Alvin J. Paris

1946-1947

Alvin J. Paris ingratiated himself with two New York Giants football players by inviting them to parties at his apartment and taking them to nightclubs. He bet on a Giants game and gave them the payout, $500 each ($5,300 today). Then he made his move.

He promised them incentives to intentionally lose their upcoming playoff game against the Chicago Bears for the 1946 National Football League (NFL) Championship — $2,500 ($33,300 today) in cash, the winnings of a $1,000 ($13,300) wager on the Bears and a $15,000 ($200,000) job with the novelties shop Paris ran.

Allegedly, Frank “Frankie” J. Filchock, quarterback and halfback, refused whereas Merle Hapes, fullback, indicated he might go along with it.

Merle Hapes

The Story Gets Out

Before the Dec. 15 gridiron showdown, the NFL learned about the possible fix. The scandal went public a few hours before kickoff.

The media purported that a “big-time syndicate … said to control the betting of millions of dollars on sports events in all major cities,” was behind this scheme (United Press/Nevada State Journal, Dec. 17, 1946).

NFL Commissioner Bert Bell immediately suspended the two Giants, for a duration to be determined later. However, he allowed Filchock to play in the championship game, as the opening quarterback, reportedly because he’d denied having been approached by anyone about throwing it. The thousands of fans present booed the eight-year pro player when he was announced.

Frank Filchock

Hapes, on the other hand, admitted a gambler had tried to bribe him and, thus, was benched.

Gamblers predicted the Bears would prevail by 10 points. During play, the Giants scored two touchdowns, but Filchock’s six intercepted passes led the Bears to a 24-14 victory. As for bets placed on either team to win, the game was a push, so there weren’t any winners or losers.

In The Crosshairs

Two days later, the local grand jury returned indictments against these four allegedly involved men:

• Alvin Paris, 28, for bribery and bookmaking. Described as a playboy, Paris was the front for the New Jersey-based bookmaking enterprise of racketeer Eddie Ginsberg, his stepfather.· 

• Jerome Zarowitz, 32, for bribery and conspiracy. Zarowitz worked for Ginsberg as his handicapper, right hand man and sometimes bookie, and owned an estimated 20 percent interest in the business. Zarowitz had two previous arrests, for bookmaking, but no convictions. He was married, had one child and a clean U.S. Army military record. (Zarowitz, an alleged partner of the New York Genovese and Boston Patriarca Crime Families, later would become the casino manager of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.)

• David Krakower aka Dan Kramer, Peter Krakauer, Abe Goldstein, 44, for bribery and conspiracy. Krakower, who owned a 12.5 percent interest in Ginsberg’s book operation, was a gangster who’d served time for various charges, possession of a revolver, burglary, arson, and passing and selling counterfeit Federal Reserve bank notes.

• Harvey Stemmer, 36, for bribery and conspiracy. Stemmer, also with a 12.5 percent stake in Ginsberg’s business, was a racketeer with a family and a criminal record. When indicted, he was serving prison time for attempted bribery of Brooklyn College basketball players two years earlier.

While cases against the quartet were being pursued, the NFL “sought to restore public confidence in the integrity of the ‘pro’ game,” the United Press reported (Nevada State Journal, Dec. 17, 1946).

“We are ready to take steps to combat and kill this evil thing,” Commissioner Bell said.

One Down, Three To Go

Paris, still in jail because he couldn’t raise his $28,000 ($327,000 today) bail, was the first to stand trial. There, the prosecutor introduced Paris’ full previous confession and had both Hapes and Filchock testify. Filchock admitted Paris had broached a fix with him, too.

The defense didn’t call any witnesses.

After 65 minutes of deliberating, the jurors, sequestered throughout the proceedings, found Paris guilty.

Case Against The “Conspirators”

The joint trial of Zarowitz and Stemmer, who’d pleaded innocent, and Krakower, who’d pleaded guilty, took place in March. Prosecutor George Monaghan accused the trio of “counseling and commanding” Paris in the attempted bribery of Filchock and Hapes, the Associated Press reported (Reno Evening Gazette, March 5, 1947).

As the state’s key witness, Paris testified to all of his related interactions with the defendants. (After his time on the stand, Paris received death threats.)

Patrolman Joseph Jove spoke to the contents of conversations he overheard through the 10-day wiretap on Paris’ phone leading up to the championship game. Jove’s testimony tied Stemmer, Krakower and Zarowitz to Paris’ bribing of the Giants footballers.

In his closing argument, Monaghan said, “A fine sport is now contaminated by lice and rodents. It is a good opportunity for this jury to delouse the sport and get rid of the lice that infest it” (Nevada State Journal, March 9, 1947).

The Final Fallout

The jurors found all three defendants guilty, and the judge gave them prison sentences. Krakower and Stemmer’s was five to 10 years. Zarowitz’s was up to three years. Subsequently, Paris was given a one year jail term, given his cooperation with the state.

Krakower and Stemmer appealed the ruling. However, in 1949 the Supreme Court of New York affirmed the lower court’s decision. 

As for the two Giants players, Filchock’s NFL suspension was for three years, between 1947 and 1950. Hapes’ was for life, which would earn the No. 3 spot in 2015 on WhatCulture.com’s list of the “10 Most Severe NFL Suspensions Ever.”

“They barred me for telling the truth,” Hapes told the press (Nevada State Journal, April 27, 1947). “Maybe I should have lied to them. I never did a thing wrong. I just made a stupid mistake by associating with Paris Alvin, gambler.”

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Which NFL teams do you predict will compete in this bizarre season’s (2020) conference championships?

Sources

1935

Stanford University’s (California) Indians and Southern Methodist University’s (Texas) Mustangs were to vie in the Rose Bowl football game on New Year’s Day, and this meant trains of people traveling from The Lone Star State to Pasadena.

Texas officials warn any gamblers with ideas of operating games of chance on those trains that special agents will be on board to curtail such activities. (The game odds favored the Mustangs, yet the Indians won, 7 to 0.)

Photo from freeimages.com: by J. Hodge

1937

The Great American Football Pool (GAFP) of 1937 was to be of massive scale and the first of its kind in the U.S.

The organizers aimed to sell 3 million tickets at $1 apiece and award sizable prizes: $100,000 to the first place winner, $50,000 to the second and $25,000 to the third in addition to 2,100 other weekly awards totaling $424,500.

And similar to the popular Irish Sweepstakes, which many Americans participated in, a percentage of the proceeds — 10 percent, or $300,000 in this case — would go toward building a children’s hospital in Reno, Nevada.

“Americans generally, however, associate the Irish Sweeps with charity, never with rackets, and until recently the great lottery has run without a single sharp glance being cast in its direction,” wrote Fred J. Cook in A Two-Dollar Bet Means Murder. “It is made to appear that the huge Irish Sweepstakes pot is divided 75 percent in cash prizes returned to the winners, 25 percent to the hospitals in Ireland.”

For the GAFP, San Francisco, California resident, Charles Warren, formed a Nevada corporation, obtained the requisite gaming license and opened a Reno office, where all operations had to be carried out to be legal.

“We will not have any solicitors in any other city and positively will not use the federal mails in any way. We believe, and so do leading lawyers in Reno, San Francisco and Los Angeles, that there is nothing illegal about the pool,” Warren told the Nevada State Journal (June 17, 1937), emphasizing that it was not a lottery or sweepstakes, which are illegal under state and national laws.

In terms of how the pool was to work, participants would select a number with each ticket they purchased. That figure was their guesstimate of this: the total points to be scored by 40 specified U.S. college football teams throughout the upcoming season multiplied by the total number of games all teams cumulatively would play.

The first place prize would go to the ticket holder who guessed the correct number. Second, third and subsequent awards would go to the individuals with the next closest guesses.

Not In The Business Plan

GAFP ticket sales started in September. Within two weeks, bunco squad police in San Francisco, California arrested Warren, two employees and three promoters of the pool, one of whom, Jack Ferdinand Van, police said was the operation’s mastermind. They were charged with theft conspiracy for selling tickets outside of Nevada. Officers said the football pool was being operated as a lottery and was arranged such that it would be impossible for anyone to win the first prize.

These arrests led to an investigation in Reno, in which it was discovered GAFP Inc. had sent tickets via car to sales representatives in San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta and Van Horn (Texas) and tickets had been sold in nearly every state. Also, GAFP Inc. hadn’t secured any property for the hospital.

In early October, sheriff’s deputies raided the GAFP’s Reno office, seizing ticket books and pool promotional literature and advertisements. They arrested the three employees present — the Reno manager/secretary-treasurer, the publicity agent and the accountant — for violating Nevada’s anti-lottery law. Authorities closed the office and revoked the corporation’s gaming license.

During the trial for the three men arrested in Reno, the state contended that the football pool was a lottery scheme. The defense claimed it wasn’t and had been approved by the city and county authorities when they granted licenses. The jury acquitted the three defendants.

Meanwhile, a San Francisco grand jury indicted six men on two charges each: conspiracy to violate the California lottery law and conspiracy to commit grand theft in operating the GAFP. These individuals included Van, three promoters and two employees. Interestingly, Warren, the president, wasn’t among them. All six pleaded innocent when indicted.

Their trial took place in March of 1938. One witness testified ticket sales proceeds were to be split this way: 10 percent ($300,000) for the hospital, 23 1/3 percent ($699,900) for prizes, 33 1/3 ($999,900) percent for ticket sales commissions and the other third ($999,000) for GAFP Inc.

The jury found the two employees not guilty but convicted the remaining four. Of them, the judge sentenced Van, the pool leader, to a two-year prison term in San Quentin State Prison in light of his previous record. The three promoters were placed on probation.

The Great American Football pool turned out to be not so great.

Sources

1948

The November 22, 1948 issue of Sports-Week roiled Nevada Wolf Pack fans and supporters.

Bevy Of Allegations

An article in that edition of the nationally circulated digest charged that the University of Nevada* (UN) football team had thrown the game against Santa Clara two weeks earlier, on November 7, “for the specific benefit of Nevada gamblers” — casino owners and operators and bookmakers — who’d made “a killing” on it (Reno Evening Gazette, Nov. 30, 1948).

The Nevada Wolf Pack had been favored in that game; the Santa Clara Broncos had been a 21-point underdog. The loss cost the Pack a bowl bid.

The story asserted that Renoites were saddened by the Wolf Pack’s 14-0 loss to the Broncos, except for an “exclusive group of bookies who were on the ‘in’ and a few dozen assorted Nevada football players who were on their payroll” (The Camden News, Nov. 20, 1948).

Those players, the article explained, which included All-America candidate, quarterback Stan Heath, received weekly paychecks from the area gambling clubs, a charge the casinos subsequently denied. (Some players worked in the gambling clubs only during summers, they said.)

The exposé noted that Nevada casinos donated large sums to UN in what appeared publicly to be a gracious act but in reality was to buy off the necessary officials so the football team would win or lose as instructed. Reno casino owners gave $30,000 (about $304,000 today) as “a direct subsidy to the university and planted their $40,000,000 per annum business [$406 million today] squarely behind the ostensibly noble purpose of building a national gridiron power,” wrote Don Freeberg, staff writer for the New York-based publication.

Up In Arms

The response in The Silver State to the Sports-Week piece was swift and adamant. Several Nevada attorney-politicians even volunteered to intervene: Patrick “Pat” A. McCarran, then U.S. senator  for Nevada; E.P. Carville, former U.S. senator and governor; and Morley Griswold, former governor.

As a policy, most of the large casinos in Northern Nevada didn’t accept bets on Nevada football games, they clarified through the media. Those that did noted that $500 ($5,000 today) at most had been wagered on the Pack-Broncos game locally.

UN’s newspaper, The Sagebrush, published an editorial demanding action against Sports-Week.

“If the athletic board sits back and allows this incident to pass unnoticed, many will reason it is true,” it read. “It is time to stop ignoring accusations and time to start making a few people eat their insidious remarks. In the event such action does not come, it is time for the board of regents to take over and protect its interests.”

School athletics officials — Joe Sheeketski, director of athletics and head football coach, and Harry Frost, chairman of UN’s board of athletic control — publicly denied the allegations. They had the law firm, Thatcher, Woodburn and Forman, demand that Sports-Week publisher Marty Berg print a full retraction of the story or face a libel suit. In their letter, the attorneys wrote:

“The University of Nevada athletic department makes a categorical and complete denial of the charges and insinuations contained in the article. The charges in your article are infamous, untrue and damaging to Nevada athletics, to the members of the athletic department and to the boys on the Nevada squad.”

Editor Backpedals, Sort Of

Berg issued a public statement in which he didn’t admit any wrongdoing or regret. Sports-Week hadn’t run the article with malicious intent or carelessness, he said. Rather, it published it “in the interest of clean sports in this country which is especially needed so far as college football is concerned.”

He shifted blame to UN officials, saying they’d read into the article charges that weren’t there, perhaps his way of backing off the accusations.

Yet, he seemed to re-level the allegations in his concluding remark: “We commend the Nevada situation to the governor of that state. We believe it warrants his inspection, if Nevada is to occupy any wholesome position in college athletics in this country.”

Berg agreed to print the Reno attorneys’ letter in full in the upcoming December 6 issue. Presumably, he did, as the university didn’t sue Sports-Week. Instead, it let the issue die a quick death.

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* The university was located in Reno. Today, the university is called the University of Nevada, Reno to be distinguished from its southern counterpart, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which didn’t exist then.

What do you think? Did the Wolf Pack throw the game for the casinos?

Do any of you have either of these Sports-Week issues, November 7 or December 6, 1948? It’d be great to see the article and subsequent letter in full.

Sources

Photo from University of Nevada, Reno’s Wolf Pack Athletics Digital Collection