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The Spaniard's Fix By Ted
Mann
Jack Molinas was one of the most remarkable athletes ever to grace Washington Heights. He was to the basketball team what Lou Gehrig was to the baseball lineup, or Sid Luckman to the football squad. As a sophomore in 1951, Molinas guided Columbia to a 22-0 record, one of only six undefeated seasons in college basketball history. Following his senior year, he was honored as an All-American, awarded a trophy as Columbia's most outstanding varsity athlete, and given the Haggarty Award as the best basketball player in the New York area. After graduation, Molinas was sought after by many NBA teams—The New York Knicks, Rochester Royals, and Boston Celtics (Red Auerbach lobbied especially hard)—but, on April 24, 1953, he was drafted by the Fort Wayne "Zollner" Pistons. There was a tense negotiation over salary, where Molinas squeezed Pistons' owner Fred Zollner for a $10,000 first-year contract (more than any other rookie). After Molinas threatened to go to law school instead of the NBA, Zollner caved; he offered $8,500 in salary and $1,500 as a signing bonus. On January 6, 1954, Jack Molinas was named to the Western Division All-Star team as a rookie. The reason that you don't often hear about Jack Molinas—especially from Columbia and the NBA—is that throughout his playing career, Molinas shaved points and dumped games. The relatively huge contract Jack Molinas received when he signed with the Fort Wayne Pistons was dwarfed by the small fortune of around $200,000 he had already earned through his various nefarious activities while at Columbia. His NBA contract was just pocket change; a demonstration of the respect due to Molinas, while he continued to earn his real salary from bookmakers. Molinas first became attracted to underworld mobsters and sports betting as an adolescent, living in a Jewish middle-class neighborhood in the Bronx. He took up both basketball and gambling in 1944, and by the time he started for Stuyvesant High School, he was already working with bookies. In his excellent biography of Molinas, The Wizard of Odds, Charley Rosen writes "To, Molinas, playing in a rigged ball game was more exhilarating than playing it straight. He had to be mindful of the score, the game clock, the point spread, and even the substitutions... Molinas loved the idea of playing so many secret games at the same time." An academic standout, with a "genius" IQ of 175 and six-foot-six frame, Molinas had his pick of colleges. He considered many, including Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Penn, Michigan, and West Point, before choosing Columbia—a school close to his family, and closer still to his crooked friends. At first Molinas was reluctant to dump games and, by doing so, taint his college career. He turned down an offer to dump Columbia's 1951 First Round NCAA Tournament game in exchange for $20,000. But then, at the end of his sophomore year, while he was on his way to setting every scoring record at Columbia, a silly dorm-room prank backfired. A friend was throwing water balloons from a window, and Jack joined in by hurling a piece of glassware. The glass shattered the windshield of Mark Van Doren—the same man depicted in the film Quiz Show—and Molinas found himself suspended for six months. During the hiatus, Molinas grew bitter toward Columbia. His coach hadn't defended him and the school had been overly harsh. After flirting with transferring, he decided instead to fight back and exact a stealthy revenge on the school that he felt had betrayed him. Molinas was such an outstanding player that it was often difficult to perceive that he was fixing a game's score. In his first dump, a game against Holy Cross in January 1952, Jack scored an astounding 39 points. He carefully botched certain plays in order to ensure the loss, in exchange for $10,000 dollars. During his junior and senior years, Molinas perfected the art of shaving points: he would bungle shots and drop passes in order to stay under the point spread. Against Yale, for instance, the spread favored Columbia by nine points, so when Molinas engineered a seven-point victory, Columbia won the game and Molinas earned $50,000 (while also tying the single-game rebounding record). When the point spread didn't favor Columbia heavily, Molinas had to dump games entirely. Such was the case when Columbia played Penn in 1953. Molinas was guarding his longtime rival: Penn star forward Ernie Beck. The only problem was that, when the game was on the line, Beck couldn't hit a shot to save his life. Here's Molinas's recollection of the game's final moments:
Molinas's college career ended with a series of disappointing losses and erratic performances, but he quickly redeemed himself in the eyes of pro scouts. In the summer following his graduation, Molinas played on a team of college All-Stars that toured the country competing against the Harlem Globetrotters, who at the time, were considered to be on a par with the NBA. Molinas excelled in these match-ups and he was once again a hot commodity. He signed with the Pistons and quickly established himself as one of the premier scoring forwards in the NBA. In his repertoire, Jack had developed an excellent one-handed push shot from the perimeter and a devastating hook shot under the basket. Unfortunately, these skills were only used in one season of professional basketball, as Jack Molinas played his last NBA game on January 7, 1954: a 79-57 loss to the homestanding Syracuse Nationals. The day after the Syracuse game (January 8), NBA commissioner Maurice Podoloff issued a statement claiming that Molinas had bet on a total of ten games, won six of those bets, and cleared a total of $400,000. Though Podoloff falsely denied that Molinas had ever deliberately lost games for the Fort Wayne Pistons, Molinas was suspended indefinitely and his place in the upcoming All-Star Game was taken by fellow Piston Andy Phillip. Ironically, Phillip was also a dumper. While he only admitted to betting on the Pistons to win, Molinas was clearly guilty of greater wrongdoing in the NBA: shaving points and conspiring with other players to lose games. Despite this disreputable behavior, Molinas sought to redeem his name after the NBA expulsion. He went to law school and passed the bar without cracking a book. He also joined the Eastern Basketball League, where he played alongside future coaching legends John Chaney, Bobby Knight, and Jack Ramsey. Of course, while Molinas was rehabilitating his public image, he secretly continued to fix college basketball games at a furious rate. Starting in 1957, Molinas traveled from campus to campus, corrupting young ballplayers with prostitutes and cash. Between 1957 and 1961, he had no fewer than twenty-seven collegiate programs in the bag. For Molinas, the biggest coup, though certainly not the best player, was Freddy Portnoy, a fellow Columbia Lion. A scholastic standout, Portnoy came from a stable, comfortably middle-class family—an unlikely candidate for dumping. But Portnoy was drawn to the easy money and, in exchange for a thousand dollars, ensured that Columbia lost to Penn by at least twelve points. Ten years after the glass-throwing incident, Molinas was still angry that the Columbia Athletic Department had failed to support him and lessen his punishment. It was particularly satisfying for him to see the whole betrayal come full circle. At its height, the Molinas-led gambling operation—which he referred to as "Fixers Incorporated"—was pulling in more than $50,000 a week. The mob had deep ties to the bookmaking component, and Jack used a collection of ex-pros and local hoods to help recruit dumpers. Fixers Incorporated even branched out into other sports: rigging horse races by installing an electric buzzer in the animals' rear ends and fixing a boxing match by having a fighter drugged with a flu-inducing liquid. Though these schemes were largely successful, the heart of the operation was always basketball. And eventually, basketball was what brought it all to an end. Frank Hogan was the same New York District Attorney who in 1951 prosecuted the national champion CCNY team, which captured both the NCAA and NIT titles while shaving points in both championship games. Hogan resolved to put an end to Fixers Incorporated. The DA's office specifically wanted to take down Molinas, whom they referred to as "the Spaniard," because of his Sephardic appearance (olive complexion, dark hair and eyes, elongated features). Hogan offered immunity to most of the crooked players (though their schools and the NBA would not be so forgiving), and the government built a solid case against Jack Molinas through the use of wiretaps. The goverment's charges were eye-popping: conspiracy to fix 25 games involving 22 players at 12 colleges, three counts of bribery, and subornation of perjury. Molinas was found guilty on all counts, and received the stiffest penalty ever imposed in New York for such crimes: 15 years in prison. Molinas's life only became more bizarre during and after his jail sentence. While serving time in Attica and The Tombs, Molinas was disbarred and stripped of his law practice. In need of a new vocation, he became a stock market whiz and he was regularly released from jail to manage investments for a federal judge. After his parole, Molinas moved to California and became involved in a number of strange ventures, ranging from fencing stolen fur coats, to producing pornographic movies, to swindling mob investors and bookmakers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Despite Molinas's amazing intellect and ability—he continued as a standout basketball player in his later years—double-crossing the mob was not the wisest move on his part. Early one morning in 1975, a bullet was fired through the back of Molinas's head. The gangland execution demonstrates an abiding theme in Molinas's life: abrupt endings. Molinas's NBA career, his law practice, his gambling operation, and eventually his life all met with premature and sudden conclusions. An exceptional intellect helped him recover from these setbacks, only to focus on new scam and swindles. However, the same man who so effortlessly manipulated the scores of so many games could not exert similar control over his environment off the court. Recommended Reading To read more on the life of Jack Molinas, we recommend the following books, which were the source of much of the information in this article:
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In November 1954, the presidents of the eight Ivy schools signed
an agreement to formalize their athletic league, and, in the process, they
imposed limitations on scholarships, scheduling and admissions. This
agreement sought to institutionalize what author Paul Zingg termed "the
last bastion of 'pure' collegiate athletics." Ironically, only one
year earlier, a star forward at Columbia was shaving points and dumping
games--well on his way to engineering the biggest point-fixing scandal in
college basketball history.
