Free Interference by Dan E. Moldea Page B

Chicago street on June 24, 1946. He died from his wounds seven weeks later.
    Indicted for the Ragen murder were David Yaras and LeonardPatrick. Yaras, a non-Italian/Sicilian member of the Chicago Mafia, was a henchman for Chicago Mafia chiefs Accardo and Sam Giancana. However, the two key witnesses against Yaras and Patrick were murdered; two others then refused to testify. Consequently, the case was dropped. 6 Yaras, who was among the first Chicago mobsters to “discover” Florida after Al Capone went to prison, was a key figure in the Continental Racing Wire and an ally of Mickey McBride.
    Soon after, McBride, again in his son’s name, bought out Ragen’s two-thirds interest from Ragen’s son. Trans-American immediately folded, and its customers were given to Continental, clearly indicating Accardo’s approval of McBride.
    Joe Nellis, the assistant counsel of the Kefauver Committee, told me that there was high drama when McBride was called to testify. “It took me two days to tear his ass apart,” Nellis says. “The McBride situation was a very serious matter. Here was a guy who owned the Cleveland Browns, who was in bed with a lot of gamblers and hoodlums. And he was a man people respected. They took off their hats when he came around.
    â€œHe tried to tell us that Continental Press was supplying racing wire information. That was simply not true. In the end, we undid Continental. It went out of business shortly after we exposed McBride as a supplier of illegal information to bookmakers all over the country about all sports.”
    McBride was indeed the embodiment of the connection between organized crime and professional sports. In its final report, the Kefauver Committee charged that McBride was “making a gift to the Mafia-affiliated Capone mob in Chicago of about $4,000 a week.” The committee also concluded that as a result of the national network created by McBride, “the Capone affiliates and the Mafia are now in control of the distribution of racing wire news with a resultant source of enormous profits and power over bookmaking.”
    Another target of the Kefauver investigation was Chicago Cardinals owner Charles Bidwill, who had died in April 1947 of bronchial pneumonia in Chicago’s St. George’s Hospital. 7 Aside from his interest in the Cardinals, the fifty-one-year-old Bidwill was also president of the National Jockey Club, which operated the Sportsmen’s Park racetrack, and was the managing director of the Hawthorne racetrack. Both were located in Cicero, a Chicago suburb.
    Bidwill’s partner at Sportsmen’s Park was William H. Johnston, who was identified by the select committee as an operative in the Capone syndicate; Bidwill and Johnston had bought out Jack Keeshin, a founding member of the All-American Football Conference and the owner of the Chicago Rockets. The attorney for the two partners was Edward O’Hare, who had also represented Capone and was the business manager of the Cardinals team. O’Hare was murdered in 1939. Another investor at Sportsmen’s Park was Frank Erickson.
    During testimony before the Kefauver Committee, racetrack operator John Patton—a Chicago Mafia associate and business partner of Frank Erickson—said that he, Bidwill, and Johnston had operated Sportsmen’s Park together until Bidwill died.
    After his purchase of the Chicago Cardinals NFL franchise in 1933, Bidwill had also become the president of Bentley-Murray Printing Company, which was one of Moses Annenberg’s subsidiaries. The NFL owner and the mob-connected wire-service tycoon had been close friends for years. Still, Bidwill continued to do business with McBride and the wire-service operations after Annenberg was sent to prison.
    When I asked Nellis what danger is posed to professional sports when underworld associates like McBride and Bidwill were involved, he replied, “The shaving of points, the fixing of games, and