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By Charles Elmore, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 8, 2001
Fifty years after its most
infamous gambling scandal, college basketball is wrestling with the demon again.
The dismissal of University of Florida guard Teddy Dupay in September after a five-month investigation into his contacts with a bookmaker showed the problem is one that still reaches the highest levels of the sport. This time, it has brought down a starter on a pre-season top-five team.
In some ways, little has changed fundamentally since the 1951 scandal that forever banished City College of New York from national basketball prominence and forced powerhouse Kentucky to suspend its most cherished athletic program for a year. The problem has reappeared in one form or another in every decade and in virtually every region, from Boston College to Tulane to Arizona State to Northwestern.
The NCAA has asked Congress to stop legal betting on the sport in Nevada, but the Sept. 11 attacks have put that effort on hold. Meanwhile, illegal betting has become easier than ever.
"There are over 1,000 sites on the Internet to wager on," said Bill Saum, director of agent, gambling and amateurism activities for the NCAA. "People can do it from the convenience of their homes. They don't have to deal with bookies on the street corner."
The NCAA would like to end all betting on college sports, legal or otherwise, but once again, it probably won't happen this year.
Why? It's too popular and involves too much money. In legal betting alone, the NCAA basketball tournament will generate an estimated $100 million in wagers this year. In past years, the amount spent on the college tournament often has exceeded that wagered on the Super Bowl.
That doesn't count illegal betting, including office pools, estimated to be worth $4 billion to $5 billion over the course of a season. That's where the public-relations dilemma comes in. Reformers look like stodgy prohibitionists if they try to stamp out the friendly, local office pool. But if they wink at it, they're halfway to conceding that gambling is too powerful to be fenced out of college basketball's neighborhood.
Betting on college basketball has become an industry. And it's one that creates a huge incentive for gamblers to pay amateur players -- some of them still teenagers, living in a dorm or apartment and eating cafeteria food -- to influence the outcome.
In some cases, such as the Boston College scandal of the late 1970s, there were fairly clear ties to organized crime. Wise guys handled the payoffs and collected the winnings from crooked bets. How did it work? Players sometimes deliberately lost games, but more often they "shaved points." They missed a free throw here, or a layup there, in order not to win by as much as bookmakers predicted. Players wound up in prison (one got 29 months), yet gambler and small-time hood Henry Hill never served a day, even though he was the one who actually paid off the players. He was the government's star witness.
The new face of gambling necessarily isn't Don Corleone. It's more like Bill Gates with a sports jones -- a young, computer-savvy entrepreneur.
Take the case of Dupay, who ranked third all-time in three--point shots at UF. He gave inside information about injuries and the Gators' ability to beat the point spread to Kresten Lagerman, 23, a finance major who graduated from Florida in May, according to a police complaint.
"I understand that I have violated NCAA rules and I take full responsibility for those actions," Dupay said when he stepped down from the team in September. "I put myself in a situation that I should not have put myself in, and I am paying the price for that."
Dupay is listed as an uncharged co-defendant in the case. The University of Florida Police Department gathered evidence on Lagerman concerning charges of unlawful betting and "tampering with a witness, victim or informant."
Lagerman shared an off-campus apartment with Dupay and UF players Brent Wright and Udonis Haslem last season, though the other players were not implicated. Phone records reportedly showed calls to a Jacksonville bookmaker were made on Dupay's personal line.
State Attorney Bill Cervone in Gainesville said Dupay is not facing criminal charges at this time, and he has not decided whether to prosecute Lagerman. But Dupay's days playing college ball are over, and his pro career, if any, begins under a cloud.
The Dupay case comes on the 50th anniversary of the City College of New York scandal, the first great traumatic event linking gambling and college basketball.
New York jeweler Salvatore Sallazzo liked to gamble, and he particularly liked college basketball. The pro game was in its infancy, but college contests drew up to 18,000 fans and were popular as a focus of illegal but widespread wagering. Newspapers printed a "line" on each game.
Some of the best players were from New York, places like Manhattan and City College. Sallazzo had friends who knew the area players from summer camps. Sallazzo paid them up to $1,500 each. Eventually, the scandal would involve 35 players accused of fixing 86 games. Twenty players and 14 gamblers were indicted and convicted.
More recent cases have exposed what is often a powerful motivation for the players to go along -- they have become gamblers themselves, and find themselves in debt.
In 1997, former Arizona State players Stevin Smith and Isaac Burton Jr. admitted fixing four games in exchange for their debts being forgiven and an additional payment of $20,000. Arizona State student Benny Silman, described as the mastermind of the scheme, got 46 months in federal prison.
At Northwestern, two players fell under the sway of their bookie, former Notre Dame football kicker Kevin Pendergast. He bribed them to shave points. The case came to light in 1998. He served two months behind bars; Kenneth Dion Lee and Dewey Williams each got a month.
At Tulane, the school came out worse than star player John "Hot Rod" Williams. His NBA career was delayed for a year, but he wound up signing with Cleveland for a league-high $5 million per year. Tulane dropped the sport for four years.
This spring, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee passed legislation cosponsored by Sen. John Edwards that would outlaw gambling at Nevada casinos on college basketball and other sports.
"I think it is very important for us to send a clear and unmistakable signal that we do not condone gambling on college sports," Edwards said.
The Amateur Sports Integrity Act would ban betting on college sports in Nevada, the only state where it is now legal, according to Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain.
The Nevada exemption "puts the young people who play the games in an untenable position," said Dr. William Friday, former president of the University of North Carolina and co-chairman of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.
The money surrounding gambling is perhaps the greatest known threat to the integrity of the game, Penn State basketball player Titus Ivory told the committee: "You have the availability of quick money when you really have none in your pocket."
Not everyone agrees about the solution. Former college and Olympic coach Pete Newell testified, "It isn't Nevada that is the problem; it is the illegal bookies and widespread illegal gambling that occurs elsewhere that is to blame."
The NCAA's Saum believes closing down the legal betting would send the right message. "In the last two cases, at Arizona and Northwestern, money was laid legally in Las Vegas," Saum said.
Defenders of legal gambling say it isn't necessary to shut down an industry to stop the bad guys who actually try to corrupt the players. Nevada senator Harry Reid stormed out of one meeting about the bill. Amid more pressing terrorism concerns, the measure is not on a fast track.
The NCAA presses ahead with its efforts. These include public-service announcements on TV and in stadiums urging players not to become involved with betting. The organization shares information with the FBI.
The biggest challenge is conveying to young players what is at stake, Saum said.
Dupay found out. His college career is all past tense now.
"If I am ever saddened, I will close my eyes and imagine that I am running out onto the floor of the O-Dome to play in front of the greatest fans on earth," he said.
Staff researcher Dorothy Shea contributed to this report with material from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and the St. Petersburg Times.
charles_elmore@pbpost.com
Thursday, November 8, 2001
Fifty years after its most
infamous gambling scandal, college basketball is wrestling with the demon again.
The dismissal of University of Florida guard Teddy Dupay in September after a five-month investigation into his contacts with a bookmaker showed the problem is one that still reaches the highest levels of the sport. This time, it has brought down a starter on a pre-season top-five team.
In some ways, little has changed fundamentally since the 1951 scandal that forever banished City College of New York from national basketball prominence and forced powerhouse Kentucky to suspend its most cherished athletic program for a year. The problem has reappeared in one form or another in every decade and in virtually every region, from Boston College to Tulane to Arizona State to Northwestern.
The NCAA has asked Congress to stop legal betting on the sport in Nevada, but the Sept. 11 attacks have put that effort on hold. Meanwhile, illegal betting has become easier than ever.
"There are over 1,000 sites on the Internet to wager on," said Bill Saum, director of agent, gambling and amateurism activities for the NCAA. "People can do it from the convenience of their homes. They don't have to deal with bookies on the street corner."
The NCAA would like to end all betting on college sports, legal or otherwise, but once again, it probably won't happen this year.
Why? It's too popular and involves too much money. In legal betting alone, the NCAA basketball tournament will generate an estimated $100 million in wagers this year. In past years, the amount spent on the college tournament often has exceeded that wagered on the Super Bowl.
That doesn't count illegal betting, including office pools, estimated to be worth $4 billion to $5 billion over the course of a season. That's where the public-relations dilemma comes in. Reformers look like stodgy prohibitionists if they try to stamp out the friendly, local office pool. But if they wink at it, they're halfway to conceding that gambling is too powerful to be fenced out of college basketball's neighborhood.
Betting on college basketball has become an industry. And it's one that creates a huge incentive for gamblers to pay amateur players -- some of them still teenagers, living in a dorm or apartment and eating cafeteria food -- to influence the outcome.
In some cases, such as the Boston College scandal of the late 1970s, there were fairly clear ties to organized crime. Wise guys handled the payoffs and collected the winnings from crooked bets. How did it work? Players sometimes deliberately lost games, but more often they "shaved points." They missed a free throw here, or a layup there, in order not to win by as much as bookmakers predicted. Players wound up in prison (one got 29 months), yet gambler and small-time hood Henry Hill never served a day, even though he was the one who actually paid off the players. He was the government's star witness.
The new face of gambling necessarily isn't Don Corleone. It's more like Bill Gates with a sports jones -- a young, computer-savvy entrepreneur.
Take the case of Dupay, who ranked third all-time in three--point shots at UF. He gave inside information about injuries and the Gators' ability to beat the point spread to Kresten Lagerman, 23, a finance major who graduated from Florida in May, according to a police complaint.
"I understand that I have violated NCAA rules and I take full responsibility for those actions," Dupay said when he stepped down from the team in September. "I put myself in a situation that I should not have put myself in, and I am paying the price for that."
Dupay is listed as an uncharged co-defendant in the case. The University of Florida Police Department gathered evidence on Lagerman concerning charges of unlawful betting and "tampering with a witness, victim or informant."
Lagerman shared an off-campus apartment with Dupay and UF players Brent Wright and Udonis Haslem last season, though the other players were not implicated. Phone records reportedly showed calls to a Jacksonville bookmaker were made on Dupay's personal line.
State Attorney Bill Cervone in Gainesville said Dupay is not facing criminal charges at this time, and he has not decided whether to prosecute Lagerman. But Dupay's days playing college ball are over, and his pro career, if any, begins under a cloud.
The Dupay case comes on the 50th anniversary of the City College of New York scandal, the first great traumatic event linking gambling and college basketball.
New York jeweler Salvatore Sallazzo liked to gamble, and he particularly liked college basketball. The pro game was in its infancy, but college contests drew up to 18,000 fans and were popular as a focus of illegal but widespread wagering. Newspapers printed a "line" on each game.
Some of the best players were from New York, places like Manhattan and City College. Sallazzo had friends who knew the area players from summer camps. Sallazzo paid them up to $1,500 each. Eventually, the scandal would involve 35 players accused of fixing 86 games. Twenty players and 14 gamblers were indicted and convicted.
More recent cases have exposed what is often a powerful motivation for the players to go along -- they have become gamblers themselves, and find themselves in debt.
In 1997, former Arizona State players Stevin Smith and Isaac Burton Jr. admitted fixing four games in exchange for their debts being forgiven and an additional payment of $20,000. Arizona State student Benny Silman, described as the mastermind of the scheme, got 46 months in federal prison.
At Northwestern, two players fell under the sway of their bookie, former Notre Dame football kicker Kevin Pendergast. He bribed them to shave points. The case came to light in 1998. He served two months behind bars; Kenneth Dion Lee and Dewey Williams each got a month.
At Tulane, the school came out worse than star player John "Hot Rod" Williams. His NBA career was delayed for a year, but he wound up signing with Cleveland for a league-high $5 million per year. Tulane dropped the sport for four years.
This spring, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee passed legislation cosponsored by Sen. John Edwards that would outlaw gambling at Nevada casinos on college basketball and other sports.
"I think it is very important for us to send a clear and unmistakable signal that we do not condone gambling on college sports," Edwards said.
The Amateur Sports Integrity Act would ban betting on college sports in Nevada, the only state where it is now legal, according to Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain.
The Nevada exemption "puts the young people who play the games in an untenable position," said Dr. William Friday, former president of the University of North Carolina and co-chairman of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.
The money surrounding gambling is perhaps the greatest known threat to the integrity of the game, Penn State basketball player Titus Ivory told the committee: "You have the availability of quick money when you really have none in your pocket."
Not everyone agrees about the solution. Former college and Olympic coach Pete Newell testified, "It isn't Nevada that is the problem; it is the illegal bookies and widespread illegal gambling that occurs elsewhere that is to blame."
The NCAA's Saum believes closing down the legal betting would send the right message. "In the last two cases, at Arizona and Northwestern, money was laid legally in Las Vegas," Saum said.
Defenders of legal gambling say it isn't necessary to shut down an industry to stop the bad guys who actually try to corrupt the players. Nevada senator Harry Reid stormed out of one meeting about the bill. Amid more pressing terrorism concerns, the measure is not on a fast track.
The NCAA presses ahead with its efforts. These include public-service announcements on TV and in stadiums urging players not to become involved with betting. The organization shares information with the FBI.
The biggest challenge is conveying to young players what is at stake, Saum said.
Dupay found out. His college career is all past tense now.
"If I am ever saddened, I will close my eyes and imagine that I am running out onto the floor of the O-Dome to play in front of the greatest fans on earth," he said.
Staff researcher Dorothy Shea contributed to this report with material from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and the St. Petersburg Times.
charles_elmore@pbpost.com
Beware of the EGGHEAD!
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