From All-Star to inveterate gambler
Chad Millman
ESPN INSIDER
There's a great new book called Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, with contributions from bigwig writers like David Remnick and Jonathan Safran Foer. I was asked to represent the degenerate wing of the Hall and contributed an essay about Jack Molinas, an 1950s NBA All-Star who was kicked out of the league for gambling. You can read the essay below. Meanwhile, your regularly scheduled line moves are at the bottom. But why skip history?
"The first sign of trouble came when Jack Molinas was a toddler in the Bronx. His father, an immigrant from Turkey, noticed that Jack preferred using his left hand. Louis Molinas believed that lefties were evil deep in their souls, that they carried the trait of the devil. To save his son, Louis strapped the 2-year-old's left arm to his side with a belt, every day, until he was sure the right hand had prevailed. Louis was too late.
<offer>Jack Molinas very well could have gone down as the kind of basketball player New Yorkers turn into mythology -- on par with Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Connie Hawkins and Bob Cousy. In 1945, at fourteen, he was six foot four and played with an effortless grace. By eighteen, he was full-grown at just a shade north of six-six, shooting hooks that angled down at the basket, using his broad mitts to befuddle opponents. He found himself recruited by the basketball powers: Kentucky, Michigan, and all the schools in the five boroughs. By twenty-two, he was the fifth overall pick in the NBA draft and elected to the All-Star team his rookie year. 'Flat out,' Hall of Fame coach Hubie Brown told the writer Charley Rosen, 'Jack Molinas was one of the greatest players to ever play the game.'
But instead of becoming a legend, he pursued a far different career. It began earlier, when he started hanging out with Joe Hacken, known as Joe Jalop because of the beat-up car he drove around the Bronx. He was the borough's biggest bookmaker, running his operation out of the front left table at Bickford's cafeteria on the Grand Concourse, where Molinas went every day after school for pie.
Molinas loved to listen to Jalop work, calculating spreads and commissions. Molinas had a brain, 175 IQ, that was as big as his game. As Rosen wrote in his bio of Molinas, 'The Wizard of Odds,' before kindergarten he was fluent in Spanish. While in grammar school he untangled algebra problems for his proud parents and their friends as a party trick. Eventually he found himself sitting by Jalop's elbow, helping him make odds for the baseball games. When he was twelve he asked Jalop if he could make a bet. He took eight dollars he had saved in allowance and put it all on the Yankees to win. He lost.
By the time Molinas went to Columbia in the fall of 1949, college basketball was lousy with point-shavers. At City College, which won the 1950 NCAA and NIT championships (you could do both back then), three players were eventually arrested for throwing games during the title year. They were the faces of an epidemic that included eight universities -- four from New York City -- and 33 players.
But Molinas, working on Jalop's behest, was crafty. He could miss a shot just so, lightly rolling it off the rim. During his senior year, he was bringing in nearly $20,000 a game for Jalop. He was in the bag; nearly every gambler in New York knew it. And if they could find a corner bookie who didn't, they profited from it.
When Molinas was drafted by the Fort Wayne Pistons in the fall of 1953, he had $100,000 in the bank thanks to his work with Jalop, and was so brash about betting on his own team that he walked around the locker room asking, 'OK boys, how are we going to do today?' The whispering among New York gamblers rose to a roar. 'Wonder what's going on with Fort Wayne games?' a New York Post columnist asked midway through the season. 'Most bookies won't deal with them.'
Early in 1954, just three days after Molinas was named to the All-Star team, the NBA commissioner, Maurice Podoloff, confronted him with his suspicions. Molinas denied shaving points. 'I bet a few times,' he admitted. 'That's all.' But that was enough. He was kicked out of the pros.
Molinas attended Brooklyn Law School. But he spent every weekend on the courts of the Bronx or semipro leagues. These games were peppered with college players, all of whom had read the headlines about the infamous Molinas. He had always seen the angles on the court, and it wasn't too long before he found them off it, too.
Working out of a legitimate law office, Molinas mobilized his vast networks of college players and gambling contacts to create a point-shaving ring that extended from Alabama to Kentucky to Seattle. It involved bookies in New York and St. Louis and mafia families from the biggest cities east of the Mississippi. He named his group, which included Jalop, Fixers Incorporated. Between 1957 and 1961, he traveled the country, closing deals with needy point guards in Tuscaloosa and down-on-their-luck forwards in the state of Washington. He'd give them $1,000 to shave points, then sell the game to the mafia families for $10,000. At the height of his powers, Molinas controlled twenty-seven college teams and made $50,000 a week.
'I didn't hurt anybody,' Molinas said in an interview with the writer Milton Gross, 'except some bettors and bookies.'
The Manhattan district attorney disagreed. Working on a tip from a player, the DA's office tapped the phone of one of Molinas's partners. In May 1962, after nearly a year of investigations and armed with point-shaving players at Bowling Green, North Carolina State, Alabama, Niagara, and Pacific who'd turned state's witness, the DA indicted Molinas and Jalop on charges of bribery.
While Jalop quickly pleaded guilty, Molinas refused a deal to give up his law license and serve six months in prison. As Rosen detailed in The Wizard of Odds, he walked into the courtroom just before his trial and whispered into the ear of the district attorney, 'I'll bet you $10,000 that you won't convict me.'
He would've lost that one, too.
Seven years later, after serving time in Attica state prison, Molinas went where hustlers start over: Hollywood. He was 30 pounds heavier, his hair was thinner, but his head was still full of schemes.
He hired a writer to coauthor a memoir. He took meetings with producers to convince them his story should be a movie. He imported screws from India and bolts from Taiwan and opened a liquor store.
He borrowed $300,000 from his well-connected friends back East to invest in a fur coat company. He treated himself to a hair weave and grew a Fu Manchu and bought a Rolls-Royce. He became a porn producer and moved into a Hollywood Hills rental with one of his actresses. On sunny afternoons, with his girlfriend sunbathing nude by the pool, Molinas would stand on the deck, admiring his view.
He seemed flush, which was, of course, a con, because he was gambling as heavily as ever, only this time he didn't know how the games would end. On Sunday afternoons he puffed his way through cigars and kept tabs on the NFL, watching two televisions side by side in his living room. Soon, the money coming in from triple-X hits such as 'Caught in the Can' and 'The Magic Mirror' was going out to pay bookmakers. And he had other debts due.
One night in the spring of 1975, Molinas received a visit from a low-level mobster involved in the fur coat transaction who warned him he was overdue on his loan. Molinas ignored him. Through the rest of that spring and into summer, he lived as carefree as when he was fixing games at Columbia. He made frequent trips to Vegas. He invested in new businesses. He entertained at his house when his girlfriend was away.
That's what he was doing on a warm August night in 1975. He was on the deck, showing his female guest around, telling her how wonderful the view would be as soon as the sun came up. A gunshot, muffled by a silencer, pierced the small talk. The assassin's aim wasn't nearly as true as Molinas' had once been. One bullet hit Molinas' dog, another nicked the girl's neck. Finally, a third landed behind Molinas' left ear. It traveled through the brain with the 175 IQ and came out the right side.
There he lay: basketball prodigy, inveterate gambler, a natural lefty."
From the book JEWISH JOCKS: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame. Copyright (c) 2012; edited by Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy. Reprinted by permission of Twelve/Hachette Book Group, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
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Chad Millman
ESPN INSIDER
There's a great new book called Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, with contributions from bigwig writers like David Remnick and Jonathan Safran Foer. I was asked to represent the degenerate wing of the Hall and contributed an essay about Jack Molinas, an 1950s NBA All-Star who was kicked out of the league for gambling. You can read the essay below. Meanwhile, your regularly scheduled line moves are at the bottom. But why skip history?
"The first sign of trouble came when Jack Molinas was a toddler in the Bronx. His father, an immigrant from Turkey, noticed that Jack preferred using his left hand. Louis Molinas believed that lefties were evil deep in their souls, that they carried the trait of the devil. To save his son, Louis strapped the 2-year-old's left arm to his side with a belt, every day, until he was sure the right hand had prevailed. Louis was too late.
<offer>Jack Molinas very well could have gone down as the kind of basketball player New Yorkers turn into mythology -- on par with Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Connie Hawkins and Bob Cousy. In 1945, at fourteen, he was six foot four and played with an effortless grace. By eighteen, he was full-grown at just a shade north of six-six, shooting hooks that angled down at the basket, using his broad mitts to befuddle opponents. He found himself recruited by the basketball powers: Kentucky, Michigan, and all the schools in the five boroughs. By twenty-two, he was the fifth overall pick in the NBA draft and elected to the All-Star team his rookie year. 'Flat out,' Hall of Fame coach Hubie Brown told the writer Charley Rosen, 'Jack Molinas was one of the greatest players to ever play the game.'
But instead of becoming a legend, he pursued a far different career. It began earlier, when he started hanging out with Joe Hacken, known as Joe Jalop because of the beat-up car he drove around the Bronx. He was the borough's biggest bookmaker, running his operation out of the front left table at Bickford's cafeteria on the Grand Concourse, where Molinas went every day after school for pie.
Molinas loved to listen to Jalop work, calculating spreads and commissions. Molinas had a brain, 175 IQ, that was as big as his game. As Rosen wrote in his bio of Molinas, 'The Wizard of Odds,' before kindergarten he was fluent in Spanish. While in grammar school he untangled algebra problems for his proud parents and their friends as a party trick. Eventually he found himself sitting by Jalop's elbow, helping him make odds for the baseball games. When he was twelve he asked Jalop if he could make a bet. He took eight dollars he had saved in allowance and put it all on the Yankees to win. He lost.
By the time Molinas went to Columbia in the fall of 1949, college basketball was lousy with point-shavers. At City College, which won the 1950 NCAA and NIT championships (you could do both back then), three players were eventually arrested for throwing games during the title year. They were the faces of an epidemic that included eight universities -- four from New York City -- and 33 players.
But Molinas, working on Jalop's behest, was crafty. He could miss a shot just so, lightly rolling it off the rim. During his senior year, he was bringing in nearly $20,000 a game for Jalop. He was in the bag; nearly every gambler in New York knew it. And if they could find a corner bookie who didn't, they profited from it.
When Molinas was drafted by the Fort Wayne Pistons in the fall of 1953, he had $100,000 in the bank thanks to his work with Jalop, and was so brash about betting on his own team that he walked around the locker room asking, 'OK boys, how are we going to do today?' The whispering among New York gamblers rose to a roar. 'Wonder what's going on with Fort Wayne games?' a New York Post columnist asked midway through the season. 'Most bookies won't deal with them.'
Early in 1954, just three days after Molinas was named to the All-Star team, the NBA commissioner, Maurice Podoloff, confronted him with his suspicions. Molinas denied shaving points. 'I bet a few times,' he admitted. 'That's all.' But that was enough. He was kicked out of the pros.
Molinas attended Brooklyn Law School. But he spent every weekend on the courts of the Bronx or semipro leagues. These games were peppered with college players, all of whom had read the headlines about the infamous Molinas. He had always seen the angles on the court, and it wasn't too long before he found them off it, too.
Working out of a legitimate law office, Molinas mobilized his vast networks of college players and gambling contacts to create a point-shaving ring that extended from Alabama to Kentucky to Seattle. It involved bookies in New York and St. Louis and mafia families from the biggest cities east of the Mississippi. He named his group, which included Jalop, Fixers Incorporated. Between 1957 and 1961, he traveled the country, closing deals with needy point guards in Tuscaloosa and down-on-their-luck forwards in the state of Washington. He'd give them $1,000 to shave points, then sell the game to the mafia families for $10,000. At the height of his powers, Molinas controlled twenty-seven college teams and made $50,000 a week.
'I didn't hurt anybody,' Molinas said in an interview with the writer Milton Gross, 'except some bettors and bookies.'
The Manhattan district attorney disagreed. Working on a tip from a player, the DA's office tapped the phone of one of Molinas's partners. In May 1962, after nearly a year of investigations and armed with point-shaving players at Bowling Green, North Carolina State, Alabama, Niagara, and Pacific who'd turned state's witness, the DA indicted Molinas and Jalop on charges of bribery.
While Jalop quickly pleaded guilty, Molinas refused a deal to give up his law license and serve six months in prison. As Rosen detailed in The Wizard of Odds, he walked into the courtroom just before his trial and whispered into the ear of the district attorney, 'I'll bet you $10,000 that you won't convict me.'
He would've lost that one, too.
Seven years later, after serving time in Attica state prison, Molinas went where hustlers start over: Hollywood. He was 30 pounds heavier, his hair was thinner, but his head was still full of schemes.
He hired a writer to coauthor a memoir. He took meetings with producers to convince them his story should be a movie. He imported screws from India and bolts from Taiwan and opened a liquor store.
He borrowed $300,000 from his well-connected friends back East to invest in a fur coat company. He treated himself to a hair weave and grew a Fu Manchu and bought a Rolls-Royce. He became a porn producer and moved into a Hollywood Hills rental with one of his actresses. On sunny afternoons, with his girlfriend sunbathing nude by the pool, Molinas would stand on the deck, admiring his view.
He seemed flush, which was, of course, a con, because he was gambling as heavily as ever, only this time he didn't know how the games would end. On Sunday afternoons he puffed his way through cigars and kept tabs on the NFL, watching two televisions side by side in his living room. Soon, the money coming in from triple-X hits such as 'Caught in the Can' and 'The Magic Mirror' was going out to pay bookmakers. And he had other debts due.
One night in the spring of 1975, Molinas received a visit from a low-level mobster involved in the fur coat transaction who warned him he was overdue on his loan. Molinas ignored him. Through the rest of that spring and into summer, he lived as carefree as when he was fixing games at Columbia. He made frequent trips to Vegas. He invested in new businesses. He entertained at his house when his girlfriend was away.
That's what he was doing on a warm August night in 1975. He was on the deck, showing his female guest around, telling her how wonderful the view would be as soon as the sun came up. A gunshot, muffled by a silencer, pierced the small talk. The assassin's aim wasn't nearly as true as Molinas' had once been. One bullet hit Molinas' dog, another nicked the girl's neck. Finally, a third landed behind Molinas' left ear. It traveled through the brain with the 175 IQ and came out the right side.
There he lay: basketball prodigy, inveterate gambler, a natural lefty."
From the book JEWISH JOCKS: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame. Copyright (c) 2012; edited by Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy. Reprinted by permission of Twelve/Hachette Book Group, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
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