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Mob Fixes Yankee Games!!
Tonight on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel on HBO: The mob is making claims that they fixed Yankee games during the period they won the World Series in the seventies. The charges made by Michael Franzese, a once-powerful capo in the Colombo crime family, are "absolutely beyond belief," fumed Yankee spokesman Howard Rubenstein. Franzese, says that in the late '70s, several well-known players began gambling with Colombo bookies. Some of the players had gambling problems."They got into trouble, couldn't pay the debt and eventually I got involved. "I spoke with them and said, 'You gotta work this out, get the money, borrow the money, do what you have to do. And if all else fails, I got another way for you to make it up: You're gonna help us win a game.' The Yanks won the World Series in 1977 and 1978. Franzese did not identify which games were allegedly fixed or what players were involved. "We'd tell them: 'Whatever it is you have to do . . . and if that ball comes to you and the game is on the line, you don't catch the ball," he said. Franzese said the players were also sometimes ordered to "not perform at the plate." Franzese says he first got to know the players through his partner in a Long Island car dealership. The partner, a former athlete who was not named, was friends with some of the players and lent them cars. In 1986, Franzese was sent to the slammer for 10 years on racketeering, conspiracy and tax-fraud charges. He later quit the mob and settled in California. Former FBI agent George Randolph told "Real Sports" he is not surprised at the Yankee game-fix charges. "The mob lives to gamble, and if the mob had the opportunity to fix a game, they would do it in a nanosecond," Randolph said.
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