The Kansas City Chiefs, the Mafia, and the 1970 Super Bowl (Part 1)
An NFL team that routinely went "off the boards"
Introduction
Next Sunday, February 11, in Las Vegas, 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 first of two parts, “The Kansas City Chiefs, the Mafia, and the 1970 Super Bowl,” excerpted and updated from my 1989 book, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football, which was re-released in 2014.
Inasmuch as I interviewed all of the key characters in this drama—from Len Dawson to Don Dawson and Hank Stram to Gene Nolan—I do not believe that a more thorough and accurate account of what happened exists.
Last weekend, in my homage to the AFC and 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)
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 professional and college sports. . . . It is inevitable.
Chapter 1: “On Fixing Games and Inside Information,” p. 27
I once asked Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson of the Kansas City Chiefs whether the fact that his team’s games had been taken off the betting boards by bookmakers across the country during the late 1960s was an indication that they were fixed. Dawson replied, “It would be a dangerous thing to fix a game. To me, a player would be branded for life if he did that. His teammates would express shock and anger. I don’t know how one guy could do it, even a quarterback. In our system, we ran the ball a lot. Even when I wasn’t in there, it didn’t make much difference who was quarterback, because the defense scored points to help win games.
“I suppose the quarterback could put the ball on the ground, with turnovers in crucial situations. It would certainly have a bearing on the game. Hell, a kicker could have as much to do with it just by missing. He has more control over it than sometimes the quarterback does.”
Chapter 15: “Football and Hollywood,” pp. 136
In May 1963, after archrival Clint Murchison had verbally threatened to run him out of Dallas, Lamar Hunt moved his Dallas Texans to Kansas City, where the team became the Kansas City Chiefs. Soon after, Hunt proposed a world championship game between the winners of the NFL and the AFL, [aka “The Super Bowl.”] The NFL laughed off the proposal.
Chapter 20: “The Kansas City Shuffle,” pp 180-190
When asked whether [top mob bookmaker] Gil Beckley had ever influenced the outcomes of professional football games, FBI supervisor Ralph Hill replied, “The records would show that, yes. They would have been manipulated in many ways. One is getting to the ballplayers, to get the coaching staff to manipulate the points down and then ensure that they are within the spread.”
Hill added that Beckley and his associates were successful in getting to those team members who could guarantee their bets. “They would have to. If you’re going to get to a given football organization, you would have to get to those key people.”
Hill cited one government informant who was a part of the Beckley/Sklaroff organization and had claimed to have fixed several players on a particular team. He told my associate, William Scott Malone, “We have this guy . . . who says that on a particular occasion he had at least [three members of one team] sharing in their profits from manipulating a point spread on certain football games. [He] is in a far better position to do that than I am because he was involved, and he was there.”
In convicted bookmaker Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder’s autobiography, he told of the Kansas City Chiefs being taken off the betting boards in Las Vegas during the 1968 season because “‘unnatural money’ had begun to show up on their games. I should say, unnaturally big money.”[1]
Snyder wrote that he had investigated the situation and discovered that two or three Chiefs players were thought to have been cooperating with gamblers and throwing games.
Mobster Jimmy Fratianno told Malone, “For years, bookmakers were always skeptical about Kansas City. When money starts showing up on a team, there is a reason for it . . . When everybody starts coming in and bets Kansas City—Kansas City or the other side, it doesn’t matter. They know something is wrong. Either they have got some information that somebody is hurt or maybe they got a little help in there.”
Bookmaker Ed Curd told me, “What was going on with the Kansas City Chiefs was common knowledge all over the country. We took many of those games off the boards.”
Marty Kane says, “I used to find out about these Chiefs games because I worked in Las Vegas. Whenever I’d see a Kansas City game go off the board, I’d run to a pay phone and call [Gil Beckley’s junior partner] Marty Sklaroff in Miami and say, ‘Listen, bet with whoever is still playing the Chiefs for all you can take.’”
Oddsmaker Bobby Martin agreed and noted that Washington, Detroit, Oakland, San Diego, and Houston also had been taken off the boards on occasion. “It’s always hard to find out for sure what’s going on,” he told me. “I personally believed that there were two players with the Chiefs who were shaving points. They had a mutual friend betting for them, and week after week the bets got bigger and bigger. Sooner or later, the money started showing up.”
Discussing the Chiefs, sports reporter Larry Merchant wrote, “I’ve always had success betting on and against the Chiefs, which is why I have always retained a scintilla of doubt about the exact nature of their alleged misdeeds.
“I believe, absolutely, Bob Martin’s revelation about the betting pyramid that resulted in the Chiefs being taken down from the line in 1966. What I’m not so sure about is how the pyramid started.”[2]
For years, the rumors about the Kansas City Chiefs have circulated among bookmakers and gamblers. However, the origin and circumstances of this talk have never been explained. A major Mafia-connected gambler in New Orleans told me, “In the case of Kansas City being taken off the boards, it was not because of some vague rumors.” And there weren’t just gamblers who were hearing these rumors.
During the late 1960s, it was thought by federal and local law-enforcement agencies that members of the Kansas City team had been cooperating with the Beckley/Sklaroff gambling network, particularly through Kansas City mobsters, and were occasionally shaving points and even throwing games in return for a piece of the gambling action.
Throughout the 1966, 1967, and 1968 football seasons oddsmakers took several Kansas City Chiefs games off the boards—and no further bets were accepted on them. According to DOJ evidence, the FBI considered a sports-bribery investigation into an October 1, 1967, game between the Chiefs and the Oakland Raiders, which the Raiders won, 23-21. This heavily edited document, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, stated, “An investigation was initiated by the Kansas City Office . . . to determine whether a sports bribery violation had occurred involving a member of the Kansas City Chiefs football team, in the Oakland-Kansas City football game.”
The following week, the FBI monitored the game between Kansas City and the Miami Dolphins in Miami, which the Chiefs won, 24-0.
After the Chiefs’ big victory over the Dolphins, the matter was considered closed because FBI “auxiliary offices [have] failed to reflect any relevant information indicating sports-bribery violation. Information compiled does reflect that bookmakers are generally reluctant to accept bets on the Kansas City Chiefs football games because of their erratic play and alleged squad dissension.”
At the time Kansas City was off the boards, two Chiefs players were suspected to have been involved with members of the gambling community: quarterback Len Dawson and defensive back Johnny Robinson. Both players were thought to have been providing inside information to bookmakers, if not shaving points and even fixing games.
Len Dawson is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time.[3] He grew up in Alliance, Ohio, just about twenty miles from the automobile agency in Canton where the NFL was chartered in 1920. A three-letter man in football, basketball, and baseball at Alliance High School, he starred at Purdue and became an all-American. He was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1957. He remained with the team until 1959 when he was traded to Cleveland.
Dawson told me, “I started two games in five years in the NFL, but I never started and finished a game. I don’t think I ever played in two games in a row for any amount of time in those five years.
“My first year at Pittsburgh was the year [head coach] Buddy Parker quit at Detroit, and Art Rooney talked him into coaching the Steelers. Walt Kiesling drafted me. He was the head coach. Walt had some health problems, and Art didn’t want to subject him to what was looking like another losing season. So he brought Buddy over. I was the number one draft choice. Teddy Marchibroda and Jack Scarbath were the other quarterbacks. He traded those guys and he got Earl Morrall, who was with the Forty-Niners. He also brought Jack Kemp in, who was a rookie, like me. Kemp had been released by the Lions, so Buddy brought him over to the Steelers.[4] So the three quarterbacks in my first year were two rookies, Kemp and I, and Earl Morrall, who was in his second year.
“After the second game of 1958, Buddy traded Earl Morrall to Detroit for Bobby Layne. And he was the quarterback. I was at Pittsburgh for 1958 and 1959, and then I got traded to Cleveland.”
In 1962, Dawson jumped leagues to join Lamar Hunt’s Dallas Texans, which became the Kansas City Chiefs in 1963.
According to FBI records, nearly twenty games played by the Kansas City Chiefs over a period of two and a half seasons, 1966-68, were the targets of unnatural money. In a vast majority of these games, the side where the unnatural money turned up was the winner.
During that period the Chiefs won the AFL Championship in 1966 with an 11-2-1 record but lost the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game (which became known as the Super Bowl in January 1969) to the NFL’s Green Bay Packers, 35-10, on January 15, 1967. During the 1967 regular season, the Kansas City team slipped to 9-5 and did not make the AFL playoffs.[5]
According to NFL Security Chief William Hundley, the numerous Kansas City games were taken off the boards because gambling interests in Louisiana had been killing the big bookies by betting on the Chiefs. “A Baton Rouge bookmaker had beat the spread on the Chiefs something like thirteen weeks in a row,” Hundley told me.
In 1968, as the bookmakers began to loosen up the freeze on Kansas City’s games, the FBI concentrated its investigation on Eugene Nolan, a Baton Rouge bookmaker who was associated with Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, the boss of the Louisiana Mafia.
“We’re in the same area,” Nolan told me, speaking of Marcello. “One time, there were some kidnappers from Chicago who wanted a piece of my action. And I wasn’t going to give it to them. So they were coming to get my daughter, who was then a baby. And my father-in-law found out about it. He sent my wife, my daughter, and me to New York and put off-duty police officers in the house. It cost me six hundred dollars a day. The only people these cops threw off were the FBI and the IRS, who were staking out my house.
“So I called that man [Marcello] and told him what was happening. He called back and said, ‘You can come home.’ I went to see him. He threw down some pictures of the guys who were after me and said, ‘These are the motherfuckers that wanted to do it. They said they wanted some money. I told them, “If you want some money, take mine.’” He told me to go to Chicago and tell them that I already have a partner. ‘You tell them it’s me,’ the man [Marcello] said. ‘And I guarantee you that when you leave, they’ll be kissing your ass.’
“So I went to Chicago, and I told them just that. And they said, ‘If you have him as a partner, you don’t need us.’ And everything was okay. But I haven’t been back to Chicago since.”
Nolan was born in 1930 in Baton Rouge. After high school, he tried to get into Yale but did not score well enough on his college boards. He then attended Tulane but ended up at Louisiana State University, where he received his degree with honors in accounting. Through his participation in the ROTC program in college, he became an officer, first in the National Guard, followed by twelve years in the Army Reserves.
“As far back as I can remember, I’ve been gambling,” Nolan told me. “I started shooting craps when I was a child during World War II. When my high school football team had its picture taken, I wasn’t there for it. I was dealing blackjack someplace. I gambled forever, and I just got to be good.
“A brother-in-law of mine had dealt with Gil Beckley and introduced me to him right after I graduated from LSU in 1953. Gil, who was about twenty years older than me, got me to come to Newport, Kentucky, to visit with him. We later shared an apartment together in a hotel for six months. I was dealing coast to coast, but I was primarily betting. I would take a bet on occasion, but that wasn’t my business.”
Nolan had been indicted with Beckley and others for gambling violations in 1967 in New York’s Nassau County. He later pleaded guilty and received a one-year suspended sentence. Nolan was also convicted in Oklahoma for conspiring to use a telephone to carry on an illegal gambling operation. His appeals were turned down; his attorney was Washington Redskins President Edward Bennett Williams.[6]
Like Beckley, Nolan also enjoyed a relationship with the NFL. Nolan says, “Gil told me that if anything ever happened to him, he wanted me to call the NFL twice a week to tell them if any unusual money was showing up. [The DOJ’s William] Hundley was his man, and I was around Hundley a lot.”
Federal agents investigating the Kansas City Chiefs were interested in Gene Nolan because his brother, Joseph Lee, had been convicted in 1968 for participating in a conspiracy to bribe football players at Louisiana State University to fix four LSU games[7] The case became the first successful use of the Federal Sports Bribery Act of 1964. “Jo-Jo” Nolan was to have paid the LSU players off in up-front cash—through a middleman—and lay down bets for them.
An FBI source in New Orleans told special agents that Gene Nolan had been doing business with the Kansas City Chiefs, particularly Johnny Robinson, a 1960 LSU graduate and a teammate of the legendary all-American halfback Billy Cannon, who had been playing for the Houston Oilers and later the Oakland Raiders before he joined the Chiefs.[8]
Robinson, who is now the director of Johnny Robinson’s Home for Boys in Monroe, Louisiana, denies that he knew Gene Nolan. “We happened to be from the same town [Baton Rouge],” Robinson explained to me. “I just never knew the guy. I only ran into him maybe once or twice someplace. I never knew him on a personal basis.”
Dawson told me that he did not know Gene Nolan at all.
Essentially, Nolan agrees with Robinson and Dawson. “I don’t think I’ve been around Johnny more than three times,” Nolan told me. “I don’t remember speaking to him but once. And, emphatically, I don’t know Len Dawson at all.”
Nevertheless, the FBI took the New Orleans source particularly seriously because members of the Kansas City Mafia often visited New Orleans to make deals with Carlos Marcello. “The New Orleans family is like a big brother to the Kansas City mob,” a U.S. Strike Force attorney says. “Kansas City won’t do anything in a big way without Marcello’s permission.”
Aaron Kohn, the head of the New Orleans crime commission, was more specific, saying, “There is constant travel back and forth. The Kansas City mob leaders were down here constantly. They always made their first stop at Marcello’s office in the Town & Country Motel in Jefferson Parrish to pay their respects to Marcello. One of the sons in the Civella crime family was married to the daughter of a New Orleans family that was in the chicken and egg business—the principal owner of which was the Marcello mob.”
The head of the Kansas City Mafia was Nick Civella. Backed by Marcello and his gang, as well as by the Chicago Mafia, Civella took power after the Kefauver Committee hearings had been eclipsed by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting barrage. Civella’s territory covered all of eastern Kansas and western Missouri. He was backed by his ruthless brother Carl Civella. In 1966, the Civellas, through their middlemen, received a $5.5 million loan from the Teamsters’ pension fund for the purpose of completing the construction of the Landmark hotel/casino in Las Vegas, in which the family had a hidden interest.[9]
Meantime, the New Orleans informant insisted to the FBI that the September 15, 1968, game between the Chiefs and the New York Jets was being fixed for the Jets, and that the big money that would be bet on the Jets was coming from Nolan’s Baton Rouge operation.
The FBI immediately opened another sports-bribery investigation with Nolan, Robinson, and Dawson as its targets. Consequently, Nolan and both players were placed under surveillance, according to the FBI. An FBI official says that the investigators received “absolutely no cooperation from the NFL.”
The Jets, who were six-point underdogs, won the game, 20-19.
Nolan, Robinson, and Dawson all flatly deny that they had been working together in this or any other game. And the evidence I have collected from numerous sources in the gambling underworld and a variety of law-enforcement agencies clearly indicates that there was no conspiracy among Nolan and the two players, all of whom were unaware that the investigation was even going on.
Thus, in this investigation, the FBI was simply off the track. Meantime, the Chiefs continued going off the betting boards.
After defeating the twenty-one-point-underdog Denver Broncos, 34-2, on September 22, the 3-1 Chiefs were preparing to play the 1-3 Buffalo Bills on October 5, 1968. Both teams had been impressive the previous week—with the fourteen-point favorite Kansas City defeating Miami, 48-3, and Buffalo narrowly defeating the Jets, 37-35. Because the Bills’ regular quarterback, Jack Kemp, had been injured and lost for the season, the Bills coaches were experimenting at quarterback and decided to start rookie Dan Darragh against Kansas City. Consequently, the Chiefs, led by veteran Len Dawson, were heavily favored, at first, by as many as eighteen points.
However, according to FBI documents, a tremendous amount of unnatural money again began to pour in on the Bills. The amount was so great that the spread dropped from eighteen to thirteen and even to twelve in some parts of the country. The Chiefs won the game by eleven points, 18-7; those who had bet on the Bills and taken the points won. The small and middle-size bookmakers were reportedly furious because many of the bets were placed at the last minute and could not be laid off.
After the Buffalo game, Kansas City was off the boards again in Las Vegas for its 13-3 victory over the Cincinnati Bengals on October 13. While the Las Vegas bookmakers were conducting their blackout of Kansas City’s games, the Chiefs played the Oakland Raiders on October 20. It proved to be another bizarre game, because the Chiefs, led by Dawson, one of the greatest passers of all time, threw the ball only three times, the fewest passing attempts for a single game since 1950. Nevertheless, despite the lack of an aerial attack, the Chiefs won, 24-10, and upped their record to 5-1.
The Chiefs remained off the boards the following week when they defeated San Diego, 27-20. The Chiefs went back on the boards the next week as two-point underdogs against the Raiders. The Chiefs lost that game, 38-21.
Consequently, the Chiefs went off the boards for the next five weeks in their games against Cincinnati, Boston, Houston, San Diego, and Denver. Kansas City won all of these games.
But, back on the boards again on December 22 as three-point favorites in their divisional playoff against the Raiders, the Chiefs were slaughtered, 41-6. Dawson completed seventeen of thirty-six passes for 253 yards and had four interceptions.
The NFL concluded that the Chiefs’ games had been taken off the boards because the team was “too unpredictable” in 1968. NFL executives failed to note that during the 1968 season, the Chiefs had compiled a 12-2 record, which was the best in the AFL that year.[10]
Hundley denies that the NFL ever attempted to influence the government’s investigation of the Chiefs and says that his own investigation had cleared Len Dawson and Johnny Robinson. Hundley told me, “I was convinced that neither Dawson nor Robinson had ever fixed a game or shaved points.” However, Hundley does describe Dawson as “the most controversial man ever to play the game of professional football.”
At Hundley’s request, Dawson and Robinson were questioned and passed polygraph examinations in which they denied having any associations with bookmakers.[11]
Recalling the experience, Dawson told me, “It happened after practice one day. It wasn’t like I knew three days in advance that these people were coming. Hank [Stram, the Chiefs’ head coach] just said, ‘There’re some people from the league office down there, and they want to discuss something. I don’t know what it’s about. A commercial or something. You’re supposed to meet them at seven.’ I really didn’t ask any questions. Little did I know how it was going to end up.
“We met downtown at the President Hotel. And we drove out to the Best Western motel out in Overland Park on the Kansas side. When I got there, Johnny Robinson was there. And I said to myself, ‘Something’s going on here.’ The NFL people were talking about somebody [Gene Nolan] whom Johnny had known in college. I had never heard the guy’s name. Johnny never mentioned him.
“They put me in a motel room with a guy with the [polygraph] machine. I was very apprehensive when they wired me up. I’d never been attached to one of those things before. He apparently had the questions written down. He asked me my name and basic questions. ‘Now are you familiar with [Nolan]? Did you ever meet him? Did you ever talk to him? Did you shave points? Did you try to fix games?’ I passed the test. I never bet on anything but cards or a golf game in my entire life.”
Dawson adds, “Up to that time, I had no idea that there was an investigation going on. I was pissed because it was just thrown at me. I was upset with Stram because he didn’t give me a hint as to what was going on.”
When I asked Stram for his explanation of the suspicions revolving around the Chiefs, he replied, “I never paid any attention to it. I didn’t know if we were off the boards or on the boards. The first time I heard about this off-the-boards thing, a very dear friend of mine, Tony Zoppi, who worked in Las Vegas, called me and said, ‘Hey, coach, there’s a guy here in town, a bookmaker, who really hates your team. He said that a couple of guys on your team were gambling and throwing games.’” Stram told me that Zoppi had identified the bookmaker as Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder.
Stram added, “Later, after I started broadcasting games and Jimmy was with CBS, he mentioned to me, ‘You had two guys on your team who were throwing games: Johnny Robinson and Lenny Dawson.’ I said, ‘Jimmy, how can you so irresponsibly make those kinds of statements about these two kids? I recruited Lenny at Purdue. I know his moral, social, and athletic fiber. There is just no way in the world that Lenny Dawson would be involved in something like that, nor would Johnny Robinson.’”
In December 1968, Bill Hundley resigned as the director of NFL Security and was succeeded by Jack Danahy, a Columbia law school graduate and a former FBI special agent who had headed the New York office’s organized-crime division. A man with a history of military-intelligence experience, he had monitored German intelligence for the FBI during World War II, and he later became an expert on Soviet espionage.
“I became the director of NFL Security through Bill Hundley,” Danahy told me. “Before he was head of the [DOJ’s] Organized Crime and Labor Racketeering Section, he was a special assistant to the attorney general, prosecuting espionage matters. And I was the supervisor of the Soviet-espionage squad in New York. So we knew each other from back in that era.
“Then Bill switched over to organized crime in the Justice Department. At about the same time, in 1961, 1 was transferred to Washington. And then, just three months later, I was sent back to New York to take over the organized-crime squad there. So we were running on parallel tracks again.
“About the time Bill’s law practice began to pick up in Washington, Pete Rozelle wanted to have his security chief in the NFL office in New York. Bill was reluctant to leave his practice, so he told Pete he was going to have to give up the job.
“Pete asked him to recommend someone, and he recommended me. I came in on December 13, 1968. I had retired from the FBI that Friday and came to work at my new job the following Monday morning. Actually, Hundley and I overlapped a little. Pete asked me if I would come aboard for a transition period. The Super Bowl was in Miami that year, and I went down there about a week before the game to meet with Hundley and all the security representatives. In effect, Hundley broke me in. He taught me the ropes. Hundley stayed on as counsel to [NFL] Security for a year or two after that. That ended after Hundley and [his partner Robert] Peloquin split up.”
A week after Danahy’s arrival, the NFL hired Bernie Jackson as Danahy’s assistant chief. Well-qualified for the job, attorney Jackson had been a New York City police officer and later an assistant U.S. attorney.
Like his predecessors, Danahy watched the fluctuations in the betting line carefully. “We all deal with bookmakers to monitor the line,” Danahy says. “I dealt with bookmakers whom I had known when I was with the FBI—my own private sources in New York.”
Danahy’s office conducted about 50 investigations a year at first and as many as 150 by the end of his tenure in 1980. Most were background checks on prospective business partners for players, prospective new owners, and candidates to become NFL referees. Danahy and Jackson also continued a program that [Jim] Hamilton had begun, which consisted of traveling from team to team during the preseason and discussing the problems of gambling and associations with the NFL players and staff.
Most players think beyond football and plan for their futures—and they attempt to make the contacts in the outside world necessary for players to achieve their post-football goals. “Players are in the public eye,” Danahy says. “They are naturally going to attract con men. First of all, they are young men who have come right out of college. They have had a minimum amount of business experience. So they’re potential bait for business sharpies.
“We initiated a program to assist the ballplayers in business opportunities. We would investigate the individuals who were offering these deals to them to see if they were legitimate. We would give them the results of our investigations, without recommendations. And then they would have to make up their own minds.”[12]
NEXT IN PART 2: “Len Dawson under siege before Super Bowl IV”
ENDNOTES
[1] Jimmy the Greek with the editorial assistance of Mickey Herskowitz and Steve Perkins, Jimmy the Greek by Himself (New York: Playboy Press, 1975), pp. 145-46.
Snyder, whose real name is Dimetrios Georgos Synodinos, is a tenth-grade dropout from Steubenville, Ohio, and the son of a grocer in a local ma-and-pa store. The Synodinos family had been victimized by a severe act of violence. Snyder’s uncle murdered Snyder’s mother, his estranged wife, and then himself during a shooting rampage when Snyder was only nine.
Snyder pleaded no contest to interstate transportation of bets and wagering information in 1963. He was fined $10,000 and placed on probation for five years. He received a full and unconditional pardon from President Gerald Ford in December 1974. In his autobiography, Snyder wrote that he had met Ford while he was still a congressman, at the home of Robert Maheu, the liaison between the CIA and the Mafia in the Fidel Castro assassination plots (p. 238).
[2] Larry Merchant, The National Football Lottery (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1973), pp. 265-66.
[3] Dawson finished his nineteen-year career, still with the Kansas City Chiefs, in 1975. At the time of his retirement, he had earned an 82.6 passing rating—which, according to the NFL, “is based on performance standards established for completion percentage, interception percentage, touchdown percentage, and average gain. Passers are allocated points according to how their marks compare with those standards.” Only one NFL quarterback had done as well by 1975: Sonny Jurgensen, who also had an 82.6 rating and retired in 1974.
[4] Kemp left the Steelers at the end of the 1957 season and joined the Los Angeles Chargers in the first AFL season in 1960. He went to the Buffalo Bills in 1962 and played there until 1969.
[5] As Kansas City had in Super Bowl I, the Oakland Raiders lost to the Green Bay Packers, 33-14, in the second AFL-NFL World Championship Game. The game produced a $3 million gate, which was then the largest in sports history.
[6] Nolan was sentenced to prison in October 1970. He fled the country the following month and lived in fifteen countries. Finally, after fifteen months on the run, Nolan surrendered and went to jail. There, he told me, he later became a good friend of convicted former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell. Nolan was released in August 1978.
[7] The four games were LSU vs. South Carolina, September 17, 1966; LSU vs. Texas A & M, October 8, 1966; LSU vs. Kentucky, October 15, 1966; and LSU vs. Florida, October 22, 1966.
[8] Nolan—through one of his younger brothers, Charles—had become a friend of several other local sports stars, including fullback Jim Taylor, who later played for the Green Bay Packers; halfback Billy Cannon, who later played for the Houston Oilers; and basketball player Bob Pettit, who later played for the Boston Celtics.
“I used to keep away from Bob,” Nolan says. “He never had a shadow on him. He’s the all-American type. And I like him. But I used to stay on the other side of the room if we were in the same place—because I gambled and he was a professional athlete.
“One time, Jimmy Taylor came up to me and grabbed me around the neck and said, ‘What’s the matter with you? Why aren’t you speaking to me?’ And I said, ‘Oh, Jimmy, I’m gambling, and you’re playing football.’ He said, ‘I’ve known you all my life. You mean we can’t even talk?’” Nolan described Taylor as “the cleanest man I ever knew.” He added that Billy Cannon was “lily white.”
Cannon completed his career with the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970. In 1983, Cannon, by then a successful Baton Rouge dentist, pleaded guilty for his role in a $6 million counterfeiting scheme. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Earlier in the year, Cannon had been selected to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. However, his induction was withdrawn after his conviction.
[9] Responsible for arranging the loan was Kansas City Teamsters official Roy Williams, who was owned by the Civellas. Williams later became general president of the union. Also, six years before the pension fund loan, both Nick and Carl Civella, along with Motel Grezebrenacy of Kansas City, were listed in the original 1960 Las Vegas “Black Book,” a distinction for those who are forbidden to enter any Nevada casino. Other charter members include John Battaglia, Tom Dragna, Bobby Garcia, and Joe Sica of Los Angeles; Marshall Caifano, Sam Giancana, and Murray Humphreys of Chicago; and Mike Coppola of Miami and New York.
[10] Coincidently, in the midst of the NFL investigation of Dawson and Robinson, the league suspended six-game officials in December 1968 for the remainder of the season after they made a serious mistake that cost the Los Angeles Rams a down during the final seconds of their game against the Chicago Bears. The Bears won, 17-16. The error occurred while the game clock was running down and after a Rams lineman was cited for holding during a first-down play that resulted in an incomplete pass. The Rams were penalized ten yards. At the time of the penalty, the Rams were on the Bears thirty-two-yard line.
When play resumed, the Rams should have had the ball first down and twenty-five on the forty-seven. Instead, the referee said it was second down and twenty-five. Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel then threw three more incomplete passes. Out of downs, according to the officials, the ball was turned over to the Bears with five seconds left in the game. The 10-2-1 Rams immediately lost the divisional championship to the 12-1 Baltimore Colts, whom the Rams played the following week in what would have been the decisive game.
The suspended officials were referee Norm Schachter, umpire Joe Connell, head linesman Burl Toler, line judge Jack Fette, back judge Adrian Burk, and field judge George Ellis. Toler received the blame for the mistake. However, all game officials are equally responsible for keeping track of the downs in a game.
There was no evidence of any wrongdoing among the officiating crew, which was considered among the best in the league.
[11] The polygraph examinations were conducted by former FBI special agent Tom McShane. The fact that Dawson had taken the test was not revealed until January 1970.
[12] One of the biggest problems faced by NFL Security is impersonations, people impersonating NFL players. “They were often involved in fraud and passing bad checks,” Danahy says. “Every year when the training camps were being conducted, we would get a rash of impersonators in the areas of the training camps. Some guy who looked and smelled like a football player would walk into a local bar with a couple of friends who would drop the word that he was Joe Schmoe, the new prized draftee of the local team. The next thing, he’d be writing a check to buy his friends a few drinks and whatever. Then two or three days later, we’d start getting calls from the owners of the bars, who were complaining that our ballplayers’ checks had bounced. Of course, the ballplayers had been nowhere near the places. It was the impersonators.”
Dan nailed this story. I am going to re-read his book. The information he put together deserves a Pulitzer award.
Great reporting. Very important work.