Charles Comiskey tried to discourage talk of a fix, brought on by his team’s dismal performance in the Series, by issuing a statement to the press. Comiskey told reporters,
Assistant State’s Attorney Hartley Replogle with Joe Jackson
“I believe my boys fought the battle of the recent World Series on the level, as they have always done. And I would be the first to want information to the contrary–if there be any. I would give $20,000 to anyone unearthing information to that effect.” Meanwhile, Comiskey hired a private detective to investigate the finances of seven of the eight men who were part of the original conspiracy. (Weaver was the player not under suspicion.)
A bombshell was thrown into the winter baseball meetings on December 15, 1919, when Hugh Fullerton, a Chicago sportswriter, published in New York World a story headlined IS BIG LEAGUE BASEBALL BEING RUN FOR GAMBLERS, WITH BALLPLAYERS IN THE DEAL? Fullerton angrily demanded that baseball confront its gambling problem. He suggested that Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal judge, be appointed to head a special investigation into gambling’s influence on the national pastime.
Talk of a possible fix in the 1919 Series continued through the winter months into the 1920 season. In July, Sox manager Kid Gleason ran into Abe Attell at a New York bar. The Little Champ confirmed Gleason’s suspicions about the fix. “You know, Kid, I hated to do that to you,” Attell told Gleason, “but I thought I was going to make a bundle, and I needed it.” Attell revealed that Arnold Rothstein was the big money man behind the fix. Gleason went to the press with the story, but was unable to convince anyone–because of fear of libel suits–to print it.
Exposure of the Series fix finally came from an unexpected source–just as the Sox were in a close fight for the 1920 American League pennant. Reports on another fix, this one involving a Cubs-Phillies game on August 31, led to the convening of the Grand Jury of Cook County. Assistant State Attorney Hartley Replogle sent out dozens of subpoenas to baseball personalities. One of those called to testify was New York Giants pitcher Rube Benton. Benton told the grand jury that he saw a telegram sent in late September to a Giants teammate from Sleepy Burns, stating that the Sox would lose the 1919 Series. He also revealed that he later learned that Gandil, Felsch, Williams, and Cicotte were among those in on the fix.
A couple of days later, the Philadelphia North American ran an interview with gambler Billy Maharg, providing the public for the first time with many of the shocking details of the scandal. Cicotte regretted his participation in the fix. He seemed to Gleason and others to have been stewing over something all summer. Perhaps because of the Maharg interview or perhaps because he knew that he had already been implicated in the fix by Henrietta Kelly (manager of the rooming house where he and other players stayed), Cicotte decided to talk.
“I don’t know why I did it,” Cicotte told the grand jury. “I must have been crazy. 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.” Tears came to Cicotte’s eyes as he continued talking. “I’ve lived a thousand years in the last twelve months. I would have not done that thing for a million dollars. Now I’ve lost everything, job, reputation, everything. My friends all bet on the Sox. I knew, but I couldn’t tell them.”
Within hours, the other Sox players learned that Cicotte had talked. Who would be next? It was Joe Jackson that turned up in the chambers of presiding judge, Charles McDonald. Two hours after he began testifying, Jackson walked out of the jury room, telling two bailiffs, “I got a big load off my chest!” [link to Jackson confession] On the way out of the courthouse, according to a story that ran in the Chicago Herald & Examiner, a youngster said to Jackson, “It ain’t so, Joe, is it?”–to which Jackson replied, “Yes, kid, I’m afraid it is.” (Jackson later denied that such an exchange ever occurred: “The only one who spoke was a guy who yelled at his friend, ‘I told you he wore shoes.'”) Gandil, Risberg, and McMullin were not happy with developments, and let Jackson know that. According to Jackson, the other players told him before his testimony, “You poor simp, go ahead and squawk. We’ll all say you’re a liar.” Jackson said he asked for protection from the bailiffs when he left the jury room because “now Risberg threatens to bump me off…I’m not going to get far from my protectors until this blows over.”
That same day, in his office at Comiskey park, Charles Comiskey dictated a telegram that would be sent to eight of his players and then made public: YOU AND EACH OF YOU ARE HEREBY NOTIFIED OF YOUR INDEFINITE SUSPENSION AS A MEMBER OF THE CHICAGO AMERICAN LEAGUE BASEBALL CLUB. With those words, the hopes of Sox fans for the 1920 championship came to an end. The final games in St. Louis would still be played–Harry Grabner, White Sox secretary, told the press, “We’ll play out the schedule if we have to get Chinamen to replace the suspended players”–but the results were predictable.
Defense attorney William Fallon knew that to protect his clients, which included Abe Attell and other gamblers, he would have to keep Attell and Sport Sullivan away from the Chicago Grand Jury. The two gamblers were called to Rothstein’s apartment, where Fallon announced that Sullivan would go to Mexico and Attell to Canada. Vacation with pay, Fallon said, as Rothstein pulled out his wallet.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, more details about the fix were coming out. Lefty Williams became the third White Sox player to tell his story to the Grand Jury, testifying for more than three hours. Then Oscar Felsch told his version of events in an interview that ran in the Chicago American. “Well, the beans are spilled and I think I’m through with baseball,” Felsch said. “I got $5000. I could have got just about that much by being on the level if the Sox had won the Series. And now I’m out of baseball–the only profession I know anything about, and a lot of gamblers have gotten rich. The joke seems to be on us.”
Fallon decided to adopt a bold strategy for his client. With Sullivan and Attell out of the country, he would bring Arnold Rothstein to Chicago to testify before the Grand Jury. (Fallon had a second reason for heading west: he understood that Comiskey hated the investigation, and believed that a meeting with the Sox owner might be mutually beneficial.) Rothstein told the jury that he came to Chicago because he was “sick and tired” of all of the talk about his involvement in the fix. “I’ve come here to vindicate myself….The whole thing started when Attell and some other cheap gamblers decided to frame the Series and make a killing. The world knows I was asked in on the deal and my friends know how I turned it down flat. I don’t doubt that Attell used my name to put it over.” Fallon’s strategy worked. After his testimony, Cook County Attorney Maclay Hoyne declared, “I don’t think Rothstein was involved in it.”
On October 22, 1920, the Grand Jury handed down its indictments, naming the eight Chicago players and five gamblers, including Bill Burns, Sport Sullivan, and Abe Attell. Rothstein was not indicted. The indictments included nine counts of conspiracy to defraud various individuals and institutions.
Shortly after the indictments came down, as the old staff of the Office of State’s Attorney was ready to be replaced by the newly elected Robert Crowe (the same man who prosecuted the Leopold and Loeb case), some important papers walked out of the office. George Kenney, State Attorney Hoyne’s personal secretary, probably for money offered by Attell’s local counsel, had lifted the confessions and waivers of immunity of Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams.
Fallon begin to gather, for the players, some of the best and most expensive defense attorneys in Illinois. Clearly, the impoverished Sox players weren’t going to be footing the legal bills–so who was paying for them? Comiskey? Rothstein? No one who knew talked. An acquittal would benefit Comiskey, who held out hope that his suspended players could be reinstated–possibly after serving brief suspensions.
Pushing most strongly for convictions was American League President Ban Johnson, who–to his credit–was determined to clean up the sport. Johnson became frustrated with the lack of support his investigation received from Comiskey: “We have been working on this case for three solid months and we have not had an iota of cooperation from the Chicago club,” Johnson complained.
The defendants were arraigned on February 14, 1921. All the ballplayers were present, but none of the gamblers. Defense lawyers presented Judge William Dever with a petition for a bill of particulars, a statement that would specify the charges against their clients with more specificity than the indictments contained.
A month later, George Gorman, for the State, then announced the shocking news that the players’ confessions had been stolen. A new set of charges was presented to a Grand Jury, who issued a superceding indictment, adding five new gamblers, on March 26.
The Trial
Gambler “Sleepy Bill” Burns testifies at the 1921 trial
On June 27, 1921, the case of State of Illinois vs Eddie Cicotte et al opened in the Chicago courtroom of Judge Hugo Friend. The players faced charges of (1) conspiring to defraud the public, (2) conspiring to defraud Sox pitcher Ray Schalk, (3) conspiring to commit a confidence game, (4) conspiring to injure the business of the American League, and (5) conspiring to injure the business of Charles Comiskey. With the confessions still missing, George Gorman knew he faced a difficult fight. He did, however, have one key witness who could tie the players to the fix: Sleepy Burns. American League President Ban Johnson, with the help of Billy Maharg, had found Burns fishing in the Rio Grande in the small Texas border town of Del Rio. Promised immunity from prosecution, Burns reluctantly agreed to testify.
By July 5, with the defense’s motion to quash the indictments having been rejected, jury selection began. Before a final jury of twelve was seated, over 600 prospective jurors were questioned about their support of the White Sox, their betting habits, and their views of baseball. On potential juror, William Kiefer, was excused because he was a Cubs fan, and presumbably bore ill will against the team’s cross-town rival.
On July 18, George Gorman delivered the prosecution’s opening statement. Gorman described the 1919 Series fix as a chaotic chess game between gamblers and players: “The gamblers and ball players started double-crossing each other untile neither side knew what the other intended to do.” When he began to quote from a copy of Cicotte’s confession, defense attorney Michael Ahearn (later called “Al Capone’s favorite lawyer”) objected, saying “You won’t get to first base with those confessions!” Gorman countered, “We’ll hit a home run with them!” “You may get a long hit,” Ahearn acknowledged, “but you’ll be thrown out at the plate.” Ahearn proved to be the better predictor. Judge Friend did indeed call any mention of the confessions out of bounds.
The first witness for the prosecution was Charles Comiskey, who provided a history of his career in baseball, from his days as a player beginning in Milwaukee in 1876, to his current position as president of the White Sox organization. On cross-examination, defense attorneys tried to show that Comiskey had made more money in 1920 than any previous year, thus undercutting the State’s theory that Comiskey had been financially injured by the alleged conspiracy. Judge Friend cut off this line of questioning, causing Ben Short to complain, “This man is getting richer all the time and my clients are charged with conspiracy to injure his business.”
The following day saw Sleepy Burns, dressed in a green checkered suit with a lavender shirt and bow tie, take the stand. He spoke, as described in a newspaper account of the day, “in a low, even tone, which scarcely carried past the jury and repeatedly wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.” Under questioning from prosecutor Gorman, Burns (who had been promised immunity in return for his testimony for the prosecution) identified Eddie Cicotte as the instigator of the fix and the man with whom he had met at the Hotel Ansonia in September of 1919. When Gorman asked about his conversation with Cicotte on September 16 or 17, however, the defense objected and their objection was sustained by Judge Friendly. Burns described meetings in New York with Cicotte, Gandil and Maharg during which a possible fix was discussed. He testified that he and Maharg “went to see Arnold Rothstein at a race track” to discuss possible financing. Later, Burns told jurors, he and other gamblers held a meeting, two days before the start of the Series, with seven of the Sox players during which the promise to pay the players $20,000 for each thrown game was made:
Q. [What players were there at the meeting at the Hotel Sinton]?
A. There was Gandil, McMullin, Williams, Felsch, Cicotte, and Buck Weaver.
Q. What about Jackson?
A. I didn’t see him there.
Q. Did you have any conversation with them?
A. I told them I had a $100,000 to handle the throwing of the World Series. I also told them that I had the names of the men who were going to finance it.
Q. Who were the financiers?
A. They were Arnold Rothstein, Attell, and Bennett.
Q. Did the players make any statements concerning the order of the games to be thrown?
A. Gandil and Cicotte said the first two games should be thrown. They said,however, that it didn’t matter to them. They would throw them in any order desired, it was a made-to-order Series.
Q. What else was said?
A. Gandil and Cicotte said they’d throw the first and second games. Cicotte said he’d throw the first game if had to throw the ball over the fence [at Cincinnati’s park…]
Q. Who left the room first?
A. Attell and Bennett [alias of gambler David Zelcer of Des Moines, a defendant in the case]. I asked the players what I was to get. Gandil said that I would get a player’s part….After the first game, I met Attell…and then we met Maharg. Attell said he bet all the money and couldn’t pay the players until the bets were collected. I told the ballplayers and told Williams that Attell wanted to see them. Williams, Gandil, and I went to see Attell at a place on Walnut Street about a block and a half from the Sinton Hotel. That was about 8:30 p.m. Attell asked Williams if he would throw the game the next day and Williams said he would. I met Attell the next day and he showed me a telegram from New York [signed “A.R.” and suggesting that Rothstein would back the fix]….I went to the ball players then–all except Jackson were present–and told them a telegram had been received and that twenty grand–$20,000–had been sent. I told them before the game [Game Two]. Gandil said they were being double-crossed. Gandil said the telegram was a fake. I said if it was, I wasn’t in on it….
For three days, Burns remained on the stand, recounting the many trials and tribulations of the fix. On cross-examination, defense attorneys tried unsuccessfully to shake Burns’ assertion that it was the players, and not him, that came up with the idea of throwing the Series. Although he was forced to admit that some of his dates of meetings were wrong, many in the press thought that the prosecution’s star witness turned in a superb performance. (Members of the jury might have been less impressed, based on the comments of a juror in a post-trial interview with an AP reporter.) A Kansas City Times story from July 21, 1921 reported, “At the end of his twelfth hour on the stand, the witness appeared exhausted. His body was limp in the witness chair, his eyes were half closed, but his head was held back and his answers still came clearly and defiantly despite a cataract of innuendoes, disparaging remarks about his mentality and character and other bitter verbal shots heaped on by his questioners.” “If that man’s story is not proven false, we may as well consider our case lost,” said one of the defense attorneys to a reporter.
The next witness for the prosecution was John O. Seys, secretary of the Chicago Cubs. Seys testified that he met Attell at the Sinton Hotel the day before the Series opener and that Attell said he was betting on Cincinnati. “Attell was taking all the White Sox money he could get,” Seys told jurors. Meeting with Attell again before Game Three, Seys testified that the gambler told him “he wasn’t going to bet on Cincinnati that day because it looked like Dick Kerr, the Sox pitcher, would win.”
The big battle of the trial was over the issue of how to handle the missing confessions and immunity waivers. Judge Friend ruled that no evidence of the confessions could be introduced unless the State could prove that they were made voluntarily and without duress. Former State’s Attorney Hartley Replogle testified that the statements were made voluntarily and without any offer of reward. Cicotte testified that Replogle had promised him that in return for his statement “I would be taken care of,” which he assumed meant not prosecuted. Asked whether he was told that the statement he was about to make could be used against him, Cicotte said, “I don’t remember.” Prosecutor Gorman offered a different story, arguing Cicotte “was panic stricken and ran to the grand jury to confess.” In his cross-examination of the pitcher, Gorman asked, “didn’t you read about the ball scandal in the paper and tell everything of your own free will?” Cicotte replied, “No, they promised me freedom.” “Didn’t you cry bitterly?”, Gorman asked. “I may have had tears in my eyes,” Cicotte answered. Joe Jackson took the stand to offer a similar story. Jackson said that he was told that “after confessing I could go anywhere–all the way to the Portuguese Islands.” Asked whether he read the document he signed before offering his statement, Jackson replied: “No. They’d given me their promise. I’d’ve signed my death warrant if they asked me to.” After listening to this testimony, Judge Friend ruled that the confessions could be part of the State’s case–but only to prove the guilt of the players giving the statements.
Judge Charles A. MacDonald testified as to meetings he had with Cicotte and Jackson before their grand jury testimony. Cicotte told him, he said, that after hitting the first batter in Game One “he played on the square.” Cicotte told the judge he used his $10,000 pay-off to take care of a mortgage on a Michigan farm and buy stock. Jackson told the judge he was first approached in New York about participating in the fix, and made clear that it would take at least $20,000 for him to join. The initial offer, Jackson said to the judge, was so low “a common laborer wouldn’t do a job like that for that price.” MacDonald said that Jackson was concerned that his grand jury testimony be kept secret because he “was afraid Swede Risberg was going to bump him off, to use Jackson’s words.” On July 27, the confessions of Cicotte, Williams, and Jackson were read in court. According to a newspaper report of the trial, “The actual transcript of the confessions varied little from the frequently published reports of them.” In Cicotte’s confession, he expressed misgivings about his participation: “I would gladly have given back the $10,000 they paid me with interest.” Jackson denied making any intentional fielding errors, but told the judge that he “might have tried harder.”
Billy Maharg was the state’s final witness. The gambler confirmed Burns’s story about an intial meeting in New York involving Cicotte and Gandil. Maharg testified that Attell told him that Rothstein had agreed to finance the fix in return for his having once saved Rothstein’s life. He also said that the first payment of $10,000 to Burns came when Attell pulled the money “from a great pile of bills under his mattress,” money that Rothstein had apparently sent by wire.
The defense presented a variety of alibi, character, and White Sox players and team officials as witnesses. Sox manager Kid Gleason testified that the indicted Sox players were practicing at the Cincinnati ballpark at the time Burns alleged he was meeting with them in a hotel room. A series of Sox players not involved in the fix were called and asked whether they thought the indicted players played the Series to the best of their ability. The prosecution shouted its objections to each of these questions. The judge sustained the objections, as calling for opinions. Comiskey’s chief financial officer, Harry Grabiner, was called to show that the Sox gate receipts in 1920 were well above those in 1919, when the players allegedly defrauded Comiskey of his property. The jury seemed intensely interested in the financial testimony, which undermined the prosecution’s contention that the White Sox was damaged by the players’ actions.
On July 29, Edward Prindeville summed up the case first for the prosecution. He told the jury that “Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, and Claude Williams sold out the American public for a paltry $20,000. This game, gentleman, has been the subject of a crime. The public, the club owners, even the small boys on the sandlots have been swindled.” Prindeville said, “They have taken our national sport, our national pleasure, and tried to turn it into a con game.” The prosecutor was particularly scathing in his attack on Cicotte: “Cicotte, the American League’s greatest pitcher, hurling with a heavy heart–by his own confession–and a pocket made heavy by $10,000 in graft, was beaten 9 to 1. No wonder he lost. The pocket loaded with filth for which he sold his soul and his friends was too much. It overbalanced him and he lost.” Prindeville asked the jury to return a “verdict of guilty with five years in the penitentiary and a fine of $2000 for each defendant.” Gorman followed Prindeville. He asked the jury to remember the fans:
Thousands of men throughout the chilly hours of the night, crouched in line waiting for the opening of the first World Series game. All morning they waited, eating a sandwich perhaps, never daring to leave their places for a moment. There they waited to see the great Cicotte pitch a ballgame. Gentleman, they went to see a ballgame. But all they saw was a con game!”
Ben Short, for the defense, told the jury that “there may have been an agreement entered into by the defendants to take the gamblers’ money, but it has not been shown that the players had any intention of defrauding the public or bringing the game into ill repute. They believed that any arrangement they may have made was a secret one and would, therefore, reflect no discredit on the national pastime of injure the business of their employer as it would never be detected.” Anther defense attorney, Morgan Frumberg, said the real guilty party, Arnold Rothstein, was not in the courtroom. “Why was he not indicted?….Why were these underpaid ballplayers, these penny-ante gamblers who may have bet a few nickels on the World Series brought here to be the goats in this case?”
Although evidence suggests that the jury was already leaning toward acquittal, the outcome of the trial may have been sealed when Judge Friend charged the jury. He told them that to return a guilty verdict they must find the players conspired “to defraud the public and others, and not merely throw ballgames.” (The New York Times editorialized that the judge’s instruction was like saying the “state must prove the defendant intended to murder his victim, not merely cut his head off.”)
The jury deliberated less than three hours. When the Chief Clerk read the jury’s first verdict, finding Claude Williams not guilty, a huge roar went up in the courtroom. As the string of not guilty verdicts continued, the cheers increased. Soon hats and confetti were flying in the air and players and spectators pounding the backs of jurors in approval. Several jurors lifted players to their shoulders and paraded them around the courtroom.
Joe Jackson told reporters, “The jury could not have returned a fairer verdict, but I don’t want to go back to organized baseball–I’m through with it.” Buck Weaver said, “I had nothing to do with this so-called conspiracy; I believe that I should get my old position back. I cannot express my contempt for Bill Burns.” Claude Williams asked, “How could the verdict have been anything else?” Gandil also claimed “never have any doubt about the verdict” and blamed the whole trial ordeal on “those two liars, Bill Burns and Billy Maharg.” Eddie Cicotte, while shaking hands with jurors, had little to say about the trial outcome: “Talk, you say? I talked once in this building, never again.”
The Epilogue
The players joy was short-lived. The day after the jury’s verdict, the new Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, released a statement to the press:
Defendants and lawyers with jury after the trial acquittal
“Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ballgame, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ballgame, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”
Landis was true to his word. Despite the best efforts of some of the players, especially Buck Weaver, to gain reinstatement, none of the Eight Men Out would ever again put on a major league uniform.
What happened in 1919 still has relevance to a debate today: Should Shoeless Joe Jackson, the man with the third highest lifetime batting average in baseball (behind only Cobb and Hornsby) be admitted to the Hall of Fame? His actions in 1919 dishonored the game, but he wasn’t a ringleader in the fix and came to regret his role. Over the years, many fans and former players, including the great Ted Williams, have argued for Jackson’s enshrinement at Cooperstown. Williams said:
Joe shouldn’t have accepted the money…and he realized his error. He tried to give the money back. He tried to tell Comiskey…about the fix. But they wouldn’t listen. Comiskey covered it up as much as Jackson did–maybe more. And there’s Charles Albert Comiskey down the aisle from me at Cooperstown–and Shoeless Joe still waits outside.
In 1949, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson offered his own account of the Black Sox Trial in a SPORT Magazine article. Jackson’s retelling of events differs in many particulars from the account he gave in his 1920 confession (See Court Records), but nonetheless makes for interesting reading. See: Joe Jackson’s account : “This is the Truth.”
In the September 17, 1956 issue of Sports Illustrated, Arnold “Chick” Gandil provided his story of the great Series fix: “This Is My Story of the Black Sox Series”
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