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In this episode of Gangland Wire, Host retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins dives into the shadowy intersection of organized gambling and college athletics through the story of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. During the early 1960s, Rosenthal built his reputation by identifying weaknesses in sports systems, particularly among vulnerable college athletes. He met one who could not be bought, Mickey Bruce of Oregon. At the center of this story is a little-known but pivotal attempt at a fix involving the Oregon Ducks. Rosenthal and his associate, David Budin, believed they had found an opening, but they ran headlong into the integrity of Oregon halfback Mickey Bruce. Bruce flatly refused the bribe, setting off a chain reaction that would help expose a much wider pattern of corruption in college sports.  I break down how this wasn’t an isolated incident but part of a nationwide effort by gamblers to influence outcomes and exploit young athletes. The episode explores the mechanics of organized gambling, attempts to fix games, and why college sports became such an attractive target for mob-connected bookmakers.
The story reaches a dramatic turning point during U.S. Senate hearings on gambling in college athletics, where Mickey Bruce publicly identified Lefty Rosenthal as one of the men who tried to corrupt him. It’s a rare moment in mob history—one where a gambler is named in open testimony by a player who refused to bend.  From there, I trace Rosenthal’s continued rise in the gambling world, from Miami to Las Vegas, where he would help shape modern sports betting while repeatedly managing to stay one step ahead of serious legal consequences. Rosenthal’s story raises enduring questions about accountability, the limits of law enforcement, and why some figures seem untouchable.
I close the episode by reflecting on Rosenthal’s legacy—and on Mickey Bruce’s quiet heroism.
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0:03 The Story Begins
4:14 The Bribe Attempt
7:58 The Aftermath of Scandal
12:26 The Rise of Lefty
14:34 College Sports and Corruption
18:58 The Online Gambling Boom
22:26 The Fall of Adrian McPherson
24:24 Mickey Bruce’s Legacy
[0:00] Hey, hey, all you wiretappers, back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. I worked a mob for about 14 years, and now I tell some mob stories, as many as I can find. And we all know Lefty Rosenthal. We all know Robert De Niro played him as Ace Rothstein in the film movie Casino. And that movie, part of the reason it was so good that Nicholas Pelleggi, the screenwriter, and wrote the book, was able to spend hours and hours interviewing Lefty Rosenthal in real life. He had gone to Florida by then and it seemed like the mob wasn’t after him anymore. They had one attempted bombing of him, if you remember.
[0:41] So it was a really good movie. There’s really good depiction of that era and that system that they had going out there. Let’s go back on Lefty Rosenthal’s history to a guy that he couldn’t corrupt. Lefty Rosenthal thought he could corrupt anybody, but he found a guy that he couldn’t corrupt. It was really one of his early cases where law enforcement, the FBI, and other state law enforcement agencies figured out Lefty Rosenthal was somebody, and he was a pretty big gambler. He was a nationwide gambler. In 1960, the Oregon Ducks had a pretty good team. What a name, the Oregon Ducks. They had a man named Dave Grayson and the quarterback with Dave Gross in the backfield. They had a 5’3 All-American receiver named Cleveland Jones. What a name, Cleveland Jones. They went 7-2-1. They lost to Michigan, and they also lost to eventual Rose Bowl champ Washington. But this was good enough to gain a Liberty Bowl invite to play Penn State. Oregon lost the bowl and played in two feet of snow and freezing temperatures in Philadelphia that year.
[1:50] But the biggest news of the season was made during their trip to Ann Arbor to play Michigan. They had this potential All-American player named Mickey Bruce, who really was obscure compared to especially this Dave Gross or this Cleveland Jones, who was an unusual player. He was a president of his fraternity. He was a former Little League World Series star. He was the son of an attorney. He was a team captain. He played halfback and defensive back. And there was two professional gamblers came to Ann Arbor that year and they didn’t know much about this guy, but they did know, one of them’s name was Budin, David Budin, and the other one was Frank Lefty Rosenthal. They didn’t know much about Mickey Bruce, but they had a connection to him. A guy who played for the Oregon State basketball team named Jimmy Granada and knew Boudin from when they were little kids growing up on the basketball courts in New York City. Now, Granada told Mickey that he had two friends staying at the team hotel and they needed tickets. This time, players could then were given tickets and they could turn around and sell them to people. Boudin ended up finding him and introduced himself and said he was Jimmy Granada’s friend and invited Mickey up to the room and said, I’m the guy that needs a couple of tickets.
[3:15] Mickey was a little bit hesitant, but didn’t know this guy. He’s probably got a New York accent, probably slick, more than likely. He hesitated at first and booted and said, just take a few minutes. I just want to get you to go and get those tickets. And so he goes him, so he follows him into the room and he finds Lefty Rosenthal waiting there, who he doesn’t know and won’t even have any idea who he is till much later. So they chatted a little bit about the game as people will and ask him questions about the team. And Rosenthal mentioned that Oregon was a six-point underdog. He said, do you don’t think a player could be bribed? Mickey said, I suppose they could. Buden then cut in. He said, Mickey, he said, what do you think it would cost to ensure that Michigan won by at least eight points? Mickey plays along. He says, you’re the big-time gamblers. You should know. So Buden said, about $5,000. And Mickey said, that’s probably fine.
[4:14] Mickey said, let me check into this. And he said, I’m late for a team meeting and I got to get going. So they made plans to meet later on about 9 p.m. Mickey was no fool or small town rube. His father had been a Chicago attorney and he now practice in El Cajon, California.
[4:31] He raced to catch up with his teammates and told an assistant coach about the bribe who told the athletic director, who then called in the Michigan State Police, who called in the FBI. And they told Mickey to go ahead and show up at 9 p.m. at the meeting in the hotel room. They don’t want to apprehend Buden and Rosenthal right now. They want to get some more information and really get a real solid bribery attempt out of them. So acting on the advice of these cops, Mickey goes back to the hotel room that evening.
[5:00] Buden and Rosenthal start talking to him. And so they gave him tips about how to carry out this scheme without attracting any attention. Buden and Rosenthal say, we’ll give you an extra $5,000 and you can get the quarterback, Dave Gross, to go along with this scheme. He said, Mickey, you just need to let some pass receivers get behind you once in a while and let them run up the score a little bit. And you’re not going to win anyhow, more than likely. Get the quarterback to call a few wrong plays nobody really ever noticed. And he said, I’ll give you each $5,000 after the game if you’ll do that. He also offered Mickey $100 a week just to call him at his house down in Florida and update him about the health of Oregon’s team before weekly betting lines were released makes you wonder how many guys did Rosenthal have calling him to update him on injuries and everything on different college teams and professional too. Because I know from doing a story before that Ocardo and a lot of the Chicago gangsters really valued Rosenthal’s tips on making their football bets. He seemed to have some kind of an inside track.
[6:08] As he got ready to leave, Mickey said, oh, wait a minute. I gave you those tickets. You got to pay me, which were only worth about three bucks each. And so Lefty gave him 50 bucks for the two tickets. Mickey would remember later that he had to roll $100 bills in his pocket, which is typical for a high-flyer, high-rolling kind of a dude like that, have a big roll of cash in your pocket. And then you reach down in, peel some off so everybody can see how much money you got in your pocket. Rosenthal said, hey, I got to leave tonight, but see my friend Buden in the morning, David Buden, and he’ll give you the money. Mickey agreed, went back to his room. The next morning, while eating breakfast with his teammates, he sees a state trooper leading Buden out of the hotel in handcuffs, and then missed Lefty Rosenthal, who, as he had told them the night before, the Lefty was going to be leaving, and they had made a good bribery attempt. I don’t know what the police were waiting on. They were trying to make an even better case or something. I guess they probably They wanted him to go back in and catch them all together with the money. But then lefty left, and they went ahead and pulled the trigger early. You never know how these things work out exactly and what was at play. During the game, Mickey, I tell you what, Mickey played his heart out. He got an interception for a touchdown. It didn’t make any difference. Michigan won easily, 21 to nothing, and easily covered the six-point spread.
[7:28] A player will later be asked about this, and part of the reason was he said the coach had called a late-night team meeting and told them about this bribery attempt and asked them if any of them had been approached. Of course, everybody said no. Whether they had or not, they’re going to say no. But this player said it really shook us. We just had no rhythm. We just couldn’t get together for that game.
[7:50] Buden, when he was arrested, it turns out he was arrested for registering at a hotel under a fake name. He ends up paying some little fine and leaving town.
[7:58] Lefty was long gone the next day. It’s possible that Rosenthal and Buden knew that just attempting this bribe might have the negative impact on Oregon’s chances against the spread anyhow. All we know for sure is they got off scot-free in the end, and Buden paid a $100 fine or whatever. Lefty, but he did get exposed because Mickey Bruce, he didn’t have any idea of what he was getting drawn into, but it became a nationwide scandal. Basketball and football games, college games were being influenced on a wide scale by these gambling interests and Lefty Rosenthal was right in the middle of it all. Part of the McClellan committee, Senator McClellan of Arkansas convened his select committee just to investigate gambling and college athletics later that year. Because of this Michigan interaction with Lefty and college players and attempted bribery, they brought Mickey Bruce in. September the 8th, 1961, there’s a Senate hearing witness table. And sitting at that table is Mickey Bruce at one side and Frank Lefty Rosenthal at the other. And this was the same Frank he’d met at this hotel room. And he literally fingered Rosenthal as one of the men who attempted to bribe him. That photo that I’ve got in there, if you’re on YouTube, Rosenthal fled the fifth, of course.
[9:27] Committee here, meetings like that, really what they’re good for is to stir law enforcement and bring people out and bring out and get the public riled up against organized crime. That’s what McClellan’s committee was really good for. They had several of those committees that finally got local authorities and the FBI to start looking at organized crime. And in particular, this is the mother’s milk of organized crime by now is gambling. And college sports gambling was the thing at the time. There was some pro teams going on, but it didn’t have near the action going down on it that the college teams had. There was a lot more interest in college and a lot more college games every week. Later on the next year, Wayne County, Michigan District Attorney’s Office wanted Mickey Bruce to come back to Detroit and swear out a complaint against the people that tried to bribe him and name him and give statements and everything. Bruce, by then, he didn’t really want to mess with it. He was playing football. He had his fraternity work. He had to keep his grades up because he was going to law school.
[10:32] But they had a game against Ohio State that November. Michigan authorities thought, just come in and see us when you’re here. But he was out for the season by then. He had separated his shoulder, and he never really played again when they were playing Stanford earlier that year. He wasn’t going to go back to Michigan. His coaches tried to get him to cooperate, but he said, I’m done with the whole matter. In an interview, he said, as far as I’m concerned, this whole thing should have been dead a month ago after it happened. He conferred with his father, and they both said they can’t really make him do that.
[11:05] He said, I didn’t have time to go. I’ve got all these school activities that I’m doing, and I just don’t want to go. And he said, the Michigan police botched this thing from the start. They should have stuck around, and they should have got Rosenthal before they left town. There were several things they should have done, and it was a poorly run investigation that probably wasn’t going to succeed anyhow. And he said it had been over a year, and he said, I don’t really remember exactly what happened. I understand all that, and he could have helped him make a case, but there’s an obscure a paragraph in Lefty Rosenthal’s FBI file. And it might explain a little more about why Mickey Bruce didn’t testify in a criminal trial against Lefty. It already testified and pointed him out in the McClellan hearing. But right after that, his mother received a telephone call in her home in El Cajon, California. Now, there’s some, it says name redacted, but you can easily fill in the name. 1961, September 1961, name redacted, El Cajon, received a phone call from an unidentified male asking if, name redacted, can you fill in, Mickey Bruce, 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. I think it’s pretty easy to fill in the names of Mickey Bruce and his mother easily.
[12:26] Bruce stayed home Oregon went to Columbus Lost to the Buckeyes again Wayne County DA Dropped any cases Against Buden and Rosenthal For lack of evidence Lefty will continue During these years To run his sports book Out of Florida He’ll continue Traveling around the country And making contact With people in the College sports world Trying to bribe players And coaches And gather information And.
[12:50] Cops in Miami were watching Lefty by then, 1960, New Year’s Eve. Police Chief Martin Dardis of Miami knocked on Rosenthal’s door with a group of guys and found him in his bedroom in his pajamas. He had a telephone in one hand and a small black book in the other. Dardis took the phone away from him and started answering the calls, and they were from bettors all around the country. He remembered that there was one guy named Amos who wanted to place a bet on a football game on New Year’s Day. And Dardis handed the phone to Rosenthal who told the guy that was calling in says you’re talking to a cop you stupid SOB.
[13:28] During that raid, Rosenthal complained he’d paid $500 to keep local police from harassing his bookmaking operations. He said, you guys must be kidding.
[13:37] Evidently, you didn’t get your piece. About a year later, February 1962, after the Senate hearings, detective knocked on his door again in Miami. He came to the door sporting dapper attire, which he was a really dapper dresser, and he had painted fingernails, according to a newspaper account. He said, I’ve been expecting you.
[13:58] The detectives arrested Rosenthal, not for bribing Mickey Bruce, but he and his friend Buden faced charges in North Carolina for offering $500 to Ray Paprocki, a basketball player at NYU, and wanted to shave points in a 1960 NCAA tournament against West Virginia. During this time, authorities had uncovered a nationwide network of fixtures who conspired to influence hundreds of college basketball games over a five-year period. In the end, 37 players from 22 schools were arrested on charges relating to
[14:31] port shaving. Man, that’s, boy, that was huge. We’ve got these guys going down now periodically that are getting involved because of the apps. And we’re going to get a little more into that. This gambling thing and college athletics especially, but even pro athletics. It’s a corrupting force, guys. I know a lot of you like to bet on games, but it really, there’s a real potential for corrupting the game. And in the end, if they keep it up and people keep corrupting these games, it’s just going to be like wrestling. You’ll just, somebody will control who’s going to win and who’s going to lose in every contest. That’s what these gamblers would like to get, and they’d make all the money.
[15:08] Rosenthal pleaded no contest. He got a $6,000 fine for trying to fix this NYU-West Virginia game. He claimed that David Buden gave up his name and that he said later on, trying to clear himself of that, that that wasn’t really me. David Buden did it, and he would have given up his mother’s stay away from what he had to face. That was when the Nevada Gaming Control Board was after him.
[15:33] In 1967, Rosenthal, under the watch of the Chicago Outfit, started acting like his outfit bosses and bring outfit tactics down to Miami. He started intimidating rival bookies and others in Miami who incurred his wrath. He ordered bombings of the territory. I interviewed the son of a CIA operative named, his father’s name was Ricardo Monkey Morales. Look back and see if you can find that interview of the son of Monkey Morales. I think Monkey Morales was probably in the title. And he told us about his father’s relationship with Rosenthal. He told him that Lefty had told his dad that he represented organized crime out of Chicago. And he said that Morales said that Rosenthal paid him. He said that Rosenthal paid Monkey Morales to blow up Alfie’s newsstand with a bookie joint in the back. He also had him, they had him blow up a car and a boat owned by a well-known jewelry thief that the mob was pressuring to do some burglaries for them. He also had him explode a bomb. I remember this, explode a bomb in the front yard of a Miami police officer trying to show his power. I guess this guy was messing with him or something, trying to tell everybody he was connected to the outfit and don’t mess with me.
[16:50] Morales would also claim that he’d witnessed Rosenthal meeting with Tony Splatron in Miami in 1967.
[16:58] 1970s, he goes to Las Vegas at the request of the outfit, which we all know. We’ll go back over it a little bit. Even legitimate gambling people will say he invented the sportsbook industry in Las Vegas. They didn’t really do that before. And Sports Illustrated once called him the greatest living expert on sports gambling. He’ll die in 2008 of natural causes down in Florida after all the skimming investigation went down and people started going to grand juries and being indicted and going to trials and everything. All the mobsters did. Several people in Las Vegas did. A guy out of the Tropicanda who was Kansas City’s man, Joe Augusto, and a guy named Carl Thomas who worked at both casinos and helping in skimming and several other guys that worked in the casino business. But guess who never was indicted? And guess who never even was called in for an interview? And guess who just hid out? Lefty Rosenthal. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Jane Ann Morrison of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Finally, they get an FBI agent to confirm to her that he was a top echelon informant during all this time. They try to blow him up in his Cadillac, another famous attempted mob hit. A lot of people speculate on that. They’ll always say it was Kansas City because they thought he was an informant all along. and never liked him and never trust him because he really, he brought all the heat down out in Las Vegas. Now, the heat was coming anyhow, but he maybe brought it a little bit quicker.
[18:24] There’s a former federal prosecutor out of Las Vegas that once said, it’s been said you should never speak ill of the dead, but there are exceptions to the rule, and Frank Rosenthal is one of those exceptions. He is an awful human being.
[18:38] Dave Budin, the guy who first approached Mickey Bruce, Yes. Continues in the sportsbook game and draws his son Steve into it. And by the 1990s, the online betting industry has taken over from your neighborhood bookie and a mob just running everything. It’s a multi-billion dollar thorn in the side of the U.S. authorities.
[18:59] 1998, federal prosecutors indicted Miami gambler David Buden, same man that tried to bribe Mickey Bruce, and indicted Buden’s son for running something called SDB Global.
[19:13] Which later became SBG. Federal authorities prosecuted Boudin under a federal anti-gambling statute because SDB Global was incorporated in Costa Rica, but it was based in Miami. Pleaded guilty and got a $750,000 fine. In Kansas City, during those same years, the son of the feared mafia capo, if you will, Willie the Rat Comisano, Willie Comisano Jr., They headed up a group of bookies that contained the names and sons and other extended relatives of many Kansas City Mafia members out of the 50s and 60s. And they were using the internet and dealing with either SDB Global or one of the other sports betting sites that sprung up in Costa Rica because they were all over the place. Budins were high flyers in this doing business out of Costa Rica. And they were making a lot of money, a lot of money. In 2004, SBG comes to the attention of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. They sent an undercover in, and they asked an SBG operator why the company required customers to call before wiring each new deposit. And he got him on tape to say, because we change the names in the countries of the middlemen all the time. The agent suggested that the process made it uneasy, and the employee of SBG said, you don’t have to worry about it. Lots of people do it.
[20:35] Well, during this investigation, they also found there was a Florida State star quarterback named Adrian McPherson was placing bets on games that he was playing in and ends up getting dismissed from the Florida State Seminoles football team. He was a rising star, a rising young star quarterback. In the investigation, they learned he’d already lost $8,000 to a local bookie who’d cut him off. He was giving him, extending him credit. Guy owed him $8,000 and he cut him off. So that’s when he turned to online SBG sites. Now, you have to pay up front. So he was getting some money to gamble somehow, and he tried to hide this activity by using a roommate, but a review of his phone records showed several calls to STB, and one time was, like, just before, there were, like, two in a row. And that’s how they were, like, trying to hide it and then pass it off to make it look like there was somebody else making the bet. He eventually gets arrested. He pleads to lesser charges. But one of those charges was check forgery. And when a gambler starts losing, many times they’ll turn to those white-collar crimes like check forgery, embezzlement. They’ll start stealing from their work, shoplifting, drug dealing. They can do anything like a junkie, man. They’ll do anything to keep gambling.
[21:52] I once knew a guy said he couldn’t even walk into a casino because he just starts getting a rush. He just can’t stay away from the machines once he walks in. So he totally has to stay out. Adrian McPherson, he was also an all-star baseball player. Even though he is kicked out of college ball for betting on his own team, he then gets drafted. The New Orleans Saints in 2005 draft him. They want him as their starting quarterback. But they also drafted a guy named Drew Brees, who ended up leading him to the Super Bowl in 2006.
[22:27] Now, later in that season or during that season, the Tennessee Titan mascot will accidentally hit McPherson with a golf cart. He sues him for several million dollars. The following year, he does this. He’s been injured by this golf cart. I don’t know if it wasn’t a career injury, obviously, but they also the gambling thing. And the following year, he appears with the Grand Rapid Rampage AFL team. Then he goes to a Canadian team. Then he plays on a variety of arena football teams, a different one every year almost. And finally, in 2018, the Jacksonville Sharks, which is an arena team, releases him. His gambling led him to a free fall into obscurity. He was on his way up to life-changing generational wealth, and the gambling just got him.
[23:17] Let’s go back a minute, you know, all these, I’ll be telling all these stories about these low rents and degenerate gamblers. Let’s go back to the incorruptible Mickey Bruce. He was injured during 1961 during his senior year. His last game was in 1961 against Stanford. His three seasons of Oregon, he rushed 29 times for 128 yards. At one touchdown, he caught 10 passes for 113 yards and three touchdowns. Defensively, he intercepted six passes in the last season, returned six punts for an 11-yard average. He ends up being drafted in the 24th round of the 1962 AFL draft by the Oakland Raiders, but he never pursued a professional football career. Instead, he followed his father’s footsteps. He went to law school and became a lawyer out in California.
[24:08] Michael J. Bruce, his story goes really beyond the gridiron. He’s on that very short list of individuals who have implicated gangsters, pointed them out in court, and survived. And he prospered from then on under
[24:20] his own name. He didn’t go in witness protection or anything like that. He might not have agreed to prosecute Lefty going back to Michigan for that other case, but he did stand up and point at Lefty Rosenthal and say, he’s the one that tried to bribe me. 1981, Mickey Bruce will get the Leo Harris Award. Presented to alumni, alumnus Letterman, who have been out of college for 20 years and have demonstrated continuous service and leadership to the university. Some of the other, Alberto Salazar went to Oregon. He got it. A guy named Dan Fouts, I know that name, Johnny Robinson, Bill Dellinger.
[25:02] So guys, it’s much better to get a Lifetime Achievement Award for doing good than to get a car bomb or to die in obscurity. So thanks, guys. That’s the story of Lefty Rosenthal and his earlier years before the skimming and really the story of a tribute to Mickey Bruce, a guy that stood up and did the right thing when it needed to be done. Thanks, guys. And don’t forget, stand up and go to your computer and order one of my books online or rent one of my movies or look at my website and see what you like there. Make a donation, if you will. I got expenses. Don’t usually ask for. I got ads. They just cover some things and then other things. Some of these FOIA things cost a lot of money and got a few expenses. Anyhow, so thanks a lot, guys. But mostly, I appreciate your loyalty and all the comments that you make on my YouTube channel and on the Gangland Wire podcast group. It’s inspiring. It really, truly is inspiring. It keeps me coming back. Thanks, guys.