March 29th, 1981. 1:35 in the afternoon, Mount Sinai Hospital, Manhattan. Frank Alphonse Tieri, the man the FBI called the boss of all bosses on the East Coast, stopped breathing in a private room on the 14th floor, 77 years old. A federal conviction hanging over his head, he’d just become the first mob boss in American history to be convicted under the new RICO statute, and he died before they could lock him up.
The doctors said natural causes. The streets said something different. The streets said he died on his own terms, the way a real boss is supposed to. With his secrets intact, his family protected, and the United States government still trying to figure out what the hell he’d actually been running.
Because what Funzi Tieri ran wasn’t just a crime family, it was something nobody outside the inner circle understood at the time. By the late 1970s, this quiet, asthmatic old man from Brooklyn had his hands inside every major American sport, boxing, basketball, horse racing. And in February 1980, when the entire world turned its eyes to a small village in Upstate New York for the Winter Olympics, Frank Tieri’s people were already there, waiting, counting, skimming.
This is the story of how the Genovese crime family didn’t just infiltrate American sports, they owned the back end of it, the concessions, the unions, the bookmakers, the fixers. From the Olympic torch in Lake Placid to a college basketball court in Boston, from the trotters at Roosevelt Raceway to the heavyweight title in Las Vegas, every major game had a hidden line running back to Mulberry Street.
But here’s the part the documentaries never tell you. The FBI knew. They’d known for years, and the reason they couldn’t stop it wasn’t because Thierry was lucky. It was because the system was designed from the inside to look exactly like business as usual. You have to understand who Frank Thierry was before you understand what he built.
Born February 22nd, 1904 in the old country, Naples, Italy. Came to America as a boy. Grew up in Brooklyn back when South Brooklyn was a war zone and Sicilian, Neapolitan and Calabrian factions all carving each other up over docks and bakeries and numbers routes. By the 1930s, Thierry was running with the Vito Genovese crew.
By the 40s, he was a made man. By the 60s, he was a capo. He survived the Castellammarese War. He survived Appalachian. He survived Joe Valachi’s testimony in 1963 when half the underworld got named publicly for the first time. He just kept his head down. He kept earning. He kept his mouth shut. That was Funzi’s gift. He was invisible.
He looked like somebody’s grandfather. 5’7″, heavy glasses, a wheeze when he talked. He carried an inhaler. He walked with a cane in his later years. He took his coffee black at a small social club on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village where the regulars knew not to sit at his table unless he nodded first. He had a wife.
He had grown children. He went to mass. And while the John Gottis and the crazy Joes of the world were giving interviews and getting their pictures in the Daily News, Frank Thierry was building the most sophisticated criminal enterprise in the country and nobody outside the FBI’s organized crime task force could even spell his name right.
When Tommy Eboli got shot in Brooklyn in July 1972, the Genovese family needed a new front boss. The real power, the actual ruling panel, stayed hidden. That was the Genovese way. Always a front boss, always a decoy, always layers between the man at the top and the indictments at the bottom. Tieri stepped into the front boss role.
And from that chair, between 1972 and his death in 1981, he engineered the family’s expansion into something the old-timers never imagined, the full-spectrum corruption of American professional and amateur sport. Here’s the thing about the Genovese family that other crime families never figured out. They didn’t chase the headline crimes, they didn’t do the big robberies or the flashy hits.
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They went after the boring stuff. The concession contracts, the vending licenses, the garbage hauling, the construction unions, the stagehands locals, anything where money moved through a contract nobody ever read. And in 1974, when the International Olympic Committee announced that Lake Placid, New York would host the 1980 Winter Games, Funzi Tieri saw a 6-year window of pure opportunity.
You have to understand how Lake Placid worked. It was a village of about 2,700 people, 12 cops on the local force. And the federal government allocated $28 million just to build the Olympic Village. The total event cost climbed past $170 million, food service contracts, souvenir vendors, transportation, bus charters, hotel laundry, cleaning crews, garbage pickup, concession trailers selling hot dogs and beer and pretzels.
None of that work could be done by 12 local cops watching 12 local guys. They had to bring in outside contractors. Most of those contractors came down from New York City and up from New Jersey. And in 1970s New York and New Jersey, you didn’t get a vending contract, you didn’t get a trucking permit, you didn’t get a stagehands crew without somebody, somewhere, kicking up to one of the five families.
The Genovese family had the vending machine business sewn up. They’d had it sewn up since the 1950s. Coin-operated machines, cigarette machines, jukeboxes. Anything where coins went in and cash came out and nobody could prove how much volume the machine actually did. That was the perfect mob business, untraceable cash skim.
And when the Olympic concession contracts went out to bid in 1978 and 1979, Thierry’s people, working through layers of legitimate-looking front companies, picked up pieces of the vending and food service work in the Olympic Village and the surrounding venues. Nothing you could pin on the boss.
Nothing that even looked criminal on the surface. Just companies. Just contracts. Just business. But here’s where it gets interesting. The skim wasn’t the only play. The real money in the Olympics wasn’t in the hot dogs. It was in what Thierry did with the side action, the betting lines. The boxing matches, the hockey games. Every event had a number and every number could be moved.
And in the months leading up to February 1980, Genovese bookmakers from Boston to Miami were taking action on Olympic events at volumes that organized crime had never seen before for an amateur sporting event. The FBI knew something was happening. They didn’t know exactly what. They had wiretaps up on several Genovese social clubs.
They had informants inside the Lucchese family who were hearing whispers about Olympic action. And in the spring of 1979, while the world was getting ready for Lake Placid, the FBI was running a parallel investigation into something even bigger, something that would explode publicly before the Olympic torch was even lit. The 1978-79 Boston College basketball point shaving scandal.
This is one of the great untold stories of American sports corruption, and it starts not with a mob boss, not with a fixer, but with a kid, Rick Kuhn, 6’5″ forward for the Boston College Eagles. 21 years old from Swissvale, Pennsylvania. Decent player, not a star, not going to the NBA. He needed money. He had a friend back in Pittsburgh named Tony Perla.
And Perla had a brother named Rocco, and Rocco knew a guy named Paul Mazzei, and Paul Mazzei knew Henry Hill. Henry Hill, you know that name. He’s the guy Ray Liotta played in Goodfellas. Lucchese family associate. Burglary, hijacking, [snorts] narcotics. In 1978, Hill was looking for the next big score.
Mazzei brought him the Boston College idea. Hill brought it to Jimmy Burke, the Lufthansa heist mastermind. And Burke said, “Yes.” They put up the money, $100,000 to fix nine games over the 1978-79 season. Here’s how the scheme actually worked. Kuhn agreed to shave points, not throw games, just shave. Boston College would still win, but they wouldn’t cover the spread.
If the Eagles were favored by 10 points, they’d win by six. If they were favored by seven, they’d win by three. The bookmakers working with Hill and Burke would lay massive bets on the underdog covering the spread. The bets came in through layers of runners across multiple states, Pittsburgh, Boston, Las Vegas.
Each bet small enough to avoid attention. Total exposure on a single game sometimes climbing past $250,000. The first game they tried to fix was December 16th, 1978. Boston College versus Providence. They lost money. Kuhn played a clean game by accident. The next attempt worked. Then another.
By February 1979, the operation had cleared profits well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some accounts say the total take ran past 300,000. Others say closer to 500,000. The exact number was never confirmed because the money was split across so many hands, so many cities, so many under the table envelopes that even the FBI later couldn’t reconstruct the full ledger.
And the problem? Kuhn talked. Hill talked. The whole operation was built on guys who couldn’t keep their mouths shut. When Henry Hill got arrested on a separate narcotics charge in 1980, he flipped. He gave the FBI everything. Boston College, Lufthansa, the truckloads of stolen cigarettes. The whole Lucchese book.
And buried inside that confession was a detail that the agents on the organized crime squad in New York lit up over. Hill claimed that during the point shaving operation, there had been conversations about expanding the scheme, about bringing in bigger players. Specifically, about coordinating with bookmakers connected to the Genovese family.
That’s the line that connected Boston College to Funzi Tieri. Not a direct order from the boss, not a fingerprint, just a network. The point shaving money flowed into Lucchese bookmakers, and the Lucchese bookmakers laid off the heavy action on Genovese sports books, and the Genovese sports books, controlled by Tieri’s underlings, took the volume and kept the skim.
Every fixed game in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts made money for an old man in a social club in Greenwich Village who had never seen a basketball game in his life. But the basketball fix was just one front. The horse racing operation was older, bigger, and by 1979, the FBI was finally starting to crack it open.
Roosevelt Raceway, Westbury, Long Island, built in 1940, the most famous harness racing track in America, trotters, pacers, standardbreds running a half-mile oval under the lights six nights a week with millions of dollars in parimutuel handle every single night. And underneath the legitimate operation going back decades was one of the most sophisticated race-fixing operations in American history.
Here’s how race-fixing actually worked at Roosevelt and at sister track Yonkers Raceway. You didn’t bribe the jockeys. You drugged the horses. There were veterinarians on the take getting paid in cash envelopes who would inject specific horses in specific races with drugs designed to slow them down. Not enough to be visible. Not enough to fail a post-race test in most cases.
Just enough to take a favorite out of contention. A horse that should win by two lengths finishes fourth. A long shot at 20 to 1 suddenly looks like a genius pick. The fixers, working through Genovese and Colombo family bookmakers, would place massive bets on the long shot. They’d spread the action across multiple windows, multiple tracks, multiple states.
They had relationships with builders, with feed suppliers, with horse owners themselves. A federal grand jury investigation that became public in March 1981, just days before Tiere’s death, identified a network of builders, contractors, and racing insiders tied directly to the fixing operation.
The exact financial scope was staggering. Investigators believe the operation had generated tens of millions of dollars in illegal betting profits across the 1970s. You want to know what the FBI didn’t see coming? The drugging operation at Roosevelt wasn’t just about winning bets. It was about losing them, too. Thierry’s people would deliberately blow bets through certain bookmakers to wash money.
Dirty cash would go in as a wager. Clean checks would come out as winnings. The track itself became a laundromat. $5,000 in cash from a heroin sale walks in through one window. $4,750 in legitimate-looking gambling winnings walks out through another. The track keeps 250 as the take. Everyone’s happy. Nobody asks questions. And then there was the boxing.
Boxing was always the dirtiest sport in America, going back to the 1800s. By the 1970s, the mob’s grip on professional boxing was tighter than it had been in decades. Frankie Carbo had run boxing for the Lucchese family back in the ’50s. Blinky Palermo had run the Philadelphia side. After Carbo went to prison in 1961, the operation got more sophisticated, more layered, more invisible.
By the late ’70s, the FBI launched an investigation that would eventually be called Operation Shadow Boxing, a 4-year deep cover operation targeting organized crime infiltration of professional boxing promotions. The setup was beautiful. The FBI created a fake promotional company, front money, a real office, a fake heavyweight contender they were pretending to manage.
They put agents undercover as boxing managers and trainers, and then they walked into the boxing world and started making offers. Pay us this much, we’ll deliver this fighter at this weight on this date. The mob took the bait. Genovese soldiers, Gambino associates, independent fixers from Philly and Atlantic City.
Conversations got recorded. Money got exchanged. Specific fights got discussed as candidates for fixing. By the late ’70s, the FBI had documented a pattern. Heavyweight title eliminator fights with predetermined outcomes. Undercard fights where the loser was paid to take a dive in the fourth round. Officials and judges who would deliver decisions on cue.
The operation spanned promotions in New York, New Jersey, Las Vegas, and Atlantic City. Total documented mob skim from boxing in that era ran into the tens of millions, and every dollar of it tracked back through layer after layer to ruling panels of the five families. Thierry’s people were among the heaviest players. Now, you might ask, if the FBI knew all of this, if they had wiretaps and informants and undercover operations and grand juries running, why couldn’t they stop Frank Thierry? The answer is something the FBI agents themselves
admitted later, off the record. Thierry was too smart. He never gave a direct order. He never put his hands on anything. He communicated through capos who communicated through soldiers who communicated through associates who actually did the work. By the time an investigation got to the third or fourth layer of the chain, the trail went cold.
Thierry sat in a social club. He drank his espresso. He nodded at people who knew what the nod meant. He shook hands with men whose handshakes confirmed deals nobody had ever spoken aloud. But on November 21st, 1980, the impossible happened. Frank Tieri became the first organized crime boss in American history convicted under the new RICO statute.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, passed by Congress in 1970, designed specifically to prosecute mob bosses for the actions of their entire organization, not just their personal crimes. The conviction was historic. It changed everything. It opened the door for every major mob prosecution of the 1980s, the Pizza Connection, the Commission trial, the Gotti cases.
All of it started with Funzi. The jury convicted him on multiple counts, racketeering, conspiracy. He was sentenced in January 1981 to 10 years in federal prison. He was 76 years old. He had emphysema. He had a heart condition. His lawyers [clears throat] filed appeals. He stayed out on bail while the appeals were pending.
And then on March 15th, 1981, he checked into Mount Sinai Hospital. Two weeks later, on March 29th, at 1:35 in the afternoon, he was dead. He never served a single day of that 10-year sentence. The Lake Placid Olympics had already come and gone by then, February 13th through February 24th, 1980. The Miracle on Ice, the American hockey team beating the Soviet Union.
Eric Heiden winning five gold medals. The whole world watching one small village in the Adirondacks for 12 days. And in the background, invisible to the cameras and the broadcasters and the millions of viewers at home, Genovese family front companies were collecting their cuts on every concession, every vending machine, every linen contract, every garbage haul.
The exact dollar figure the The pulled out of the Olympics was never officially established. Estimates from FBI organized crime files later suggested the total scheme across all fronts ran somewhere between four and seven million dollars over the 18-month build-up and execution of the games. The point-shaving cases went to trial in 1981.
Rick Kuhn was convicted in November 1981 and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. He served 28 months. Henry Hill, the man who built the operation, walked into witness protection and gave the FBI Lucchese family secrets for the next decade. Jimmy Burke was already in prison on other charges. Paul Mazzei went down. The Boston College players who had cooperated against Kuhn walked away clean.
The total recovered from the scheme was a fraction of what had actually changed hands. The bookmakers kept their money. The Genovese sports books kept theirs. The horse racing investigation eventually produced indictments in 1981 and 1982. Several track insiders were charged. A handful of veterinarians lost their licenses. The parimutuel handle at Roosevelt Raceway started declining shortly afterward, and the track itself eventually closed in 1988, ending a 48-year run as one of [clears throat] the crown jewels of American harness racing.
The fixing operations didn’t end. They just moved to Yonkers, to Meadowlands, to off-track betting parlors where the action was harder to trace and easier to launder. Operation Shadow Boxing produced a wave of indictments in the mid-1980s. Multiple mob figures were convicted of boxing-related racketeering.
Promotional companies were dismantled. State boxing commissions were forced to overhaul their oversight procedures. But anyone who tells you that professional boxing was cleaned up by those prosecutions hasn’t watched a heavyweight title fight in the last 30 years. So, what does all of this mean? What does the story of Frank Tiery actually reveal? It reveals something the public has never wanted to admit about American sports.
The line between the games we love and the men who quietly profit from them has always been thinner than we think. From the 1919 Black Sox scandal to the 1951 college basketball point shaving cases to Boston College in ’79 to the modern era of legal sports gambling, the structure changes. The technology changes. The players change.
But, the principle stays the same. Wherever money moves and wherever outcomes can be influenced, someone, somewhere, is doing the influencing. And for a 40-year stretch in the middle of the 20th century, that someone was sitting in a social club in Greenwich Village sipping black coffee, watching the world believe it was watching a clean game.
Frank Tiery died on March 29th, 1981. He died a convicted man. He also died a free man. He left behind no public empire, no biography, no memoir, no interviews. He left behind a family. He left behind a successor in Anthony Salerno who would inherit the front boss chair and run it for another 5 years until his own RICO conviction in 1986.
He left behind a system of corruption so deep, so layered, so woven into the fabric of professional and amateur athletics that some of the schemes he built were still operating decades after his funeral. And he left behind a question that nobody in law enforcement has ever fully answered.
How many of the games you watched in the 1970s and ’80s were real? The boxing matches, the horse races, the basketball games, the Olympic events nobody thought to question because they were too pure to be touched. How much of what we cheered for, gambled on, remembered as miracles was actually shaped by men we never saw and never named? That’s the real story of Funzi Tieri.
Not the conviction, not the funeral, not the headlines. The real story is that he proved something the mob always understood and the rest of us never wanted to believe. The most powerful crime isn’t the one that breaks the rules. It’s the one that quietly rewrites them contract by contract until you can’t tell the difference between the game and the fix.
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