Chapter 16
When a door says Private, you want to know what’s on the other side.
When an envelope says Private, you immediately want to open it.
I entered Private through the reception area, waved to Joanie behind the desk, and climbed the grand spiral staircase that wraps around the open core of the atrium. The staircase always gives me a lift. Reminds me of the cross section of a nautilus shell.
I was on my way into my office on the fifth floor when Colleen stopped me.
“You’ve got company,” she said. “Lots of it. Suits. Expensive ones.”
I went to the threshold and saw three men lounging in my seating area, a corner furnished with upholstered armchairs, a deep blue sofa, and a chunk of polished sequoia I use as a coffee table. This was where people came with their secrets, and where those secrets were always kept in confidence.
Two of my unscheduled visitors were smoking like tobacco company CEOs. Colleen said, “The gentlemen said they didn’t want to be seen in reception. What a surprise.”
The third man turned to face us, and with a start, I realized I was looking at my uncle Fred. Fred Kreutzer is my mom’s brother, the one who always told me to call him any time I needed an ear. He taught Tommy and me to play football when we were kids and encouraged me to play in high school and then college.
In short, Uncle Fred was the stand-in good dad for the man who’d sired me. Fred had gone further in football than I had-much further. He was a general partner of the Oakland Raiders.
The big florid-faced man stood, gave me a crushing bear hug, then introduced me to his associates, men I now recognized.
Evan Newman was as refined as Fred Kreutzer was rough. His suit was hand tailored. His hair had been sprayed into place, and his fingernails were as gleaming as his handmade shoes. He owned the San Francisco 49ers.
The third man was David Dix, a legendary entrepreneur, the kind of guy they write about in business school. Dix had made a killing in Detroit during the eighties, got out of auto parts before the meltdown in ’08, and bought the Minnesota Vikings. I remembered something I’d read about him, that his apparent happiness masked his fundamental heartlessness. Sounded like an epitaph to me.
Evan Newman stood up and came toward me with a convincing smile and outstretched hand. “Sorry to barge in like this,” he said. “Fred said you would see us.”
“We have a problem,” Uncle Fred said. “It’s urgent, Jack. A screaming five-alarm emergency, actually.”
“We’d like to be wrong,” said Dix. “In fact, I have to say, if we’re right, this could cripple the game of professional football.”
Dix beckoned to me to sit. “We’ve got money,” he said. “You’ve got the best people for this. Sit down so we can lay out a nightmare for you.”
Chapter 17
Evan Newman brushed invisible ashes off his trousers and said, “We have reason to suspect a gambling fix in our league, Jack, something that could be as bad for football as the Black Sox scandal was for baseball.”
I was bothered by this intrusion into my office, but also intrigued. Andy’s inventory of former clients was calling to me from my briefcase, Justine needed me on the Schoolgirl murders, and I had a conference call meeting with our London office in twenty minutes-a scandal in the House of Lords no one knew about yet.
I looked at my watch and said, “Give me the highlights. Please. I’ll help if I can.”
Fred spoke up. “Jack, we think this thing may have started about two years ago-in a wildcard play-off game. On paper, winning should have been no problem for the Giants. Their opponent, Carolina, was good, but a couple of defensive backs were out. Their quarterback had a hairline fracture in the index finger on his throwing hand. This game shouldn’t have been close. But you may remember this, Tommy-”
“Jack.”
“Jack, I’m sorry. Jesus. Anyway, in the third quarter, Cartwright’s touchdown run, into a hole you could’ve driven a Brinks truck through, was called back. The ref said it was a holding penalty, and in the fourth quarter, as New York was trying for the kick that would’ve sent the game into overtime, there was another penalty that took them out of field goal range.”
Fred went on, his face getting redder. “New York lost by three. At the time, the calls just looked bad. There was the usual talk in the sports press that eventually faded as the play-offs moved ahead.”
“Okay, Jack.” Dix spoke next. “Fast-forward to the third game of last season between the Vikings and the Cowboys. Different set of circumstances but basically the same scenario.”
My uncle jumped in again. He wanted to tell the story play-by-play. “This time the Vikings get a forty-yard pass called back at the end of the second quarter that would’ve sent them into the locker room ahead by seventeen points.”
Fred was gesticulating angrily, telling me that another questionable holding penalty wiped the pass off the board. “As they lined up at the end of the fourth quarter for what would’ve been the winning field goal, the Vikings get called for an illegal shift which nobody, nobody saw except the referee.
“Again it takes them out of field goal range, the game goes into overtime, and they lose.”
I saw where these stories were going, of course. Bad calls happen in football and people scream about the officials and then they get over it. For Fred Kreutzer, Evan Newman, and David Dix to come to me, it meant they had more to go on than alleged bad calls in a couple of games.
Newman said, “We’ve looked at the tapes ad nauseam, Jack, including last Sunday’s game in San Francisco. We see a pattern. All told, eleven games stink badly over two and a half years. Nine of the losing teams had winning records and seven of them made the play-offs.”
My uncle said, “A lot of people lost a lot of money on these games. They’re starting to wonder if there’s something funny going on.”
“Why come to me?” I asked. “Why not take this to the commissioner first?”
“We don’t have any proof,” said Dix. “And frankly, Jack, if something did happen, we don’t want the commissioner and the press and the public to hear about it. Ever.”
Chapter 18
Emilio Cruz came through my office door first, and Del Rio arrived maybe five minutes after the owners had left. I waved them both into chairs. “We’ve been tapped by three NFL team owners,” I said, “and they could be representing a dozen more. One of them is Fred Kreutzer. Fred is my mother’s brother.”
Cruz lifted his eyebrows. “Fred Kreutzer is your uncle?”
“He is. He and some other owners think that games are being fixed. They see a pattern of long-odds underdogs winning too often, and based on questionable calls.”
“That’s nuts.” Cruz frowned. “You can’t cheat at football. You can’t predict a game-changing play, and even if you could, there are cameras on every move. Every second is under a microscope.”
“If that turns out to be the case, we’ve got happy clients,” I said, “and nice paychecks. We’ve been guaranteed double our rate for fast, thorough, and very confidential work.”
“They’re saying the players are rigging the games?” Del Rio asked.
Del Rio is my age, but the years he spent at Chino aged his face and shattered his faith in people. I think the sanctity of football is one of the few things he still believes in.
“Fred says that they didn’t find any player infractions, just calls that may have been crooked. Or else the refs were seeing optical illusions.
