City College of New York: A Betting Scandal

One of the great things about looking back on the college basketball betting scandal of 1951 is the colorful names involved. 

At the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, college basketball was the basketball that mattered, especially in New York City, where City College of New York (CCNY) had a team that represented the Big Apple’s milieu of minorities. 

The Beavers roster was all Jewish and African American, certainly unusual for the time, but not the problem it would have been in perhaps other places in the nation.

City was so popular, and so good, it played in front of sellout crowds at Madison Square Garden, and if there was a scheduling conflict with the Knicks, the pros had to move to the dilapidated old 69th Regiment Armory. 

Apart from showing the relative import of the two teams, the fact CCNY played in the Garden is relevant for another reason. 

“It's estimated that there were 4,000 bookmakers operating illegally in New York,” author Matthew Goodman said in the WBUR piece on his book The City Game: Triumph, Scandal and a Legendary Basketball Team. “About $300,000 was bet on each game that was being held at the Garden. Much of it — as everybody knew — from inside the Garden itself.” 

Betting in the Borscht Belt 

In the 1940s, point-shaving was a preferred method for gamblers to make money on hoops. Since college players weren’t permitted to be paid for play, a system sprung up in which players from New York and elsewhere would be hired by the summer resort hotels upstate in the Catskills - supposedly as waiters or lifeguards or whatever – but actually to play ball for their respective hotels (and play ball with gamblers). 

“Each hotel had a basketball team, and the competition got pretty intense,” said Goodman. “There was always a raffle at the end of these games, and whoever had the ticket that was closest to the final score of the two teams’ combined points would win a huge pot. And the gambler would say, ‘You know what? If you can arrange it so that my number is the final number, I will give you half the pot.’ And that was where these players first began to take money to control the points.” 

To go from there to shaving points in college games wasn’t much of a moral leap, so during the 49-50 season, a few City players shaved points in a few games. CCNY finished the regular season at 17-5 record, good enough for a bid to the NIT — then the most prestigious postseason tournament. 

Called the “darkest of dark horses,” the Beavers opened the NIT against defending champion University of San Francisco (which, with Bill Russell on the team, would win back-to-back titles a few years hence). 

Before that game, senior forward Norm Major got an offer of $2,000 per player, twice the going rate, to shave points during the NIT. He took the offer to the other starters, but they decided to play honestly for the duration of the tournament. 

City upset USF and advanced to the second round against the Kentucky Wildcats, whose coach, Adolph Rupp, had told New York sportswriters that he never had a Black player because God didn’t want whites and Blacks to play against each other (if there was a national championship for racism…). 

CCNY 89 Kentucky 50 

Wins over Duquesne and Bradly made gave City the NIT title. Coach Nat Holman went on the Ed Sullivan Show and the team got a full-page photo in Life magazine, and the last spot in the-then eight-team NCAA tournament. 

Again playing in New York, the Beavers won a rematch with Bradley in the final and became the first and only team to win both tournaments in the same season, a double that’s no longer possible under NCAA rules. 

Fast forward nine months to Jan. 17, 1951. 

The Schwartzberg brothers and Kelleher, all convicted felons, plus two members of the previous year’s Manhattan College team, Henry Poppe and Jack Byrnes, were arrested and booked on bribery and conspiracy charges.  

As described during an ESPN Classic episode, Poppe and Byrnes had received $50 a week during the off season, plus $3,000 to make sure Manhattan didn’t cover the spread against Siena, Santa Clara and Bradley. They were also paid $2,000 each to cover the spread in two other games. 

Poppe had also tried to corrupt Manhattan junior center Junius Kellogg, the first Black man to play for that school, and who had enrolled at Manhattan after 40 months in the U.S. Army, entering under the GI Bill. 

Kellogg had already refused a $1,000 offer from his former teammate Poppe, but Poppe asked Kellogg to reconsider and suggested a meeting three days later.  Kellogg went to that meeting but was wearing a wire. That was the beginning of the end. 

A month later, detectives waited at Penn Station at 1:30 in the morning for the train from Philadelphia carrying the CCNY Beavers. 

The detectives were there to arrest three team members following the wiretap of a phone of a former player who was acting as a liaison between players and gamblers. And in Brooklyn, district attorney Miles McDonald had quietly recruited 29 police rookies who went undercover and pretended to be students at City College and several other schools throughout New York. 

“They're interrogated in separate rooms for hours. The players are not allowed to call attorneys,” Goodman said. “They're not allowed even to call their parents. Finally, after hours of questioning, they break, and they confess to having shaved points in three games during that season. And, literally overnight, they've gone from heroes to villains." 

Four more City College players were arrested later on. The scandal involved CCNY, NYU, LIU, Manhattan, Bradley, the University of Toledo and the University of Kentucky. In total, 32 players admitted to taking bribes between 1947 and 1950 to fix 86 games in 17 states. 

Bookmaker Harry Gross pled guilty to 66 counts of gambling and bribery and was sentenced to eight years in prison. 

Most of the schools involved, such as Kentucky and Bradley, bounced back from the scandal. City College was never stripped of its championships, but the team was banned from Madison Square Garden and eventually dropped to Division 3.  

There’s a reference to the scandal in The Sopranos in an episode broadcast in 2014. Learning of the death of New York mob boss Carmine Lupertazzi, Junior Soprano relates how Lupertazzi invented point shaving for "CCNY versus Kentucky, 1951. Nobody beat the spread. I bought a black Fleetwood."