Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  “This is not a Leo Durocher case,” Kaufman said, referring to the former Brooklyn Dodgers manager who, in 1947, was kicked out of baseball for a year by then-commissioner Happy Chandler for associating with gamblers. “Mr. Steinbrenner was told by Mr. Spira that [Spira] gambled while he was at the Winfield Foundation. But [Steinbrenner] did not associate and do business with him other than to take information from him, which he sought to substantiate and corroborate the unlawful activity that had occurred [at the foundation].”

  Once he concluded his opening statement, Kaufman reiterated to Vincent his team’s intention to call a number of witnesses, but suggested that, for this proceeding, normal courtroom protocol be put aside. Instead of Steinbrenner being their last witness, he said, “we welcome the opportunity to have him as the first witness, because I think you should be satisfied to anything that may be of concern to you. As we go forward, we may want to call him back again, but that’s why we’re putting him on first.”

  Vincent agreed.

  Steinbrenner’s team strongly suspected that Vincent, taking his cue from the Dowd report, which they weren’t allowed to see, would seek to tie Steinbrenner’s payment to Spira to the gambling angle, as that would carry a lifetime sentence for violating baseball’s cardinal rule. On the surface, that seemed to be a stretch, if for no other reason than that the only actual proof of Spira being a gambler was Spira’s own word—which Vincent himself had called worthless a number of times.

  Indeed, Vincent pressed hard on Spira’s gambling, and Steinbrenner, much to his attorneys’ dismay, was anything but a strong and steady witness under the heat of the commissioner’s interrogation.

  The flashpoint moment of the hearing was when Steinbrenner, asked by Vincent if there was one single factor that had prompted him to make the $40,000 payment to Spira, threw Lou Piniella and former Yankees employees Pat Kelly and Dave Weidler (who had been fired for alleged financial improprieties) under the bus.

  “[Spira] scared me, and he really scared my children,” Steinbrenner said, “and then there was the matter of the Kelly-Weidler situation and Piniella situation. The Piniella family is very close to me, and I think the world of Lou Piniella. But when [Spira] said that he threatened to sell information, as I recall he told me, on Lou Piniella and his sports betting habits, I didn’t want to see baseball or Lou Piniella dragged through something the way it would have been sensationalized.” He then added that Spira had also threatened to go public with the Kelly and Weidler scandal, in which Steinbrenner claimed they had taken various Yankee Stadium giveaway items, “selling them or giving them to this fellow who had a warehouse.” (Weidler publicly and adamantly denied Steinbrenner’s suspicions, saying any accusation that he stole from the Yankees was “false and untrue.”)

  At the time, Piniella (whose “sports betting habit” consisted of frequenting the racetrack, many times with Steinbrenner himself) had just replaced the banished Rose as manager of the Cincinnati Reds. When reports of Steinbrenner now linking him to gambling at the hearing leaked out a couple of weeks later, he was understandably outraged. “George calls me his friend?” Piniella said. “With friends like that, who needs enemies? The fact is, if someone told him something like this about me, you’d think he’d come to me and ask me about it. Did he? Never. What does that tell you? Hell, George fired me twice and even accused me of stealing furniture. He always talks about how much he likes me and my family. This sort of raises my doubts, I’ll tell you that.”

  Vincent asked Steinbrenner, “Did anyone say to you, ‘George, suppose this guy takes the money and pays off gambling debts. You are now an owner in baseball financing a gambler’?”

  “Well, I didn’t,” said Steinbrenner. “I never thought of that. Nobody ever mentioned that to me, commissioner.”

  “And I am saying to you: Why didn’t you call me, get help from other people, before you did something which your advisors told you not to do?” Vincent asked.

  “I told you, nobody, for the whole time from ’87 on, from the commissioner’s office ever told me to stay away from this guy,” Steinbrenner replied, in reference to the fact that he’d alerted former commissioner Peter Ueberroth of his association with Spira and that Hallinan, the commissioner’s security chief, had interviewed Spira at length. “If it was a mistake to make the payment, I made the mistake. But the thing I’m having trouble understanding is that this Spira was in the foundation for years. Why aren’t [Winfield and Spira] . . . I mean, you’ve got me [here]. Literally, I feel like I’m on trial. Okay. If I am, why aren’t they on trial?”

  Vincent’s response was to remind Steinbrenner of the taped conversation with Spira in which he said, “You told me the gamblers were after you and they were going to kill you because of the money you owed them. I wanted you to get out of New York so you could get away from them.”

  “Take the money and get out of New York,” Steinbrenner reiterated.

  “Nothing else,” said Vincent, further clarifying Steinbrenner. “ ‘I gave you the money to do that.’ ”

  “To take the money and get out of New York,” Steinbrenner repeated. “Not to pay gamblers. I got to really say to you, Fay, that’s honest to God what I said.”

  Vincent’s grilling of Steinbrenner would go on for two days. At its conclusion, Kaufman reminded Vincent of his intention to call his next set of seven witnesses, all of whom, he said, were hostile to Steinbrenner in varying degrees but who could “provide live testimony of crucial facts” that had not been available to Steinbrenner. One of them was to be Rizzuti, the court stenographer who, Steinbrenner contended, had, on Dowd’s orders, altered Steinbrenner’s sworn testimony to the investigator.

  Vincent’s response astounded Kaufman.

  “I have no intention of cross-examining any of the people that you might call as witnesses,” he said. “I don’t want to have the record cluttered with testimony that I don’t think is relevant. So, obviously, since I run this meeting, I reserve the right to decide what witnesses are relevant.”

  This, along with refusing to share Dowd’s report with Steinbrenner’s attorneys, was another abuse of due process on Vincent’s part. Still, Vincent was largely applauded by the press—particularly by the New York Times—for finally bringing to justice the serial baseball miscreant and bully that was Steinbrenner—“who had gotten away with a lot of shit for years,” as John Dowd had noted.

  So instead of continuing on with the hearing, Vincent went to Cape Cod to begin his deliberations, accompanied by Dowd and deputy commissioner Steve Greenberg. Vincent had told the Times that he would need a couple of weeks to formulate his decision. “That was ‘Fay the Faker’ at his best,” said one of Steinbrenner’s other attorneys, Dominic Amorosa. “It’s a wonder why he even bothered with the sham of a hearing.”

  On the morning of July 30, Steinbrenner and his attorneys went to the commissioner’s office at 350 Park Avenue, where Vincent handed them his 50-page decision. He was suspending the Yankees owner for two years, followed by a three-year period of probation. Steinbrenner’s attorneys concluded that Vincent had been worried that if he had suspended Steinbrenner for life, the maximum penalty in baseball, which was reserved for those found guilty of gambling on the game or directly involved with gambling in baseball, he would certainly have been sued on the grounds that he’d violated baseball’s rules of procedure. As it was, Curran was prepared to sue anyway, but Steinbrenner wasn’t interested.

  However, Steinbrenner did have a problem with the wording of his sentence.

  “I can’t have the word ‘suspension’ attached to any of this,” he said to Vincent. “I’m concerned about my position [as vice president] with the Olympic Committee. I don’t want to lose that too. Isn’t there some alternative here, Fay?”

  Vincent could not believe his luck. Why, yes, he said, there was an alternative. Steinbrenner, he said, could voluntarily resign as Yankees managing general partner, remove himself from the day-to-day operations of the team and go on baseb
all’s permanent ineligible list. He would also have to agree not to sue baseball.

  For nearly 11 hours, as the sides worked on fine-tuning the agreement, Steinbrenner’s lawyers implored him not to sign. “For some reason, he just couldn’t grasp the fact that it was a lifetime deal he was agreeing to and that he was signing away his right to sue,” said Amorosa.

  Shortly before 8 o’clock, as hordes of reporters waited at the nearby Helmsley Palace Hotel for the decision to be announced, Vincent lost patience and sent word to Steinbrenner’s camp that he was going to release his original decision. As Curran and Kaufman looked on in exasperation, Steinbrenner signed the agreement. Afterward, Vincent would tell Murray Chass of the Times that he “found some aspects of his decision very strange.” There was no compromise, Vincent added. “I had the cards. I could’ve decided to go with Plan A, but I’m a reasonable man and I gave him an option.”

  What was it that possessed Steinbrenner to trade in a two-year suspension for a lifetime sentence? Did his commitment to the Olympics outweigh his love for the Yankees?

  Steinbrenner had first joined the U.S. Olympic Committee in a volunteer leadership capacity in 1985. In 1988, while watching the dismal performance of the U.S. Olympians in the Calgary Winter Games (six medals total, the only two golds by skaters Brian Boitano and Bonnie Blair), Steinbrenner told USOC president Robert Helmick that something had to be done to restore America’s Olympic honor. Helmick agreed and named Steinbrenner to chair a special Olympic Overview Committee. If there was one thing Steinbrenner knew how to do, it was raise money, and money was what he deemed necessary for American athletes to win consistently on the international stage.

  In February 1989, Steinbrenner issued a 21-page report that he had prepared at his own expense. It cited the need for a significant increase in financial support to athletes through tuition assistance, a job opportunities program and direct payments through marketing and corporate sponsorships.

  The committee adopted Steinbrenner’s suggestions. After that, armed with new corporate and marketing sponsorships, U.S. athletes saw their stipends from the USOC rise from $2,500 each to over $100,000 apiece. Their overall performance rose too. After winning those paltry six medals in Calgary in 1988, the U.S. achieved 11 medals in the 1992 Albertville, France, Winter Games, and in 2002 won 34, including 10 golds, in Salt Lake City. And Steinbrenner’s Olympic effort really paid off in 2010, when the U.S. team broke its own record for medals in the winter games.

  Though Steinbrenner never admitted this publicly, people close to him believed that the Olympics were always his first love, even more so than the Yankees. The one-on-one, individual competition was, after all, in his blood. A love for hurdling had been instilled in him by his father and, from his formative years at Culver and then at Williams, he competed against other athletes and against the expectations of Henry Steinbrenner. Henry had been a world-class hurdler, and he never let George forget it.

  “People have said that George was obsessed with winning, and that’s obviously true,” said Harvey Schiller, who worked alongside Steinbrenner as an executive director of the Olympic Committee in the ’80s. “But I just think George always loved America more than anything, felt totally committed to those kids wearing the red, white and blue, and was extremely nationalistic.”

  WHEN HE ANNOUNCED his decision to the throng of reporters at the Helmsley Palace Hotel at 8:27 P.M., Vincent confirmed that Steinbrenner had agreed “to be treated as if he has been placed on the permanent ineligible list” and that he had also agreed not to challenge the sanctions in court. In a separate 11-page summary of the decision handed out to reporters, Vincent said that Steinbrenner’s $40,000 payment to Spira and their “undisclosed working relationship” constituted conduct not in the best interests of baseball.

  Vincent set August 20 as the date by which a new general partner of the Yankees would have to be appointed, subject to his approval. “This sad episode is now over,” he said. “My decision in this case and this result will serve, I trust, to vindicate once again the important responsibility of the commissioner to preserve and protect our game.”

  News of Vincent’s decision was quick to reach Yankee Stadium, where the Yankees were in the seventh inning of their game against the Detroit Tigers. There were only 24,037 fans in the ballpark, many of them listening on their transistor radios and passing along the report that Steinbrenner had been permanently removed as the owner and general partner of the team. Suddenly, a chant erupted: “No more George! No more George! No more George!” Steinbrenner, who left Vincent’s office after signing the agreement and went back to his suite at the Regency with Bill Fugazy, didn’t learn about this final insult until he watched the local 11 o’clock news that night.

  Steinbrenner’s first choice to be the new Yankees general partner was his oldest son, Hank, who in 1986 and ’87 had served in the front office under the tutelage of general managers Clyde King and Woody Woodward before going back to the family horse farm in Ocala. The 33-year-old Hank loved baseball but had no desire to be his father’s puppet general partner in New York. Steinbrenner next proposed Yankees VP and CEO Leonard Kleinman, a nomination that was swiftly rejected by Vincent, who cited an ongoing investigation of Kleinman’s involvement in the Spira affair.

  With time and candidates running out, Steinbrenner convened a meeting of Yankees partners in the Cleveland law offices of Daniel McCarthy, himself a partner, on August 15, and emerged with the surprise announcement that Robert Nederlander, another of the limiteds, was his choice to assume the duties of Yankees general partner. The 57-year-old Nederlander had been one of Steinbrenner’s original limited partners in the Yankees, along with his older brother Jimmy, the Broadway theater owner and producer. Robert was surprised to be tapped to run the Yankees, and sounded very much as though he did not think the gig would last very long. “Hopefully, Mr. Steinbrenner’s son or son-in-law will get involved with the New York Yankees,” he told reporters. “They’re bright, young people. I look forward to have them come in and work with us over a period of time.”

  All that was left was Steinbrenner’s formal letter of resignation as Yankees general partner to Vincent. He undertook that painful exercise six days later. At 9 A.M. on August 21, Vincent received a two-paragraph note from Steinbrenner informing him of his resignation, effective at 12:01 the next morning. In addition, Steinbrenner wrote, Jack Lawn, the former chief of the Drug Enforcement Agency for President George H. W. Bush, would be joining the Yankees as president and chief executive officer and would oversee the operations of the team until Nederlander was formally approved as general partner by the other baseball owners. (Thus, just as he had done with his dual general managers, Steinbrenner had now established a two-headed front office hierarchy, with Lawn and Leonard Kleinman both serving as operations chieftains.)

  That afternoon, Steinbrenner’s last at Yankee Stadium, Arthur Richman, the Yankees’ VP of media relations, hastily arranged a farewell luncheon for the owner. As Lawn remembered, it was not at all a melancholy or maudlin affair. He and Gene Michael were both asked by Richman to say a few words about Steinbrenner and, finally, George himself got up and expressed his appreciation to all the Yankees employees, as well as his support for the new men in charge. The luncheon ended with Steinbrenner’s minions forming a line to shake his hand and say goodbye on his way out.

  That night Steinbrenner watched from his private box as the Yankees beat the Toronto Blue Jays, 6–5, in 11 innings, bringing their sorry record to 50-70. After the game, he was led out of the Stadium through the outfield loading dock, where his limo was waiting, to avoid the throng of reporters congregated at the main entrance. Pausing to look back at the Stadium before stepping into the limo, Steinbrenner’s eyes began to well up.

  How had it come to this? AmShip, which he’d single-handedly built into a thriving industry leader, was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, and now, incomprehensibly, he’d lost his baseball team too. Where once he’d been the prince wh
o’d rescued the Yankees from the inert ownership of CBS and restored them to greatness, now he was vilified. His only consoling thought was that at least Henry Steinbrenner wasn’t around to tell him what a failure he was.

  Chapter 16

  The Comeback

  AFTER SUCCESSFULLY RIDDING BASEBALL of the menace that was George Steinbrenner, Fay Vincent now set his sights on prosecuting the Yankees owner’s accomplice in crime, Leonard Kleinman. As chief operating officer of the Yankees, Kleinman had, according to Spira, arranged for Chase Manhattan Bank officials to circumvent their customary banking policy and set up an account for Spira’s $40,000 payment from the Yankees boss. The bespectacled, bookish Kleinman had been Steinbrenner’s tax attorney in Cleveland and Tampa when, in 1990, he was summoned by the Boss to New York to oversee the Yankees’ business operations. Kleinman’s arrogant and evasive demeanor engendered both contempt and fear from the other Yankees front office execs, who saw him as Steinbrenner’s hatchet man.

  The day after Steinbrenner left Yankee Stadium for the last time to begin his self-imposed lifetime banishment, Vincent announced that he was now officially examining Kleinman’s role in the Spira matter, setting the Yankees COO’s hearing for September 6. Kleinman reacted angrily to the announcement, telling reporters that the commissioner’s allegations were “utterly false, improper and made in bad faith.” But in pursuing a case against Kleinman, Vincent unwittingly created for himself a whole new, even more nettlesome adversary in Robert Costello, a New York attorney and former federal prosecutor, hired by the Yankees to represent their COO. Now that he was no longer involved with the Yankees, Steinbrenner spent much of his time conversing with his lawyers and grousing about Vincent’s continued harping in the newspapers about the restrictions of his permanent ban. Finally, he began to realize what he’d done to himself. In a meeting with his attorneys, Paul Curran and Steve Kaufman, he complained about the unfairness of the whole process and how they needed to sue the commissioner on those grounds. “That’s what we intended to do, George,” said Curran, “but you signed those rights away when you signed that agreement.”