by Madden, Bill
Was there no way at all to undo this? To turn it around on the grounds that Vincent had violated baseball’s rules of procedure and denied him due process? This was the topic of a phone conversation Steinbrenner had with Costello shortly after the latter had been hired to defend Kleinman in Vincent’s continuing probe.
“It’s like Steve and Paul told you, George,” Costello said. “You gave up your right to sue when you signed the Major League agreement and again when you signed your agreement with Vincent.”
“I don’t care,” Steinbrenner said. “I still want to sue. The guy fucked me!”
“You can’t sue, George,” said Costello, “but someone who hasn’t signed the Major League Agreement can.”
“Who could that be?” Steinbrenner asked.
“For one, Leonard Kleinman,” Costello said. “You would have to nominate him as your choice to succeed you as Yankees general partner, and Vincent will surely reject him, thus giving Kleinman a cause of action to sue.”
“But Kleinman isn’t even a limited partner,” Steinbrenner said.
“You can make him one by simply giving him a share of the team.”
“A share of the team?” Steinbrenner protested. “This stuff is worth a lot of money! I can’t just give him a share!”
“It can be one one-thousandth of a point, George,” Costello said. “It doesn’t matter how big the share is. As long as it’s a smidgen, you can then nominate him to be managing general partner.”
“And then what?” Steinbrenner asked.
“And then,” Costello said, “Vincent will automatically assume Kleinman is your stooge and stop it, giving Kleinman grounds to sue, whereby, in discovery, we’ll be able to bring out all of the things Vincent did to deprive you of your due process. It’ll all be out there. And the rest of baseball will know the true story. Your fellow owners will see what Vincent did to you and realize he would do the same to them.”
“All right,” Steinbrenner said, “I’ll do it. But you better be right. I don’t want that little shit Kleinman running the Yankees.”
“Trust me,” said Costello. “I know Vincent. He’ll take the bait.”
“He better,” said Steinbrenner, “because if you’re wrong, I’ll throw you out the fucking window.”
This conversation took place before Steinbrenner had nominated his replacement as general partner. Sure enough, Vincent rejected Kleinman, which led to Steinbrenner’s nomination of Nederlander. In the meantime, on the day before his scheduled hearing, Kleinman filed a $22 million lawsuit against the commissioner and John Dowd in a Manhattan federal court, alleging that “Vincent’s course of conduct from the very beginning of his involvement in this matter demonstrates that he has harbored a prejudice against Kleinman and Steinbrenner and a desire to find a way to exclude them from being involved with the Yankees.” The suit further charged that Vincent and Dowd had conducted an unfair and biased investigation of Steinbrenner and that Dowd had tampered with transcripts of witness testimony. “[Vincent’s] initiation of the charges against Kleinman was done in bad faith with the intent to undermine his contract with the Yankees and to prevent him from succeeding Steinbrenner as Yankee general partner.” Kleinman’s suit against Vincent and Dowd, like Steinbrenner’s against the stenographic agency, was ultimately dropped.
At the time, the media viewed the Kleinman suit as just another nuisance on the part of the Steinbrenner camp. Most of Steinbrenner’s fellow owners were privately glad he’d been tossed out of baseball. His big spending on free agents had driven up salaries, and his constant battles with league officials, umpires and most of the other owners themselves had established him, in their eyes, as baseball’s Public Enemy Number 1. If Vincent had screwed him, so be it. He deserved it, and their game would be better off without him.
IN THE MEANTIME, the team Steinbrenner left behind was well on its way to a last-place, 67-95 season, their worst record since 1912. On his way out the door, Steinbrenner had made two other announcements: Stump Merrill was getting a two-year contract extension as manager, and Gene Michael was being promoted from scout to general manager. In effect, it was “co–general manager,” as George Bradley would be moving to New York to work side by side with Michael as VP of baseball operations. Although it seemed almost an afterthought on Steinbrenner’s part to return Michael to the role of GM, it would later prove to be the most significant decision the deposed Yankees owner ever made for the organization.
Michael faced a daunting task. His best player, Don Mattingly, seemed helpless to regain his MVP form because of his debilitating back condition, and closer Dave Righetti, the team’s most consistent pitcher since 1981, was eligible for free agency. Michael thought that, at 31, Righetti’s skills had begun to erode: seven years removed from the birthday present he gave Steinbrenner in no-hitting the Boston Red Sox at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1983, Righetti’s saves as a closer had been gradually declining and his ERA had risen to a career-high 3.57 in 1990. Nevertheless, Righetti’s agent, Bill Goodstein, was working the media with abandon, declaring his intention to get a five-year contract for his client. At one point, the new general partner, Robert Nederlander, obviously concerned about the public relations fallout of losing Righetti (not to mention the second-guessing he’d get from Steinbrenner), suggested to Michael that they offer a four-year deal to Goodstein.
“Are you kidding?” Michael said. “I don’t even want to offer him three years! I love Dave. He’s been a great Yankee, and he was unselfish in agreeing to become a closer, but I think he’s got two years left, tops. I’ll only go the extra year because he’s meant so much to us.”
As a hedge against Righetti leaving, Michael signed 34-year-old free agent right-hander Steve Farr, who had been both an effective closer and setup man for the Kansas City Royals during the previous five seasons. (Farr would save 78 games over the next three seasons and proved to be the first of many enlightened acquisitions by Michael.)
However, at the winter meetings in Chicago that December, Michael and George Bradley clashed in an embarrassing fashion, revealing a dysfunctional Yankees front office operating at cross-purposes. Late on the afternoon of the fourth, San Francisco Giants general manager Al Rosen announced he’d signed Righetti (whom he’d originally acquired for the Yankees in the Sparky Lyle trade with the Texas Rangers all those years ago as Steinbrenner’s GM) to a four-year, $10 million contract. At the time of the announcement, Michael, who had yet to make his final two-year offer to his closer, was at a cocktail reception with Nederlander, privately expressing his relief at not having had to go three years for Righetti. But before Michael was able to sample his first hors d’oeuvre, I interrupted him, asking for an explanation as to why the Yankees had just signed their second baseman Steve Sax to a whopping four-year, $12.4 million contract extension at the same time they were letting Righetti go. Michael was dumbfounded.
“I don’t know anything about that. I have to check on this,” he said, before dashing out of the room with Nederlander, a look of panic on both their faces.
The 30-year-old Sax, coming off a bad season in which he’d hit a career-low .260, had been publicly angling for a contract extension even though he had another year to go before he was eligible for free agency. Behind Michael’s back, George Bradley had given Sax what was then a record deal for a second baseman.
“We probably didn’t have to sign Sax, but we did,” Michael said uneasily to a throng of New York reporters later that night. “We don’t know if it’s the right move. Only time will tell.”
Privately, however, Michael was enraged—and became even more so when he heard that Bradley and Righetti’s agent, Goodstein, had called in to WFAN, a New York radio station, from their hotel rooms, and were mutually commiserating over the departure of the popular pitcher.
“I know if George here had been doing the negotiations, David would still be a Yankee,” Goodstein said, to which Bradley replied, “You’re probably right.”
Not long after Bradley got
off the air, Michael confronted him in his room. “How dare you criticize me in public like that!” he shouted. “You sign Sax behind my back and then go on ‘Fans’ [sic] radio with that fucking Goodstein and make me out to be the villain with Righetti? I’m telling you right now, George, it’s going to be either you or me! I’m not going to put up with any more of this!”
Because Sax’s agent was Tom Reich, Steinbrenner’s pal, there were strong suspicions among the media and Yankees front office execs that Bradley had acted on the banished owner’s instructions. Former Yankees GM Bob Quinn, then with the Cincinnati Reds, told reporters, “My analysis is that the Sax signing was done to offset Righetti leaving, in Steinbrenner’s eyes. That’s how George works, and I know him as well as anyone. He’s a great attention diverter.”
The next day, Steinbrenner took the opportunity to turn his front office chaos into another indictment of Fay Vincent.
“Don’t blame Gene Michael or George Bradley,” Steinbrenner said when called by reporters. “Blame Fay Vincent. If I were involved, this never would have happened.”
Steinbrenner went on to insist there was a clause in his agreement with Vincent that permitted him to negotiate with free agents. “I have no intention of twisting the agreement,” he said, “but there are four areas where I have the absolute right to be involved, areas where he can’t say no. They involve ‘extraordinary and material affairs,’ and certainly Righetti qualifies. I was turned down by the commissioner. He gives no reason. He just says it’s irrelevant.”
(For the record, Michael’s assessment of Righetti proved to be correct; the left-hander had three poor seasons in San Francisco before being released.)
Michael ended the year with a New Year’s Eve signing of free agent right-hander Scott Sanderson, who would win 28 games over the next two seasons. But his most gratifying moment that off-season came on February 6, when Nederlander announced the firing of George Bradley. Pushed into taking sides between Steinbrenner’s two warring GMs, Nederlander bravely chose Michael. Two weeks later, Michael made another free agent deal, one that raised eyebrows throughout baseball, when he announced he was bringing in 31-year-old left-handed closer Steve Howe, a six-time offender for drugs and alcohol, on a minor league contract. Perhaps at another time, the Yankees wouldn’t have brought in a player with a reputation as damaged as Howe’s, but these were desperate times for the Yankees, in which elite players were no longer inclined to cast their lot with them, no matter how much money they offered. Before succumbing to drugs and alcohol, Howe had been a Rookie of the Year and an All-Star with the Los Angeles Dodgers. As Michael explained to reporters, “I know he can still pitch and I hope he’s straightened his life out. He’ll have to prove himself, but in our situation I think he’s worth the gamble.”
AS MICHAEL CONTINUED patching the Yankee roster, behind the scenes Steinbrenner was ramping up his campaign to undo his lifetime ban by Vincent. The previous fall he had added a couple of new attorneys, Arnold Burns and Randy Levine, to his legal team, both of whom had recently worked in the Reagan Justice Department. Steinbrenner had met the two at a law enforcement luncheon in Brooklyn at which he was the headline speaker. Burns was a high-profile lawyer in New York and a former deputy U.S. attorney general, while Steinbrenner’s interest in Levine was piqued when he learned of Levine’s long-standing relationship with Bud Selig, the influential owner of the Milwaukee Brewers.
Despite periodic outward support of Vincent’s handling of Steinbrenner’s case by some owners, Levine, in his discussions with Selig, detected a growing disenchantment with the commissioner by another faction of owners. Those owners, the so-called hawks in the previous spring’s rancorous labor negotiations with the players’ union, were miffed that Vincent had overstepped baseball’s executive council and injected himself into the stalled talks, making a series of overtures to the union in an attempt to end the 1990 spring training lockout. At Steinbrenner’s behest, Levine and Burns, along with Steinbrenner’s Tampa attorney, Bob Banker, began researching all of Vincent’s actions as commissioner as they pertained to adhering to baseball’s rules of procedure in the Steinbrenner case. In addition, they began engaging in a series of meetings and phone conversations with Selig and his attorney Bob DuPuy, Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf and Atlanta Braves chairman Bill Bartholomay regarding the power structure of baseball and the Steinbrenner situation.
“It was a very tense time in baseball,” Levine remembered. “There was beginning to be open warfare between a lot of the owners and Vincent, as well as the owners and the union. We were trying to determine what was in the commissioner’s power and what was in the power of baseball’s executive council. By ignoring the rules of procedure as he did in George’s case, we all agreed Vincent had abused his power.”
In early February 1991, baseball’s executive council (which consisted of the commissioner, the two league presidents and four owners from each league) received a 135-page report compiled by Reinsdorf and Bartholomay, based on the petition submitted to them by Steinbrenner’s lawyers, Levine, Burns and Banker, detailing all of Vincent’s violations of the rules of procedure, specifically in regard to the Steinbrenner investigation. “Vincent could have put away Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein and not gotten as much positive publicity he did in getting rid of George,” Reinsdorf told me. “But there was significant concern among the owners about the procedure he used.”
Vincent, who had just returned from a 2½-month health leave when details of the petition were reported in an exclusive Daily News story, was quick to respond. Ironically, he invoked Reinsdorf’s reference to the Iraqi dictator.
“I can’t think of anyone other than Saddam Hussein I’d rather have making all these complaints,” Vincent told the Daily News. “It’s very difficult to be explaining complicated matters such as this. How do you go about explaining due process and how we did it?”
Steinbrenner, Vincent maintained, had admitted two things under oath: that he did not notify the commissioner’s office of his involvement with Spira and that he made a $40,000 payment to Spira, a known gambler. “I didn’t have to take into account any other testimony,” Vincent insisted. “If anything, I gave [Steinbrenner] the benefit of the doubt. I based my opinion on two instances of misbehavior. When I initially gave him a two-year suspension, I thought I was being fair.”
Still, the executive council’s decision to review Reinsdorf’s report was ample reason for concern for Vincent. The executive council did not have the power to overrule the commissioner’s decisions, but it could apply sufficient pressure on him to provide Steinbrenner with a new hearing.
Steinbrenner’s case was aided by the extortion charges he’d filed against Spira. It was here, his lawyers maintained, that they would prove the $40,000 payment had been made by Steinbrenner in good faith, with no ulterior motive, and that he had refused Spira’s demands for more. They were confident Steinbrenner would come off as an even more sympathetic figure in the trial, and ultimately they were right.
The Spira extortion trial began in April in a Manhattan federal court. For the first few days, Spira’s defense attorney, David Greenfield, who had gained permission from the judge to introduce Steinbrenner’s 1974 conviction for illegal campaign contributions into the proceedings, did a masterful job of painting Steinbrenner as an influential power broker, perjurer and convicted felon. Citing Steinbrenner’s coercion of his employees at American Ship to lie to the grand jury about the illegal contributions, Greenfield asked, “So did you concoct and orchestrate a story to protect your business interests?”
“I pleaded guilty to what that says,” Steinbrenner replied, shakily.
“For those first couple of days, Greenfield kicked the shit out of George,” remembered Bobby Gold, one of Steinbrenner’s attorneys. “That’s when we took him across the street to the Vista Hotel and made him sit down and read all the discovery material that had been given to Greenfield by John Dowd. He had to be coached as to what was coming and how
to respond to it.”
Steinbrenner’s attorneys all seemed to agree that the case turned in their favor when prosecutor Gregory Kehoe introduced a glassine envelope containing a list of names and phone numbers that had been seized by the FBI in a raid of Spira’s house.
“Are you aware of what the FBI seized?” Kehoe asked Steinbrenner.
“No.”
“Look at this envelope,” Kehoe said, “and see if you recognize anyone you know.”
Upon perusing the list, Steinbrenner’s eyes suddenly welled up and he began to sob uncontrollably.
“Are you okay, sir?” Kehoe asked.
“Yeah,” Steinbrenner mumbled, pulling out his handkerchief.
At that point, one of the U.S. attorneys turned to Gold, who was sitting in the second row, and whispered, “You little prick! How many days did it take you to teach him to do that?”
In fact, Steinbrenner hadn’t known until he saw the list that one of the phone numbers on it was that of his 84-year-old mother, Rita.
“It demonstrated the full extent of how he was being extorted and the lengths Spira had gone to intrude into his life,” Gold said.
The jury ultimately agreed. On May 8, 1991, Howie Spira was convicted on five of six charges involving his extortion of Steinbrenner. He would later be sentenced to 30 months in a federal penitentiary, along with three years’ probation, counseling and 200 hours of community service. As he was led from the court in handcuffs, Spira said, “I hope George Steinbrenner never gets his team back and that God at least knows what he did to me.”