Paige Bruce was in fifth grade the first time her father disappeared. As a child, she didn’t know where he was or why the men took him away. Once Paige knew the full story, it all made sense: the dark sunglasses, the hushed conversations, the reason her father always sat next to the exit at a restaurant. All she knew at the time was she didn’t have to ride the bus to school while he was gone. The men from the FBI would drive her instead.
Mickey Bruce was a strong guy, a former football star at the University of Oregon and a criminal defense attorney who represented bikers from the Hells Angels. It took a lot to scare him. He put on a brave face in front of the kids. But as she got older, Paige learned there was another side to her father’s life.
In 1961, when he was a senior in college, Mickey made an enemy of a dangerous man. When he disappeared, Paige realized, it was because the FBI had taken him to a safe house. The second time it happened, the agents showed up at Mickey’s law office. Paige, who’d just graduated from high school, worked there as a receptionist.
“I’m like, ‘What the hell is going on?’” Paige said. “They took him away for, like, three days. Then he came back and said, ‘Yep, everything’s good.’”
Around the same time, Paige came across a story about the attempted assassination of a gambler named Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, a notorious Las Vegas figure who managed casinos controlled by the mob. The 1995 movie “Casino” is a fictionalized portrayal of Rosenthal’s real-life battles with the Nevada Gaming Commission, starring Robert De Niro as Ace Rothstein, a character inspired by Rosenthal.
On Oct. 4, 1982, Rosenthal was leaving a Las Vegas restaurant when his Cadillac Eldorado burst into flames. Thanks to a metal plate under his seat, Rosenthal walked away with only minor burns. When she heard about the car bombing, Paige began to understand the kinds of characters her father was dealing with.
“I think about how public of a person he was,” Paige said. “He’s always in court, always at his office, always at home. That’s kind of scary to think about now.”
The story of Mickey and Lefty began in 1960 at a Dearborn, Mich., hotel. Mickey later testified at a Congressional hearing that Rosenthal and another man offered him $5,000 to shave points in a football game between Oregon and Michigan. Thanks to Mickey’s testimony, Lefty’s face was splashed on the front pages of newspapers across the country, his left hand tugging anxiously at the knot of his tie, lower lip jutting out in a De Niro-esque pout. For the next five decades, until both men died of natural causes, their lives would be intertwined, the football player and the Vegas fixer who became central characters in a nationwide gambling scandal.
Mickey’s Senate testimony surfaced again in the 1970s, when Rosenthal was fighting the Nevada Gaming Commission for a license that would allow him to continue operating Las Vegas casinos. Attorneys wanted Mickey to come to Las Vegas and testify against Rosenthal at a hearing. This time, Mickey declined.
“He didn’t go because of comments that were made by Lefty’s attorney that if he came to Las Vegas he would … something about the sand,” said Mickey’s wife, Patsy Bruce. “That they would find him in the desert.”
She paused.
“We never went to Las Vegas.”
Gambling scandals are nothing new in college sports.
The Athletic reported in April that the FBI is investigating ties between gamblers who bet on Jontay Porter, a former Toronto Raptors center who admitted to manipulating his own stats for gambling purposes, and suspicious betting activity involving five college basketball programs. Those allegations harken back to investigations in the 1950s and 1960s, when rumors of point-shaving, poisonings and other shady dealings ran rampant.
City College of New York, the NCAA and NIT champion in 1950, was at the center of a nationwide point-shaving scandal that reached 32 players and seven schools. The CCNY scandal prompted schools and regulators to become even more vigilant about the influence of gamblers in college sports. Those efforts didn’t stop gamblers like Lefty Rosenthal from running underground bookmaking operations using the technology of the time: long-distance phone lines.
As a young man in Chicago, Rosenthal bet on horse races and baseball games involving the Cubs and White Sox. In 1957, he attracted the attention of the criminal division of the Illinois Bell Telephone Company, which found him running gambling operations out of three storefronts: a delivery service, a trucking company and a home remodeling company. Feeling the heat, Rosenthal left Chicago and moved to Miami, where he ran a bookmaking operation out of his condo.
On Sept. 23, 1960, Rosenthal checked into the Dearborn Inn under the alias “Frank Grosscup,” accompanied by a Brooklyn school teacher and former college basketball player named Dave Budin. The same day, a plane carrying Mickey Bruce and his Oregon teammates landed at Willow Run Airport for a game against Michigan.
On the surface, Mickey was an odd target for a bribery attempt. He was the president of his fraternity, a former Little League World Series star, the son of an attorney and a team captain who played halfback and defensive back. Rosenthal and Budin didn’t know much about him, and he knew even less about them. The only connection was an Oregon basketball player named Jimmy Granata who, like Budin, grew up playing on the courts of New York City.
Granata told Mickey he had two friends staying at the team hotel who needed tickets. At the hotel, Budin introduced himself as Jimmy Granata’s friend and invited Mickey to his room. Mickey hesitated at first, but Budin assured him it would take only a few minutes.
Mickey followed Budin into the hotel room and found Rosenthal waiting inside. As they chatted about the game, Rosenthal mentioned Oregon was a six-point underdog. He asked if it was possible a player could be bribed. Mickey conceded it was. Budin then asked Mickey what it would cost to ensure that Michigan won by at least eight points.
“You are big-time gamblers,” Mickey said, according to his Senate testimony. “You should know.”
“About $5,000?” Budin offered.
“That is fine,” Mickey replied.
Budin and Rosenthal told Mickey they’d pay him an additional $5,000 if he could get quarterback Dave Grosz to go along with the scheme. Mickey agreed and said he needed to go, as he was late for a team walking excursion outside the hotel. The men made plans to meet again at 9 p.m. to finalize the deal.
Mickey raced to catch up with his teammates and told an assistant coach about the bribe. The coach told Oregon’s athletic director, who informed the Michigan State Police. Police told Mickey to show up for the 9 p.m. meeting as planned but didn’t attempt to apprehend Budin and Rosenthal that night, which proved to be a crucial mistake.
When Mickey returned to the hotel room, Budin and Rosenthal gave him tips about how to carry out the scheme without attracting suspicion. Rosenthal also offered Mickey $100 a week to call him in Miami Beach and update the health of Oregon’s team before the weekly betting lines were released. Mickey asked to be paid for the tickets, which were worth about $3 each, and Rosenthal peeled $50 from a roll of $100 bills.
Rosenthal said he had to leave later that night but told Mickey to see Budin in the morning to collect the money. Mickey agreed and went back to his room. The next morning, while eating breakfast with his teammates, he saw a state trooper leading Budin out of the hotel in handcuffs.
Mickey played his heart out against the Wolverines, hauling in an interception, but it made no difference. Michigan won 21-0, easily covering the six-point spread. Budin was arrested and charged with registering at the hotel under a fake name, a minor offense. By the time the cops showed up that morning, Lefty was long gone, on his way to Miami with no one in pursuit.
The Michigan State Police weren’t the only ones on the trail. On the same weekend that Budin and Rosenthal tried to bribe Mickey Bruce, a player from Florida reported a similar bribery attempt involving a game between the Gators and Florida State. Authorities began to suspect these were part of an organized gambling ring.
Meanwhile, police in Miami noticed suspicious activity at Lefty Rosenthal’s condo. On New Year’s Eve of 1960, police chief Martin Dardis knocked on Rosenthal’s door and found him in his bedroom in his pajamas, telephone in one hand and a small black book in the other. Dardis took the phone and answered calls from bettors around the country, including one from a man named Amos who wanted to place a bet on a football game. Dardis handed the phone to Rosenthal, who said, “You are talking to a cop, you stupid S.O.B.”
During the raid, Rosenthal complained that he’d paid $500 to keep the local police from harassing his bookmaking operation. “You guys must be kidding,” he said, according to a sergeant’s sworn affidavit. “Evidently you didn’t get your piece.”
In 1961, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations announced hearings on illicit gambling. The committee was chaired by John McClellan, a Democratic senator from Arkansas who, a few years earlier, oversaw a Senate investigation into corruption allegations involving Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa.
The chief counsel to the McClellan committee, Robert F. Kennedy, became attorney general in 1961 and was determined to crack down on organized crime. Over three weeks in late summer, the McClellan committee hauled accused gamblers, including Lefty Rosenthal, to Washington, D.C., and grilled them about their activities.
When it was Rosenthal’s turn to testify, the committee asked if he recognized anyone from a list of accused gamblers and mob figures: Fi-Fi Buccieri, Sam “Mooney” Giancana, Gussie Alex, Sam Minkus. Rosenthal took the Fifth in response to every question, including one about whether he was left-handed.
Finally, the committee’s lead counsel, Jerome Alderman, asked the million-dollar question: “Have you ever specifically tried to bribe any football players in the Oregon-Michigan games?”
When Rosenthal declined to answer, the committee called its star witness, Mickey Bruce. Mickey described the bribe attempt in detail, recounting how Dave Budin approached him at the hotel and initiated the meeting with another man, a “blond fellow” with a receding hairline.
ALDERMAN: “Do you recognize anybody in this room as that man?”
BRUCE: “Yes, sir.”
ALDERMAN: “Who is that?”
BRUCE: “The man sitting at my left.”
ALDERMAN: “Would you point him out?”
MCCLELLAN: “Are you talking about —”
BRUCE: “Mr. Rosenthal here.”
That dramatic reveal doubled as a rebuke of the Michigan State Police, who failed to connect the dots and place Lefty Rosenthal in the hotel room that night. Police in Michigan had gotten Rosenthal’s name from police in Miami by tracing phone calls from his room at the Dearborn Inn, but they let the trail go cold. Lt. Carl Robinson, head of the Michigan racket squad, was asked by one of the senators if police now had enough evidence to pursue bribery charges against Rosenthal.
“If Mr. Bruce would testify,” Robinson answered. “That was our problem before.”
“Mr. Bruce will testify,” the senator responded.
With Mickey’s help, the committee succeeded in putting a face on the shadowy world of illicit gambling. As the hearings concluded, McClellan applauded Mickey’s integrity and held him up as an example for college athletes around the country.
“I hope if any of them are ever approached in any way by this crooked element that would defile and corrupt the youth of our country, that they will follow the example that you set here today,” McClellan said. “I certainly commend you, and I think all decent Americans applaud you for what you have done.”
Days later, President John F. Kennedy signed the Wire Act, which made it a federal crime for gamblers to use interstate telephone lines to transmit betting information. Mickey was hailed as a hero, and people from around the country sent him letters praising his courage.
Police had what appeared to be an open-and-shut case linking Lefty Rosenthal to the attempted bribe and assurances that Mickey would cooperate. But Lefty was not an easy man to catch.
In February 1962, a few months after the Senate hearings, detectives knocked on the door of Rosenthal’s condo in Miami. Rosenthal came to the door sporting dapper attire and, according to one newspaper account, painted fingernails.
“I’ve been expecting you,” he said.
The detectives arrested Rosenthal, but not for bribing Mickey Bruce. Instead, Rosenthal and Budin faced charges in North Carolina for offering $500 to Ray Paprocky, a basketball player at NYU, to shave points in a 1960 NCAA Tournament game against West Virginia.
Authorities had uncovered a nationwide network of fixers who conspired to influence hundreds of college basketball games over a five-year period. In all, 37 players from 22 schools were arrested on charges related to point shaving. Rosenthal pleaded no contest and was fined $6,000 for attempting to fix the NYU-West Virginia game, though he later maintained his innocence and said Budin fed his name to authorities in hopes of receiving a lighter sentence.
“David Budin would have given his mother up to stay away from what he had to face,” Rosenthal said in a 1976 hearing in front of the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
Despite the evidence against him, Rosenthal never faced charges in Michigan. The reason, it appears, is that the Michigan State Police missed their chance to get a statement from Mickey Bruce.
After getting embarrassed in the McClellan hearings, authorities in Michigan tried to salvage their investigation by asking Mickey to travel to Detroit and give a sworn statement. Oregon’s athletic director offered a compromise, suggesting that authorities could interview Mickey in Columbus, Ohio, before a game against Ohio State in November 1961. Mickey, out for the season with a shoulder injury, refused to make the trip and said he was done testifying against Rosenthal.
“My obligation has been served,” Mickey told the Eugene Register-Guard. “I have no obligation to do anything anymore.”
Mickey told the newspaper he wasn’t afraid to testify — he’d done it once, after all — but he was busy with schoolwork and his fraternity. In his eyes, Michigan police had botched the investigation once, and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t do it again. Mickey said he’d consulted his father, an attorney in El Cajon, Calif., for legal advice but insisted he’d made his own decision.
For all the adulation he received for testifying in front of the committee, Mickey got plenty of ribbing, too. He was tired of hearing about Lefty Rosenthal and the bribe.
“That’s getting old,” he told the newspaper. “I just want to forget it.”
Mickey had done his civic duty by reporting the bribe and traveling to Washington, D.C., to testify. Still, in all of the reporting about Mickey’s case, the question of why he didn’t return to speak with the Michigan police lingered as an unsolved mystery.
An answer may be hidden in Lefty’s FBI case file, posted online after his death. Buried in hundreds of pages of documents is a single paragraph from a report made to police in El Cajon, Calif., where Mickey’s parents lived, on Sept. 8, 1961, the day Mickey testified in front of the McClellan committee. The names are redacted, but the story is easy to decipher:
El Cajon, California, PD advised that on 9/8/61, (name redacted) El Cajon received a telephone call from an unidentified male asking if (name redacted) was there. (Name redacted) answered in the negative, at which time this person uttered an oath and added, “You’re going to get it, and so is he.” (Name redacted) advised the son had recently testified before a Congressional Committee at Washington, D.C., regarding a bribery attempt on him by Frank Rosenthal.
Paige Bruce let out a gasp when a reporter informed her of the phone call. Her father shielded her from those kinds of details, though she always sensed there was more beneath the surface. Patsy Bruce, now living in Oregon, declined to discuss specific threats but acknowledged Mickey’s parents had reasons to fear for his safety.
“I think he didn’t feel safe to go back to Michigan to talk,” Patsy said. “He was really getting directions from his parents. They were greatly affected by it because it was nationwide.”
When he pointed his finger at Lefty Rosenthal, Mickey had no way to know that the shadow would linger for nearly 50 years, until Rosenthal died of a heart attack in 2008. Mickey, who died three years later at 70, didn’t see Lefty’s death as any kind of liberation, Patsy said. He was already at peace, knowing he never played harder in his life than he did that day at Michigan Stadium.
“A kid in college never thinks of that kind of stuff, how this is going to affect you in the long run,” Patsy said. “It didn’t matter. He would have done exactly the same thing.”
(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; photo of Mickey Bruce courtesy of Patsy Bruce; photo of Lefty Rosenthal via Getty Images; photo of the 1960 Michigan-Oregon game via Bentley Historical Library / Bentley Image Bank)
