June 11, 1979
The Spreading Scandal In Jai Alai
A player and three bettors were charged with fixing games, and more revelations are expected as the probe continues
Robert Boyle, Nancy Williamson
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Kevin Kane, a special prosecutor in the office of Austin McGuigan, the Chief State's Attorney for Connecticut, last week obtained warrants to arrest a player and three gamblers on charges of rigging and conspiring to rig games in 1977 at the Milford Jai Alai fronton. Kane acted after Superior Court Judge Eugene Kelly, who has been sitting and will continue to sit in Hartford as a special one-man grand jury, heard testimony on widespread corruption in the sport.
One of those arrested was Paul Commonas, 29, a member of a gambling ring known as the Miami Syndicate, which is alleged to have won a fortune betting on rigged games at Milford in 1977. Lieutenant Richard Hurley and three troopers from the Connecticut State Police and members of the Fugitive Squad of the Dade County (Fla.) Public Safety Department arrested Commonas at his apartment in North Miami. Apprehended on the same charges were Bert Ira Caskill, Commonas' former roommate in North Miami and West Haven, Conn., and James Sobie, a gambler who, like Commonas and Caskill, bet at the Milford fronton. At week's end, the police had been unable to find Juan Guardino, a 40-year-old jai alai player and native of Spain, to arrest him on identical charges. While the arrests were under way, Leigh Somers, chief investigator for Florida's Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering, which is conducting its own probe into corruption in the sport, seized 250 boxes of betting records, IRS forms and tickets from the Dania Jai Alai fronton north of Miami.
The arrests ordered by Connecticut authorities are likely to be merely the first of a number that will send shock waves through Florida, Rhode Island and Nevada, where betting on jai alai is also legal, and perhaps put a fatal crimp in the sport's plans to invade Delaware, Louisiana, Maryland and about a dozen other states and two Canadian provinces. Recently, New Jersey State Senator David Friedland introduced a bill calling for the establishment of frontons in Jersey City, Camden and Long Branch, even though last year New Jersey voters turned down jai alai in a referendum. Using the standard spiel of proponents of legalized betting on jai alai and other sports, Senator Friedland renewed the call for building frontons in Jersey by claiming that the revenues the state would derive from the pari-mutuel betting would "be dedicated to helping the elderly and the medically and physically handicapped."
One difficulty with jai alai is that too many politicians who are at best overly idealistic and at worst crooked have been overseeing the game, and proper regulation of the game is almost unknown. The revelations in Connecticut are not the result of probing by scrupulous politicians but of the questions and charges raised by three men: Harvey Ziskis, a bettor who was barred under clouded circumstances from the Hartford fronton; Theodore A. Driscoll, investigative reporter for
The Hartford Courant; and Professor Lester Snyder of the University of Connecticut School of Law, who served on the State Commission on Special Revenue, popularly known as the gaming commission, from October of 1976 until last March.
To call the Connecticut gaming commission inept and naive would be kind. Before inspecting one of the state's three frontons, it would alert the management of its planned visit. Until its restructuring last month by Governor Ella T. Grasso and the legislature, the commission served for the most part as a dumping ground for political hacks. The last chairperson was Mrs. Beatrice Kowalski, former head of the state's Republican Women's Club, and the last executive secretary was James Fitzgerald, a Democratic town chairman.
Legalized betting came to Connecticut in 1972, and the state now gets about $75 million a year in revenues from levies on gambling. The frontons in Hartford, Milford and Bridgeport did not open until 1976 and 1977, but from the beginning politicians have been involved behind the scenes. Indeed, the original owner of the Bridgeport Jai Alai fronton, David Friend, claimed he paid a $250,000 bribe to John Bailey, the former state and national chairman of the Democratic Party, to get the license to build his fronton. Bailey was dead when Friend made his charge, and a judge later cleared Bailey's name, but that didn't lay to rest the rumors of wrongdoing that have pervaded the sport in Connecticut and elsewhere. Now much of what was hidden is starting to emerge. For example:
•There is a logical and widespread suspicion that at least some bettors in the Miami Syndicate, who have been operating in Connecticut, Florida and Rhode Island, are merely hirelings of richer and more sophisticated criminals, who have put up the millions of dollars the Syndicate has bet and have reaped its huge winnings. In return, some Syndicate members reportedly received a salary and living expenses.
•Members of the Miami Syndicate allegedly have been cheating the IRS by inducing others, including fronton employees, to sign forms saying that the nonmembers had won some of the big bets actually placed by the Syndicate. Thus the Syndicate's bettors may have avoided moving into higher tax brackets and paying the full levies on their winnings.
•World Jai-Alai owns the Hartford fronton and four others located in Florida. A year ago, Roger Wheeler, a Tulsa oilman and chairman of the Telex Corporation, who has a reputation for honesty, bought World Jai-Alai. The previous owners had sought to peddle it to Bally Manufacturing Company, the world's largest slot machine manufacturer, which has had mob ties in the past. That deal never came about. Paul Rico, who was and is World's vice-president in charge of security, also attempted to get Jack Cooper of Miami Beach, an associate of mob boss Meyer Lansky, to buy World. A former World president, John Callahan, had underworld associations.
•Until recent months, the state of Florida, where betting at frontons has been legal for 44 years, boasted that jai alai was the cleanest pari-mutuel operation in the country. The trouble is no one ever really took a close look at the sport. As Captain Richard Sheets of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Department, which has been investigating charges of criminal activities at the West Palm Beach fronton, says, "Jai alai is difficult to penetrate. It's one big fraternal organization. You have the same people—players, cashiers, bettors, mutuel clerks and management—moving from fronton to fronton. They are very clannish people, and when you have the same group operating in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Florida, there are all kinds of opportunities for fraud." Dan Bradley, division director of the Florida Pari-Mutuel Commission, puts it more bluntly in discussing gambling irregularities in Florida's 10 frontons: "It's not just at one and it's not just at two, it's at all of them."
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