] Beckley had also been using a system of “blue boxes,” an electronic device that, when installed, can distort the telephone signal and bypass the phone company on long-distance telephone calls. The “blue box” network covered fifteen cities. One location had placed a hundred long-distance calls in a single day and not been charged for any. Beckley’s gambling syndicate had used the devices as a means of illegally transmitting wagering information.
[11] Blanda retired from the NFL after the 1975 season after scoring 2,002 points in his career.