Interference Read Online Free PDF Page B

investigations of NFL owners have ended up in “a black hole” and were never disclosed. “To me,” he says, “NFL Security is a special police force that monitors the players but protects the owners. It’s one thing to monitor the activities of the players, because they come and go. It’s quite another to monitor the activities of the owners. They seem to last forever.”
    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.
    â€œThese 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 supervisor 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-enforcementofficial and gives him season tickets and box seats. They get wined and dined and taken out to play golf.
    â€œAnd 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.”
    Welsh defends the current system. He insists that he is a “fact finder” and has never been asked to halt an investigation of any NFL personnel. “And there have never been any roadblocks put up in my path in terms of investigating anything that would have to do with a member club—whether it was a player, coach, or an owner.”
    That might be true: Warren Welsh and his predecessors have all been men of high integrity. But they have had no final decision-making powers. Thus, the real question is: What have their bosses, the NFL owners, done once they received the results of their investigations? The evidence is clear that they have protected themselves and their investments—sometimes to the detriment of the sport they represent.

2 Getting Organized
    EARLY PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL POSSESSED little finesse and only basic strategies. The public’s draw to the game was based upon its display of legal violence. During his eight-year tenure as president, Theodore Roosevelt had actively tried to ban the game because of its inherent brutality. For the most part, the players—who looked like faces on a post office wall—were picked for their size and toughness rather than their agility, intelligence, and speed. Many of them carried railroad ties, chopped wood, and cow-poked during the rest of the week. Fans came to football games to see dogfights—and to gamble.
    The only known successful bribery incident in the pre-NFL period