Legalized Gambling Will Destroy College and Professional Sports, Part 4
Bill Hundley and NFL Security
In this chapter, I feature the relationship between NFL Security and mob-controlled oddsmakers and bookmakers via my interviews with former Nassau County prosecutor William Cahn, former NFL Security chief Bill Hundley, bookmaker Marty Kane, and NYPR detective supervisor Ralph Salerno.
This is an excerpt from my 1989 book, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football (pp. 161-171, 223-224)
Incredibly enough, Gil Beckley’s conviction was bad news for some top NFL officials. In fact, they did everything they could to keep him out of jail. The reason? Beckley had also been working for the NFL.
As the prelude to Beckley’s work with the league, the highly respected NFL Security director Jim Hamilton had died in 1966 after a long illness. Following a lengthy search for his successor, he was replaced by William G. Hundley, another man of impeccable credentials and reputation.
Hundley grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. After high school, he enlisted in the Army and was decorated with a Bronze Star for heroism during World War II. A 1950 graduate of Fordham Law School, Hundley was recruited by the Justice Department in 1951. Soon after, in the wake of the Kefauver Committee hearings, he was prosecuting alleged Communists for alleged Smith Act violations.
Until September 1966, Hundley had been the head of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section in the Justice Department. Hundley was the attorney who “handled” Joe Valachi, climaxed by the mobster-turned-informant’s sensational televised testimony before the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the fall of 1963. Kennedy had described Valachi’s testimony as “the biggest intelligence breakthrough in organized crime yet in the United States.”
When he resigned from the Justice Department in 1966, Hamilton, Rozelle was searching for a replacement. The commissioner then turned to Hundley, and the NFL became his first major client.
“They brought Hundley in for two reasons,” Ralph Salerno told me. “One, they needed a replacement for Hamilton. Two, the NFL already had high-priced attorneys, but they needed an attorney with some good Justice Department friends and contacts. The NFL and the AFL were going through a merger, and they didn’t want to run afoul of the federal antitrust laws.”
On March 8, 1967, the same month as Beckley’s federal conviction in Miami, William Cahn, a Nassau County, New York, prosecutor, met privately with Hundley. A few weeks earlier, Cahn had indicted Beckley, Marty Sklaroff, Gene Nolan, and nineteen others. The indictments followed a massive investigation of a $100-million-a-year bookmaking operation in the New York metropolitan area.
The probe began after several unnamed NFL players were found to be living in a Nassau County apartment house in which two known bookmakers also lived. Cahn received wiretap authorizations against the bookmakers and discovered that they had finks to gambling syndicates in Canada, Las Vegas, Miami, New Orleans, and on the West Coast. Other top sports figures had been implicated in the bookmaking operation, but none of them was named in the indictment. Cahn said that they had been part of an “information network” for bookmakers.
With Hundley, Cahn wanted to discuss “reports that certain points in at least nineteen [professional football] games . . . were rigged.” Pete Rozelle had stated in November 1966 that Hundley “was conducting a general investigation of continuing rumors in the American Football League.” Cahn said that he had discovered that Beckley had “picked nineteen out of twenty winners” and had actually picked the point spreads of each winner.
Cahn explained to Hundley that he had been told “bookies took four AFL games ‘off the boards’ last season, indicating gamblers were suspicious of the games.” He had also uncovered evidence that an unnamed, well-known college coach had been working in cooperation with the gamblers and had won $20,000 betting on a single game. “As a result,” Cahn told reporters after the indictments, “certain layoff- bets were completely switched by all the bookmakers with orders to go heavily on the team backed by this coach.” The line had jumped from fourteen to eighteen points after the coach had made his bet.[1]
In the end, Beckley and his coconspirators were permitted to plead guilty to reduced charges—because the courts had begun to question the manner in which intelligence on the case was collected; the wiretaps could not be used as evidence in court.
However, Beckley’s indictment and guilty plea had little impact on Beckley or on the NFL’s relationship with the bookmaker. Hundley assured Cahn that he had the Beckley situation under control.
Salerno says: “Beckley had gone to Hundley and said, ‘I know who you are, and you know who I am. While you were with the Department of Justice, you were on one side of the fence, and I was on the other. And I would never dream of approaching you about anything. But you no longer work for the Justice Department. You now work for the National Football League. And that puts you and me on the same side of the fence. You and me are on the same team.’ And Hundley said, ‘What the hell are you talking about? I’m not on your team!’ And Beckley said, ‘Yes, you are—because you want what I want: honest National Football League games.’
“Hundley’s interest was to protect the integrity of the game; Beckley wanted to protect the integrity of the bets he booked and the volume of his business. Beckley told Hundley: ‘I will be your chief informant, because what I do all week long is exchange bets, take bets, and layoff bets with bookmakers in every NFL city. These guys are sharp, and they know what’s going on. And the deal we will have is that instead of just laying bets with me, these smart cookies will tell me everything they hear—a whisper, a rumor, and everything else. And I will convey that to you.’
“That’s why, when he was convicted, Beckley went to Hundley and said, ‘Look, I’ve been helpful. I called you and told you what was going on. All I want you to do is tell the judge that I, Gil Beckley, did more to keep the National Football League honest than any human being alive.’ And they had that deal.”
Marty Kane, who was indicted with Beckley in Miami on the federal bookmaking charges, told me that he was aware of Beckley’s relationship with Hundley and the NFL. “Gil was living in New York at the time,” Kane says. “Gil would call me on either Sunday night or Monday morning and asked me what the NFL line was. And I would give it to him. He wanted to know at what price these games opened, at what price they closed, and if there were any unusual moves, and what the reasons for them were. He knew that I would know whether a player was out—which would cause the line to go from three to six.
“Gil told me that he was doing this for Bill Hundley. The reason Gil did this was that he thought Hundley might be able to help us in our case.”
In an extraordinary letter on NFL stationery and dated April 20, 1967—sent on Beckley’s behalf prior to his sentencing in Miami—Hundley wrote to a federal probation official: “Shortly after I left the Justice Department to join the National Football League, I was contacted by Gil Beckley, who said he knew me by reputation in Justice. . . . He offered, on a confidential basis, to furnish any information that came into his possession concerning the possibility of endeavors to corrupt professional football players, [or to] seek unauthorized information about players’ conditions, and [to] supply any other information that might reflect adversely on the integrity of professional football.
“During the season, he was most helpful in apprising us of any unusual fluctuations in the betting odds and assisting us in ensuring the integrity of professional football from the influence of undesirable elements.”
Hundley added that Beckley had not asked the NFL for any assistance “in connection with his present difficulties with the government.”
On April 17, 1967, just three days before Hundley wrote his letter on Beckley’s behalf, the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, which Hundley had just left,[2] wrote an internal report that stated that “Beckley was deeply entrenched with La Cosa Nostra [LCN] elements” and had become “involved with Michael Coppola, a/k/a ‘Trigger Mike’—identified by [federal witness] Joseph Valachi . . . as a ‘capo regime’ of the Vito Genovese family of LCN. . . . Trigger Mike was receiving approximately 50% of the profit on Beckley’s wagering operation. Trigger Mike died just last year and with his demise Anthony Salerno, a/k/a ‘Fat Tony,’ took his place as the Mafia’s representative.”[3]
Hundley was aware of the Justice Department’s view of the bookmaker. But, despite Hundley’s surprising confidence in bookmaker received the maximum sentence for his federal bookmaking conviction in Miami. C. L. Williams, Beckley’s probation officer, to whom Hundley had sent his letter on April 20, told U.S. District Judge Theodore Cabot of Miami that Beckley should be sentenced to the maximum eight years in prison. In spite of Hundley’s letter, Williams wrote that Beckley was “the number one figure in nationwide gambling . . . involved with the Cosa Nostra, and [paid] tribute to that organization. . . . The sentencing of Gilbert Lee Beckley would deal a severe blow to organized illegal gambling in the United States.”[4]
Beckley appealed and moved his operations from Miami to New York City and then to Atlanta while the federal government pressured him to talk.
Hundley defends the NFL’s relationship with Beckley. “Beckley was one of the many contacts in the bookmaking field who used to give us information about point-spread fluctuations, suspicions, and rumors,” Hundley told me. “We took his information. We knew who we were dealing with and judged what he told us accordingly.” Hundley added that Beckley was never paid by the NFL for anything he did.
Sources inside and outside the NFL say that Beckley was consulted in several NFL Security investigations:
• Just after Hundley became NFL Security chief, an FBI agent in Detroit received information from a Detroit mobster that the second 1966 game between the Chicago Bears and the San Francisco 49ers in Chicago had been fixed for the 49ers. Knowing that the Bears and the 49ers had played to a 30-30 tie in their first game earlier in the season, FBI agents monitored the second game that was played in San Francisco. This time, the 49ers demolished the Bears, 41-14. The 49ers, who were 6-6-2 that year, had also defeated the Detroit Lions in Detroit by the same score later that season.
The FBI reported the matter to the NFL, which approached Beckley. Beckley claimed to know nothing about the game. Without additional evidence, the investigation was dropped.
• Beckley had worked with the NFL on an investigation of “the relationship between a star American Football League quarterback and two bookies, Carmello Coco and Philip Cali of Boston. The inquiries were stepped up after the player’s teammates were overheard in the locker room angrily accusing him of ‘throwing’ the game they had just lost.”[5]
• Another investigation involving Beckley’s information was of Boston Patriots quarterback, Vito “Babe” Parilli, a former all-American from the University of Kentucky. Parilli and several of his teammates were known to be patronizing Arthur’s Farm, a Revere, Massachusetts, bar owned and operated by a convicted gambler. Law-enforcement officials claimed that the bar was a hangout for underworld figures and had linked the Patriots quarterback to Boston mobster Henry Tameleo, a top capo under New England’s Mafia head, Raymond Patriarca.[6] Parilli was polygraphed by the NFL, but the results were not made public.
• Beckley was also consulted after several games of two teams—the Kansas City Chiefs and the Washington Redskins—were taken off the board by oddsmakers in Las Vegas and New York in 1967 and 1968. . . .
In February 1970, after the latest NFL gambling scandal flamed out and the movement to legalize offtrack betting in New York geared up, fifty-six-year-old Gil Beckley disappeared and was presumed murdered while still out on bond after his most recent gambling conviction.
“It is the opinion of many law-enforcement agencies, including representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” says Nassau County prosecutor William Cahn, “that Beckley was done away with by the top echelon of syndicated organized crime because Beckley might have been cooperating with law-enforcement agencies.”
Thought to have been behind Beckley’s killing was New York mobster Tony Salerno, who had been Beckley’s banker and equal partner in his nationwide bookmaking operation.
“Gil told me that he was going to make a deal with the government,” one of Beckley’s top associates told me. “Gil was doing poorly before he disappeared and for a long time before that.” He adds that Beckley was a little off the wall at the end. Among other things, he was dealing in stolen clothing and airline tickets, as well as bogus credit cards. “In 1969, he couldn’t pay off. He owed me over thirty thousand dollars.
“Gil was in bad shape. During the baseball season before he disappeared, Gil told me, ‘Let me give you the people who are making the plays [bets] so that I can be sure that they get paid.’ In other words, Bettor A was betting with him X amount on games, and he couldn’t handle it. He wanted to give me Bettor A’s business so that I could pay and collect from him. But he wanted to be the one who talked to them, to make the deal. He wanted to be my beard. He was falling down bad.”
The last known person to see Beckley alive was Elmer Dudley, an Atlanta-based member of Beckley’s national bookmaking syndicate. Dudley claims that Beckley decided to flee the country to escape prison, and that Beckley had asked him to drive him to the airport in Montreal. “He had a suitcase with over a million dollars in it,” Dudley recalls. “Don’t ask me where he got it from.” Dudley says that after dropping Beckley off in Montreal, he never saw him again. However, he, too, believes that he was murdered before he got away.
Another Beckley associate Mary Kane told me: “Knowing Gil as well as I did, I think it would have been impossible for him to stay hidden. Somebody would have known where he was. He didn’t low-key it.”
ENDNOTES
[1] A Nassau County wiretap picked up one Miami bookmaker telling his New York layoff contact, “Lay the eighteen, all you can.”
“What is it all about?” the layoff man replied.
“The college coach is putting up his own stuff.”
[2] Hundley was succeeded as head of the OCRS by Henry Petersen.
[3] In a separate memorandum on the layoff bookmaking syndicate, filed by the FBI in Atlanta, Beckley was described as “the key figure in this organized crime operation.”
Coppola, Vito Genovese’s heir apparent, had died of natural causes on October 1, 1966, in a Boston hospital.
[4] In May 1967, a New York City police detective was dismissed for his “dealings with known criminals,” according to an NYPD report. The officer, a twelve-year veteran of the department, also had been “providing his criminal associates with “a quantity of police records.” Named by police officials as the officer’s underworld contact was Gil Beckley.
[5] Life, September 8, 1967.
[6] Tameleo had also been linked by a congressional committee to Bob Cousy and Gene Conley of the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association. Cousy and Conley, along with Parilli, often patronized Arthur’s Farm and another gamblers’ hangout, the Ebb Tide.