Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (22 page)

Rose did not know it then, as the fans dispersed happily into the spring evening and he jabbered happily in the clubhouse—“We’re going to be a tough ball club,” he predicted—but at that very same time, a phone conversation was taking place that would dramatically reorder his life, that would, along with others of its kind, bring his transgressions and indiscretions home to roost with a severity of consequence he had never imagined. The phone call, its transcript later appended to John Dowd’s report to the commissioner of baseball, began quite simply. Like this:

Janszen: “Hello.”

Bertolini: “Paulie.”

Chapter 14

John Dowd

T
HE DOWD
REPORT
,
In the Matter of: Peter Edward Rose, Manager Cincinnati Reds Baseball Club,
runs 228 pages, mostly double-spaced. It’s heavily footnoted, with many of the notes referring to the accompanying trove of evidence and supporting material gathered over the course of baseball’s, and John Dowd’s, investigation into Rose. Straightforward and carefully reasoned, the report provides a streamlined account, a cogent narrative meant to be easily digested by new baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti, his deputy Fay Vincent and the others who would read and reflect upon it under heavy pressure during the spring and summer of 1989.

The report’s attendant exhibits, however, are raw and sumptuous and largely unedited—they include depositions, transcripts of phone conversations, court documents, canceled checks and much more. Bound in hardcover books, the exhibits bring the physical output of the investigation to 13 hardbound volumes that together take up 23 inches of shelf space, weigh about 54 pounds and total more than 5,100 pages. The legal fees associated with baseball’s Rose investigation have never been released but if you were to guess “astronomical” you would be in the right ballpark.

Rose had been up to many things that you would not want a major league player or manager to be up to, but the central trouble, of course, was that he had bet, and bet frequently, on games involving his own team. Although this fact—and its dangerous implications—is borne out and verified in numerous ways and by numerous people and documents in the exhibits, it was the decision by Paul Janszen to come forward to the authorities and the media, and to come forward with such potent material as his taped April 4, 1988, conversation with Mike Bertolini, that put baseball’s investigation in motion and sustained it. If not for Janszen, might Rose have gotten away with what he did? “You know, yes, he may have,” says Dowd. “Pete might have actually walked at that time. But it would have caught up with him. There were too many people who knew too much, and several witnesses ready to roll. Once we started hearing names we just followed up on them, and then it was one person after another verifying what we knew.”

Throughout the investigation, all of the evidence, testimony and other uncovered information was, per commissioner Giamatti’s directive, immediately made available to Rose and his team of lawyers. Some material got to the media. More than six weeks before Rose was banned, for example,
Sports Illustrated
ran an excerpt from Dowd’s deposition of an Ohio bookmaker named Ronald Peters, which included this sequence:

Q: And in 1985 what sports activities did [Pete Rose] place bets on?

A: He bet college basketball, professional football and major league baseball.

Q: And that continued into 1986?

A. Yes. Q: And when [he] bet baseball, did he bet on the Cincinnati Reds?

A: Yes he did.

Transparency was a crucial tenet of the process. “The world will see what we do and how we do it,” said Giamatti. Yet that transparency did not always lead people to see things that they did not want to see. Though the finished report went out to the media right away and many of the exhibits were made available soon after, many reporters, as well as many fans, continued for years to believe (or to say that they believed) Rose’s claims that he had not bet on baseball. Those people simply must not have read the Dowd Report. For someone to spend even a short time paging through the document—which includes, over one 72-page stretch, a game-by-game breakdown of Pete’s bets on the Reds during the first half of the 1987 season—and still maintain Rose’s innocence is to be a subscriber to the most elaborate conspiracy theories. It is to believe that the ’69 moon landing was a hoax and that the earth, never mind what Copernicus, Galileo or, well, satellite photos might say, is obviously flat.

The power of the Dowd Report traces to its thoroughness and also to its all-knowing tone—one that anticipates the Rose camp’s inevitable attempt to discredit and vilify what was found. As the report marches along, often pointing up contradictions in Rose’s testimony, its language is dusted with the bluster of righteous conviction. There’s a subtle edge to the text, an underlying feeling that another “gotcha” moment is coming up and then, yes, it does. Dogged, intelligently crafted and occasionally, to Rose’s annoyance, smug, the sense and quality of the report provide a reflection of Dowd himself.

JOHN DOWD is a large man. About 6' 5" and full across the chest and belly. Even in his early 70s he looks as if he could throw you across the room and that if the need arose he would not mind doing so. He is bluff and gesticulant, and a former captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. One thing that first impressed Dowd upon meeting Rose, when both men were in their late 40s, was his size and muscularity. “Pete was just solid, right through. Strong,” Dowd says. He long ago adopted the habit of immediately sizing people up.

Dowd is easy to talk to and good with a story the way Pete is, and he abides by a self-defined sense of fairness that he prides himself on. He has an emotive, appealing face—long, heavy cheeks, blue eyes, a thick lower lip. He’s much smarter than he might want to appear and his temper, even when you don’t see it, is right there. There is a trace of Boston in his speech. From the standpoint of a casting director or a reader of legal thrillers, Dowd is pretty much exactly what you would want a lead investigator to be.
¹

The Rose inquiry—noncriminal though it was—remains the signature case of Dowd’s long career, but it’s hardly the only time his profile has risen. He’s a highly regarded trial lawyer who has done much of his conspicuous work as a defender (perhaps surprising to those who know him only for his prosecutorial role in baseball). Dowd represented Sen. John McCain in the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s (McCain was cleared). He defended Arizona governor Fife Symington against charges of extortion in the mid-’90s (later overturned on appeal), and he defended the billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, who in 2011 was convicted on numerous counts of securities fraud and conspiracy. During the Rajaratnam trial a visibly worn Dowd told a reporter it would be his last, and after the verdict he was approached by CNBC outside the courtroom. Dowd looked into the camera and barked “get the fuck out of here” then flipped the bird. “That’s what I’ve got for CNBC,” he said in a clip that the network played and replayed.

“John’s really a big pussycat,” says Fay Vincent. “Well, no he’s not really. Only sometimes.”

Dowd embraces the spotlight and on the wall of his office at the Washington firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld LLP, hangs an excerpt of Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech of 1910. Roosevelt famously hails the man with the courage to risk himself, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood” and “who at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly.”

A type of book occupies the office shelves: bound volumes of the Dowd Report, along with several war hero tributes—
The Gift of Valor, Medal of Honor
—as well as
Baseball as America,
a glossy companion to the Baseball Hall of Fame’s traveling exhibit of the same name. Dowd and Vincent swap reading material sometimes and on the day I was in D.C. to see Dowd, Vincent called and said he was sending down a biography of Dwight Eisenhower. There is a red, Everlast boxing glove on display in Dowd’s office and a bumper sticker that says
WHEN IT ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY HAS TO BE DESTROYED OVERNIGHT
, and also a lot of framed photos—the family at Christmas; a wedding; a picture of Dowd seated on a red Wheel Horse tractor with a small laughing child in the crook of each arm.

“I guess I like to be in the World Series,” is how Dowd describes his affection for big, well-publicized cases. “And when the commissioner of baseball calls and asks you to take on a case involving Pete Rose, you do it. It is an honor to be asked.”

Dowd was living in the D.C. suburb of Vienna, Va., the father of five kids, on the day that call came in late February of 1989. He’d just come back from a few weeks trying a case in Atlanta, and hadn’t seen the head-lines reporting that Rose had been summoned to New York from spring training to meet with baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth and talk about allegations of Rose’s gambling. Ueberroth was about to step away as commissioner—he would officially resign on April 1—and Giamatti was coming in, with Vincent as his deputy.

“Pete stood in front of us in the commissioner’s office and said he bet on other sports but didn’t bet on baseball,” Vincent recalls. “He said ‘I’m not that stupid,’ and we all believed him. There was a part of Peter and Bart that did not want to follow up, but there was so much smoke, it was impossible not to.”

A day after that meeting the phone rang at Dowd’s house at 10:30 at night and it was Vincent on the line. They had known each other since the 1970s when Vincent worked as a securities guy at the firm of Caplin & Drysdale in D.C. and Dowd worked at the Justice Department. It turned out they each had a place up in Brewster on Cape Cod and during the summer Dowd sometimes ran into Vincent and gave him a lift to the grocery store. By the time of the Rose investigation, they’d been friends for years. “John, I’m here with Bart Giamatti,” Vincent was saying now. “And I said to him that as long as we’re looking for outside counsel in this Rose case, let’s talk to this guy Dowd, because he knows what he’s doing.”

Giamatti then came on the phone and he spent 40 minutes getting a handle on Dowd—“He is the only man I ever met who could question you for that long without getting your edge,” Dowd says. Finally, pleased by Dowd’s manner and knowledge and approach, Giamatti asked in closing, “Do you have any conflicts with Rose or the Cincinnati Reds?”

“No,” said Dowd.

“Then can you be on a plane to Cincinnati tomorrow morning at eight o’clock?” Giamatti asked.

“And I was off and running,” says Dowd. “I did nothing else for six months.”

AN INVESTIGATION into Rose had long been underway by the time Dowd touched down in Cincinnati, of course. It had been set in motion by Kevin Hallinan, Major League Baseball’s head of security who’d come into the position in 1986, not long after commanding a joint FBI-NYPD anti-terrorism task force. Commissioner Ueberroth liked the FBI back-ground and he wanted Hallinan to do things a little differently in base-ball, to be proactive and look at all kinds of things under the security umbrella—stadium operations, crowd control, anything that might impact attendance. Ueberroth was a tough executive, a no-bullshit kind of guy. On Hallinan’s first day at the office an assistant asked him what his title should be on his business card. “I don’t know,” said Hallinan. The assistant went into Ueberroth’s office and came back out. “Peter says let’s see what you can do first, before we put anything on your business card.”

That first year Hallinan spent a lot of time on the road going to ball-parks, pressing the flesh, meeting people on every team. He set up an infrastructure, enlisting retired cops in each big-league city to work as stringers. New to baseball’s culture, Hallinan was taken aback at how the clubhouse served as a kind of makeshift bazaar before games—guys selling clothes or equipment, players getting haircuts. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the distractions and he didn’t like not knowing who was milling around in there. So Hallinan made sure that every team kept someone at the clubhouse door before games; anyone coming in had to sign their names. Hallinan kept going around the league checking up on how things were working out. “That was when I just stumbled onto the Rose stuff,” he says. “It seemed like wherever I was traveling I kept running into the Reds, either in Cincinnati or on the road. So much so that in Philadelphia one time Pete asked one of the local guys, ‘Is your boss following me?’ As God is my judge I wasn’t following him at all. This was pure coincidence. But when Pete asked that, it did send up a little red flag. I thought,
If he is that paranoid
…”

Hallinan had also taken note of the characters that Rose had hanging around him, the muscle guys with the attitudes and the oil slicks through their hair. He had a strong sense about them—they fit into a less-than-savory type that he had come across time and again in his years as a lieutenant in the NYPD. “There’s a kind of radar,” Hallinan says. “I saw those guys and right away I knew that some of them were no good. And it was plain that they could see the cop in me. The way they reacted to me, uncomfortable right away, and avoiding where I was, that told me something too.”

There was talk in Cincinnati about some of the things going on at Gold’s Gym, the steroids and the cocaine. Pete went over there sometimes to work out and mingle with Gioiosa and others he knew. Hallinan had heard too that Rose was selling off some of his prized memorabilia—his 4,192 bat, jewels off the Hickok belt he’d won in 1975—hardly a crime (any number of Hall of Fame players have sold any number of pieces of memorabilia) but another red flag, especially since Rose wasn’t usually setting up public shop to sell these items but rather appeared to be selling them on the sly. Why? Hallinan wondered. Why would Pete, flush in salary and endorsement dollars, have such an interest in cash?

Hallinan told Ueberroth that he believed he needed to dig further into what he was seeing and hearing around Pete. (Later it turned out that the FBI, tipped off to Rose’s gambling, was independently watching him then too.) Hallinan had a feeling he might be getting into some deep water—this was Pete Rose in Cincinnati—so he spread his wings again; getting the O.K. from Ueberroth, he brought in another ex-FBI guy, Joe Daly of Cincinnati. Daly could put his ear right to the ground on those city streets. He knew where to look and whom to ask. Daly was an even-keeled guy, reliable, efficient and sharp, and it was through the work that Daly did that Hallinan first started hearing that Pete was betting with bookies on baseball. On that February day in 1989, when Rose came up to meet with Ueberroth and the others in the commissioner’s office—with his hair spiked and wearing a green polyester suit—Hallinan was standing in the very next room.