by Bill Madden
On March 18, 1990, the Daily News dropped the bomb with an exclusive front-page story in which Pienciak revealed for the first time Steinbrenner’s $40,000 payment to Spira. The story ran with photocopies of the two checks from Gold & Wachtel and transcripts from the various phone conversations between the two.
It was all out there now: Spira telling Steinbrenner he owed him. Spira begging for Steinbrenner to help bail him out from his gambling debts. And Steinbrenner finally giving in to him. When Pienciak called Steinbrenner and asked him to explain why he’d made the $40,000 payment to Spira, the owner said, “I did it because I cared about the guy, who, in my opinion, was a lost human being who cried about his parents, having used all their money, who cried about gamblers. . . . The reason I did it was absolutely out of the goodness of my heart, no other reason. I know I look stupid, for trusting a young guy, for trying to help a young guy.” As for the secrecy clause in the agreement, Steinbrenner insisted he didn’t care if the payment became public. “Do you think anything you do with Howard Spira can remain confidential? I have nothing to hide.”
That wasn’t the way Fay Vincent saw it. Vincent, a former classmate of Steinbrenner’s at Williams, had been elevated from deputy commissioner of baseball to commissioner when Bart Giamatti died of a heart attack on September 1, 1989. As Giamatti’s deputy, Vincent, along with John Dowd, a former trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, had gathered the evidence that led to Giamatti handing down the permanent suspension of baseball icon Pete Rose on August 24, 1989, for betting on the game while managing the Cincinnati Reds. On March 24, the day after Spira was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tampa for allegedly trying to extort Steinbrenner, Vincent announced that he was looking into the payment but stopped short of calling it a full-fledged investigation.
All this was happening as the Yankees began the 1990 season under Bucky Dent. Dave Winfield was back after missing all of 1989 while recovering from back surgery. The 38-year-old slugger began the season as the Yankees’ designated hitter, only to be reduced to platoon status by Dent, but a slump in late April in which he went 0 for 23 forced the manager to bench him. More than anyone, Pete Peterson was exasperated with Winfield’s poor performance. Over the winter, Peterson had taken Winfield to lunch at the Plaza, in New York, to ascertain the perennial All-Star outfielder’s recovery. “Don’t worry, I’ll be there, and I’m gonna have a typical year for me,” Winfield had boasted. “You can count on it.”
With Steinbrenner’s full approval, Peterson began exploring trade options, even though, as a player with ten years in the majors, the last five with the same club, under baseball rules Winfield could not be dealt without his approval. Nevertheless, on May 11, Peterson reached agreement with the California Angels to trade Winfield for a serviceable 29-year-old right-hander, Mike Witt, who had been 9-15 in 1989 after five straight seasons with 13 or more wins. Peterson figured Winfield would embrace a trade from the Yankees after all he’d been through with Steinbrenner. But as Peterson and Dent were announcing the deal to beat writers who were gathered in the
visiting manager’s office at the Seattle Kingdome, Winfield, who had been informed of the trade by the GM while taking pregame batting practice, burst into the room and said, “Not so fast. I’m not going anywhere.”
“This is our press conference, Dave. You can have your own when we’re through,” Peterson said curtly.
Afterward, Winfield declared he would not report to the Angels unless they gave him a contract extension. This left the trade in limbo as Winfield’s agent, Jeff Klein, sought to work out a deal with Angels GM, Mike Port. In the meantime, Steinbrenner met with Winfield when the team got back to New York on May 14 and assured him that the Yankees would welcome him back if he was unable to reach a deal with the Angels. Steinbrenner further assured Winfield that he could count on being restored to the starting lineup, which was news to Bucky Dent. Then, on May 17, the Angels announced that Winfield had been signed to a three-year, $9.1 million extension. The long and stormy Steinbrenner-Winfield saga was over. A liberated Winfield told reporters, “The manager didn’t think I could play, and the general manager wanted me traded. I felt strong in my position, but as long as I got the end result, I’m pleased.”
It did not bode well for Dent that Steinbrenner had Winfield’s side in their dispute. As the Yankees continued to lose and sink deeper into last place, Dent’s position became more and more tenuous. In January, Steinbrenner had told the Yankees beat writers at a luncheon at “21”: “Bucky will be the manager all year. He’s one of my guys. He’s won everywhere he’s been in the minors, and we’re gonna keep this guy around for a while. I have the greatest confidence in him. He’s like a son to me.”
Hadn’t they heard that somewhere before?
But on June 5 at Fenway Park in Boston, the scene of Dent’s greatest moment as a Yankee 12 years earlier, the Yankees lost 9–8 to the Red Sox on a squeeze play in the ninth inning. The loss was their ninth in 10 games, leaving them, at 18-31, with the worst record in baseball. When Dent got back to his hotel room after the game, he placed a call to George Bradley, the VP of player development in Tampa, requesting to have another pitcher sent up to him. The response was silence on Bradley’s end of the phone.
“Is there something wrong?” Dent asked.
“George is not real happy right now,” Bradley replied coldly, before hanging up.
Turning to his wife, Dent said, “I’m gonna be fired tomorrow!”
Sure enough, the next morning there was a note under Dent’s door instructing him to be in his room at 12 noon for a phone call from Steinbrenner in Tampa.
At 2 P.M. on June 6, Bradley, who had flown up from Tampa, and Peterson held a press conference at the team’s Boston hotel, where they announced that Dent had been fired and introduced as the new manager Carl “Stump” Merrill. A relatively unknown minor league “lifer,” Merrill had been in the Yankee system as a manager since 1977, winning five league championships along the way. Stunning as the choice of Merrill was to the writers, no one at the press conference seemed more surprised than the new manager himself.
“I felt Mr. Steinbrenner would always hire a marquee name,” Merrill said. “You have no idea what’s going through my body right now. It has long been a goal of mine to manage in the big leagues. I just thought it was a goal that may never be reached, especially with the New York Yankees.”
“I know I’ll take a lot of heat for this,” Steinbrenner said in a conference call later that day. “I said I wouldn’t make a change, that I’d give Bucky the whole year, but I felt we had to do it. I’m a big boy. I’ll handle it.”
The truth was, Steinbrenner had already given up on the season. The team was a mess, and he was helpless to do anything about it, other than his customary firing of the manager, if only for cosmetic purposes. In this case, he couldn’t even bring Billy Martin back for a quick fix. But for Stump Merrill, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. How could he have known that he was about to become the sacrificial lamb for an organization in chaos and an owner in big trouble with the commissioner?
Chapter 15
Banished!
BY MIDSPRING 1990, FAY Vincent was no longer just gathering information about Steinbrenner’s involvement with Spira. He was now in the midst of a full-scale investigation, having once again enlisted the investigative services of John Dowd. In early May, Steinbrenner, accompanied by his attorney Bob Gold, was called in by Dowd to give his deposition on everything that had gone down with the $40,000 payment to Spira and the events that led up to it. For the better part of several days, Steinbrenner answered Dowd’s questions as a court stenographer named Philip C. Rizzuti, of the Esquire Reporting Co., feverishly typed it all into the record. A few days later, however, when Steinbrenner received a copy of the document from Dowd’s office, he was aghast. His lawyers brought to his attention that long passages had either been altered or deleted
outright.
When Gold, who had taken his o
wn copious notes of the proceeding on a yellow legal pad, received his copy, he agreed. It was Gold’s opinion that the deposition was distorted to the point that in many cases it didn’t properly reflect what Steinbrenner had testified to. Dowd had also allegedly taken pains to remove parts of the deposition that reflected badly on him, among them his scorn for the press. “I am not as public a person as you are, Mr. Steinbrenner. I know how treacherous they are. [One of the prices we pay] for being a free country is to let them out there torturing us.” Also allegedly deleted were Dowd’s pronouncements, on a couple of occasions, that Dave Winfield was “the greatest Yankee who ever wore pinstripes.”
Gold was flabbergasted and immediately telephoned Rizzuti from his home in Connecticut.
“Did you do something that can get you in big trouble, Phil?” he asked.
Gold remembered Rizzuti responding: “Dowd made me do it. I can’t discuss it.”
But when Gold registered his complaints with Dowd and Vincent, they sloughed them off. Because it was an informal administrative hearing and not a judicial proceeding involving a civil or criminal case, Vincent said, the documents were not considered a deposition, and the changes made to them were “routine.” Vincent was correct that it was not a civil or criminal proceeding, but baseball’s rules of procedure—which serve as the articles of conduct for everyone in the game, from the commissioner on down, as part of baseball’s constitution—state that commissioner’s hearings “must be conducted like a judicial proceeding, with regard for all the principles of natural justice and fair play.” And while they stopped short of charging unlawful behavior on Dowd’s part, Steinbrenner’s attorneys contended that, if nothing else, he had acted in an unprofessional and unethical manner in editing sworn testimony by Steinbrenner. Indeed, Paul Curran, one of Steinbrenner’s lead attorneys, later wrote a number of letters to Vincent complaining about the investigation and Dowd’s behavior while implying their intentions to sue.
Steinbrenner ultimately did file suit against Rizzuti and his employer, Esquire Reporting, but not Dowd, over the alleged tampering. But a federal judge dismissed the complaint, finding that the transcript had not been materially altered. Steinbrenner later dropped an appeal and issued a statement saying he did not question the “professional competence or integrity” of the firm and its personnel.
Did Dowd and Vincent have an agenda? Roland Thau, the court-appointed attorney who represented Spira in the extortion case Steinbrenner filed against him, told me of a meeting he had with Dowd in which Dowd told him that “only the commissioner could bring [Steinbrenner] down,” and that “the arrogant son of a bitch has gotten away with shit for a lot of years and it was high time he was dealt with.”
On June 26, Vincent, having received Dowd’s report, set Steinbrenner’s formal hearing for July 5. “It is not my place, nor is it the place of John Dowd, to hide anything from George,” Vincent told Claire Smith of the New York Times. Nevertheless, Vincent did just that, refusing Steinbrenner’s attorneys’ request to be provided a copy of Dowd’s report—another clear violation of the due process rights as outlined in baseball’s rules of procedure, which further state that “judgment at a hearing must render a decision based solely upon information presented at that hearing.” (It should be noted that when Vincent’s predecessor, Bart Giamatti, conducted his hearing with Pete Rose, he’d allowed Rose’s lawyers to preview the report Dowd had compiled on their client.)
Steinbrenner, seeking to expose the special investigator’s unethical conduct, called Barbara Walters, then co-host of ABC’s 20/20 news program. Soon, veteran reporter Tom Jarriel began working on a piece for the program, beginning with interviews of Steinbrenner and Bob Gold. But Vincent flat-out refused to talk to 20/20, and Dowd, after first agreeing to go before the cameras, reneged.
According to an October 8, 1990, investigative report in Sports Illustrated, titled “Bad Job, Baseball,” Dowd called an ABC lawyer to complain that Steinbrenner’s allegations against him “were completely unfounded and untrue.” Vincent, meanwhile, reportedly telephoned Daniel Burke, president of Capital Cities/ABC, to refute the story while subtly reminding him that Cap Cities/ABC owned 80 percent of ESPN, which had a
$400 million contract with Major League Baseball to televise games, something he didn’t exactly deny. “If there was such a call,” Vincent later told Sports Illustrated, “I’m not going to talk about it.”
The story never aired, but Steinbrenner had at least succeeded in calling to the attention of his fellow baseball owners for the first time the kind of “investigative” methods used by Dowd. A few months later, Bob Gold was boogie-boarding with his daughter on Cisco Beach, in Nantucket, when he noticed a tall, heavyset man in a dark suit, carrying a briefcase, approaching him on the beach. It was John Dowd. Gold could not believe his eyes as Dowd walked right up to the water’s edge, the surf splashing over his expensive leather shoes.
“How could you do this to me, Bobby?” Dowd said. “I thought we were friends.”
“John,” said the incredulous Gold, “I can’t believe you came all the way up here to seek me out just to tell me that. You’re a fucking madman!”
In the days leading up to his hearing with Vincent, Steinbrenner tried to remain upbeat and confident he would be exonerated. Ira Berkow, a sports columnist for the New York Times who had been particularly critical of Steinbrenner in the past, remembered a bizarre interview he had with the owner in his Yankee Stadium office.
“I had started to ask him about his feelings about the whole investigation,” said Berkow, “and he put his hand on my shoulder, ushered me into his office and began talking about Attila the Hun; what Attila the Hun did and how Attila the Hun handled things.”
Berkow finally said, “George, what in the world are you talking about?”
Steinbrenner reached into his desk drawer and produced a small hardcover book titled Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.
“That’s the guy who pillaged and plundered,” Berkow said.
“Well, he wasn’t perfect,” said Steinbrenner, “but he did have some good things to say.”
“Like what?” Berkow asked.
Flipping through the pages, which Berkow noticed contained several passages that had been underlined in red, Steinbrenner mused, “Here, look at this: ‘Chieftains must work hard to establish discipline and morale, then to maintain them within the tribe.’ Or this one: ‘It is the custom of all Huns to hold to strong personal honor. This is a cardinal virtue. One’s word must prevail over all other considerations.’ ”
“But, George,” said Berkow, “you don’t follow all this advice.”
“What I’m saying,” said Steinbrenner, “is that we can all learn from this.”
After their session, Steinbrenner handed the book to Berkow, assuring him that he had another copy back in Tampa with the same underlined passages. He then inscribed it: “To my good friend, Ira. You, I know, are deep enough to understand this! George.”
On the weekend before July 4, Steinbrenner celebrated his 60th birthday at his Ramada Inn hotel in Ocala, Florida. It was quite a gala affair, with over 200 guests and a pair of orchestras. The highlight of the event was a video showing the opening scene of the movie Patton, in which the general, played by George C. Scott, is standing in uniform in front of a giant American flag. But as the camera zoomed in on Patton’s face, it turned out not to be “Old Blood and Guts” but rather Steinbrenner himself, provoking roars of applause and laughter from the audience.
ON JULY 4, Steinbrenner’s actual birthday, Vincent outlined for Claire Smith of the New York Times how he expected the next day’s hearing with the Yankees owner to go. Smith reported that Steinbrenner would be allowed to call witnesses and that Vincent had requested a list of them, purportedly following the guidelines set by Giamatti in the Rose hearing. Vincent would not reveal to Smith who Steinbrenner might call to testify, saying only that the length of the proceedings “really depends on them. It’s their show.” Vincent ass
ured her that he and Dowd had nothing to hide from Steinbrenner and would be conducting the hearing with utmost fairness in conjunction with all the due process principles, as outlined in the rules of procedure.
Vincent also announced that he was fining Steinbrenner $225,000 for violating Major League Rule 3J, “with respect to tampering in the trade of outfielder Dave Winfield from the Yankees to the Angels last May.” This was in regard to Steinbrenner’s public comments that the Yankees would welcome Winfield back in the event he was unable to reach a satisfactory contract agreement with the Angels.
At 9:30 A.M. on July 5, Vincent convened the hearing at the 30 Rockefeller Plaza office of Judge Howard R. “Ace” Tyler, the commissioner’s attorney and advisor. Besides the 68-year-old Tyler, a former assistant U.S. attorney and federal judge, Vincent’s team included Dowd; baseball’s general counsel, Tom Ostertag; head of security Kevin Hallinan; and deputy commissioner Steve Greenberg. Steinbrenner’s legal team was headed by Curran, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Steve Kaufman, a noted New York trial attorney.
Vincent began by delivering a lengthy dissertation refuting Curran’s claims of bias against Steinbrenner. After that, Kaufman presented a detailed chronology of the events that had brought all of them to this hearing, all the while making the case that Steinbrenner’s association with Spira had been made known to baseball (and, in particular, Hallinan) and that his $40,000 payment made to Spira, though an error in judgment and against the advice of counsel, was neither illegal nor against the best interest of baseball. Kaufman noted that an IRS investigation of the Winfield Foundation had found that 80 percent of the foundation’s funds, overseen by Winfield’s agent, Al Frohman, were being expended on administration. In other words, he said, “the foundation was not exactly being conducted by the United Way.” Kaufman then took special pains to separate the gambling issue—which he knew Vincent was going to pursue—from Steinbrenner.
