Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (39 page)

Then, too, Judge Friend came through for them. He ruled that the State had proved a conspiracy had existed, and that testimony could now be entered concerning actions that took place in New York.

When Burns resumed the stand for further questioning by the State, the bailiffs had to struggle to keep the spectators in their seats. Burns himself seemed the coolest person in the room. This was merely a stage on which he was certainly the principal actor, a role he was enjoying to the fullest.

Especially today. Today he was going to let loose with some heavy artillery. He had waited hungrily for the moment…then it came:

Gorman: Mr. Burns, I am going to question you now concerning certain meetings you attended at the Hotel Ansonia in New York City before the World Series…. When did you meet Cicotte in New York prior to the World Series of 1919?

A: September 16.

Q: What did he say to you?

A: He said that the Sox would win the pennant, and that he had something good for me.

Q: Did he tell you what that good thing was?

Burns stared at the crowded court. The spectators leaned forward in their seats, waiting for him to come across.

A: No.

Q: When did you next meet him?

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A: On the eighteenth.

Q: Who was present?

A: Cicotte and Gandil.

Q: Was anything said?

A: Yes, Gandil said: "If I could get $100,000, I would throw the World Series!"

He had taken his time spitting it out, and the crowd really came alive. There was an audible response, and all eyes shifted from him to Gandil. This was the first declaration that the ballplayers had initiated the fix, and not the gamblers. As it sank in, the effect was devastating. Even the Judge seemed jolted.

Gandil sat there, wearing his same stone face. Burns thought: The sonofabitch—if he'd paid me off, none of this would have happened!

Q: And what did you say?

A: I said I would see what I could do.

Q: Was anything else said?

A: Well, Gandil said they would sure throw the Series if they won the pennant.

The courtroom reacted with a babble of shock. It was several moments before order was restored.

Joe Jackson sat through all this like a kid listening to a fascinating story he had never heard before.

Somehow he'd assumed that it was the gamblers who had started it all. He had been following the proceedings with absorbed attention. As Burns had pointed out, he hadn't been at those meetings in Cincinnati. He had ducked them, an indication of his confusions about the fix. Now he was sitting there with Gandil, Cicotte, Risberg
et al
, all of them lumped together in one big, silent bunch. Was that the way they would be judged? He hated himself for having confessed. He had run scared and gotten drunk.

Not so much because he had been stupid, but because he'd been weak. He had allowed himself to believe the lawyers' promise of protection. Now he had no choice but to rely on them. That, too, he hated.

Because he couldn't understand all this. At recesses, he would nervously joke about his ignorance. "Hey, lawyer, who's winning?" he would ask Ben Short. His counsel would smile back and shrug. In a ball game, Jackson could always look at the scoreboard and tell. Here, the answer was a shrug.

The State was through with Burns and turned him over to the defense. Attorney Michael Ahearn stood before him a few moments later, and the badgering began in earnest this time. It led, however, only to Burns's further triumph.

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Q: When you went to Cincinnati,
you
proposed the conspiracy to the players!

A: I did not.

Q: You talked of an offer of $100,000 made by Attell and Bennett.

A: That was the players' proposition!

This knocked Ahearn right out of the box. James "Ropes" O'Brien stepped in and began questioning Burns about how much money he'd been paid to testify. Burns was ready for him. In a matter-of-fact tone, he itemized the payments made by Ban Johnson, out of American League funds. They totaled $700, covering expenses he and his wife had incurred over a period of several months. He made it all sound very legitimate. After all, a workingman should not have to suffer financially for giving testimony for the State.

Max Lusker, attorney for gambler David Zelser, kept trying to shake Burn's identification of Zelser as

"Bennett."

Q: Mr. Burns, when did you see Bennett first?

A: In the Ansonia Hotel in 1919.

Q: When last?

A: About a week ago, I saw his back in Chicago. He was about two hundred yards away.

Q: You have a good memory, have you? You are able to remember a man after two years' time?

It was a specious question, for it ignored all the times Burns had seen him during the Series.

A: I can remember faces.

Q: Backs, too, I suppose?

Everybody laughed, including Burns.

A: I did, this man.

Q: By the way, where were you going to get your reward for fixing the Series?

A: The players, and also Attell.

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Q: You were going to be paid by Attell?

A: Yes.

Q: You didn't think that was double-crossing, did you?

A: No.

Q: You were going to get a slice both ways, eh?

A: Sure.

Q: Did you tell the players?

A: No. It was none of their business.

Q: You were afraid you would lose it if you told them, weren't you?

Burns refused to answer.

Lusker was then followed by the acrid, Defense Attorney Ben Short. He forced Burns to admit that one of the reasons he was testifying against the defendants was because they double-crossed him.

Q: You told Gandil you would spill the beans if they didn't come through with your share, didn't you?

A: That's right.

Q: The players double-crossed you, didn't they?

A: Yes.

Q: Well, you double-crossed them.

A: Not until they crossed me.

Q: Is that a reason for testifying?

A: One of them.

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Q: Then it is not for the purity of baseball?

A: Well, they double-crossed me and I would have been the fall guy for the whole outfit.

The savage irony of this line of reasoning was not lost on Short.

He exploited it for all he could get out of it. His voice rose to attack.

Q: If the players had
really
been crooked, you would have been satisfied! Do you think you are even with the boys now?

A: I am liable to be before I leave here!

The spectators laughed. Short snorted and stepped back. At this moment, he genuinely felt hatred for the witness.

"You don't like me much, do you, Bill?" Short's tone was full of contempt.

Burns was not one to relinquish the upper hand. "Sure I do, Ben. You're a smart fellow, and I wish we had someone like you at the head of this deal; we'd all be rich, now…."

Short was followed by Thomas Nash, who tried to get Burns in a contradiction. He forced Burns to admit that he'd been mistaken when he said he had met the Sox players the evening before the first game, in the Sinton Hotel.

Q: Didn't you say you saw them before the first game?

A: I ain't saying.

Nash immediately turned to the Bench, declaring he would have the witness impeached as a perjurer.

Burns got the message. He requested permission to change his testimony, admitting that he had made a mistake. He told the Judge he was just a "plain fella from Texas" and sometimes got a mite confused with all this lawyer talk. Judge Friend was amused, but granted permission. The Jury was instructed to note this change.

Burns was then allowed to leave the witness stand, his testimony and cross-examination finished. State's Attorney George Gorman was proud of him. Burns had been a magnificent witness. He had remained unshakable—with minor transgressions—in the face of a battery of high-powered attacks. His performance surprised those who had known him. Some were actually incredulous. The wiseacres among them said they hadn't thought that Sleepy Bill could stay awake long enough to put over such a big deal in the first place.

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To Cicotte, who had known Burns over the years, his performance was baffling. He had never sensed that the drawling Texan was capable of anything like this. Burns could make a dozen mistakes, find himself in a manure pile of troubles, yet now he came up clean. Cicotte need slip only once, and they'd be cutting him up in pieces.

On the mound, Cicotte was king. Year after year, they hadn't come any better. Burns had been a sloppy, very mediocre, third-rate nothing. Was the difference all in the skill of the pitching arm? What changed the pattern when it really came to staying alive?

The answer to that was the answer to the whole story of Cicotte's life. He had grown up believing it was talent that made a man big. If you were good enough, and dedicated yourself, you could get to the top.

Wasn't that enough of a reward? But when he got there, he had found out otherwise. They all fed off him, the men who ran the show and pulled the strings that kept it working. They used him and used him, and when they had used him up, they would dump him. In the few years he had been up, they had always praised him and made him feel like a hero to the people of America. But all the time they paid him peanuts. The newspapermen who came to watch him pitch and wrote stories about him made more money than he did. Meanwhile, Comiskey made a half million dollars a year on Cicotte's right arm.

Burns knew how to operate. So did Gandil. Cicotte didn't. That was the answer.

Having disposed of his star witnesses, State's Attorney George Gorman then advised the Court that the original copies of the signed confessions and immunity waivers had disappeared. His statement was delivered as if this had just been discovered, and the courtroom responded with a sense of shock.

Gorman explained that he had never seen them, that they had been stolen before he had taken office. He did not know where they were or what had happened to them. His response to persistent questions was

"Ask Arnold Rothstein, maybe he knows!"

However, he had no intention of letting their disappearance exclude them from being admissible. "We would like to have them, of course, but the hole they leave can easily be plugged up by the testimony of the Grand Jurors, the court stenographers, and others present when the statements were obtained."

Judge Friend was sympathetic. He had, of course, already covered the law on this problem. He ruled that unless the State could prove that the confessions (copies were available) were made voluntarily, they could not be entered into the trial.

The battle then began over the immunity waivers. If the players had signed waivers, then the court would accept their confessions as freely given.

Gorman's first big gun was former Assistant State's Attorney Hartley Replogle. He, too, did not know file:///C|/Palm%20Stuff/Eliot,%20Asinof%20-%20Eig...tml]/Eight%20Men%20Out%20by%20Eliot%20Asinof.html2/17/2004 11:47:47 AM

what had happened to the waivers. He recalled that just before Maclay Hoyne had left office, Hoyne had taken a large quantity of papers from the Grand Jury files, ostensibly to have them copied for his own uses. Replogle had called this breach of procedure to the attention of Judge Charles MacDonald who supposedly had the papers impounded. Replogle also recalled a statement by the newly appointed Commissioner Landis to the effect that if there was any suspicious business going on, he would take Federal action.

Replogle testified that the ballplayers had signed the waivers of immunity, without duress and without any offer of reward. With that, the Court recessed until Monday.

The question of the disappearing Grand Jury papers dominated everybody's weekend. On Monday, July 25, the day opened with a statement that rocked everybody—especially Arnold Rothstein in New York.

Its author was Ban Johnson:

"I charge that Arnold Rothstein paid $10,000 for the Grand Jury confessions of Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams. I charge that this money, brought to Chicago by a representative of Rothstein, went to an attaché of the State's Attorney's office under the Hoyne administration. I charge that after Rothstein had examined these confessions in New York City, and had found that the ballplayers had not involved him to the extent of criminal liability, he gave the documents to his friend, the managing editor of a New York newspaper. I charge that the editor offered these documents for sale broadcast throughout the country."

John Tyrrell, Attorney for the State, declared that the Grand Jury would be summoned to investigate.

But he was firm in denying that Rothstein would be summoned as a witness at the trial.

It was a ringing challenge to Rothstein in New York. He cried out that he would sue Johnson for $250,000 for libel and defamation of character. Johnson, intractible as ever, barked back defiantly.

"Rothstein can go ahead and sue anytime he wants!"

As it turned out, the gambler chose to ignore it all. It was said that he took the advice of his old mentor, Tammany Hall's Big Tim Sullivan: "Never sue. They might prove it!"

The ballplayers watched the battle rage around them. The potential benefits resulting from the stolen confessions and immunity waivers had been carefully explained to them: it would simplify the repudiation of those confessions and make it extremely difficult for the prosecution to get them admitted as evidence. If there were carbon copies (the attorneys knew there were), at least there were no signatures on them. Nor were the signed immunity waivers available; thus, there was no way for the State to prove their validity. In short, whoever stole those papers did the ballplayers a big favor.