For Allegheny County police, it was a critical raid at the Fort Pitt Hotel on a warm, summer afternoon in 1948 that was part of a citywide crackdown on gambling rooms.
What county police found in Room 579 stunned them: Three long distance telephone lines, equipment to run a ticker tape machine for racing results, and radios to get tips about cops headed their way, all located in a room in one of Pittsburgh’s busiest hotels.
The investigation found the room — and a suite comprising rooms 1170 and 1171 — was part of a multistate betting syndicate that took big bets and was considered one of the largest on the East Coast.
During the raid, the phone rang and a police detective answered and said a bettor wanted to place $600 on a horse in a race in Monmouth, N.J.
“How do they get that kind of equipment into a hotel room and no one getting wise?” asked Allegheny County Detective Chief Charles Johnston, according to the Pittsburgh Press.
The crackdown was spurred by scandalous allegations about the rackets by a former county inspector-turned-private detective, Al Florig, who said that illegal horse, slots, numbers and gambling operations in the city were run openly because law enforcement and political leaders were paid to look the other way.
Florig, who had been given the nickname “The Green Hornet” by the press for his raids on illegal numbers joints, had been publicly calling out the operators. His allegations backed the city’s then-mayor, David Lawrence, into a corner, forcing the relatively new city leader to call for an investigation into the gambling dens.
By the time of the raid at the Fort Pitt Hotel, Downtown, District Attorney William Rahauser had already convened a grand jury, calling, among other people, Art Rooney’s brother, Jim, and Jim’s friend, George Quinlan, to testify.
It wasn’t the first time the horse rooms at Fort Pitt had come under scrutiny.
Police had been sent to check on the rooms a year earlier. An official in Yonkers, N.Y., where police had raided a similar horse room, told Pittsburgh police that the Yonkers operation was linked to the Fort Pitt betting rooms by phone calls. Police were sent to the rooms then but reported finding no crime.
Such notoriety made Room 579 — known simply as “The Room” in gambling circles — the single most important part of Lawrence’s crackdown on horse rooms, despite his friendship with Art Rooney. Prosecutors pushed hard for convictions of everyone tied to the room, and every step in its prosecution was covered by all three of the city’s newspapers for more than a year.
After descending on the hotel at Penn Avenue and 10th Street, police turned up dozens of betting slips in the horse gaming room and an adjacent alley where they had been thrown out the window, and chased down the front man running the joint — Nate Farber, who had served as a front for Rooney in several operations.
Farber and two other men were all charged, convicted and fined $500 and given a year’s probation for running the horse rooms. The hotel itself would be charged as a business entity and initially convicted for allowing a gambling facility to operate on-site, though the ruling was later overturned because a judge said the state never proved any hotel workers knew about the betting.
County prosecutors said what they really wanted was to find out who really owned the rooms and had provided the police protection for so long.
Investigators found that one of the long distance phone lines in Room 579 was taken out by Farber and Barney McGinley, Rooney’s business partner, though McGinley was never charged.
County Detective Charles Johnson told the Post-Gazette on Sept. 9, 1948, that the grand jury was now trying to build evidence against “The Big Three,” people he said were “top-flight racketeers who operate or finance the operations of many of the city and county horse rooms.”
“All three have been prominent in Pittsburgh district sporting and gambling circles for years but due to their money and their political connections heretofore have been considered ‘untouchable’ by city and county police officers,” the paper said he told them.
The article never identified the men, but the description of “The Big Three” was nearly identical to the phrase used in the Pittsburgh Press a year earlier about the players who controlled slot machines in the county. And in that case, the FBI said the paper was referring to Rooney and McGinley.
Five days later, on Sept. 14, 1948, the grand jury heard from 22 hotel employees on the witness stand. The Post-Gazette reported that jurors were shown pictures of Rooney and McGinley, hoping the hotel workers could connect both men to the horse rooms.
But the hotel employees — who the grand jurors would later say in their report were reluctant to testify — all said they had seen Rooney and McGinley in the Steelers’ office on the Fort Pitt Hotel’s first floor that they shared with the Rooney-McGinley Boxing Club, but never in the horse rooms.
Rooney had escaped again.
His connection to the city’s horse rooms was still well known three decades later to those who knew him.
Jim Rooney said in a 1982 interview with Pittsburgh historian Rob Ruck that his brother had a horse room at the Fort Pitt Hotel.
Like most horse room operators, Rooney became a bookie after first becoming infatuated with horse betting himself.
“A lot of these big bookies were at their heart gamblers, but they realized early on that it was better to be on both sides of the table,” said Arne Lange, author of the 2016 book, “Sports Betting and Bookmaking: An American History.”
In the 1930s, Rooney developed a national reputation for handicapping by scoring six-figure paydays multiple times at East Coast racetracks.
The most famous of those large paydays was a three-day run betting at two New York racetracks in 1937 in which he won at least $300,000. The moment was dubbed by columnists as “Rooney’s Ride,” a streak that made him the most famous horse bettor — or “plugger” in the parlance of the day — in the nation.
Rooney claimed he was able to regularly turn a profit legally at a race track — a claim that horse racing experts say would be dubious under the pari-mutuel betting system nearly all American tracks began using by the 1940s.
Bettors could make a living “in the old days when you called a bookie on the phone” or bet with them at the track, Mr. Lange said. “But with the pari-mutuel system, no, you couldn’t make a living at it.”
Legal bookmakers used to set up at racetracks taking bets, and the odds on a horse were set when you made your bet. But under the pari-mutuel system, every bettor’s odds constantly change based on how much is bet on each horse. As a bettor, Rooney despised the pari-mutuel system.
“A horse player who bets more than a deuce around the mutuels is asking for a flop in the poorhouse,” he complained, according to the book “Rooney: A Sporting Life”.
He would later come to appreciate the pari-mutuel system as a track owner because it ensured that the track got its cut — usually around 15% of the total bet — before winnings were paid out.
FBI documents, and evidence in a 1990 federal case, show that Rooney did not adhere to the legal, pari-mutuel betting system. Instead, he was still making his bets in later years with illegal bookies, perhaps into the 1980s. He died in 1988.
Art Rooney’s brother, Jim, said in 1982 that Art’s legendary handicapping skills early on came from the insider tips he got from running horse rooms.
“If a guy owned a horse or a trainer says he wants to be $5,000 on a horse, they’d take his $5,000 and [Rooney’s operation would use the same information] bet $25,000 with some other bookmaker to make sure they’d get paid,” Jim Rooney told Mr. Ruck.
“They knew the trainers and they’d tell [Art’s operation] when the horse was ready,” he said. “That’s really the only kind of tip there is, where the trainers tell you and then you handle his money [in a bet]. He’d bet $5,000 on a race horse and then give you another tip.”
Jim Rooney’s assessment was bolstered by evidence that emerged in the federal case in West Virginia in 1990, when Art was connected to another large national betting operation as perhaps their most important customer.
In a wide-ranging federal criminal case, prosecutors said Paul “No Legs” Hankish, a notorious West Virginia mobster who lost his legs when a rival detonated a bomb in his car in 1964, set up a nationwide betting syndicate in 1957.
Prosecutors said Rooney began betting through Hankish’s operation in 1957 through a conduit: Nate Farber’s nephew, Norman, a known bookie. To place his bets, Rooney was given the code name “Number 42.”
“Hankish’s partners in that earlier operation state that they took out-of-state wagers for sporting events over the telephone, including horse-racing wagers from a Pittsburgh-based group headed by a celebrity who they code-named Number 42,” prosecutors wrote in a case document.
The document said one of Hankish’s partners in the betting ring, Williams “Pee Wee” George, said the group assumed “that Number 42 must have had access to special information because he generally won 80% of the bets that he placed with them.”
“The Hankish group continued to accept this action in order to be in a position to follow Number 42’s lead. When the leader of the Number 42 betting group passed away, George states that flowers were sent to that person’s funeral with a card inscribed to ‘Number 42.’”
Reporter: Sean D. Hamill: shamill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2579 or Twitter: @seandhamill
Development: Laura Malt Schneiderman: lschneiderman@post-gazette.com
