September 2, 2016 • 45 mins
Could it be possible that your favorite sports are fixed? Join the guys as they interview Brian Tuohy, author of The Fix is In, on the murky connections between sports, gambling, politics and organized crime in the first part of this two-episode series.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
(00:20):
name is Noel. They call me Ben, and you are you,
and this is stuff they don't want you to know.
We're doing something a little bit different to bend the
Bookie Bolling, Null Numbers, Brown, Matt is bad at Math,
Frederick Matt Mad Money Frederick. Okay, we want to introduce
(00:41):
you to a very special guest in this episode. This
is a two part episode about sports fixing, and as
we are not uh, despite our new monikers, as we
are not ourselves experts on sports fixing. No, I haven't
done much gambling at all. I've been to because you know,
two times I watched a football game on TV. Once
(01:05):
it was a date and I was trying to get
in good with this gal and she was a huge
Stanford fan. And I tell you, I sat through that
whole game like a champ, and I almost think maybe
I understand how football works. Putty Simon, Well, we've received
questions for years from you and listeners just like you
(01:26):
who have asked us to cover something like FIFA or
something like even corruption in sumo wrestling. Uh So, we
were fortunate enough to get an interview with one of
the world's pre eminent experts on sports fixing, Mr Brian Tooey. Yeah,
Brian has written extensively on the subjects. He has three
books a Season in the Abyss, The Fixes In and
(01:48):
Larceny Games, all of which dive deep into the world
of bookmaking organized crime, where the money goes in these scenarios.
And of course the question is what we're seeing legitimate?
Are these games having their outcomes manipulated by one of
several possible forces. So we'll dive into the first part
(02:13):
of the interview where we get we get a deeper
understanding of how this sort of system would work, a
look at the history of corruption in sports, and information
about what inspired Brian to again these investigations. Grant, could
(02:37):
you tell the audience and us what inspired you to
become the world's leading expert on corruption in sports? Well,
it really took off when I realized nobody else seemed
to want to do this job. I mean, I was
really just a fan of professional sports for a long
time growing up as a kid, you know, a hockey
fan to baseball fan, football fan, and what have you.
(02:59):
But as I got older and perhaps a little wiser,
I started noticing what I felt were almost like too
many coincidences that were occurring within these games, within these
sports that always seemed to benefit the league. And I
came to realize, when the leagues have the ability to
really control everything that surrounds the games, what prevented them
(03:21):
from controlling what happens within the games. And once I
kind of asked that question of myself and started doing
a little research, it kind of led me down this
path to where I am today. It's interesting that you
mentioned the way the league figures into all of this,
because obviously there is a whole lot of profits to
be made in and around professional sports, whether it's the
(03:43):
legal end of it, merchandizing ticket sales, TV deals, things
like that. We're talking billions and billions of dollars. But
when you really segment it out and you talk about
just the money that can be made out of sports betting,
how is all of this generated and what kind of
figures are we talking here? Well, the professional leagues, the
four main leagues, the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NHL,
(04:05):
in the NBA make a combined about billion dollars a
year in revenue. And as for the sports gambling end
of things, the problem is is nobody really knows because
of the sports gambling done in the United States today
is done illegally and much of that money is controlled
by organized crime. The state in Nevada, which is the
(04:27):
only place where you can legally bet on single games
and all of these sports, says they account for about
two to three percent of all the sports gambling done
in the nation and they took in about what was it,
I think about three or four billion dollars on sports betting,
which means if you extrapolate that number, it means that
(04:49):
perhaps as much as three to four hundred billion dollars
is being waged in the United States today illegally, but
nobody really knows money. Yeah, that's so much money. So
these guys that are running the books on these in
these illegal gambling operations, how do they actually make money
(05:11):
on this operation? And moreover, I mean, what's the structure
of this illegal operation? Like from you know, me being
a joe on the street that wants to you know,
place a bat on a sports game. How do I
go from point A to point B too making or
losing a whole bunch of money. Well that's the scary
part in a way, is most gamblers are recreational gamblers.
(05:32):
You know, their average Joe is or James, and they
want about twenty bucks or fifty bucks on the game
this weekend or what have you, and they don't realize
that many times when they do bet the twenty or
fifty dollars or hundred dollars or whatever, they can afford
to lose or sometimes can't afford to lose whatever their betting.
Most often those small amounts are being bet with local bookies,
(05:52):
and they might be guys, people they know, people that
don't really well know. But the problem is is even
though small bets really get funneled into organized crime, even
if they're kind of gambling with somebody they know or
think they know, because what happens is is local bookies
often get wagers on local teams. Like I live in Wisconsin.
So let's say in this example, most of the bookies
(06:14):
that I perhaps would deal with would take a lot
of bets on the Green Bay Packers in the NFL,
because a lot of people bet with their hearts, they
bet on the home team, they bet on the games
they're gonna watch. And in Wisconsin, you watch the Green
Bay Packers or you don't watch television really someday. So
the local bookies get overwhelmed with basically Green Bay Packer money,
and that's not good for them, because what most bookies
(06:37):
want is a fifty fifty split on the game they
want bet on the Packers. They want and say, bet
on the Bears, and they collect a ten percent on
the losers. So you have to bet eleven dollars to
win ten dollars. And that's how the bookies make their money.
And that's the big right is that like the concept
(06:58):
of the VG sort of like a premium that you
have a bigger issue there. Take their rake however you
want to put it. Yeah. So, but what happens is
these local bookies in this case again get overwhelmed with
the money bet on the Packers. So what they want
to do is basically what they call layoff that money
and bet with other bookies, perhaps like in Chicago if
the Packers are playing the Bears, because the Bear bookies
(07:19):
are gonna have too much money on the bears, and
so they kind of swap wagers to kind of alleviate their,
you know, exposure on these games. And so what happens
is little bookies bet with slightly bigger bookies. Bigger bookies
bet with even bigger bookies, and this money almost actually
funnels upwards and sitting at the top of this pyramid
(07:39):
is organized crime, who have controlled illegal sports gambling for
probably a hundred years. It's one of those things where
even though you're betting with somebody you may know and
just somebody think is local, some guy at the bar,
that money gets funneled upwards to people who are running
organized crime. And then people say, well, you know, so
what it's, you know, a harmless crime, it's a victimless crime.
(07:59):
But the fact is that money that feeds organized crimes
then goes to prostitution, that goes to loan sharking, and
it goes to all the other bad things that organized
crimes still does today. And just to be specific for
our audience members who may not be as aware of
the nuts and bolts of this of the betting process,
what is the point spread and why does it matter so? Well?
(08:22):
The point spread really only matters in mainly in the
NFL and the NBA, or college basketball and college football,
because too often games are almost lopsided. And this really
started way back about a hundred years or so, maybe
in twenties or thirties, where bookies wanted to take bets
on games, on all games that are being played, but
(08:43):
in certain instances, you know, people are almost certain that,
for example, the Packers are going to beat the Bears.
You know, almost no matter what happens, that they are
almost certain Packers are going to beat the Bears, and
the odds that they would have to set on the
game would be so high that nobody want to bet
on the Packers because already turn on their money would
be so low. And at the same time, the bookies
who wouldn't want to necessarily give huge odds on the
(09:04):
Bears to win because then if that miracle of miracle
did happen, so they might have to lay out too
much money to those people who took the long shot.
So over time they developed what's called the point spread,
and the point spread basically kind of even the playing
field where oftentimes at football, like safe the Packers are
playing the Bears, they might say the Packers are minus seven,
which means that is, you have to subtract seven points
(09:28):
from the Packers at the end of the game and
or add seven points to the Bears total, and that's
what the final score wins up being in the betting circles.
So if the Packers won four to ten, you subtract seven,
which means the Packers really only scored seventeen points. The
Bears would get seven points. But yet that twenty four
(09:49):
to ten differences fourteen points, so it doesn't really come
into play for the point spread. And if you got
the Packers, you won. If you bet the Bears in
this example, you would lose. So it's a little convoluted concept. Yeah,
but that's a perfect explanation, absolutely, And I know folks
are probably eager for us to get into the whole
fixing aspect of it, But I do have one more
question about the rules and just sort of the you know,
(10:09):
structure for this betting scenario. Um. I know that, uh
in you in your book Larceny Games, when you're talking
about sort of the history of betting and gambling on
sports and how at its heart it is a simple
prospect of making a fifty fifty bat where you're saying like,
I think it's gonna be this one, and I'm putting
all my eggs in that basket and I'm either gonna
(10:30):
win or I'm gonna lose. But at the end of
the day, that's not enough to attract enough people to continuously,
you know, keep people in business who want to you know,
make money on this betting. So the bookies came up
with this idea of odds and they basically created it,
and it's a little bit lopsided, I think from the
way I understanding it, where I'm sure there are stats
(10:51):
that go into determining these odds, but at the end
of the day, it's sort of like, well, you know,
you get more of a return on your money if
you maybe bet on the underdog and they win. But
I just want to little bit of clarification on how
you see odds playing into this and whether or not
they are based on stats or if it's just kind
of a construct in something that these books sort of
came up with, you know, sweeten the pot. I guess, well,
(11:11):
it's interesting because really odds and even the point spread
are make believe numbers. You know, they don't necessarily reflect
the reality of the game. Or like a boxing match
or horse race, there really artificial numbers, and the point
spread is really almost based from what I understand from
talking to some of these guys who set the point spreads,
(11:32):
is based on their perception of the public perception of
the game that's about to be played. So it's funny
the guys who do like the NFL point spreads, they
can almost doom just off the top of the heads
without looking at computers or statistics or that sort of things.
They just know a lot of betters like certain teams,
they like certain matchups, and they just kind of assumed
(11:54):
that certain games are going to go a certain way.
So the guys who are setting the point spreads and
creating a lot of times can just wing it because
it's based off the perception of the public's perception and
not really the bookies perception of what's going to happen
in the game. So if they point set the point spread,
like again in the Packer Bearer game at minus seven,
(12:15):
it doesn't mean that the book he really thinks the
Packers are gonna win seventeen. They may think the Packers
are gonna win thirty five to nothing, but they think
that's what the public thinks is that the game might
be like seventeen matchup. So that's how they create the
point spread. And it's interesting because now we start to
see these frames, these interlocking frames of perception that play
(12:41):
a powerful role, almost as powerful as the actual athletes
in the game. And and this brings us to a
question that I was I was dying to ask after
we had checked out Larceny Games Season and the abyss
UH and the fixes in UH, we wanted to ask you, what,
(13:02):
in your opinion, are the easiest and most difficult sports
to fix. Well, you know, the unfortunate thing is I
get asked a lot like what's the least corrup sport?
And unfortunately I can't name one, because you really, if
you do some digging around, you will realize almost every
(13:23):
professional sport has been negatively influenced by some sort of corruption.
I mean you could go soccer, cricket, tennis, rugby, baseball, football, boxing, hockey,
the UFC hors arry scene. I mean, the list goes
on and on, and you can find corruption in terms
of altering the outcomes of certain events in all of
those things. You can even find it little League baseball.
(13:46):
I've seen it where you know, the Chicago team from
the Little League World Series a couple of years ago
was deemed illegal. Where I think a New York team
a few years ago ahead of Pitcher who was fourteen
and he should have only been twelve and they lied
about his age. I mean, it's unfortunately everywhere. But in
terms of your direct question, I think the easiest sports
to manipulate from a fixing angle for betting purposes, one
(14:08):
is soccer, because it's happening all over the globe and
it's been happening for a very long time and they
can't or maybe they don't, but they can't seem to
stop it. But in America, I think the two biggest
ones to be football and basketball because of that point
spread and the idea of the point spread. And I
can explain why is basically because what people can do
(14:31):
is they can get athletes to what they call shaved points.
Where again, if you go back to that seven point
point spread in that Bear Packer, the fictional Bear Packer game,
I means you could approach the players or a player
from the Packers and say, hey, look you can still
win the game. You can still beat the Bears. That's fine,
Just don't cover that point spread. Instead of winning by
more than seven, just win by like three points, and
(14:54):
therefore I can bet the Bears. You can still win
your game. But because the Bears are getting seven points
and they only lost by three in the betting parlance,
they won the game by four. So that's the tricky thing.
And you could do it a lot, and I think
it occurs a lot, especially at the college level in
basketball and football, because of these point spreads where a
team can still win but yet not covered the point spread,
(15:17):
and that makes it really hard to uncover who really
was giving a percent out there and who maybe was
doing something a little illegal. That's my question. Isn't it
really difficult to do? It seems like such a precise
thing to influence the outcome of a game just by
a certain number of points based on what you do,
and not have it be completely transparent to anybody watching saying, oh,
(15:38):
that guy totally took a dive there. He screwed up
that play. It was clearly on purpose. Like how do
these It seems like they're a whole another level of
skill required to be able to do this convincingly funny,
he said it like Joan amoth. Back in the late sixties,
he was accused of throwing a couple of football games
because I think twice in the season he threw like
(16:00):
five interceptions within a single game, and he kind of
got fingered for potentially throwing those games. And Joe name was,
when approached and asked about he said, look, because I
wouldn't be dumb enough to throw five interceptions in the game.
I fixed. What I would do is I would throw
the ball slightly out of the reach of the wide receiver,
or I, you know, mishandle a snap, or I would
(16:20):
you just do something small that would be imperceptible, and
that's how it fixed the game. I wouldn't make it
obvious like that, which always found funny because that means
obviously Joe Namath kind of thought about it and how
we would fix the game if need be. But apparently
he claimed he didn't do it because he would have
made it that obvious. And I mean, there's a guy
by the name of Lefty Rosenthal. He's an old, old guy.
(16:42):
He um. The movie Casino was actually based on Lefty Rosenthal.
He's a real guy. In the movie. It's played by
Robert de Niro's name is like Ace Rothstein or something
like that, but that's really left the Rosenthal left. Rosenthal
was known to fix games, and he would actually have
college kids college basketball players act as missing layups so
they looked more realistic when they did it. He was
(17:05):
even known to actually supposedly he gave food poisoning to
an entire football team that came into town to play
Northwestern University and he invited the other team out for
dinner and gave him all food poisoning at a restaurant
he was familiar with to make sure he won his bet. So,
I mean, there's there's there's various ways to do this,
but yeah, I mean I think it wouldn't be necessarily
(17:27):
blatantly obvious, although sometimes it very well could be. And yet,
you know, how do you finger somebody for it, because
it could just be somebody's having a bad game, er
an off day. But proved that he did it on purpose,
that's a whole different thing. Yeah, that sounds like it
could quickly go into some subjective murky territory there. It's
(17:47):
very it's very interesting that you bring up the concept
of college athletes, because, as we know, that's a continuing
controversy here in the States. Uh, these kids, really, these
students are in a surprisingly vulnerable position, and that led
(18:07):
us to h to ask, not just in the realm
of college sports, but in the realm of professional sports,
how do some athletes become compromised to the point that
they're willing to throw a game or to shave some points?
And by that we mean, you know, not the ones
who are who get food poisoning, which is diabolical, um,
(18:29):
but but the you know, the ones who purposefully participate
in this kind of uh, this kind of corruption. Well,
did you guys happen to see that movie that just
came out called Suicide Squad? Yes? I actually did see it. Yes, Okay,
Well there's a scene in there where um Viola Davis,
who's the head of the Suicide Squad, is asked, well,
(18:50):
how do you get all these bad guys to basically
do what you wanted to do? And Harry responsive simple,
she said, Well, everybody has a weakness, and I exploit
that weakness. And I think that's exactly what can happen
with athletes and with coaches and with referees. I think
a lot of sports fans almost make it disconnect and
almost forget that these are people, and these are people
(19:13):
who are like you and me, people who can have problems,
people who can have gambling problems, who can have drug problems,
who want to use performance enhancing drugs, which is another
sort of drug problem. Who have women problems, We have
men problems, We have all sorts of weaknesses, you know, greed,
I mean, the very real thing for everybody to have
issues with this, with these things. And I think smart
(19:36):
people and we've seen again if you look at soccer
around the world, they've found that those weaknesses within the players,
within the coaches, within the referees, and then exploit them.
And that's all it takes, is it takes a simple failing.
I mean, I think if you go with college especially
and I think college is where really people should be looking,
especially United States, with the sort of corruption when you're
(19:59):
not paying like coll ja athlete, and I really don't
necessarily agree that you should pay them, but when you
don't pay them, and then football player walks out into
a stadium, he's surrounded by a hundred thousand fans, it's
being broadcast to three or four million people at home.
His coach is the highest paid state employee making three
to five million dollars a year. There's people in the
stands wearing this kid's jersey, and yet this kid getting
(20:20):
zero dollars. And then somebody approaches and said, hey, look,
I'll give you ten thousand dollars. Just slightly underperformed, shave
a few points, and make sure this game goes my way.
Oh why would a kid not accept that money. It's
a very easy offer to make, I mean, and I
think it's a very easy offer to accept. Yeah, the
same thing occurred to me earlier, like where you know,
(20:41):
there are kids getting in trouble for selling autographs, for example,
and it's sort of this attitude of well where's mine?
You know, I want something like everyone else is getting paid.
And I especially if if you're a kid who maybe
had went into like college basketball with dreams of making
the NBA. And the fact of the matter is it
easier to be elected to Congress than it is to
(21:02):
make the National Basketball Association. To the player, there's more
members of Congress under our NBA players. And yet if
you went to college with that hope and dream, and
then you know, by your junior year, realized that dream
is not gonna happen because I'm just not that good,
and yet I still got another year of college eligibility.
And again somebody comes a long and says, and it
doesn't have to be that much money. I think I
(21:23):
could have, you know, fixed a college basketball game with
the money I have in my bank accounting and being
a writer, I don't make a lot of money. I think,
you know, you could approach the kids and make them generous,
seemingly generous offers that they would go for, because again,
when everybody else is out there making money, I think
they assumed that they should be too, So you think
they're almost targeted. Whereas someone that would be trying to
(21:45):
get them to enter into this would see what you're describing, like, oh,
they haven't really been performing incredibly well, they're almost done
with school. This would be an easy mark for you know,
getting what I want out of this. I think you
can do either way. I mean, I've seen in some
of the their FBI files I have related to, you know,
attempting to fix games where it was just a basic,
(22:06):
fled out direct approach like hey kid, you want to
fix a game for me? And then you know I've
we've seen in you know, around again, especially in soccer.
Soccer is so incredibly corrupt, but we've seen where there
are really organized crime organizations I guess for lack of
better terms, that literally go out and try to target
individuals to get them to fix soccer matches. And so
(22:28):
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a similar organization within
the Highed States that may be doing the very same
thing within n C double A basketball or football and
just looking for weaknesses within certain programs and certain players
and targeting them and trying to get them to do
what they wanted to do. Because again, when there's perhaps
three to four hundred billion dollars being wagered and no
(22:49):
one there's no oversight over it, nobody's watching over it,
there's a lot of room to fudge figures and make
some easy money if no one's gonna, you know, come
after you for doing it, know, brand maybe this is
the most frightening thing here. Our show examines a lot
of allegations, a lot of theories, and a lot of
(23:10):
proof of skull duggery, and to me personally, the most
frightening thing about this situation is that, you know, we're
using the phrase organized crime and what we're looking at
an action seems to be institutionalized crime. Uh with the
by which I mean the level of reach and organization
(23:33):
seems far far beyond what the average fan thinks, uh
they're buying into when they make that or six dollar bet. Well,
I think you're right, because I don't Again, I think
a lot of fans they put on a fan hat
and when they put on their jersey and they watch TV,
they kind of disconnect from the reality of everything, the
(23:56):
reality the players, the reality of the gambling that surrounds
at the reality the media control surrounding it all. And
I think they just watched the game and assume what
happens on the game lives up to every cliche that's
out there, you know, be the player wants to give
and take it to the next level, and all those things.
I don't think fans are necessarily rational while they're watching
(24:18):
these sports, and so they don't recognize all the threats
and all the real possibilities that surround these games that
may be influencing and are corrupting the outcome of what
they think is a true athletic competition. And I think
there's so many variables that can influence these games, that
it's something that really should be looked at closer and
(24:38):
not just be assumed that it is all these cliches
that are spouted week after week. And I want to
take it back just for a second and look at
some of the historical examples that will kind of give
a framework for our listeners to really see how this
stuff started occurring. Um, one of the big ones that
(24:58):
we found in the fixes in is the Black Sox,
if you want to talk a little bit about that,
the nineteen nineteen World Series and just kind of tell
us that story and then maybe give us a few
more examples historically of of fixing. But here's the funny thing.
I mean, you guys probably might remember the answer to
these questions, but let me ask you a couple of
quick questions. So the Black Sox scandals you just said
(25:22):
took place in nine and that was the last time, supposedly,
according to Major League Baseball, a baseball game has been fixed. Okay,
that's nearly a hundred years now at this point. So
when was the last time National Hockey League game was
admittedly fixed by the league? Oh? Boy, without without going
to Google, I don't know that I can sufficiently answer that, Well,
(25:44):
the NHL was supposedly like in the nineties. I think
it was like six was the last time they said
the game was fixed? So when was the last time
that an NBA game was fixed? Last season? I don't
know that would be my answer, but yeah, what they claim. Yeah,
I've just as a sidebar here for the listeners. Uh, Brian,
(26:07):
if you're okay with it, I would like to point
everybody to uh your website the fixes in dot net
because in the course for research, we saw some fantastic
uh modern articles. Um that will get into a little
bit later, but as soon as as soon as you
had asked about the NHL, I went directly to it
(26:29):
and I thought, oh, he's got to have something on this. So, yeah,
what do you do you believe that the uh that
the NBA was fixed last season? Well, we can get
into that, but my opinion would be definitely yes. I mean,
I think one of the main things I try to
point out to people because this is kind of a
different end of the fixing now that we're talking about,
(26:50):
and I think games are fixed for organized crime and
gambling purposes, and I look into that research that and
at the same time, I think games are fixed by
the league of them selves for entertainment purposes and for
television and advertising purposes. And I mean, I think the
same the same you know, the same processes that can
(27:12):
be used for fixing games for gambling reasons can be
used to fix games for the league's reasons. And I
think the NBA certainly manipulated their own games. And the
scary part, the scariest part of all, is that it
is not illegal for league like the NBA to fix
its own game. There's no law that prevents that, right,
(27:32):
which is fascinating because in your book you you have
mentioned in the fixes in I believe it is you've
mentioned a couple of laws that come kind of close, right,
like the quiz Show law or the or the Sports
Bribery Act of nine four. So what makes them close
(27:52):
but not, uh, you know, not on the money enough
to actually enforce, you know, what they purport to enforce. Well,
the quick show law came first, and I came in
the nineteen fifties out of the quiz show scandals. If
anybody ever saw that movie corrected by Robert Redford, that's
a true story. The television networks, basically we're fixing their
game shows. And for the same reason I claimed the
(28:14):
like the NFL or the NBA is fixing your own games,
they were fixing their own game shows to make it
more entertaining, to drive up ratings, to make people more
interested in what was going on. And there was a
whistleblower from within one of the game shows who feel
who felt to get screwed basically by the network, and
he turned them in and Congress investigated, and out of
this investigation came this realization that yeah, they were fixing
(28:36):
the game shows to make it more interesting. And so
a lot was produced and it was basically called the
Quick Show Law. But that just covers intellectual contests or
contests of chance, which chance would be like you know,
rolling the dice or you know, the wheel of fortune
is a kind of chance thing. But so you can't
fix intellectual contests for television. But that doesn't cover physical
(28:59):
contests like a sport, and nobody I think what's called
sport a chance. You know, you won't call football game
a game a chance. You'd call poker maybe a game
of chance, but not football dice. You might call a
game chance, but not basketball. I know people that would
be upset about the poker being a game of chance. Yeah,
I know that was probably a bad example, trying to
blow right past, but but basically that's what the quation
(29:23):
a lot covers is mainly intellectual contests, not physical ones.
And then at the same time, in nineteen sixty four,
Congress passed the Sports Bribery Act, which made it illegal
for someone to bribe player, a coach, or a referee
to alter the outcome of a game. Amazingly, that wasn't
a federal crime before nine to fix a game, um,
but after nineteen sixty four was illegal. But that's a bribe. Now,
(29:47):
if the NBA tells its referees, the employer tells its
employees how to do their job, and that may alter
the outcome of a game, well that's not anybody being bribed.
That's just someone telling you how to do your up
and you go out in the court and do your job,
and maybe that alters the outcome of a game, and
maybe it doesn't. But the fact of the matter is
that doesn't make it illegal. So the closest thing is
(30:10):
fraud that this may cover. But even fraud doesn't cover it.
Because when New York Jets fans sued the New England
Patriots over to Spygates scandal. That's part of like a
class action lawsuit. They ultimately lost in The court ruled
that look, when you buy a ticket to a game,
if you buy a ticket to an NFL game, the
team just basically has to provide a football game to you.
(30:32):
It doesn't have to be played under any certain rules.
Certain athletes don't have to perform or perform up to
a certain level. It doesn't mean a team can't cheat.
You paid to see football game. They provided a football game.
End of story. So there's really no law that covers
this in terms of a league fixing its own game
and making it illegal. It's not a crime because it
(30:54):
is simply entertainment. And the leagues will tell you that
their entertainment right legal legally they are, which which when
we learned about this, this may come as a blue
to die hard sports fans across the league's um. Well,
we learned about this, this kind of ruling would essentially
(31:14):
render UH sports leagues more on the level of wrestling
than it would for what they're proceved as. Is that correct?
Oh very much so. And the funny thing is is ESPN,
you know the Worldwide leader in Sports. They now cover
professional wrestling regularly. In fact, they have a special section
on their web page for professional wrestling. So, I mean
(31:35):
the outline is getting more and more blurred every day.
I'm sorry. Are you guys implying that professional wrestling isn't real? No? Oh,
we've done it. No, No, it's real. Guys killing me here,
crushing my dreams. We thought it was best that you
learned this way with an expert. Appreciate it right for me? Um, Well,
(31:58):
what are the consequences of people getting caught, whether it's
a player or an official. Maybe there's betting involved, or
someone has, you know, used a position of influence to
for a personal game. What's the problem is nobody's gotten
caught that was bringing up earlier, you know, the nineteen
nineteen White Sox. Last time it's supposedly happened in baseball
ninety for the NHL, like early nineteen fifties, I think
(32:22):
it was fifty four for the NBA, and the NFL
claims that's never happened once in its entire existence that
someone tried to or someone did fix the outcome of
a football game. So nobody's gotten caught for this crime
in the United States except for college athletes. Okay, in
certain colleges like Boston College, Cleedo, University of San Diego,
(32:43):
Northwestern there's been a few, but not a lot. Now
the scary part is to me is again, you look
outside the United States, there's soccer match fixing at every level.
We know that World Cup soccer matches, which is the
most watched, most popular sporting event in the world. We
know soccer matches have been fixed in the World Cup,
we know it. We know the Indian Cricket League, which
(33:05):
is their national sport, is in the most corrupt leagues
in the world. We know rugby in um what is
it in Australia has been fixed. We know baseball in
China has been fixed. I mean, we know sumu wrestling corrupted.
We know there's corruption everywhere else around the world, but
supposedly here in the United States it just doesn't happen.
And I don't believe that for one single you know, uh,
(33:30):
we're tempted to agree with you there, because when we
talk about athletes being caught cheating, or when we talk
about the game being somehow compromised, the only real coverage
of it in the contemporary world is uh, you know,
an individual athlete in most cases uh doping or taking
performance enhancing drugs. So it seems like what's happening here
(33:55):
is a vast revenue stream for organized crime that is
going from the street level to the top and then
later global. And as as you said, this is occurring today,
is it occurring more or less or has it always
been the same and just unacknowledged. Well, I think it's
(34:17):
I think it has really been acknowledged. I think more
it's been brought to light, especially like in soccer and
with the corruption that was in FIFA and even the
International Olympic Committee to a certain extent, I think it's
come more to light, so more people are looking at it.
And at the same time, the more people that seem
to look at the more they realize that they're having
a very hard time preventing it because it's such an
(34:40):
easy crime to do, and yet it's a very hard
crime to prove to get someone taken away and thrown
in jail for it. Although it has happened. I mean,
like the Italian soccer league Serie A is incredibly corrupt.
It's been corrupted from the players all the way up
to the owners and guys have been arrested and thrown
in jail for fixing matches and all sorts of bad
(35:00):
behavior there. Yet you know, I think it was Fox
Sports paid them a few million dollars so they could
broadcast it here in the United States. And does Fox
Sports ever talk about that corruption. Of course not, it
doesn't happen. But I mean, they're the problem with it.
And the why no one I think has ever been
really caught for to the professional level here in the
United States is how do you prove it? There is
(35:22):
no concrete evidence. And from the four hundred some odd
files I obtained the Freeman of Information Act from the
FBI related to this, the FBI can't prove these things
have gone on. Yet they had great evidence. I mean,
they would talk to what they called top echelon informants,
which are really the high up mafia informants who worked
with bookies. It would say this bookie is working with
(35:42):
this player and they're going to fix this game, and
sure enough, the game would end and exactly the way
the informants said it was going to end. But that
didn't prove that the game was fixed. You know, you
can't go to court off of that. So where's your
concrete evidence unless somebody admits to committing a federal crime,
which it's gonna be hard to do if you don't
have evidence of it or you didn't get it on
(36:02):
a wire tap or some sort of recording of it.
You know, nothing's written down, it's not written on league letterhead,
it's not written you know, it's there's no evidence for
this sort of thing. So the FBI got very frustrated
in investigating these things because of that lack of evidence.
And that's why the leagues can say this has never happened,
because no one's ever been caught and convicted of it happening.
(36:23):
But that doesn't necessarily make it true. It just makes
it true to their you know, proof of evidence. There.
I think they're wrapping up some of the more historical
background of sports fixing and bookmaking. I'm kind of interested in,
you know, at its most basic level, how did the
mob originally start getting into this and start kind of
(36:49):
looking for easy targets as far as which sports to fix,
Like I I picture boxing is being one because you
can just you know, offer somebody a lot of money
or threaten somebody's family, things like that. But can you
kind of just it out a little bit about like
how this started, how it kind of ballooned into what
we see now in more modern times. Well, it's hard
to say, really because, like I said, I think a
(37:10):
lot of it was easy money. I mean, bookmaking in
many ways is pretty much easy money because most of
the time, the public is wrong when they make a bet,
you know, I mean they really are. I mean a
lot of people almost make more money betting against the
way the general public is betting on a game, because
more often than not, the general public is wrong. So
I mean most it's very hard to find a bookie
(37:32):
who went out of business because the clients were too
good and winning too often. So I mean to get into,
you know, bookmaking, and like I say, organized crime has
been in it for a hundred years or more. It's
because more often than not, the people who are betting
lose over a period of time. So that's why I
think it's easy for them to go into the business
(37:52):
and make money. In terms of fixing, I mean, it's
it's kind of nice to have a sure thing. And
I think if you know that athletes are betting with you,
you can compromise him if you know, athletes have a
drug problem and you're the ones applying the drugs, you
can compromise them. I mean that there's just ways to
compromise athletes. And that's the way the mob I think,
has made its money for throughout its history is finding
the weaknesses with the people and exploiting them. And it's
(38:15):
funny you bring up boxing because most people don't realize that.
Like for boxing, between the late forties and early sixties,
really one mobster controlled pretty much all of boxing, and
I mean literally controlled it. He determined many times who
would fight, who where they would fight, and oftentimes who
would win and who would lose, and he would always
(38:35):
get a cut of that money. But I mean, boxing
is actually what made television, believe it or not. Who
television became into the name was Frankie Carbo and Frankie
Carbon basically controlled boxing. He worked with two guys who
helped found the NHL, Arthur Wertz, whose family still owns
the black Hawks today, and James Norris, who the Norris
(38:56):
Trophy is named after his father, who owned the Detroit
Red Wings. He worked with those two guys to put
boxing events in the arenas because they controlled Medison Square
Garden in Chicago, Stadium, Olympia Stadium in Detroit, and St.
Louis Arena, and he Carbo worked with those two guys
put on boxing events and those arenas, and they sold
it the CBS and NBC is Wednesday and Friday night
(39:18):
fights and those events really helped make television a must
see thing. And it's I mean, it's pretty amazing that
really those three guys really helped influence television and made
it something that everybody had to see because boxing was
such popular in those fifties and early sixties, and yet
it was controlled by organized crime the entire time. So
(39:42):
thank you, Ma for cable television. Yes, thank you for cable. Mobsters. Um,
I you mean we've we've lived with cable. We grew
(40:02):
up with cable. I'm a cord cutter I am now,
But what from the night from the eighties up until
a couple of years ago, I had that cable like
directly attached to my heart, intravenously pumping content into your bloodstream.
And right now, ladies and gentlemen, you're with us in
(40:23):
a moment outside of time, because we've taken a break,
we can tell you that behind the scenes, Noel, Matt
and I realized that we were not going to be
able to fit this entire interview into a single episode,
so we knew we would have to split it. And
this is us traveling into our past, which I guess
(40:44):
is you were present now. Uh, podcasting plays with time
that way. We're so high on the spice right now. Yeah,
we're so high on the spice right now that we
are going to take some time. We're gonna head out
of here and we'll be back next week at the
second half of the interview. But while while we're still here,
(41:05):
while it's still uh, the three amigos in the studio,
I have to have to ask you, guys, what are
you thinking so far about this, about this weird connection
with the mafia, and about uh, Brian's Brian's statement that
pretty much all sports are ripped. So far, I'm pretty convinced,
I would have to say, But you know, maybe it's
(41:26):
just because Brian's convincing. I don't know. It seems like
after reading the material then hearing him talk about it
so openly and frankly, I mean, he's a very matter
of fact about it, and just it kind of just
speaks about it like a foregone conclusion, and not to
say that that means it's true, but in my mind,
with all of the cases of sports fixing that we've
(41:48):
we do know about in other parts of the world,
it just seems kind of naive to think that, you know,
with all that there is to gain from this, whether
it's TV deals, whether it's you know, big money bets
and organized crime, that this is not in fact happening
on some level in professional sports. I just I don't.
I can't buy that they're so squeaky clean. Also, given
(42:11):
these doping scandals that we always see uncovered and have
been you know, for a long time now, how how
can we accept that that is a thing that happens,
that people are willing to go to those lengths, but
not the ones that Brian describes. So I'm kind of
with you on that map. Yeah he did. He did
an excellent job I think building a case, uh so far,
you know, at least providing motive. So listeners, hope you
(42:36):
enjoyed this episode as much as we're enjoying making it.
That's a tall order, as you said on Facebook Live
from earlier, but the journey is not over yet. Uh
If you're looking for something else to check out while
you're waiting for the conclusion to this interview, which will
come out next week. Uh, then why not head over
(42:57):
to stuff they Don't Want You to Know dot com,
where you can check out every audio podcasts we have
ever done, along with so many of our videos. And
if you want to read more from Brian, you can
check out his side of the Fixes in dot net,
where you can see info on how to get ahold
of his books, the Fixes in Larceny Games, a season
in the abyss not to be confused with the Slayer
(43:19):
album Seasons in the abyss um and he's got a
really it's it's a very telling little tagline on his page.
Here would you leave a multibillion dollar business up to chance? Oh?
Good question. And of course, if you have a suggestion
for an upcoming episode, or you want to see some
of the stuff we do that doesn't make it to
(43:40):
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Conspiracy Stuff show. And uh, if you're feeling particularly gregarious, generous, charitable,
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(44:01):
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But you know what, we take the good with the bad, folks,
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(44:22):
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and you have the ability to review us, please do
It helps the algorithm and help people find out about
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is like the credits rolling right and we're saying all
this this other stuff. Two thirds of us are going
(44:45):
to be in New York next week, New York City,
just like in the salsa commercials, that's a deep cut.
Do you think anyone remembers that one in my New
York City? Yeah? Pekanti, Yeah, wow, they got they got you?
Huh say got me too, I guess. But we're going
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(45:06):
in Atlanta. If you want to hang out with us,
drop us. A line will be uh to and fro,
hither and yon all across the Fair Metropolis. But yeah,
I mean seriously, if enough of you guys are interested,
we'll set up a time, or we can all meet
up and hang for a bit. So when louis all
of this other stuff, if you want to get in
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(45:27):
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We are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
(00:20):
name is Noel. They call me Ben, and you are you,
and this is stuff they don't want you to know.
We're doing something a little bit different to bend the
Bookie Bolling, Null Numbers, Brown, Matt is bad at Math,
Frederick Matt Mad Money Frederick. Okay, we want to introduce
(00:41):
you to a very special guest in this episode. This
is a two part episode about sports fixing, and as
we are not uh, despite our new monikers, as we
are not ourselves experts on sports fixing. No, I haven't
done much gambling at all. I've been to because you know,
two times I watched a football game on TV. Once
(01:05):
it was a date and I was trying to get
in good with this gal and she was a huge
Stanford fan. And I tell you, I sat through that
whole game like a champ, and I almost think maybe
I understand how football works. Putty Simon, Well, we've received
questions for years from you and listeners just like you
(01:26):
who have asked us to cover something like FIFA or
something like even corruption in sumo wrestling. Uh So, we
were fortunate enough to get an interview with one of
the world's pre eminent experts on sports fixing, Mr Brian Tooey. Yeah,
Brian has written extensively on the subjects. He has three
books a Season in the Abyss, The Fixes In and
(01:48):
Larceny Games, all of which dive deep into the world
of bookmaking organized crime, where the money goes in these scenarios.
And of course the question is what we're seeing legitimate?
Are these games having their outcomes manipulated by one of
several possible forces. So we'll dive into the first part
(02:13):
of the interview where we get we get a deeper
understanding of how this sort of system would work, a
look at the history of corruption in sports, and information
about what inspired Brian to again these investigations. Grant, could
(02:37):
you tell the audience and us what inspired you to
become the world's leading expert on corruption in sports? Well,
it really took off when I realized nobody else seemed
to want to do this job. I mean, I was
really just a fan of professional sports for a long
time growing up as a kid, you know, a hockey
fan to baseball fan, football fan, and what have you.
(02:59):
But as I got older and perhaps a little wiser,
I started noticing what I felt were almost like too
many coincidences that were occurring within these games, within these
sports that always seemed to benefit the league. And I
came to realize, when the leagues have the ability to
really control everything that surrounds the games, what prevented them
(03:21):
from controlling what happens within the games. And once I
kind of asked that question of myself and started doing
a little research, it kind of led me down this
path to where I am today. It's interesting that you
mentioned the way the league figures into all of this,
because obviously there is a whole lot of profits to
be made in and around professional sports, whether it's the
(03:43):
legal end of it, merchandizing ticket sales, TV deals, things
like that. We're talking billions and billions of dollars. But
when you really segment it out and you talk about
just the money that can be made out of sports betting,
how is all of this generated and what kind of
figures are we talking here? Well, the professional leagues, the
four main leagues, the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NHL,
(04:05):
in the NBA make a combined about billion dollars a
year in revenue. And as for the sports gambling end
of things, the problem is is nobody really knows because
of the sports gambling done in the United States today
is done illegally and much of that money is controlled
by organized crime. The state in Nevada, which is the
(04:27):
only place where you can legally bet on single games
and all of these sports, says they account for about
two to three percent of all the sports gambling done
in the nation and they took in about what was it,
I think about three or four billion dollars on sports betting,
which means if you extrapolate that number, it means that
(04:49):
perhaps as much as three to four hundred billion dollars
is being waged in the United States today illegally, but
nobody really knows money. Yeah, that's so much money. So
these guys that are running the books on these in
these illegal gambling operations, how do they actually make money
(05:11):
on this operation? And moreover, I mean, what's the structure
of this illegal operation? Like from you know, me being
a joe on the street that wants to you know,
place a bat on a sports game. How do I
go from point A to point B too making or
losing a whole bunch of money. Well that's the scary
part in a way, is most gamblers are recreational gamblers.
(05:32):
You know, their average Joe is or James, and they
want about twenty bucks or fifty bucks on the game
this weekend or what have you, and they don't realize
that many times when they do bet the twenty or
fifty dollars or hundred dollars or whatever, they can afford
to lose or sometimes can't afford to lose whatever their betting.
Most often those small amounts are being bet with local bookies,
(05:52):
and they might be guys, people they know, people that
don't really well know. But the problem is is even
though small bets really get funneled into organized crime, even
if they're kind of gambling with somebody they know or
think they know, because what happens is is local bookies
often get wagers on local teams. Like I live in Wisconsin.
So let's say in this example, most of the bookies
(06:14):
that I perhaps would deal with would take a lot
of bets on the Green Bay Packers in the NFL,
because a lot of people bet with their hearts, they
bet on the home team, they bet on the games
they're gonna watch. And in Wisconsin, you watch the Green
Bay Packers or you don't watch television really someday. So
the local bookies get overwhelmed with basically Green Bay Packer money,
and that's not good for them, because what most bookies
(06:37):
want is a fifty fifty split on the game they
want bet on the Packers. They want and say, bet
on the Bears, and they collect a ten percent on
the losers. So you have to bet eleven dollars to
win ten dollars. And that's how the bookies make their money.
And that's the big right is that like the concept
(06:58):
of the VG sort of like a premium that you
have a bigger issue there. Take their rake however you
want to put it. Yeah. So, but what happens is
these local bookies in this case again get overwhelmed with
the money bet on the Packers. So what they want
to do is basically what they call layoff that money
and bet with other bookies, perhaps like in Chicago if
the Packers are playing the Bears, because the Bear bookies
(07:19):
are gonna have too much money on the bears, and
so they kind of swap wagers to kind of alleviate their,
you know, exposure on these games. And so what happens
is little bookies bet with slightly bigger bookies. Bigger bookies
bet with even bigger bookies, and this money almost actually
funnels upwards and sitting at the top of this pyramid
(07:39):
is organized crime, who have controlled illegal sports gambling for
probably a hundred years. It's one of those things where
even though you're betting with somebody you may know and
just somebody think is local, some guy at the bar,
that money gets funneled upwards to people who are running
organized crime. And then people say, well, you know, so
what it's, you know, a harmless crime, it's a victimless crime.
(07:59):
But the fact is that money that feeds organized crimes
then goes to prostitution, that goes to loan sharking, and
it goes to all the other bad things that organized
crimes still does today. And just to be specific for
our audience members who may not be as aware of
the nuts and bolts of this of the betting process,
what is the point spread and why does it matter so? Well?
(08:22):
The point spread really only matters in mainly in the
NFL and the NBA, or college basketball and college football,
because too often games are almost lopsided. And this really
started way back about a hundred years or so, maybe
in twenties or thirties, where bookies wanted to take bets
on games, on all games that are being played, but
(08:43):
in certain instances, you know, people are almost certain that,
for example, the Packers are going to beat the Bears.
You know, almost no matter what happens, that they are
almost certain Packers are going to beat the Bears, and
the odds that they would have to set on the
game would be so high that nobody want to bet
on the Packers because already turn on their money would
be so low. And at the same time, the bookies
who wouldn't want to necessarily give huge odds on the
(09:04):
Bears to win because then if that miracle of miracle
did happen, so they might have to lay out too
much money to those people who took the long shot.
So over time they developed what's called the point spread,
and the point spread basically kind of even the playing
field where oftentimes at football, like safe the Packers are
playing the Bears, they might say the Packers are minus seven,
which means that is, you have to subtract seven points
(09:28):
from the Packers at the end of the game and
or add seven points to the Bears total, and that's
what the final score wins up being in the betting circles.
So if the Packers won four to ten, you subtract seven,
which means the Packers really only scored seventeen points. The
Bears would get seven points. But yet that twenty four
(09:49):
to ten differences fourteen points, so it doesn't really come
into play for the point spread. And if you got
the Packers, you won. If you bet the Bears in
this example, you would lose. So it's a little convoluted concept. Yeah,
but that's a perfect explanation, absolutely, And I know folks
are probably eager for us to get into the whole
fixing aspect of it, But I do have one more
question about the rules and just sort of the you know,
(10:09):
structure for this betting scenario. Um. I know that, uh
in you in your book Larceny Games, when you're talking
about sort of the history of betting and gambling on
sports and how at its heart it is a simple
prospect of making a fifty fifty bat where you're saying like,
I think it's gonna be this one, and I'm putting
all my eggs in that basket and I'm either gonna
(10:30):
win or I'm gonna lose. But at the end of
the day, that's not enough to attract enough people to continuously,
you know, keep people in business who want to you know,
make money on this betting. So the bookies came up
with this idea of odds and they basically created it,
and it's a little bit lopsided, I think from the
way I understanding it, where I'm sure there are stats
(10:51):
that go into determining these odds, but at the end
of the day, it's sort of like, well, you know,
you get more of a return on your money if
you maybe bet on the underdog and they win. But
I just want to little bit of clarification on how
you see odds playing into this and whether or not
they are based on stats or if it's just kind
of a construct in something that these books sort of
came up with, you know, sweeten the pot. I guess, well,
(11:11):
it's interesting because really odds and even the point spread
are make believe numbers. You know, they don't necessarily reflect
the reality of the game. Or like a boxing match
or horse race, there really artificial numbers, and the point
spread is really almost based from what I understand from
talking to some of these guys who set the point spreads,
(11:32):
is based on their perception of the public perception of
the game that's about to be played. So it's funny
the guys who do like the NFL point spreads, they
can almost doom just off the top of the heads
without looking at computers or statistics or that sort of things.
They just know a lot of betters like certain teams,
they like certain matchups, and they just kind of assumed
(11:54):
that certain games are going to go a certain way.
So the guys who are setting the point spreads and
creating a lot of times can just wing it because
it's based off the perception of the public's perception and
not really the bookies perception of what's going to happen
in the game. So if they point set the point spread,
like again in the Packer Bearer game at minus seven,
(12:15):
it doesn't mean that the book he really thinks the
Packers are gonna win seventeen. They may think the Packers
are gonna win thirty five to nothing, but they think
that's what the public thinks is that the game might
be like seventeen matchup. So that's how they create the
point spread. And it's interesting because now we start to
see these frames, these interlocking frames of perception that play
(12:41):
a powerful role, almost as powerful as the actual athletes
in the game. And and this brings us to a
question that I was I was dying to ask after
we had checked out Larceny Games Season and the abyss
UH and the fixes in UH, we wanted to ask you, what,
(13:02):
in your opinion, are the easiest and most difficult sports
to fix. Well, you know, the unfortunate thing is I
get asked a lot like what's the least corrup sport?
And unfortunately I can't name one, because you really, if
you do some digging around, you will realize almost every
(13:23):
professional sport has been negatively influenced by some sort of corruption.
I mean you could go soccer, cricket, tennis, rugby, baseball, football, boxing, hockey,
the UFC hors arry scene. I mean, the list goes
on and on, and you can find corruption in terms
of altering the outcomes of certain events in all of
those things. You can even find it little League baseball.
(13:46):
I've seen it where you know, the Chicago team from
the Little League World Series a couple of years ago
was deemed illegal. Where I think a New York team
a few years ago ahead of Pitcher who was fourteen
and he should have only been twelve and they lied
about his age. I mean, it's unfortunately everywhere. But in
terms of your direct question, I think the easiest sports
to manipulate from a fixing angle for betting purposes, one
(14:08):
is soccer, because it's happening all over the globe and
it's been happening for a very long time and they
can't or maybe they don't, but they can't seem to
stop it. But in America, I think the two biggest
ones to be football and basketball because of that point
spread and the idea of the point spread. And I
can explain why is basically because what people can do
(14:31):
is they can get athletes to what they call shaved points.
Where again, if you go back to that seven point
point spread in that Bear Packer, the fictional Bear Packer game,
I means you could approach the players or a player
from the Packers and say, hey, look you can still
win the game. You can still beat the Bears. That's fine,
Just don't cover that point spread. Instead of winning by
more than seven, just win by like three points, and
(14:54):
therefore I can bet the Bears. You can still win
your game. But because the Bears are getting seven points
and they only lost by three in the betting parlance,
they won the game by four. So that's the tricky thing.
And you could do it a lot, and I think
it occurs a lot, especially at the college level in
basketball and football, because of these point spreads where a
team can still win but yet not covered the point spread,
(15:17):
and that makes it really hard to uncover who really
was giving a percent out there and who maybe was
doing something a little illegal. That's my question. Isn't it
really difficult to do? It seems like such a precise
thing to influence the outcome of a game just by
a certain number of points based on what you do,
and not have it be completely transparent to anybody watching saying, oh,
(15:38):
that guy totally took a dive there. He screwed up
that play. It was clearly on purpose. Like how do
these It seems like they're a whole another level of
skill required to be able to do this convincingly funny,
he said it like Joan amoth. Back in the late sixties,
he was accused of throwing a couple of football games
because I think twice in the season he threw like
(16:00):
five interceptions within a single game, and he kind of
got fingered for potentially throwing those games. And Joe name was,
when approached and asked about he said, look, because I
wouldn't be dumb enough to throw five interceptions in the game.
I fixed. What I would do is I would throw
the ball slightly out of the reach of the wide receiver,
or I, you know, mishandle a snap, or I would
(16:20):
you just do something small that would be imperceptible, and
that's how it fixed the game. I wouldn't make it
obvious like that, which always found funny because that means
obviously Joe Namath kind of thought about it and how
we would fix the game if need be. But apparently
he claimed he didn't do it because he would have
made it that obvious. And I mean, there's a guy
by the name of Lefty Rosenthal. He's an old, old guy.
(16:42):
He um. The movie Casino was actually based on Lefty Rosenthal.
He's a real guy. In the movie. It's played by
Robert de Niro's name is like Ace Rothstein or something
like that, but that's really left the Rosenthal left. Rosenthal
was known to fix games, and he would actually have
college kids college basketball players act as missing layups so
they looked more realistic when they did it. He was
(17:05):
even known to actually supposedly he gave food poisoning to
an entire football team that came into town to play
Northwestern University and he invited the other team out for
dinner and gave him all food poisoning at a restaurant
he was familiar with to make sure he won his bet. So,
I mean, there's there's there's various ways to do this,
but yeah, I mean I think it wouldn't be necessarily
(17:27):
blatantly obvious, although sometimes it very well could be. And yet,
you know, how do you finger somebody for it, because
it could just be somebody's having a bad game, er
an off day. But proved that he did it on purpose,
that's a whole different thing. Yeah, that sounds like it
could quickly go into some subjective murky territory there. It's
(17:47):
very it's very interesting that you bring up the concept
of college athletes, because, as we know, that's a continuing
controversy here in the States. Uh, these kids, really, these
students are in a surprisingly vulnerable position, and that led
(18:07):
us to h to ask, not just in the realm
of college sports, but in the realm of professional sports,
how do some athletes become compromised to the point that
they're willing to throw a game or to shave some points?
And by that we mean, you know, not the ones
who are who get food poisoning, which is diabolical, um,
(18:29):
but but the you know, the ones who purposefully participate
in this kind of uh, this kind of corruption. Well,
did you guys happen to see that movie that just
came out called Suicide Squad? Yes? I actually did see it. Yes, Okay,
Well there's a scene in there where um Viola Davis,
who's the head of the Suicide Squad, is asked, well,
(18:50):
how do you get all these bad guys to basically
do what you wanted to do? And Harry responsive simple,
she said, Well, everybody has a weakness, and I exploit
that weakness. And I think that's exactly what can happen
with athletes and with coaches and with referees. I think
a lot of sports fans almost make it disconnect and
almost forget that these are people, and these are people
(19:13):
who are like you and me, people who can have problems,
people who can have gambling problems, who can have drug problems,
who want to use performance enhancing drugs, which is another
sort of drug problem. Who have women problems, We have
men problems, We have all sorts of weaknesses, you know, greed,
I mean, the very real thing for everybody to have
issues with this, with these things. And I think smart
(19:36):
people and we've seen again if you look at soccer
around the world, they've found that those weaknesses within the players,
within the coaches, within the referees, and then exploit them.
And that's all it takes, is it takes a simple failing.
I mean, I think if you go with college especially
and I think college is where really people should be looking,
especially United States, with the sort of corruption when you're
(19:59):
not paying like coll ja athlete, and I really don't
necessarily agree that you should pay them, but when you
don't pay them, and then football player walks out into
a stadium, he's surrounded by a hundred thousand fans, it's
being broadcast to three or four million people at home.
His coach is the highest paid state employee making three
to five million dollars a year. There's people in the
stands wearing this kid's jersey, and yet this kid getting
(20:20):
zero dollars. And then somebody approaches and said, hey, look,
I'll give you ten thousand dollars. Just slightly underperformed, shave
a few points, and make sure this game goes my way.
Oh why would a kid not accept that money. It's
a very easy offer to make, I mean, and I
think it's a very easy offer to accept. Yeah, the
same thing occurred to me earlier, like where you know,
(20:41):
there are kids getting in trouble for selling autographs, for example,
and it's sort of this attitude of well where's mine?
You know, I want something like everyone else is getting paid.
And I especially if if you're a kid who maybe
had went into like college basketball with dreams of making
the NBA. And the fact of the matter is it
easier to be elected to Congress than it is to
(21:02):
make the National Basketball Association. To the player, there's more
members of Congress under our NBA players. And yet if
you went to college with that hope and dream, and
then you know, by your junior year, realized that dream
is not gonna happen because I'm just not that good,
and yet I still got another year of college eligibility.
And again somebody comes a long and says, and it
doesn't have to be that much money. I think I
(21:23):
could have, you know, fixed a college basketball game with
the money I have in my bank accounting and being
a writer, I don't make a lot of money. I think,
you know, you could approach the kids and make them generous,
seemingly generous offers that they would go for, because again,
when everybody else is out there making money, I think
they assumed that they should be too, So you think
they're almost targeted. Whereas someone that would be trying to
(21:45):
get them to enter into this would see what you're describing, like, oh,
they haven't really been performing incredibly well, they're almost done
with school. This would be an easy mark for you know,
getting what I want out of this. I think you
can do either way. I mean, I've seen in some
of the their FBI files I have related to, you know,
attempting to fix games where it was just a basic,
(22:06):
fled out direct approach like hey kid, you want to
fix a game for me? And then you know I've
we've seen in you know, around again, especially in soccer.
Soccer is so incredibly corrupt, but we've seen where there
are really organized crime organizations I guess for lack of
better terms, that literally go out and try to target
individuals to get them to fix soccer matches. And so
(22:28):
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a similar organization within
the Highed States that may be doing the very same
thing within n C double A basketball or football and
just looking for weaknesses within certain programs and certain players
and targeting them and trying to get them to do
what they wanted to do. Because again, when there's perhaps
three to four hundred billion dollars being wagered and no
(22:49):
one there's no oversight over it, nobody's watching over it,
there's a lot of room to fudge figures and make
some easy money if no one's gonna, you know, come
after you for doing it, know, brand maybe this is
the most frightening thing here. Our show examines a lot
of allegations, a lot of theories, and a lot of
(23:10):
proof of skull duggery, and to me personally, the most
frightening thing about this situation is that, you know, we're
using the phrase organized crime and what we're looking at
an action seems to be institutionalized crime. Uh with the
by which I mean the level of reach and organization
(23:33):
seems far far beyond what the average fan thinks, uh
they're buying into when they make that or six dollar bet. Well,
I think you're right, because I don't Again, I think
a lot of fans they put on a fan hat
and when they put on their jersey and they watch TV,
they kind of disconnect from the reality of everything, the
(23:56):
reality the players, the reality of the gambling that surrounds
at the reality the media control surrounding it all. And
I think they just watched the game and assume what
happens on the game lives up to every cliche that's
out there, you know, be the player wants to give
and take it to the next level, and all those things.
I don't think fans are necessarily rational while they're watching
(24:18):
these sports, and so they don't recognize all the threats
and all the real possibilities that surround these games that
may be influencing and are corrupting the outcome of what
they think is a true athletic competition. And I think
there's so many variables that can influence these games, that
it's something that really should be looked at closer and
(24:38):
not just be assumed that it is all these cliches
that are spouted week after week. And I want to
take it back just for a second and look at
some of the historical examples that will kind of give
a framework for our listeners to really see how this
stuff started occurring. Um, one of the big ones that
(24:58):
we found in the fixes in is the Black Sox,
if you want to talk a little bit about that,
the nineteen nineteen World Series and just kind of tell
us that story and then maybe give us a few
more examples historically of of fixing. But here's the funny thing.
I mean, you guys probably might remember the answer to
these questions, but let me ask you a couple of
quick questions. So the Black Sox scandals you just said
(25:22):
took place in nine and that was the last time, supposedly,
according to Major League Baseball, a baseball game has been fixed. Okay,
that's nearly a hundred years now at this point. So
when was the last time National Hockey League game was
admittedly fixed by the league? Oh? Boy, without without going
to Google, I don't know that I can sufficiently answer that, Well,
(25:44):
the NHL was supposedly like in the nineties. I think
it was like six was the last time they said
the game was fixed? So when was the last time
that an NBA game was fixed? Last season? I don't
know that would be my answer, but yeah, what they claim. Yeah,
I've just as a sidebar here for the listeners. Uh, Brian,
(26:07):
if you're okay with it, I would like to point
everybody to uh your website the fixes in dot net
because in the course for research, we saw some fantastic
uh modern articles. Um that will get into a little
bit later, but as soon as as soon as you
had asked about the NHL, I went directly to it
(26:29):
and I thought, oh, he's got to have something on this. So, yeah,
what do you do you believe that the uh that
the NBA was fixed last season? Well, we can get
into that, but my opinion would be definitely yes. I mean,
I think one of the main things I try to
point out to people because this is kind of a
different end of the fixing now that we're talking about,
(26:50):
and I think games are fixed for organized crime and
gambling purposes, and I look into that research that and
at the same time, I think games are fixed by
the league of them selves for entertainment purposes and for
television and advertising purposes. And I mean, I think the
same the same you know, the same processes that can
(27:12):
be used for fixing games for gambling reasons can be
used to fix games for the league's reasons. And I
think the NBA certainly manipulated their own games. And the
scary part, the scariest part of all, is that it
is not illegal for league like the NBA to fix
its own game. There's no law that prevents that, right,
(27:32):
which is fascinating because in your book you you have
mentioned in the fixes in I believe it is you've
mentioned a couple of laws that come kind of close, right,
like the quiz Show law or the or the Sports
Bribery Act of nine four. So what makes them close
(27:52):
but not, uh, you know, not on the money enough
to actually enforce, you know, what they purport to enforce. Well,
the quick show law came first, and I came in
the nineteen fifties out of the quiz show scandals. If
anybody ever saw that movie corrected by Robert Redford, that's
a true story. The television networks, basically we're fixing their
game shows. And for the same reason I claimed the
(28:14):
like the NFL or the NBA is fixing your own games,
they were fixing their own game shows to make it
more entertaining, to drive up ratings, to make people more
interested in what was going on. And there was a
whistleblower from within one of the game shows who feel
who felt to get screwed basically by the network, and
he turned them in and Congress investigated, and out of
this investigation came this realization that yeah, they were fixing
(28:36):
the game shows to make it more interesting. And so
a lot was produced and it was basically called the
Quick Show Law. But that just covers intellectual contests or
contests of chance, which chance would be like you know,
rolling the dice or you know, the wheel of fortune
is a kind of chance thing. But so you can't
fix intellectual contests for television. But that doesn't cover physical
(28:59):
contests like a sport, and nobody I think what's called
sport a chance. You know, you won't call football game
a game a chance. You'd call poker maybe a game
of chance, but not football dice. You might call a
game chance, but not basketball. I know people that would
be upset about the poker being a game of chance. Yeah,
I know that was probably a bad example, trying to
blow right past, but but basically that's what the quation
(29:23):
a lot covers is mainly intellectual contests, not physical ones.
And then at the same time, in nineteen sixty four,
Congress passed the Sports Bribery Act, which made it illegal
for someone to bribe player, a coach, or a referee
to alter the outcome of a game. Amazingly, that wasn't
a federal crime before nine to fix a game, um,
but after nineteen sixty four was illegal. But that's a bribe. Now,
(29:47):
if the NBA tells its referees, the employer tells its
employees how to do their job, and that may alter
the outcome of a game, well that's not anybody being bribed.
That's just someone telling you how to do your up
and you go out in the court and do your job,
and maybe that alters the outcome of a game, and
maybe it doesn't. But the fact of the matter is
that doesn't make it illegal. So the closest thing is
(30:10):
fraud that this may cover. But even fraud doesn't cover it.
Because when New York Jets fans sued the New England
Patriots over to Spygates scandal. That's part of like a
class action lawsuit. They ultimately lost in The court ruled
that look, when you buy a ticket to a game,
if you buy a ticket to an NFL game, the
team just basically has to provide a football game to you.
(30:32):
It doesn't have to be played under any certain rules.
Certain athletes don't have to perform or perform up to
a certain level. It doesn't mean a team can't cheat.
You paid to see football game. They provided a football game.
End of story. So there's really no law that covers
this in terms of a league fixing its own game
and making it illegal. It's not a crime because it
(30:54):
is simply entertainment. And the leagues will tell you that
their entertainment right legal legally they are, which which when
we learned about this, this may come as a blue
to die hard sports fans across the league's um. Well,
we learned about this, this kind of ruling would essentially
(31:14):
render UH sports leagues more on the level of wrestling
than it would for what they're proceved as. Is that correct?
Oh very much so. And the funny thing is is ESPN,
you know the Worldwide leader in Sports. They now cover
professional wrestling regularly. In fact, they have a special section
on their web page for professional wrestling. So, I mean
(31:35):
the outline is getting more and more blurred every day.
I'm sorry. Are you guys implying that professional wrestling isn't real? No? Oh,
we've done it. No, No, it's real. Guys killing me here,
crushing my dreams. We thought it was best that you
learned this way with an expert. Appreciate it right for me? Um, Well,
(31:58):
what are the consequences of people getting caught, whether it's
a player or an official. Maybe there's betting involved, or
someone has, you know, used a position of influence to
for a personal game. What's the problem is nobody's gotten
caught that was bringing up earlier, you know, the nineteen
nineteen White Sox. Last time it's supposedly happened in baseball
ninety for the NHL, like early nineteen fifties, I think
(32:22):
it was fifty four for the NBA, and the NFL
claims that's never happened once in its entire existence that
someone tried to or someone did fix the outcome of
a football game. So nobody's gotten caught for this crime
in the United States except for college athletes. Okay, in
certain colleges like Boston College, Cleedo, University of San Diego,
(32:43):
Northwestern there's been a few, but not a lot. Now
the scary part is to me is again, you look
outside the United States, there's soccer match fixing at every level.
We know that World Cup soccer matches, which is the
most watched, most popular sporting event in the world. We
know soccer matches have been fixed in the World Cup,
we know it. We know the Indian Cricket League, which
(33:05):
is their national sport, is in the most corrupt leagues
in the world. We know rugby in um what is
it in Australia has been fixed. We know baseball in
China has been fixed. I mean, we know sumu wrestling corrupted.
We know there's corruption everywhere else around the world, but
supposedly here in the United States it just doesn't happen.
And I don't believe that for one single you know, uh,
(33:30):
we're tempted to agree with you there, because when we
talk about athletes being caught cheating, or when we talk
about the game being somehow compromised, the only real coverage
of it in the contemporary world is uh, you know,
an individual athlete in most cases uh doping or taking
performance enhancing drugs. So it seems like what's happening here
(33:55):
is a vast revenue stream for organized crime that is
going from the street level to the top and then
later global. And as as you said, this is occurring today,
is it occurring more or less or has it always
been the same and just unacknowledged. Well, I think it's
(34:17):
I think it has really been acknowledged. I think more
it's been brought to light, especially like in soccer and
with the corruption that was in FIFA and even the
International Olympic Committee to a certain extent, I think it's
come more to light, so more people are looking at it.
And at the same time, the more people that seem
to look at the more they realize that they're having
a very hard time preventing it because it's such an
(34:40):
easy crime to do, and yet it's a very hard
crime to prove to get someone taken away and thrown
in jail for it. Although it has happened. I mean,
like the Italian soccer league Serie A is incredibly corrupt.
It's been corrupted from the players all the way up
to the owners and guys have been arrested and thrown
in jail for fixing matches and all sorts of bad
(35:00):
behavior there. Yet you know, I think it was Fox
Sports paid them a few million dollars so they could
broadcast it here in the United States. And does Fox
Sports ever talk about that corruption. Of course not, it
doesn't happen. But I mean, they're the problem with it.
And the why no one I think has ever been
really caught for to the professional level here in the
United States is how do you prove it? There is
(35:22):
no concrete evidence. And from the four hundred some odd
files I obtained the Freeman of Information Act from the
FBI related to this, the FBI can't prove these things
have gone on. Yet they had great evidence. I mean,
they would talk to what they called top echelon informants,
which are really the high up mafia informants who worked
with bookies. It would say this bookie is working with
(35:42):
this player and they're going to fix this game, and
sure enough, the game would end and exactly the way
the informants said it was going to end. But that
didn't prove that the game was fixed. You know, you
can't go to court off of that. So where's your
concrete evidence unless somebody admits to committing a federal crime,
which it's gonna be hard to do if you don't
have evidence of it or you didn't get it on
(36:02):
a wire tap or some sort of recording of it.
You know, nothing's written down, it's not written on league letterhead,
it's not written you know, it's there's no evidence for
this sort of thing. So the FBI got very frustrated
in investigating these things because of that lack of evidence.
And that's why the leagues can say this has never happened,
because no one's ever been caught and convicted of it happening.
(36:23):
But that doesn't necessarily make it true. It just makes
it true to their you know, proof of evidence. There.
I think they're wrapping up some of the more historical
background of sports fixing and bookmaking. I'm kind of interested in,
you know, at its most basic level, how did the
mob originally start getting into this and start kind of
(36:49):
looking for easy targets as far as which sports to fix,
Like I I picture boxing is being one because you
can just you know, offer somebody a lot of money
or threaten somebody's family, things like that. But can you
kind of just it out a little bit about like
how this started, how it kind of ballooned into what
we see now in more modern times. Well, it's hard
to say, really because, like I said, I think a
(37:10):
lot of it was easy money. I mean, bookmaking in
many ways is pretty much easy money because most of
the time, the public is wrong when they make a bet,
you know, I mean they really are. I mean a
lot of people almost make more money betting against the
way the general public is betting on a game, because
more often than not, the general public is wrong. So
I mean most it's very hard to find a bookie
(37:32):
who went out of business because the clients were too
good and winning too often. So I mean to get into,
you know, bookmaking, and like I say, organized crime has
been in it for a hundred years or more. It's
because more often than not, the people who are betting
lose over a period of time. So that's why I
think it's easy for them to go into the business
(37:52):
and make money. In terms of fixing, I mean, it's
it's kind of nice to have a sure thing. And
I think if you know that athletes are betting with you,
you can compromise him if you know, athletes have a
drug problem and you're the ones applying the drugs, you
can compromise them. I mean that there's just ways to
compromise athletes. And that's the way the mob I think,
has made its money for throughout its history is finding
the weaknesses with the people and exploiting them. And it's
(38:15):
funny you bring up boxing because most people don't realize that.
Like for boxing, between the late forties and early sixties,
really one mobster controlled pretty much all of boxing, and
I mean literally controlled it. He determined many times who
would fight, who where they would fight, and oftentimes who
would win and who would lose, and he would always
(38:35):
get a cut of that money. But I mean, boxing
is actually what made television, believe it or not. Who
television became into the name was Frankie Carbo and Frankie
Carbon basically controlled boxing. He worked with two guys who
helped found the NHL, Arthur Wertz, whose family still owns
the black Hawks today, and James Norris, who the Norris
(38:56):
Trophy is named after his father, who owned the Detroit
Red Wings. He worked with those two guys to put
boxing events in the arenas because they controlled Medison Square
Garden in Chicago, Stadium, Olympia Stadium in Detroit, and St.
Louis Arena, and he Carbo worked with those two guys
put on boxing events and those arenas, and they sold
it the CBS and NBC is Wednesday and Friday night
(39:18):
fights and those events really helped make television a must
see thing. And it's I mean, it's pretty amazing that
really those three guys really helped influence television and made
it something that everybody had to see because boxing was
such popular in those fifties and early sixties, and yet
it was controlled by organized crime the entire time. So
(39:42):
thank you, Ma for cable television. Yes, thank you for cable. Mobsters. Um,
I you mean we've we've lived with cable. We grew
(40:02):
up with cable. I'm a cord cutter I am now,
But what from the night from the eighties up until
a couple of years ago, I had that cable like
directly attached to my heart, intravenously pumping content into your bloodstream.
And right now, ladies and gentlemen, you're with us in
(40:23):
a moment outside of time, because we've taken a break,
we can tell you that behind the scenes, Noel, Matt
and I realized that we were not going to be
able to fit this entire interview into a single episode,
so we knew we would have to split it. And
this is us traveling into our past, which I guess
(40:44):
is you were present now. Uh, podcasting plays with time
that way. We're so high on the spice right now. Yeah,
we're so high on the spice right now that we
are going to take some time. We're gonna head out
of here and we'll be back next week at the
second half of the interview. But while while we're still here,
(41:05):
while it's still uh, the three amigos in the studio,
I have to have to ask you, guys, what are
you thinking so far about this, about this weird connection
with the mafia, and about uh, Brian's Brian's statement that
pretty much all sports are ripped. So far, I'm pretty convinced,
I would have to say, But you know, maybe it's
(41:26):
just because Brian's convincing. I don't know. It seems like
after reading the material then hearing him talk about it
so openly and frankly, I mean, he's a very matter
of fact about it, and just it kind of just
speaks about it like a foregone conclusion, and not to
say that that means it's true, but in my mind,
with all of the cases of sports fixing that we've
(41:48):
we do know about in other parts of the world,
it just seems kind of naive to think that, you know,
with all that there is to gain from this, whether
it's TV deals, whether it's you know, big money bets
and organized crime, that this is not in fact happening
on some level in professional sports. I just I don't.
I can't buy that they're so squeaky clean. Also, given
(42:11):
these doping scandals that we always see uncovered and have
been you know, for a long time now, how how
can we accept that that is a thing that happens,
that people are willing to go to those lengths, but
not the ones that Brian describes. So I'm kind of
with you on that map. Yeah he did. He did
an excellent job I think building a case, uh so far,
you know, at least providing motive. So listeners, hope you
(42:36):
enjoyed this episode as much as we're enjoying making it.
That's a tall order, as you said on Facebook Live
from earlier, but the journey is not over yet. Uh
If you're looking for something else to check out while
you're waiting for the conclusion to this interview, which will
come out next week. Uh, then why not head over
(42:57):
to stuff they Don't Want You to Know dot com,
where you can check out every audio podcasts we have
ever done, along with so many of our videos. And
if you want to read more from Brian, you can
check out his side of the Fixes in dot net,
where you can see info on how to get ahold
of his books, the Fixes in Larceny Games, a season
in the abyss not to be confused with the Slayer
(43:19):
album Seasons in the abyss um and he's got a
really it's it's a very telling little tagline on his page.
Here would you leave a multibillion dollar business up to chance? Oh?
Good question. And of course, if you have a suggestion
for an upcoming episode, or you want to see some
of the stuff we do that doesn't make it to
(43:40):
the podcast, like you may have heard me mentioned Facebook Live, well,
you can visit us on Facebook and Twitter where we
are conspiracy Stuff. You can find us on Instagram where
Conspiracy Stuff show. And uh, if you're feeling particularly gregarious, generous, charitable,
if you feel like you need to give back. If
today is your day to do a good deed, then
(44:01):
why not drop us a review on iTunes? And many
of you have since the last time I checked. There
have been some nice reviews, some not so nice ones too,
But you know what, we take the good with the bad, folks,
and we really appreciate your support. Yeah, it's good, we
want it all. It's an objectivity. Um. But yeah, you
(44:22):
can do that on iTunes, You can do that on Stitcher,
there are any place that you can get the show
and you have the ability to review us, please do
It helps the algorithm and help people find out about
the show and keeps us from getting fired. The very
last thing. I know some people have kind of tune
out when we're at the end. Then we're like, this
is like the credits rolling right and we're saying all
this this other stuff. Two thirds of us are going
(44:45):
to be in New York next week, New York City,
just like in the salsa commercials, that's a deep cut.
Do you think anyone remembers that one in my New
York City? Yeah? Pekanti, Yeah, wow, they got they got you?
Huh say got me too, I guess. But we're going
to be up there, Nolan, I are gonna be up
in New York. Matt's gonna be holding down the Fort
(45:06):
in Atlanta. If you want to hang out with us,
drop us. A line will be uh to and fro,
hither and yon all across the Fair Metropolis. But yeah,
I mean seriously, if enough of you guys are interested,
we'll set up a time, or we can all meet
up and hang for a bit. So when louis all
of this other stuff, if you want to get in
touch with us without going on social media or doing
(45:27):
any of those things, are going to New York. But
we're going to New York. But hey, why not book
a flight right now? Um, you can write us an email.
We are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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