Interference by Dan E. Moldea Page B

represented by Sidney Korshak’s brother Marshall, and answered to Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Pierce—who had been acquitted of shaking down several Hollywood studios—was a top suspect in several gangland murders. He had earlier controlled John Scanlan, who had owned Mid-West News, a Chicago-based racing wire service, which had been run out of business by the Kefauver Committee.
    In 1957, Pierce—along with two other Chicago mobsters,Gus Alex, who had taken the Fifth thirty-nine times before the McClellan Committee, and Alfred Frabotta—leaned on the sixty-year-old Kaplan and allegedly forced him to accept a partner, local mob soldier Donald Angelini, also known as Don Angel.
    Already starting to burn out, Kaplan, who wanted to make the partnership look voluntary, told oddsmaker Bobby Martin, “I’d like to come to Miami for three or four months a year. So I’m going to bring someone in with me.” Kaplan moved into the Peter Miller Hotel in Miami Beach when winter began to approach.
    I asked Angelini whether Gus Alex had forced him on Kaplan. Angelini replied, “That’s not true. But I don’t want to go into that. Bill and I had similar interests. He was a helluva guy. We got along fine. He was like a father to me.”
    Born in December 1926, Angelini had had several scrapes with the law. Between 1946 and 1949, he was arrested four times for disorderly conduct and twice for traffic violations. Between 1950 and 1954, he was arrested four times for gambling violations—while using the alias Marc Schwartz.
    When Angelini joined Kaplan, their handicapping service became Angel-Kaplan Sports News, Inc. Angelini and Kaplan contracted with Sam Minkus, the owner of National Publications of Miami, the largest producer of football betting cards in the United States—fifty thousand a week. Government prosecutors estimated that the underworld kept 80 percent of the take through its use of betting cards—in which gamblers picked no fewer than three and as many as twenty winners from a choice of thirty college and pro football games. A three-winner bet paid 4 to 1; a twenty-winner game paid 5,000 to 1.
    â€œAngelini was a genius at sports handicapping,” a Chicago authority on the local underworld told me. “He had the best track record around for helping the bookmakers balance their books. He knew how to set a line. He was also responsible for bringing others into the business as well.”
    Martin adds that after hiring Angelini, Kaplan told him that the Angel-Kaplan line was going great guns. Kaplan told Martin, “That was the best thing I ever did. I’m making more money and have more free time than ever before.” The Chicago Crime Commission proved that Kaplan grossed “between ninety thousand and a hundred thousand dollars during the football season.” But that figure was considered quite low.
    There were consequences to his newly expanded partnership, mainly exposure. Kaplan was subpoenaed before a federal grand jury in August 1958 in Indianapolis, Indiana, that was investigating a Terre Haute gambling syndicate. Several arrests had already been made of bookmakers Kaplan acknowledged doing business with. “Sure,” Kaplan told prosecutors, “I traded information, such as handicapping, with the Terre Haute fellows. I paid them seventy-five dollars for their information, and they paid me seven hundred and twenty dollars during the football season for my service.”
    Of course, these sums were small potatoes. But Kaplan had never been anything but. However, his partner, Don Angelini, had become a man to watch.

9 Winning Some and Losing Some
    ON DECEMBER 28, 1958, nationally televised professional football came of age when Carroll Rosenbloom’s Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants, 23-17, for the NFL championship. After missing an earlier attempt, Colts placekicker Steve Myhra booted a twenty-yard field goal with