by William Cook
When Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics franchise was on the verge of collapse in 1951, he came to see Louie. Louie gave Mack a $250,000 interest-free loan. Rational action dictated to Louie Jacobs that he couldn’t sell hot dogs and peanuts if the Athletics weren’t playing. A couple of years later, Jacobs helped Mack sell the Athletics to Charles Finley who moved the team to Kansas City.
Danny Menendez, the owner of the AAA Toledo Mud Hens, had placed a frantic call to Louie telling him that his franchise was in deep financial trouble and about to fold. Louie told Menendez that he would be on the evening train from Buffalo to Chicago which stopped in Toledo at 4 a.m.—so be sure that he was at the train station to meet him. Menendez was on the platform pacing frantically back and forth when the train pulled in to Toledo early in the morning. Louie got off in his pajamas and slippers and handed Menendez a check, then got back on the train. With the money Jacobs had advanced Menendez, the Toledo franchise survived. What Louie got out of the deal was an extended contract to sell hot dogs.
Sportservice even loaned the City of St. Louis $12 million in the early 1960s (a guarantee of $400,000 a year) to help secure the financing for Busch Memorial Stadium. In return, Louie Jacobs got a 25-year concession contract. Then, after Emprise invested another $1.2 million in concession booths and equipment, the contract was extended to 30 years.
While Louis Jacobs and his brothers saved a lot of sports franchises from financial disaster and collaborated with some men of impeccable character, there was also a dark side to their business relationships. While Louie was considered to be an honest, hard-working man, he did business with a lot of unsavory characters, and some of those deals raised eyebrows and also got the attention of Congress.
Rumors persist that during prohibition, Louie Jacobs bought speed boats to bring illegal liquor from Canada to Buffalo. Also, it is alleged that as far back as 1937, the Jacobses were loaning money to Cleveland mobster Moe Dalitz. History shows that later, Dalitz would be instrumental in bringing syndicate gambling to Las Vegas when he acquired the Stardust Casino. Federal investigators did uncover one loan of $250,000 to the Stardust from Louie.
Giacomo “Jack” Tocco, who died in 2014 at the age of 87, had a business degree from Detroit University and operated a linen business in the Motor City. Jack Tocco was also a capo in the Detroit Mafia. Tocco was an associate of Emprise in the Hazel Park Racetrack. Emprise owned 12% in the track. Tocco, executive vice-president of Hazel Park, along with two other members of the board of directors, Anthony J. Zerilli, the son of a Mafia don and Dominic “Fats” Corrado, had been named by the McClellan Committee as members of the Detroit Mafia.*
Later, Anthony Zerilli was convicted with Emprise in a casino conspiracy. Three months before the Sports Illustrated article appeared in May 1972, a federal jury in Los Angeles found Louie and his eldest son Max guilty of conspiring to help conceal the identity of two purchasers of a Las Vegas casino.
After Howard Hughes had bought Las Vegas’ Frontier Hotel and Casino in 1972, a jury in Los Angeles federal court concluded that the casino’s real ownership had been illegally concealed. The real owners had been Detroit mobsters Anthony J. Zerilli and Michael S. Polizzi. The jury found that Emprise had made substantial loans to front men for the allegedly mob-related owners.
Both Zerilli and Polizzi received five-year prison sentences in the scam. Emprise was fined $10,000 and Louie Jacobs and his son, Max, were named as unindicted co-conspirators, but neither received a prison sentence and by the time the case was heard, Louie had died three years earlier in 1968 from a heart attack.
In the mid-1970s, Anthony Zerilli’s name would surface again as he would be a suspect in the killing of Teamster union leader Jimmy Hoffa. Zerilli died in 2015 at that the age of 87 of natural causes.
On several occasions, according to the Sports Illustrated article, Raymond Patriarca, the don of the New England Mafia, had helped associates connect with Louie. One, in particular, was an Eastern Pennsylvania mobster by the name of Russell Bufalino. In 1959, Louie had helped Bufalino arrange the financing for four amusement parks in the Pittsburgh area.
Louie Jacobs had also financed James Plumeri, a New York labor racketeer, who would be killed in a mob hit in 1971, in various boxing ventures ran by Frankie Carbo in the 1950s. During the 1940s and 1950s, Carbo and his crime associates controlled Madison Square Garden and several high-profile boxers including Jake LaMotta, Rocky Graziano, and Sonny Liston. In addition, it had been rumored that Plumeri and Carbo had controlled Floyd Patterson. It was alleged that the working relationship that Louie Jacobs had with Plumeri was that he was to use his labor clout with another mobster Johnny Dio to head-off strikes at sports sites where Sportservice had concessionaire contracts.
Jerry Catena would be the successor to Vito Genovese as the don in the New York crime family of the same name. When Jerry Catena came into a million dollars, Louie helped him invest it. Catena wanted to buy Lion Manufacturing, which made slot machines.
Tony Corallo was a Lucchese crime family member who reportedly controlled the majority of the loan sharking and illegal gambling in Newark, New Jersey. According to Corallo, Jerry Catena couldn’t use the million dollars cold cash he had to buy Lion Manufacturing because if he used the cash, he could face prosecution for tax evasion, so Louie Jacobs stepped forward to assist Catena.
The finance plan put in place by Louie was that Emprise would be a major stockholder in Lion Manufacturing by virtue of a voting trust agreement from a million-dollar loan to Lion in 1962. Later, Louie’s son Max Jacobs said that his father wanted to buy into Lion because they made a great coffee machine, but when he learned the true nature of Catena’s intentions for the company to make slot machines, he sold out his interest in the company.
In the Sports Illustrated article, Louie’s two sons, Max and Jeremy Jacobs, admitted that there were Emprise dealings with some of the people named above. In regards to Anthony Zerilli, Max Jacobs said, “Indeed there had been a loan, a big one—$256,000—in 1956. Sportservice had become the concessionaire at Hazel Park in 1949. When stock was made available seven years later, Zerilli and Tocco came to Louie Jacobs for financial backing—just as [Bill] Veeck and [Connie] Mack had. For every two shares they purchased with Jacobs money, Louie was allowed to purchase one. Emprise wound-up with 12% of the stock. The loan was paid off in December 1960.”4
Perhaps mob-related people just came with the territory in such sports venues as horse racing, dog racing, jai-alai, and boxing, but Louie Jacobs seemed to work cordially with members of the criminal element and always seemed to be in control of their common interest. Mafia dons respected Louie and honored his boundaries.
Buying into the Cincinnati Royals was not an unusual investment for Emprise and the Jacobses. At various times, Emprise had owned stock in other sports teams, such as the Buffalo Bisons baseball team of the International League and the Buffalo hockey franchise in the American Hockey League. But as things stood in 1963, the Cincinnati Royals were per se the only known professional sports franchise with mob connections.
Louie Jacobs had taken part in the building of Cincinnati Gardens. When the building project had run into financial trouble, he invested in it and wound up owning 40% of the stock.
In the fall of 1963, after forking over $400,000 to the Wood Foundation, Louis Jacobs owned 56% of the Cincinnati Royals stock and 80% of Cincinnati Gardens. The Royals had lost $25,000 in 1962–63 and had a carry-over loss of $150,000. But the franchise, which had been purchased by the Wood Estate and other local investors in 1958 for $200,000, had increased significantly in value in recent years—the same for the market value of Cincinnati Gardens. The signing of Jerry Lucas was expected to significantly increase the Cincinnati Royals’ gate receipts in the coming 1963–64 season. It is highly possible that Louie Jacobs had come to the conclusion that, with the addition of Jerry Lucas, he had acquired a franchise with huge growth potential on the bottom line.
As for Warren Hensel, what
was he going to do? Sue Louie Jacobs for breach of contract? There was no contract, and Louie had more lawyers than Hensel and was well connected to the NBA Board of Governors.
After sitting out the 1962–63 season, Jerry Lucas was ready to get back to playing basketball. The Cincinnati Royals had exercised their territorial draft rights to Lucas, and Warren Hensel had been the driving force in signing him for the Royals.
Jerry Ray Lucas was born on March 30, 1940, in Middletown, Ohio, a little steel mill town with approximately 50,000 residents located halfway between Cincinnati and Columbus.
Lucas became nationally known during his high school days playing at Middletown High School under legendary basketball coach Paul Walker where he scored 2,466 points, shattering the high school scoring record set by Wilt Chamberlain of 2,252 at Philadelphia’s Overbrook High School. Lucas led the Middletown Middies to two consecutive Ohio State high school basketball championships in 1956 and 1957 and was named the Ohio Player of the Year in both 1957 and 1958. In state championships play, Lucas averaged 44 points per game. In a tournament his sophomore year, Lucas scored 55 and 44 points on consecutive nights. After the Middies won the 1957 state title, for a week Middletown called itself Lucasville.
On the night of January 17, 1958, with Jerry Lucas rewriting the Ohio high school basketball record book, two undefeated teams from southwest Ohio, Middletown and Hamilton, met at the Cincinnati Gardens in front of 13,646 spectators, the 17th largest crowd in the arena’s history.
Middletown won the game 64–49 as Jerry Lucas scored 31 points and guard Tom Sizer, 22. However, the game was no breather for the Middies as the Hamilton Big Blue had rallied to make the score 43–40 at the end of the third period. Then, Tom Sizer poured in 9 points to spark the Middies to a 60–41 lead with two minutes remaining. It was Middletown’s 64th consecutive victory.
That year the Royals had just moved to Cincinnati from Rochester and average attendance for their home games at Cincinnati Gardens was 3,641. So, the Jerry Lucas/Tom Sizer-led Middletown Middies, a high school basketball team, had a gate draw that was over three and half times that of an NBA team in Cincinnati.
Going into the final game of the Ohio State high school tournament in 1958, the Middletown Middies, led by Jerry Lucas, had won 76 straight games. Then, Middletown lost the championship game to Columbus North, 63–62.
For decades following the loss to Columbus North, the loyal Middletown fans have suspected that something was wrong with Jerry Lucas in that game. On March 12, 2008, Rob Oiler wrote a column in The Columbus Dispatch raising the question that maybe Jerry Lucas had held back in the championship game because of hurt feelings. The record showed that he only scored 25 points on 17 attempts.
In his column, Oiler resurrects the issue that during the week before the championship game, the mother of Lucas’s teammate—guard Tom Sizer—was complaining that Lucas was getting too much attention. The speculation is that Lucas, who was always an unselfish player, became emotionally scared and shut down his game vs. Columbus North. Apparently, the issue was well-known by both Lucas and Sizer and both have denied anything like that ever happened.
Tom Sizer went on to play for the University of Cincinnati on two NCAA National Championship teams in 1961 and 1962, coached by future Royals coach Ed Jucker, that would defeat the Ohio State Buckeyes featuring his former high school teammate Jerry Lucas on the squad.
By the time that Jerry Lucas graduated from Middletown High, he stood 6 feet 8 with a reach of 12 feet three inches above the floor. He had been a straight-A student, president of the senior class, and a member of the National Scholastic Honor Society, and received offers from 160 colleges and universities.
According to Jerry’s mother, “We were told by an alumnus from one school in the East that if Jerry enrolled there my husband would get $15,000-a-year job [the husband, Mark Lucas was making $6,500-a-year as a pressman], that the mortgage on our home would be paid off, that Roy [Jerry’s 16-year-old brother who stood 6′3″, weighed 180, and was a fine football player] would also get a scholarship to the same school.”5 Also, Jerry would have a new car and expense account.
What Jerry Lucas wanted was an academic scholarship to study business administration with no strings attached. He also wanted to go to school within 200 miles of Middletown so his parents could see him play. That encompassed some very elite college basketball territory. Located within those boundaries are Cincinnati, Xavier, Ohio State, Dayton, Western Kentucky, Miami (OH), Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, and Louisville.
Lucas chose Ohio State and entered in the fall of 1958. An All-American for three varsity years, he led the Buckeyes to three Big Ten Championships, three NCAA tournament finals, and the 1960 NCAA championship defeating California in the finals, 75–55.
Had California not defeated Cincinnati to reach the finals, Jerry Lucas would have played his one and only game of his college career against Oscar Robertson.
In 1961 and 1962, despite having star-studded rosters that in addition to Jerry Lucas included John Havlicek, Larry Siegfried, Bobby Knight, and Mel Nowell, the Ohio State Buckeyes teams lost the NCAA tournament in consecutive years to the University of Cincinnati Bearcats.
Regardless of the failure of the Buckeyes to defeat the Bearcats, Jerry Lucas was named MVP of the Holiday Tournament at Madison Square Garden in 1961, College Player of the Year in both 1961 and 1962, and Sportsman of Year for 1961 by Sports Illustrated.
In the summer of 1960, Jerry Lucas played on the Gold Medal-winning USA Olympic basketball team in Rome. The team included future NBA stars Oscar Robertson, Bob Boozer, Adrian Smith (all future Royals teammates), Jerry West, Darrell Imhoff, Terry Dischinger, and Walt Bellamy. Another future Royals teammate chosen for the Olympic team, Jay Arnett of Texas, elected not to participate.
Prior to the start of the 1963–64 season, Maurice Podoloff stepped down as president, although some maintain that he was forced out.
Podoloff was replaced by Walter Kennedy, a public relations man and politician. Walter Kennedy had done some public relations work for the Harlem Globetrotters. At the time, he was voted in as the NBA’s second president, he was in his second term as mayor of Stamford, Connecticut. In 1962, Kennedy had been the campaign manager for U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff.
As the mid-1960s were fast approaching, the NBA was still in a state of structural metamorphosis; it had, in effect, little more than a trial national television contract with ABC and labor unrest with the players was on the horizon. Walter Kennedy would have to oversee it all.
Kennedy quickly demonstrated that he was going to be a no-nonsense president when he fined Red Auerbach $500 for rowdy behavior in a pre-season game. He also indicated that he was going to continue his predecessor’s tough stance against the players union, an issue that would reach a crisis level during the All-Star Game that year.
Beginning in 1963–64, the Syracuse Nationals relocated to Philadelphia and became the 76ers. Also, the Chicago Zephyrs, who had been added as the expansion team Chicago Packers in 1961–62, were transferred to Baltimore and became the Baltimore Bullets.
Chicago had been in the Western Division, but rather than properly realign the Eastern and Western Divisions, the NBA created a geographical travesty, leaving the Baltimore team in the Western Division and Cincinnati in the Eastern Division.
The failure by the NBA to realign the conferences properly in accordance with geography has not gone unnoticed. Over the ensuing decades, pro-basketball historians have more often than not advanced the opinion that the failure of the NBA to return the Cincinnati Royals to the Western Division had a dramatic effect on the history of the team. Simply stated, with the transfer of Chicago to Baltimore, it is the belief of many that if the Royals had been returned to the Western Division, they might have appeared in five straight NBA Finals. The record shows that between the seasons of 1962–63 and 1966–67, the Royals peaked. But being in the Eastern Division, they were confronted with the monumental obstacle every season o
f getting by the Boston Celtics to reach the finals.
Jerry Lucas played his first NBA game on October 10, 1963, in St. Louis as the Royals defeated the Hawks 112–93. In his professional debut, Lucas scored 23 points. Wayne Embry led the Royals with 25 points and Oscar Robertson added 22.
The following evening, Lucas played his first game at Cincinnati Gardens as the Royals lost to the Boston Celtics 92–93. Lucas had 13 points and Robertson, 20.
As expected, the presence of Jerry Lucas playing with Oscar Robertson not only elevated the Royals in competitiveness but also temporarily in gate attraction. On December 27, 1963, the Royals defeated the Boston Celtics 91–87 at Cincinnati Gardens with a packed house of 14,163 fans for the post-Christmas shootout.
By the All-Star Game break on January 12, the Royals had a record of 30–15 and were putting plenty of pressure on the Boston Celtics.
Besides having Lucas and Robertson, the Royals also had a new coach, Jack McMahon, who had been hired by Warren Hensel. Jack McMahon had played college ball at St. John’s University and captained the team in his senior year, 1952, that lost to Kansas, 80–63, in the NCAA Finals. He was then drafted by Rochester and played eight years in the NBA with the Royals and St. Louis Hawks. Prior to coming to Cincinnati, McMahon had been coach of the Chicago Zephyrs.
In regard to McMahon’s coaching style, Oscar Robertson remarked, “Jack McMahon was like a lot of coaches of that era, he was fiery. On the sidelines, he would yell and moan until he was red in the face. He also came in and, like many coaches, immediately decided we needed to play better defense and try to run more.”6
In 1954, an NBA players union had been started by Bob Cousy. Dissatisfied with the indifference of the team owners to players economic circumstances, Cousy began writing to an established player from each of the league’s teams (Paul Arizin, Philadelphia Warriors; Carl Braun, New York Knicks; Bob Davies, Rochester Royals; Paul Hoffman, Baltimore Bullets; Andy Phillip, Fort Wayne Pistons; Jim Pollard, Minneapolis Lakers; Dolph Schayes, Syracuse Nationals; and Don Sunderlage of Milwaukee) encouraging solidarity among the players. The only player that didn’t respond was Andy Phillip, who was not going to attempt to bite the hand that fed him. Pistons owner Fred Zollner, who owned a machine works plant, was very anti-union and this prevented the Pistons players from participating.
