Free Interference by Dan E. Moldea

prosecuted.
    Ryan and Mrs. Gehrig had withdrawn their interests in the AAFC franchise before league play began. The New York franchise then went to Dan Topping, the president of the New YorkYankees baseball team. Topping had owned the Brooklyn Dodgers franchise of the NFL but switched to the AAFC, also calling his new team the New York Yankees.
    Topping’s partner in the Yankees baseball and football franchises was Del E. Webb, an associate of numerous organized-crime figures. A builder from Phoenix, Webb was the contractor selected by gangster Bugsy Siegel to build the Flamingo, the first major hotel/casino in Las Vegas. Along with his building contract, Webb also received a 10 percent interest in Siegel’s hotel. Later, Webb built and owned the Sahara hotel/casino and had other casino holdings in Las Vegas, Reno, and Lake Tahoe.
    Ben Lindheimer bought the Los Angeles franchise and called it the Los Angeles Dons, named after his partner, actor Don Ameche. Lindheimer was the overlord of Chicago’s racetracks. He was closely associated with the Chicago underworld. His personal attorney was Sidney Korshak, a young mouthpiece for the old Capone mob, who had also been hired by Ray Ryan to handle labor negotiations for RKO before the deal with Hughes collapsed.
    Through political favors and payoffs, Lindheimer was principally responsible for the creation of the Illinois Racing Commission and was appointed as the chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission. In an attempt to legalize the state’s three thousand bookmakers, Lindheimer later led the lobby to legalize offtrack betting. He was supported by the state attorney general Otto Kerner. 8 However, the governor vetoed the bill.

6 The Wire Services
    ANOTHER TEAM IN THE All-American Football Conference was the Cleveland Browns, formed by a crime-syndicate bookmaker, Arthur “Mickey” McBride. At the time he owned the Browns, McBride was the head of the Continental Racing Wire, the mob’s gambling news service—which the Special Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, better known as the Kefauver Committee—later described as “Public Enemy Number One.” 1 McBride’s partner was James M. Ragen, Sr., of Chicago.
    Born in Chicago in 1888, McBride was selling newspapers on the street at age six and became the circulation manager of William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago American in 1911. Two years later, he was sent to Cleveland by Hearst and held the same position for The Cleveland News , an afternoon paper. McBride became the newspaper’s point man in its rough-and-tumble circulation wars against The Cleveland Plain Dealer . Ragen was the circulation manager of The Cleveland Leader , the News- owned morning paper. In the midst of the battles, trucks were hijacked and people were beaten, stabbed, and shot.
    Through these wars, McBride recruited Morris Dalitz and his Cleveland-based Mayfield Road Gang for the rough stuff. McBride remained in the newspaper business until 1930 when he purchased his first taxicab company and parlayed it into the only cab company in the metropolitan Cleveland area. 2
    A shrewd businessman with a wide variety of investments inCleveland, Chicago, and the Miami area, the quiet McBride once said, “Nobody ever got rich on a salary.”
    McBride had founded the Continental Racing Wire in the wake of the collapse of the Nationwide News Service, which had been operated out of Chicago by Moses L. Annenberg, who like McBride and Ragen had started his career as a circulation manager for the Hearst newspaper chain. After Annenberg’s August 1939 indictment for criminal tax fraud, he made a deal with the government that provided that similar charges be dropped against his son Walter Annenberg and two of their associates in Nationwide. In return, Annenberg pleaded guilty, paid $9.5 million in back taxes and penalties, and went to prison in 1940. 3 Walter Annenberg closed