Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (27 page)

Eddie Cicotte returned to his hotel, only to face the tall detective with the smile and soft-spoken manner.

Cicotte wanted to run away and hide. The detective told him there was no way to hide from what was going to happen to him. Everybody knew that evidence was piling up. The Grand Jury already had more than enough for indictments. The thing to do was to come clean. That would help Cicotte and everyone else. The State always takes care of its witnesses. Besides, Cicotte would feel better if he talked….

Cicotte turned and went up to his room.

The following morning, Charles Comiskey came early to his office at the ball park as he always did. But this day would be different. He had nursed this problem for a full year, and now the end was near. That much was apparent. He had not been able to separate himself from it. He had twisted and turned, file:///C|/Palm%20Stuff/Eliot,%20Asinof%20-%20Eig...tml]/Eight%20Men%20Out%20by%20Eliot%20Asinof.html2/17/2004 11:47:46 AM

attacked and retreated, shouted and bluffed. He had prepared himself as cleverly as he could to face any eventuality. On this morning, however, all these tactics provided no ease for his anguish.

Kid Gleason was waiting for him, ready for the funeral. "Commy, do you want the real truth? I think I can get it for you. Today."

"How?" Comiskey asked. The question choked him.

"Cicotte. I know he's ready to break down. He's weak. I've seen him stewing with this all summer." Then he paused before asking. "Shall I get him?"

Comiskey sighed. Well, there it was. Finally, there it was. The end of his pennant hopes, the end of his ball club. The end of God knows what else!

What was he supposed to do? Now that he faced the real issue, he wasn't any more confident of decision than he ever was. It crossed his mind that maybe there was a way of stalling this thing for a while….

"Go get him," he mumbled finally. Then he turned to call Alfred Austrian.

Gleason found Cicotte in his hotel room. He told him that Comiskey wanted to see him. Cicotte nodded.

He didn't bother to ask the manager what it was all about.

Together they went downtown to the law offices of Alfred Austrian. On their arrival, Cicotte was asked to wait in the reception room. The pitcher sat there alone for over twenty minutes while his hands grew clammy with sweat. Then a secretary asked him to follow her into one of the inner rooms. Cicotte entered, but found this room empty as well. He sat there for another twenty minutes. By that time, he was shaking, sick with guilt and hopelessness. When he was finally led into Austrian's office, he was a beaten man. He confronted Comiskey, Gleason, and Austrian. They did not need to ask him a question.

He crumbled into a chair and broke down.

"I know what you want to know—I know…" he sobbed. "Yeah—we were crooked—we were crooked…."

Comiskey could not face him. He didn't want to hear the words that would trigger his own destruction.

"Don't tell me!" he snapped. "Tell it to the Grand Jury!"

At 11:30 A.M., the Criminal Courts Building was crowded with reporters and the usual band of baseball buffs and curiosity-seekers. Cicotte, escorted by Alfred Austrian and two bailiffs, pushed their way in.

Cicotte walked stiffly through the gantlet, a smile frozen on his face. He ignored the flood of excited questions. At first, it was believed that the pitcher had come to clear himself of the charges. Someone shouted at him: "Hey, Eddie, you gonna get an immunity bath?" Cicotte seemed not to hear. He merely file:///C|/Palm%20Stuff/Eliot,%20Asinof%20-%20Eig...tml]/Eight%20Men%20Out%20by%20Eliot%20Asinof.html2/17/2004 11:47:46 AM

held his smile and moved on, Austrian's hand tight on his arm. He was led to an empty office on the sixth floor. Austrian introduced him to Hartley Replogle.

"This is the man handling the Grand Jury investigations, Eddie. He has the goods on you. Come clean with him and he'll take care of you."

A few more comforting words were spoken to him as a sheet of legal print was placed before him. It all looked complicated and legalistic.

"Sign it," Replogle said. Cicotte hesitated. "Don't worry," Replogle encouraged him. "We'll see that you'll be all right."

Cicotte signed. Since he wasn't up to reading the paper, he did not know it was a waiver of immunity.

They took him to another room, Judge MacDonald's chambers. The Judge looked him squarely in the eye. "Are you going to tell us everything, Cicotte?" The pitcher nodded. "We want to know about the gamblers…." Cicotte swallowed thickly, nodded again. The Judge then instructed Replogle to indict him. The word had Cicotte worried. He turned to Replogle and asked, "What's that mean? Don't this go

—what you promised me?" Replogle reassured him everything was going to be all right.

Then they took him down to the Grand Jury room. He had acted totally without benefit of counsel.

The members of the Grand Jury sat breathlessly still as the ballplayer began talking. "I don't know why I did it…I must have been crazy!" He had trouble finishing his first words; his voice was all choked up.

"Risberg, Gandil, and McMullin were at me for a week before the Series began. They wanted me to go crooked. I don't know. I needed the money. I had the wife and the kids. The wife and the kids don't know about this. I don't know what they'll think." He stopped, suddenly buried his head in his hands. For a moment, it seemed as if he could not go on. When he raised his head, his eyes were wet with tears.

"Before Gandil was a ballplayer, he was mixed up with gamblers and low characters back in Arizona.

That's where he got the hunch to fix the Series. Eight of us, we got together in my room three or four days before the Series started. Gandil was master of ceremonies. We talked about it, and decided we could get away with it. We agreed to do it.

"I was thinking of the wife and kids. I'd bought a farm. There was a four-thousand-dollar mortgage on it.

There isn't any mortgage on it now. I paid it off with the crooked money. I told Gandil I had to have the cash in advance. I didn't want any checks. I didn't want any promises. I wanted the money in bills. I wanted it before I pitched a ball. We talked quite a while about it. Yes, we decided to do our best to throw the games at Cincinnati.

"Then Gandil and McMullin took us all, one by one, away from the others and we talked turkey. Gandil asked me my price. I told him $10,000. And I told him $10,000 was to be paid in advance. It was Gandil file:///C|/Palm%20Stuff/Eliot,%20Asinof%20-%20Eig...tml]/Eight%20Men%20Out%20by%20Eliot%20Asinof.html2/17/2004 11:47:46 AM

I was talking to. He wanted to give me some money at the time, the rest after the games were played and lost. But it didn't go with me. Well, the argument went on for days, the argument for some now, some later. But I stood pat. I wanted that $10,000 and I got it.

"The day before I went to Cincinnati I put it up to them squarely for the last time that there would be nothing doing unless I had the money. That night I found the money under my pillow. There was $10,000. I counted it. I don't know who put it there. It was my price. I had sold out 'Commy'. I had sold out the other boys. Sold them for $10,000 to pay off a mortgage on a farm and for the wife and kids…

$10,000…what I had asked, cash in advance, there in my fingers. I had been paid and I went on. I threw the game."

The Grand Jury questioned Cicotte in detail as to the manner in which the games were thrown.

"It's easy. Just a slight hesitation on the player's part will let a man get to base or make a run. I did it by not putting a thing on the ball. You could have read the trade mark on it the way I lobbed it over the plate. A baby could have hit 'em. Schalk was wise the moment I started pitching. Then, in one of the games, the first I think, there was a man on first and the Reds' batter hit a slow grounder to me. I could have made a double play out of it without any trouble at all. But I was slow—slow enough to prevent the double play. It did not necessarily look crooked on my part. It is hard to tell when a game is on the square and when it is not. A player can make a crooked error that will look on the square as easy as he can make a square one. Sometimes the square ones look crooked.

"Then, in the fourth game, which I also lost, on a tap to the box I deliberately threw badly to first, allowing a man to get on. At another time, I intercepted a throw from the outfield and deliberately bobbled it, allowing a run to score. All the runs scored against me were due to my own deliberate errors.

In those two games, I did not try to win….

"I've lived a thousand years in the last twelve months. I would not have done that thing for a million dollars. Now I've lost everything, job, reputation, everything. My friends all bet on the Sox. I knew it, but I couldn't tell them. I had to double-cross them.

"I'm through with baseball. I'm going to lose myself if I can and start life over again."

Cicotte testified for two hours and eleven minutes. He sobbed bitterly through much of his testimony.

Part of the time, he was barely audible. The jury listened raptly, deeply moved by his anguish. There was not one moment during which the Jury pressed him in order to elicit further evidence. By the time they recessed for lunch, Cicotte had exhausted himself.

Judge MacDonald, however, was not satisfied. He was looking to break down the door that would expose the whole frame-up. He wanted to catch all the big boys involved and run them through his mill.

He wanted evidence, not a statement of
mea culpa
. He wanted Cicotte to tell him of meetings with Arnold Rothstein
et al
, of a well-integrated, highly organized plot, naming names and dates and places.

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He wanted to lead the Grand Jury to a spread of indictments that would bunch them all into one big net, an ironclad case for the State to prosecute.

But Cicotte had failed him. For gamblers, Cicotte had mentioned Burns and Maharg. Did Cicotte expect the Judge to believe this whole project was manipulated by those two punks? He accused Cicotte directly: "I thought you were going to tell us about the gamblers!"

Cicotte had nothing to say about gamblers. He insisted that this was all he knew. He had told them enough to reveal the plot, hoping, thereby, to satisfy their need for exposure and his own need for expiation. For his own protection—and that of his wife and children—he told them no more.

Ray Schalk, White Sox catcher, spent most of the morning outside the Grand Jury room, waiting to testify. He did not know what was keeping them. Then he heard that Cicotte was inside.

Schalk's first encounter with Cicotte had been back in 1912. Cicotte was already a veteran when Schalk first came to Chicago, a small, baby-faced twenty-year-old who might have passed for sixteen. At training camp, down in Texas, Schalk was resting a sprained ankle, watching the proceedings from the grandstand. He saw Cicotte talking to a park policeman, pointing in his direction. The policeman then came over to the stands and told him to move out. "No kids allowed here, sonny!" Schalk had protested, trying to convince him he was a big-leaguer. The policeman grabbed him by the arm, with some sardonic wisecrack about his being the President of the United States, and threw him out. Schalk looked back, hoping for the support of the others, but all he saw was their laughter, especially Cicotte's.

Schalk looked forward to the day when he could be a major-league manager. From his earliest awareness of his own talent, he decided that that was right for him.

Comiskey appreciated ballplayers like him, the smart, aggressive, willful men. He didn't like Comiskey, but he always tried to stay on his side. Comiskey was cheap. Comiskey underpaid him. Every year, Schalk hated to face signing that skimpy contract and the cold-turkey dictums of Harry Grabiner. But he never argued salary. He never wanted Comiskey to think he wasn't loyal.

When the Grand Jury convened, he faced the question as squarely as he could: What should he do? He didn't relish the prospect of talking, but what else could he do? If he didn't talk, could he be punished as an accomplice? Was it still worse to be a stooly? What, in the long run, was best for himself?

Then he heard the excitement as the door of the Grand Jury room opened. In a moment, the news was out: Cicotte had confessed!

Schalk turned and quickly left the building. He felt no great sense of relief, even though this took the onus off him. He merely wondered about what was going to happen now.

He was mobbed by reporters. "What were you going to tell them, Ray?"

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"We're still in a pennant race. But at the close of the season, I'll have plenty to tell."

"How about reports that
this
season's games were fixed?"

"I won't say anything at all now!" Schalk snapped, and walked away.

After leaving Comiskey Park following Monday's ball game, Joe Jackson had gotten himself good and drunk. If he was going to be confused, he figured he might as well be confused and drunk. When he awoke on Tuesday morning, he was confused and hung-over. The Sox had the day off. He thought maybe he'd call Lefty Williams and go to a movie. Nothing much else was happening. But he knew that this was crazy; trouble was brewing all over the place, bubbling over the rim of the pot. Sooner or later, he'd have to do something.

He missed his wife, Katie, who was home in Savannah. He needed someone to talk to. Katie would tell him what to do. He knew he was in trouble, serious trouble.

He reached for the phone and called the Criminal Courts Building, asked for Judge MacDonald. The Judge was in session with the Jury and could not be reached. He spoke briefly to the bailiff and told him who it was. In a few minutes, the Judge was on the phone.

"This is Joe Jackson, Judge…"

"What is it, Jackson? Are you ready to talk?"

"Look, Judge, you've got to control this thing…whatever they're digging up, I can tell you, I'm an honest man!"