In 1978, the Inspector General Act created inspectors general in several government agencies to expose corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse. That same year, I had my own first brush with corruption.
It occurred on the parquet basketball court at the Boston Garden. I was a senior at Harvard College and the cocaptain of the Harvard basketball team. On December 16, 1978, we were scheduled to play one of our biggest games of the season, against a strong Boston College team in the Boston Garden.
I almost did not make it to the game that night. I had applied for a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University, and interviews for Rhodes finalists were scheduled to take place in Baltimore on the same day as our big game. At that time, the Rhodes selection committee interviewed all the finalists in person, some more than once, selected four recipients from each region (there were then eight regions in the United States), and announced the winners to the assembled finalists at the end of a long day of interviews. I was a finalist in the Mid-Atlantic region, and this day-long interview process meant that I would likely miss our game in the Boston Garden that night.
I was torn. I felt an obligation to my teammates to play in the game, but I also wanted to compete for the Rhodes Scholarship. Tom Stemberg, a Harvard alumnus who was an avid supporter of Harvard basketball and later founded the office supply company Staples, told me he had a solution. He arranged for a private plane to pick me up at the Baltimore airport after my Rhodes interview and fly me to Boston in time for the game. The Rhodes interviewers agreed that I could leave Baltimore early, after my interview and before the selections were made, so that I could make it to the game in Boston that night.
On the plane, as we flew up the East Coast I changed into my basketball uniform. At Boston’s Logan Airport, a state police car met me on the tarmac—I do not know how that was arranged (after being an inspector general, I still wince when I think about it). The police car sped me to the Boston Garden, getting me there just before the 7:30 p.m. tipoff.
That night I had the best game of my college basketball career. My shots were dropping, I dished out assist after assist, and I had more steals than in any other game I had played. In total, I had nineteen points, fourteen assists, and eight steals. Boston College was favored to win by twelve points, but it was a nip and tuck contest the whole way. We were ahead, Boston College came back, we surged. In the last minutes, Boston College pulled ahead and won by three points, 86–83.
During the game I had forgotten about the Rhodes interview. After the game, still in my uniform, I walked to a pay phone on the Boston Garden concourse to call the Rhodes committee to find out the results. I dialed the number, identified myself, and asked about the results of the interview. The person on the line from the Rhodes committee told me, “Congratulations, you are a Rhodes Scholar.”
What a day. I played the best game of my career, and I had won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford.
There was only one problem: the basketball game had been fixed. Two years later, while I was at Oxford, Sports Illustrated published an article reporting that Mafia mobsters Henry Hill and Jimmy Burke had bribed several Boston College players to win games by less than the point spread, which is known as point-shaving. The mobsters could bet against the spread in Boston College games and win huge payouts, knowing that the fix was in. The Sports Illustrated article reported that the first game the mobsters had fixed was the Boston College–Harvard game in the Boston Garden the night of my Rhodes interview. A friend of mine sent me a copy of the article and wrote, “Glenn, I guess you played your best game when the other team was in the tank.”
Two Boston College players were indicted for the point-shaving scheme. One, Rick Kuhn, was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. I later worked at a law firm with Ed McDonald, the head of the Brooklyn Organized Crime Strike Force and the lead prosecutor on the case. He told me that he had considered subpoenaing me to the grand jury in the criminal investigation at the time to ask if I could tell that the Boston College players were letting up in the game. I responded that I could not have said that, but in retrospect it was odd that I had eight steals in that game, more than in any other game I had ever played. He said that the prosecutors had watched footage from the game but could not detect any noticeable, intentional actions to go easy by the Boston College players, so he had decided not to subpoena me to testify.
The movie Goodfellas made Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) and Jimmy Burke (played by Robert De Niro) infamous. In the film, one of the mobsters refers to the point-shaving scheme. He asks, “Did you hear about the points we were shaving up in Boston?” just before a mobster strangles his mob colleague. In another scene, a mobster says while watching a basketball game on a television in a bar, “If they f*** this up, I’m going to...”Another mobster says, “This is a lock.”
ESPN subsequently produced a “30 for 30” sports program on the Boston College point-shaving scandal titled “Playing for the Mob.” The program included a few film clips from the Boston College–Harvard game, including one of me dribbling down the court and hitting a jump shot. When I showed the scene to my children, their only comment was, “Dad, your hair was really long, and your shorts were really short.” True, but those were the styles back then.
When President Clinton nominated me to become the Justice Department inspector general in 2000, Senator Herb Kohl supported my nomination, stating in a speech that I had had perhaps my best basketball performance in college against Boston College only to discover later that the game had been part of a notorious point-shaving scandal. He opined, “No doubt this first-hand experience drove him in his later quest to weed out corruption at the Department of Justice.”