Sport: The Fix that Fizzled

From Miami to Hoboken, the grapevine was buzzing. Early on the day of the game, chunks of what the trade calls “wise money” had gone down on Manhattan College’s basketball team to wallop George Washington University by seven points. By noon, enough small-fry gamblers had heard about “the fix” to cause a minor betting stampede. By evening the game was “off the boards” in big Jersey bookie shops; no more bets accepted. The bookies’ explanation, brief and to the point: “The game stinks.”

That night, wedged in among 17,521 fans at Madison Square Garden, the wise-money boys waited confidently for George Washington to play dead. Within five minutes after the starting whistle they began to squirm uncomfortably in their seats. Instead of playing dead, George Washington was playing its head off—it won, 71-63.

What had gone wrong with the fix? College athletes, alerted to bribery attempts since the 1945 Brooklyn College scandal (TIME, Feb. 12, 1945), had found a better way to answer fixers than simply by punching them in the nose. At midnight, reporters gathered to hear District Attorney Frank S. Hogan tell the story of the big 1949 betting fix.

The Decoy. The D.A.’s account began four months ago when Brooklynite Dave Shapiro, 25, law student and co-captain of George Washington’s basketball team, got a mysterious letter, then a phone call, and then a visit. The two men who came to see him explained that he could make as much as $10,000 this winter. All he had to do was arrange to lose (or win) certain basketball games by a certain number of points. Shapiro gave them an evasive answer. He reported the incident to the D.A.’s office and got some instructions.

The strategy was for Shapiro to become a decoy and lure the bribesters out in the open. He did an artful job of it. Twice he was offered $1,000 to throw games—one against North Carolina University, an other with Virginia—and twice he went into his “hard-to-get” routine. Meanwhile, detectives were tailing the would-be fixers (four in all), including one Jack Levy, a bookmaker with big Miami connections, who seemed to be the boss.

With Shapiro’s help (he still hadn’t accepted a bribe), the D.A.’s office piled up the evidence it needed. When the fixers tried again, with another $1,000 offer to throw the Manhattan game, the trap was baited. Said Dave Shapiro to the fixers: “I’ll go along, but I want to see the money . . .”

The Trap. Last week, just before Shapiro & Co. took the floor against Manhattan, the trap was sprung. Two men waited in front of Mickey Walker’s bar, across the street from the Garden, where they were supposed to give the $1,000 to Dave Shapiro’s “uncle” (played by Detective Max Rumack from the D.A.’s office). Detective Rumack pinched them. Bookmaker Levy and the other confederate had already been hauled in and all were subsequently released on $20,000 bail each.

Besides losing their “sure-thing” bets, the four fixers, if convicted, face up to eight years in prison. For his trouble, lawyer-to-be Dave Shapiro got an offer of a job when he graduates from George Washington—working for the D.A.