Interference by Dan E. Moldea

remember who it was, asked me if I wanted to go have dinner at a fan’s house one night. It was Pete Gianaris. I never knew Pete Gianaris was a gambler. I never knew what Pete Gianaris did. I won’t deny that I knew Pete Gianaris …
    â€œI never made one damn bet in my life on a football game. I made one bet in my life on a horse race. It lost, and I [vowed] that I was never going to bet again. The horse didn’t get the call.”
    Reflecting on his life playing football, Baugh says, “I enjoyed it all my damn life. Money wasn’t that important then. You did it because you enjoyed the game.”

5 The Big Fix
    ALTHOUGH BASEBALL WAS STILL king among sports gamblers, gambling on college and professional football games had increased in popularity after World War II, giving Bert Bell, the new NFL commissioner, more and larger headaches.
    Bell had replaced Elmer Layden on January 11, 1946. Bell—who received a three-year contract at $20,000 a year—sold his interest in the Pittsburgh Steelers to Art Rooney so that he could accept the position. However, he later moved the NFL’s headquarters from Chicago to One Bala Avenue in Bala-Cynwyd, just outside Philadelphia. Action had always seemed to follow Bell, and his role with the NFL would be no different.
    On December 15, 1946, just hours before the NFL championship game between the New York Giants and the Chicago Bears, New York mayor William O’Dwyer, district attorney Frank S. Hogan, and NFL officials announced that there had been an attempt to fix the game. Gambler Alvin J. Paris of Elizabeth, New Jersey, was immediately arraigned for his attempt to bribe Giants players Merle Hapes and Frank Filchock, the former backup quarterback for Sammy Baugh in Washington.
    Baugh told me, “Filchock was a real good football player. We got him on a trade from Pittsburgh. He was a good passer and a smart quarterback. I remember Mr. Marshall was talking about trading him [to the Giants in 1946]. I told him that, no matter what they did, they should never trade Filchock because he was as good a quarterback as anybody in the league at that time.”
    Baugh said that Filchock’s role in the attempted fix “surprised” him. “Filchock never got into any trouble at all at Washington as far as I knew. I remember both Filchock and Hapes. We heard they were offered the money and didn’t report it.”
    During my interview with Merle Hapes, he told me, “On the day of the championship game, Bell came with some people and picked us up. They put us into a private room. We told them we were innocent, but their announcement had already been made [that an attempt had been made to tamper with the game]. We had been blackballed, and they had to do something. They didn’t want to hear what we had to say.
    â€œSure, I knew the man [Alvin Paris], and I couldn’t lie about that. His father [Sidney Paris, who had served four years for mail fraud] was a member of the Elks in New York, and I was a member in Mississippi. The son asked me if I would throw the game, and I laughed at him. I said, ‘I could never do anything like that. Forget about me.’ Bell asked me if I took any money, and I told him, ‘I had nothing to do with it.’”
    The attempted fix had been discovered through a wiretap on Paris’s telephone. Paris was held on a $25,000 bond and was later convicted for his role in the attempted fix.
    Paris had actually fronted for three partners who were associates of Frank Erickson and had bet at least $20,000 on the Bears to win by ten points. Even after the attempted fix had been uncovered, the Bears still won the game, 24-14.
    Hapes, a fullback, was benched before the game by order of Commissioner Bell. Only Hapes’s name appeared in wiretapped conversations conducted by New York law-enforcement officials. The wiretaps indicated that past NFL games, as well as several college basketball games, also