The NFL, the Mafia, Ronald Reagan and Fixing Elections

Many of us saw the last Super Bowl. If you are a Steelers fan you're most likely defending the performance of the officiating crew. If you're the other 80% who answered ESPN's poll "Do you think the officiating wrongly influenced the outcome of the Super Bowl?" however, you, like the rest of the world, saw some of the worst officiating in sports history. So bad, in fact, that unlike ESPN commentators I have no reservations whatsoever in saying it most likely was a fixed game.

Now some of you might not buy into that. How can an NFL game possibly be fixed? Quite easily in fact, and it's been going on for decades.

It's all recorded in Dan Moldea's book Interference . Excerpts of which can be found at:

www.moldea.com/nfl.html

For instance:

Remember the Chicago-Carolina game where Chicago's defense mysteriously disappeared?

Defensive back Dick "Night Train" Lane, formerly of the Detroit Lions and also a member of the Hall of Fame, told me that while he was a player he was once approached by Donald Dawson, the Detroit gambler who was later linked in a federal probe with Len Dawson, who was no relation. Recalling the incident, which he did not report to the NFL, Lane says, "Don told me, 'Quarterbacks do a lot of betting themselves. Did you know that?' I said [laughing], 'Get out of here.' He said, 'You know it can be done, Night Train. You're the only man between the goal post and a receiver. You can slip and fall and let the guy score.'"

It used to be the ballplayers that were targeted because they needed the money, but not anymore:

Oddsmaker Bobby Martin remembers, "There were a lot of fixed games during the 1950s, but there's nothing like that anymore. Years ago, players bet, mostly on their own teams. They'd say, 'Oh, I see we're six point favorites or four-point underdogs. We'll win this game. We know much better than the people who post the odds about what we can do.' And then they'd bet $100 or $200.

"But, now, the players are paid too much money."

now it's the refs who need the money:

In another game-fixing conspiracy, the head of Project Layoff, an IRS gambling investigation in Nevada, provided me with evidence, indicating that two referees had allegedly participated in the fixing of no fewer than eight additional NFL games.

But that's not to say that high paid players can't be "touched" too:

The conditions under which players may be compromised are clear and present in the NFL today. "Our worst case would be the athlete who is strung out on drugs and has a line of credit with his drug dealer and can't pay the bill," says Welsh. "Then he gets that knock on the door. And [the player] says, 'Hey, I told you. I can't pay the bill.' And then [the dealer] says, 'Hey, I don't want your money, but now you're going to work for us.'"

A major West Coast bookmaker agrees, "A lot of players have gotten involved in cocaine and are well over their heads--as much as ten thousand to twenty thousand dollars a month in cocaine. There is a very real danger that if they can't pay their debt, they give information and do make some mistakes in a ball game so that the dealer can make a bet and even out. And that's a great opportunity for a bookmaker, too: to set up something for a cocaine dealer and find out information that way."

Will the NFL work to stop it?

Aaron Kohn, the former executive director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, told me, "They [the NFL owners] have a tendency to employ as security people former FBI agents and other people of confidence who do competent investigations and do accumulate adverse information. But at the policy-making level, the decisions are not made consistent with the fact-finding.

"I know that the NFL can't go too far. They are going to do whatever they have to to prevent the problems of their owners and players and their overall profits from becoming subjects of public scrutiny."

One top NFL official says, "We've had owners that have supposedly been friends or associates of mobsters, and when we looked into it they had dinner in a restaurant, maybe four or five times in a year." Nevertheless, the NFL did nothing about these owners who socialized with underworld figures.

No, in fact the NFL will actively cover it up:

Patrick Healy, the former executive director of the Chicago Crime Commission, told me, "The NFL tries to give you the public Kiwanis Club talk: 'We have very little gambling; we have very little drugs. We have everything under control. We have FBI agents working for us, and whenever any rumor comes out they pounce on it. They discover it. They investigate it.' Actually, the whole thing is really just a witch tale."

Former Senate investigator Phil Manuel, another critic of the NFL security system, told me, "The oldest trick in the world is to hire old Justice Department officials and then make them understand that the security they are to protect is the security of the NFL owners.

"These retired law enforcement guys maintain their ties to their old agencies, and they can then tell which investigations are being done and whether they might be troublesome. When some wrongdoing is ready to go public, the NFL Security people can go to their old fellow workers and say, 'We can handle this ourselves. Give us a chance to straighten the mess out without all the attention your public investigation will bring.'"

Ralph Salerno, the former chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, goes even further. "How does the NFL protect itself with one guy in each NFL city? They do it illegally. The local NFL Security guy takes the local police commissioner, the chief of detectives, and any other important law enforcement official and gives him season tickets and box seats. They get wined and dined and taken out to play golf.

"And then these public employees who are paid with public funds come up with criminal information and turn it over to profit-making corporations, like the New York Giants, the Cincinnati Bengals, and so on. And that is illegal. Do the police do that for every trucking company or every furniture manufacturer? Of course not. It would be illegal for them to do it with anyone. But they do it for the NFL. That whole NFL Security operation that Rozelle [bragged] about is simply an illegal operation."

Now why do I bring Ronald Reagan into this discussion? Because Dan Moldea also wrote the book Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob wherein he details the rise of the Chicago mob to the rise of MCA. Interestingly enough, he points out that Ronald Reagan is the central figure in the MCA's rise to power:

Reagan, the president of SAG and an FBI informant against Hollywood communists, was the subject of a federal grand jury investigation whose focus was Reagan's possible role in a suspected conspiracy between MCA and the actors' union. According to Justice Department documents, government prosecutors had concluded that decisions made by SAG while under Reagan's leadership became "the central fact of MCA's whole rise to power."

So it should come as no surprise that the most beloved figure of the Neocon Movement was wholly in the pocket of the Mob:

During the presidential campaign, Reagan met privately with known associates of organized crime and appointed others to his personal campaign staff. Several of these people were later given high positions in the Reagan administration after his election. President Reagan talked tough about the organized crime problem in the United States, while surrounding himself with many who were closely linked to those who have created it.

In our present government we see a cadre of administration and Republican luminaries who all spawned from the waters of Ronald Reagans cesspool. If organized crime can fix the Super Bowl, don't you think they would fix something as all powerful to them as our elections?

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