Baseball’s First G-Man, Part Two

By Paul Jackson

Henry Fitzgibbon, the first Director of Security for Baseball, excelled at avoiding publicity, despite the tabloid-friendly substance of his work. Jerome Holtzman, one of the deans of sports writing in Fitzgibbon’s time, said of him in 1972: “He’s a wonderful private eye, just shuffles around, always watching and saying nothing, though if you’ve known him for two or three years, he might give you a ‘hello.’”

A rare Fitzgibbon profile appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1971, describing him as a “tall gentleman with thinning gray hair, with more the bearing of a bank president.” The interview Fitzgibbon gave for this piece was by far the most we could find him talking about his own work, and to hear him tell it, risk management was the name of the game.

“If we never have a case, we’ll be highly successful. Our success is not measured by what we develop to report. It’s measured by what doesn’t happen.”

Like J. Edgar Hoover, Fitzgibbon saw gambling as the greatest danger to his new territory. “Billions are bet illegally every year on sports events–baseball, football, you name it.”

“Gamblers look for what they call an edge,” he explained. And a great way to find an edge was to build a personal relationship with a player.

As a result, he said his office’s first priority was education. “If we can inform the players and others what dangers exist in the fields of organized crime and gambling, we hope they’ll have the interest and intelligence to avoid such association.”

Though mild-mannered, Fitzgibbon never hid his origins or the pedigree that had earned him his role. A framed, autographed picture of his old boss, J. Edger Hoover, sat on the desk of his baseball office, and a lacquered truncheon hung on the wall.

FBI director J Edgar Hoover investigated baseball too.Photo byNPR

J. Edgar Hoover had long sought to have the FBI in a close relationship with professional sports, and by the mid-1970s, the largest organizations had practically outsourced security matters to an unofficial wing of the Bureau.

In 1973, “Security Directors” right out of Quantico central casting were in place in the NFL, MLB, the NHL, and the NBA, bringing remarkable uniformity and consistency to an evolving profession. Three of the four directors lived in the same town, New City, New York (during their earlier overlapping time at the Bureau, they car-pooled), and they were so alike that even their childbearing habits were notably similar: three out of the four had at least four children. Fitzgibbon was the outlier in only this regard, but his deputy, Gallant, made up baseball’s deficit by having nine.

In provincial baseball, Fitzgibbon kept most of his work in-house, but the NFL security director, Jack Danahy, took the next step, building a national network of retired FBI agents, and some retired police, keeping them on retainer and ready to spring into action. This system quickly became the gold-standard, working so well that the NBA and NHL began tapping into the same freelance pool.

The men at the top all framed their roles using almost identical language: “My objective is to maintain the integrity of the sport.” This took their mission from legality up and out to morality, and everyone appreciated such a broad purview.

“These are not great civil libertarians we are talking about,” said Dick Moss, counsel for the MLB Players Association in 1976. “They are not overly concerned with players’ rights.”

“There’s too much invasion of the privacy of the player,” Arthur Goldberg, a former Supreme Court Justice complained. “This security business is just another example of the invasion.”

The Security Directors also adopted the Bureau’s emphasis on secrecy. Asked to explain how he kept tabs on baseball’s several-dozen clubs, the inscrutable Fitzgibbon had a ready response: “Security is a peculiar operation,” he said. “We don’t like to tell people how we operate.” You can see why he didn’t get many interviews.

A 1981 nationwide review of money in sports, released a few months after Fitzgibbon retired (for real), showed gambling’s soaring popularity during the prior decade, including an explosion of illegal gambling on professional sports. The money involved in illegal gambling had–at least–tripled in ten years, coinciding with a steady erosion of law enforcement resources which “decriminalized gambling by default,” the report said.

To whatever extent professional sports embraced hiring federal agents as a way to wage war on illegal gambling, given the scale of the problem, the former G-men on the payroll were just a bucket underneath an overtopping dam.

“There sure as hell is going to be another gambling scandal, just as sure as there’s going to be another earthquake in San Francisco,” a worried university president said in 1981. “It’s long overdue.”

And it was coming, no matter who was watching.

Paul Jackson writes about sports, history, and culture on Substack at Project 3.18. He has previously written for ESPN.com. Paul can be reached via email at pjacks2@gmail.com.