The inside story of the January 1983 premiere episode of PBS Frontline: "An Unauthorized History of the NFL"
Allegations of game-fixing by the Kansas City Chiefs and questions about the death of Carroll Rosenbloom
Introduction: February 11, 2024
Today, the Kansas City Chiefs, the defending NFL champions, will play the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LVIII. As part of my ongoing “the past is prologue” theme, this is the inside story of the first episode of PBS Frontline—”An Unauthorized History of the NFL”—that premiered on January 17, 1983. It is excerpted and updated from my 1989 book, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football, which was re-released in 2014.
In my homage to the NFC playoffs, I published two other excerpts:
* “The Detroit Lions, the Mafia, and the 1963 NFL gambling scandal” (January 27, 2024)
* “Edward J. DeBartolo Sr., the San Francisco 49ers, and the Mafia.: The NFL permits a DOJ-identified mobster to buy the 49ers” (January 28, 2024)
And last weekend, I published a two-part series about the Kansas City Chiefs:
* “The Kansas City Chiefs, mob bookmakers, and the 1970 Super Bowl: An NFL team regularly goes ‘off the boards’” (February 2, 2024)
* “The Kansas City Chiefs, mob bookmakers, and the 1970 Super Bowl: An NFL team regularly goes ‘off the boards’” (February 4, 2024)
Once again, the legalization of sports gambling will not only lead to the proliferation of illegal gambling and organized-crime activities, but it will also wind up destroying college and professional sports. . . . It is inevitable.
Chapter 43: “The Frontline Controversy,” pp. 356-365
On January 15, 1983, an era of the underworld ended with the death of Meyer Lansky, the last surviving dinosaur of the old mob, which had Americanized and organized disorganized crime in 1931. The syndicate’s financial wizard died in Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach after a long bout with cancer. Speaking of his crime empire, Lansky once said, “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” In his entire life, he had been imprisoned only once as an adult—serving two months in Saratoga Springs, New York, for local gambling violations.
Two days after Lansky’s death, Frontline, a new weekly PBS production, presented its premier program, “An Unauthorized History of the NFL,” which became the most-watched current affairs program ever broadcast on public television. The one-hour program was moderated by NBC reporter Jessica Savitch, who was on loan to PBS.
The concept for the PBS program began after Tom Mechling, the chairman of the National Commission on Gambling Information, a nonprofit public-interest group, was approached by Ed Garvey, the executive director of the NFL Players Association, for the purpose of conducting an investigation of the NFL owners on a consultancy basis. Mechling had come highly recommended after his work on an NBC “White Paper” on gambling which aired in December 1980.[1]
Mechling told me, “What I found out about many of the NFL teams after about six months of looking [on behalf of the NFLPA] was really more than I wanted to know about who really owns the Great American Game. The NFLPA locked up the research in their files and never used it in any fashion and/or never wanted to.”
Garvey told me, “All we really had were rumors. Frankly, the battle with the owners was so great—through the National Labor Relations Board, the federal courts, collective bargaining, and just trying to hold the union together as a unit—that the rumors seemed to be the least of our problems. The union is not deputized by the U.S. Marshals. It doesn’t have any control over how management deals with its books. It doesn’t have its own investigative arm.”[2]
Mechling persisted. “Later,” he says, “I boiled the material down to the TV program outline. I first took it to Tony Potter of NBC News Documentaries, whom I had worked with on the gambling ‘White Paper’ and other program subjects. At the time, NBC was in dire financial straits. But, regardless, Potter looked at the program idea, whistled, said it was a good program and that he would give his left nut to do it. But he also said, ‘I’m not even going to send it upstairs,’ meaning to the NBC News head. He explained that fully twenty-five percent of NBC’s revenues then were coming from the NFL contract with the network for televising their games and selected college ones too.”
Potter suggested that Mechling call executive producer David Fanning, who was starting the new Frontline series on PBS. Fanning had made his reputation with his production of the controversial “Death of a Princess” program and the PBS World Channel series. Fanning had received nearly $5 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Chubb Insurance Group, and seven of the local PBS stations around the country to produce weekly news programs too hot for the networks.
Mechling met Fanning and his producer, director, and writer William Cran. They accepted Mechling’s idea and hired him as a consultant. Also hired to do the reporting were reporters Ben Loeterman and my associate, William Scott Malone.
This fascinating show was critical of the close association between the worlds of professional football and syndicate gamblers and charged that inside information is regularly provided, points are occasionally shaved, and games are sometimes fixed. The program was dramatic and startling, discussing the dark side of the NFL that few fans ever hear about, particularly from network television—which enjoyed a cozy and lucrative sweetheart relationship with the NFL.
The most controversial portion of the PBS report was the claim by a bookmaker, John Charles “Butch” Piazza, that between 1968 and 1970 he had been involved in payoffs to a particular team’s head coach, quarterback, and defensive captain.
“With the quarterback,” Piazza said, “if he knew the perimeters of the score that we wanted to hold . . . he’d throw a bad pass or throw it out of bounds and only kick a field goal. We also bagged the defensive captain, a defensive back, so he could slip and fall down and let the other team score.” The head coach was needed to guarantee that neither the quarterback nor the defensive back were pulled out of the game.
Piazza added that he had known of the fixing of four games in each of those years. He said that the players had received and split an average of $300,000 per game, plus 10 percent of what the fixers made gambling. Their biggest payoff, he claimed, was $795,000 for a single fixed game, which he had personally delivered. The money for the bets was laid off through the Beckley/Sklaroff national gambling syndicate.
Was Piazza credible? At the time of the program, he was awaiting sentencing on drug charges and for the illegal possession of a silencer. However, Piazza—who asked Frontline to pay his wife’s moving expenses of $10,000 in return for his cooperation—did pass a voice stress evaluation test concerning his charges. Notably, the program did not name the head coach and the two players Piazza had allegedly paid off.
The PBS report also raised questions about the investigation of the accidental drowning of Carroll Rosenbloom, the owner of the Los Angeles Rams, suggesting that he might have been murdered.
William Scott Malone located Raymond Tanguay, the French Canadian citizen who had witnessed Rosenbloom’s drowning and jumped in the water in an effort to save him. Malone was aided by Edward Noel, a former sergeant in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Both men talked to Tanguay at his home in a small town outside of Montreal.
Speaking in French, Tanguay, with the RCMP officer serving as interpreter, said that he had not had a decent night’s sleep since Rosenbloom’s death because he had desperately tried but failed to save Rosenbloom’s life.
According to PBS, Tanguay’s version of what happened that afternoon on April 2, 1979, is at complete odds with the official police version, which probably resulted from the language barrier. Then thirty-six years old, Tanguay said that he was walking up the beach, collecting seashells, when he saw Rosenbloom crossing behind him and heading toward the ocean. As Tanguay came strolling back down the beach about ten to fifteen minutes later, he heard someone calling for help. He spotted Rosenbloom thrashing about in the water about a hundred yards from the shore. Tanguay said that he dove into the water with a piece of wood for buoyancy and went after Rosenbloom—who was slowly being taken out to sea.
“As [Tanguay] approached within fifty yards,” the RCMP officer said, “he saw a black object in the water about a hundred yards from the victim. [Tanguay’s] first impression was that he thought it was another person and that a boat had overturned. This object only appeared for a short period as the waves were breaking. He can only describe this object as being black, that it was partially submerged and that he thought that it was part of a person’s body in a diver’s suit or the bottom of a boat. One thing he is certain of is that he saw a black object.”
He also noted that the object was moving against the waves in a direction opposite Rosenbloom.
The RCMP officer continued that Rosenbloom was motionless and floating on the surface as Tanguay got close to him. The Rams owner was frothing at the mouth as Tanguay pushed the piece of wood under Rosenbloom’s body and began dragging him back to shore. “On a couple of occasions, heavy swells broke [Tanguay] loose from the victim, and finally he had to let [Rosenbloom] go and drag himself to shore in a state of total exhaustion.
“Once he reached the shore, he saw two men run into the water and drag the victim to the beach and then walk away. He could only describe these individuals as being well-tanned men who looked like ‘hoodlums.’
“Tanguay stated that the two policemen who arrived on the scene minutes later were not the persons who pulled the body out of the water. According to Tanguay, the only other witness on the beach at the time he came out of the water was a woman in her mid-fifties.”[3]
During my interview with William Henrikson, who was the chief of the Golden Beach Police Department at the time of Rosenbloom’s death, this mystery about the two additional men on the scene was cleared up. Henrikson told me that he and his deputy Ron Nasca—both of whom were large and tanned men—had stripped off their clothes when they jumped into the ocean trying to save Rosenbloom. Both had passed Tanguay and instructed him to return to the shore. When the two officers recovered Rosenbloom’s body and dragged him onto the beach, two paramedics arrived soon after. Both paramedics were dressed in gray uniforms.
Clearly, Tanguay, who was not familiar with the look of local police uniforms, mistook the two police officers as the well-tanned “hoodlums” and the two uniformed paramedics as the police. “I found no evidence of foul play,” Henrikson told me. “And Tanguay never mentioned anything about the black object at the time the Dade County detectives interviewed him after Rosenbloom’s death. I certainly never saw any other objects in the water.”[4]
Also, during the research for my book, Interference, I found four additional photographs taken during Rosenbloom’s autopsy, which had been reported to have been missing from the coroner’s office. There has been considerable speculation that these four pictures may have been suppressed and would prove that Rosenbloom had been murdered.
I gave the photographs and accompanying official reports to several friends within the law-enforcement community for their analyses. Detective Joseph Quantrille of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide division was among them. He told me that the pictures showed no evidence of foul play and confirmed the reports filed by the Dade County Department of Public Safety and the original autopsy report—although he noticed evidence of trauma on the right side of Rosenbloom’s chest cavity. A small clot and stream of dark blood bordered the outside rim of Rosenbloom’s lung and pancreas. However, this trauma could have easily occurred during the attempts either to rescue or revive him. Others who reviewed the pictures and other materials came to the same conclusion.
In short, the evidence appears to be clear that Rosenbloom died in a tragic accident and was not murdered. (Emphasis added)
The Frontline program on the NFL received mixed reviews. The Chicago Tribune described it as “one whale of a report. We can only wonder why it was so slow arriving and why it finally emerged on public TV rather than one of the big, football-wise commercial networks.”
Variety wrote, “It’s even more amazing that the newspapers—seemingly less needful of league goodwill—had devoted so little space to the subject. It isn’t as if they were unaware of the matter; most papers carry a betting line on Sunday afternoon and Monday night games and many handicap the games for bettors on the basis of that line.”
In the worst and most idiotic attack on the show, William Taaffe of Sports Illustrated wrote, “To say that PBS threw an incomplete pass with this program . . . isn’t to say that all NFL owners have just come out of a monastery. It’s also not to aver that no quarterback has ever intentionally thrown an interception or that no owner has ever bet on—or even against—his team. Betting exists. Not all mobsters sell tomatoes.”
NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who predictably called the PBS program “cheap sensationalism,” added, “The program presented by PBS Monday night was chiefly a rehash of press clippings, gossip, and rumor, some almost twenty-five years old.” The show was also criticized because two of those who appeared on camera were paid—-John Piazza and bookmaker Gino Tropiano—causing cries of “checkbook journalism” from those who could not attack the program for any other reason. At a press conference after the show, Rozelle told reporters, “We are looking into the possibility of bringing suit against PBS.”
Rozelle added, “If the producers of the show and their paid informants are at all confident of their information, why don’t they offer specific facts including the names of the players and the dates of the games? Without these facts, every player and coach of the period this show cited is subject to suspicion.”
Sports columnist Dave Anderson of The New York Times wrote that PBS had “dug up no new cadavers, only a convict’s allegation that an unidentified coach, an unidentified quarterback and an unidentified team captain on an unidentified team had fixed a total of 12 unidentified games during the 1968, 1969 and 1970 seasons.”
According to the Frontline documents, as well as federal law-enforcement records, Piazza claimed to have seen and identified the two players who were present when the money was allegedly exchanged. His information about the head coach was secondhand.
Born in Atlanta in 1941, Piazza was known as a major bookmaker, like his father, and a drug dealer whose facade of legitimacy was his racehorse farm in Ocala, Florida, which he had purchased in 1975 for $1.5 million. Between 1959 and 1972, Piazza had been arrested no fewer than eight times for such crimes as disorderly conduct and AWOL while in the U.S. Navy, as well as “betting or soliciting bets on athletic contests,” conspiracy to smuggle marijuana, and aggravated assault, among other offenses. There is no record of conviction on any of these charges.
Piazza had spent much of his time in Miami during the 1970s. In 1977, he pleaded guilty to drug smuggling and was given immunity from further prosecution in return for his cooperation against his coconspirators. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison; he served only forty-two months. He was released in 1981 and placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program after he agreed to testify against Meyer Lansky, who had hatched an illegal gambling scheme. However, charges against Lansky were never brought. At that time, Piazza was living under the name “John Petracelli” in Dallas.
While in the witness program, Piazza was arrested in Miami on illegal narcotics and weapons charges. He was later convicted.
Frontline’s concerns about Piazza revolved around his background and a diverse view of his credibility by law-enforcement officials. Some flat out didn’t trust him, while others, especially those who had gained important convictions from his testimony, believed him to be “extremely credible.”
During Piazza’s 1980 testimony in a drug-smuggling case, Judge Norman Roettger said of Piazza, “He has admitted just about everything under the sun. I think his testimony is impeached.”
However, FBI supervisor Ralph Hill, who specialized in sports gambling, disagreed. “I came in after a given game or after a given season, so what we saw were the results. Piazza was seeing it as it was going on. So I would state that what he says bears credence.”
Between 1967 and 1970, Piazza was known by local, state, and federal officials as being heavily involved with sports gambling and bookmaking. His immediate supervisors were Atlanta’s most active bookmakers, Elmer H. Dudley and Barney T. Berry, both of whom were top lieutenants to Gil Beckley in Georgia. At the time, Beckley was the Mafia’s most influential bookmaker.
Dudley and Berry, who both had long police records, had been indicted along with Beckley’s junior partner, Marty Sklaroff, for federal gambling violations and forty-one counts of mail fraud in the fall of 1969, just a few months before Beckley disappeared [5] Piazza was arrested in November 1969 in connection with that case. However, the charges against Piazza were eventually dropped. Piazza’s attorney was Joe Salem, an Atlanta lawyer who had also represented Beckley.
When interviewed by Frontline, Piazza made the following charges:
1. That from 1968 to 1970 he was involved in the Beckley/Sklaroff bookmaking syndicate, operating under the direction of Dudley and Berry, as well as Sklaroff.
2. That he knew of numerous professional football games that had been “fixed” during those years in which his gambling syndicate worked in cooperation with players.
3. That—at the direction of Sklaroff—he had gone to Kansas City and personally delivered a $795,000 payoff which he believed was intended for three members of the Kansas City Chiefs: head coach Hank Stram, quarterback Len Dawson, and defensive cornerback Emmitt Thomas.[6]
4. That these people had been allegedly paid for their cooperation to “fix” the supposed last game of the 1969 regular season between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Diego Chargers, in which the Chargers upset the Chiefs, 27-24.
5. That Piazza’s gambling syndicate had made between $4.5 million and $5 million as a result of having the game ensured.
6. That another game between Kansas City and the Oakland Raiders earlier in the year had also been fixed.
A spokesman for the Frontline program said, “We had two different versions of the show ready for broadcast. One named the players Piazza mentioned and the other did not. We went with the latter because we had no evidence of gambling associations against the third man [Thomas], And, in the end, we simply ran out of time.”
But what makes Piazza’s allegations suspect is the fact that the Kansas City Chiefs did not lose the last game of the 1969 season to San Diego. And in the history of the Kansas City-San Diego rivalry, there had never been a final score that ended up 27-24, regardless of who won.
In an attempt to verify Piazza’s charges, Frontline hired the Philip Manuel Resource Group, a respected Washington consulting firm, to conduct an investigation.[7] The independent probe showed that
1. Any wiretaps supporting Piazza, particularly those targeting Sklaroff, would have already been destroyed. None of the prosecutors who were involved in the Sklaroff case could remember “any wiretapped conversation involving Sklaroff in which there was talk of a specific pro-football fix.” The prosecutors—who did recall discussions about the Chiefs’ being taken off the boards—could not rule out the possibility that a transcript of such a conversation might have existed at some point. However, Manuel’s investigation showed that “to date there is no corroboration of the existence of wiretap information which bears on Piazza’s alleged trip to Kansas City.”
2. Piazza’s description of himself as a key figure in the Beckley/Sklaroff-Dudley/Berry gambling syndicate was true, and that he was particularly active from 1967 to 1970. Also, Piazza was linked with John Owen Tyler, an Atlanta bookmaker, who “repeatedly took Kansas City off the boards in the late 60s.”
During my interview with Len Dawson, I read him the official unedited transcript of the Frontline interview with Piazza and told him that Piazza had passed the voice stress evaluation test. Dawson replied, “You know, because of that program, not only did he [Piazza] take a test, but I had to take one, too. They [the NFL] did it just to clarify it. The NFL Security people and [NFL Security Director] Warren Welsh flew into Kansas City and were out at the Marriott hotel by the airport. I had to clear myself all over again.”
Once again, Dawson passed the test, proving his innocence. Dawson continued, “I’ll tell you who was really hot when that PBS program came out: John Brodie [the star quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers from 1957 to 1973]. He wanted to sue them because it implicated all the starting quarterbacks in that era. He had gotten a tape [of the program] and looked it over and wanted all the quarterbacks of that era to see if we could get a lawsuit against public television.”
Dawson said that it was laughable that Emmitt Thomas would be involved in anything like that. “Of all people, Emmitt Thomas, why, he’s the most superstitious guy in the world. I was quiet my first few years of professional football; but Emmitt was that way all the way through. I never ran around with Emmitt or hung out with him, other than on the football field.”
Stram, who was not polygraphed, laughed off Piazza’s charges, repeating that he had never gambled on anything in his life. More concerned with the claim against his onetime defensive star, Stram told me, “I never heard Emmitt Thomas’s name mentioned with a gambling issue. You’d have to know Emmitt to understand that he would never even consider anything like that.”
When I contacted Thomas and told him what Piazza had said, he told me that he wanted to talk to Len Dawson first and would then get back to me—which he never did.
When I asked Dawson why he was the target of so many rumors over the years, particularly regarding his alleged relationship with a variety of bookmakers and even the Civella Mafia family in Kansas City, he said, “I don’t know why they singled me out. Maybe it’s because I’m the quarterback. In 1966, I started my career in broadcasting. Maybe that was it: because I was so visible. I had four radio shows a day, five days a week, and I was the sports director of the television station in Kansas City. I was doing the six o’clock and the ten o’clock sports, starting in 1966 and all through that period. So Monday through Friday, everybody knew where I was.”
Len Dawson was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1987, followed by Hank Stram in 2003. And then, Emmitt Thomas joined them in 2008.
ENDNOTES
[1] Mechling, also an author and investigative reporter, had won the Democratic nomination in Nevada for the U.S. Senate, defeating Alan Bible and the Pat McCarran political machine in 1952. Running on an anti-organized-crime platform in the heart of casino country and refusing to accept any political contributions, Mechling was found to have been cheated out of several thousand votes in the general election—during which the Democratic McCarran machine supported Mechling’s Republican opponent, George Malone. With the election hopelessly corrupted, the contest was handed over to the U.S. Senate for its decision on who would be the next Nevada senator. However, the Senate vote ended in a tie. The deadlock was officially broken by the new U.S. vice president and president pro tem of the Senate, Richard Nixon, a Republican. There, Mechling ran out of luck.
[2] Garvey told me that during the 1982 collective-bargaining negotiations there was an attempt by the NFLPA to gain access to NFL Security. Garvey added, “We tried to make it a joint operation, and we failed. We made a demand that NFL Security respond to both the union and management. But we knew we weren’t going to get it.”
[3] In fact, Tanguay did not conclude that Rosenbloom was the victim of foul play. And four witnesses, who had claimed to see Rosenbloom drown and saw no evidence of it either, described the black object near Rosenbloom as sea debris
[4] There was also some suspicion about a possible cover-up by the Golden Beach Police, particularly after Henrikson resigned as sheriff the month after Rosenbloom drowned. However, Henrikson told me that he had been trying to get a job as the director of security of Federal Express’s international operation, which is based in Memphis, Tennessee. “In fact,” Henrikson says, “I received my formal offer in the mail from Federal Express earlier in the day before Rosenbloom drowned.”
[5] At the time these charges were being filed against Dudley, Berry, and Sklaroff, Beckley was under indictment for running an illegal lottery in Atlanta. Beckley disappeared in February 1970 and was presumed murdered.
[6] Thomas spent his entire professional football career from 1966 to 1978 with the Kansas City Chiefs. A graduate of Bishop College, Thomas twice led the NFL for most interceptions in a season. Selected four times to play in the NFL’s Pro Bowl, Thomas made a key interception in the 1970 Super Bowl, in which the Chiefs defeated the Minnesota Vikings. Thomas later became an assistant coach with the Washington Redskins.
[7] Phil Manuel is one of the most respected organized-crime investigators ever to work on Capitol Hill. For years, he was the chief investigator for the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He headed many inquiries into financial manipulations by organized crime groups, including trafficking in stolen and counterfeit securities and similar frauds.
Dan has uncovered and shared so much information. The footnote about the Nevada senate race that Nixon was involved with just blew me away. The NFL has deep areas of concern and they want to keep these secrets, secrets. A must read for sports fans. It is like telling a young man the facts of life, but in this case, the facts of game fixing.
Dan, do you believe Jessica was murdered? I read she had been possibly interviewing Leonard Tose at the time of death, and was working on a part 2. I've driven by the exact spot she died many times, its so hard to believe that was an accident.