Wednesday, August 08, 2001
Still no conclusion to Rose saga
12 years later, a new chapter of an old story
Alan Statman's new dog is well trained. Bentley not only fetches the morning paper, but peels off the plastic wrapper. When the Vizsla puppy had finished arranging the pages on the floor Tuesday morning, it was not the hound, but the master, who howled.
“Twelve years later and we're still talking about Pete Rose?” Statman said. “I said, "What? This is unbelievable.' There's nothing here that we don't already know and it's the front-page headline story ... I'm walking around the kitchen and I'm ranting at the dog. Even the dog knows Pete bet on baseball.”
Statman, whose law office once counseled bookmaker Ron Peters, sees no redeeming value in revisiting Rose's gambling. But the story never dies because it's never been told to everyone's satisfaction. It is a Greek tragedy for our times — complete with a fatal flaw, a cruel fate and a carping chorus — yet while its plot and themes are now familiar, its details and dialogue are still vigorously disputed.
Even now, 12 years later, we are nowhere close to closure.
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DOWD REPORT
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The findings of baseball's investigation of Pete Rose in 1989.
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SPECIAL COVERAGE
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An Enquirer special section on Aug. 22, 1989 looked back at the Rose case 10 years later.
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Vanity Fair's provocative profile of former Rose flunky Tommy Gioiosa paints another unflattering portrait of the exiled hit king. The story's allegations are consistent with claims leveled by previous accusers, notably Peters and Paul Janszen, but more damning in its particulars.
Gioiosa tells Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Buzz Bissinger Rose both bet on baseball and cheated at it — corking his bat to achieve an illicit edge to compensate for declining skills. He also claims Rose taught him to forge his autograph, a lesson he says led to thousands of fraudulent pieces of memorabilia.
Yet the most explosive allegation, and the one that may ultimately reveal Rose's capacity for confrontation, is the charge he bank-rolled cocaine trafficking in his gambling-driven, cash-obsessed quest for quick profit in late 1984 or early 1985.
“Pete Rose is not a drug dealer,” Gioiosa said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “He certainly was not a cocaine user. He was gambling a lot. My addiction to steroids and Pete's addiction to gambling was out of control. It (investing in cocaine) wasn't something that was vicious. It was, "How do I make some money in this deal?' ... We weren't thinking clearly about it.”
Janszen is already on record recounting Rose's fascination with the money to be made selling drugs, but Gioiosa's story implicates him of active involvement.
“I think this is the missing chapter, the direct chapter we didn't have,” baseball investigator John Dowd told USA Today. “He (Rose) had to get money from somewhere. He was losing his shirt (gambling). He didn't get all that money signing autographs.”
Gioiosa claims to have driven to Florida with a bag of Rose's cash to buy cocaine, a charge that was not corroborated by alleged accomplice Donald Stenger and one that has roused the angriest response from Rose's camp.
“We haven't discussed anything in terms of what might Pete might pursue,” attorney Gary Spicer said, “but I can assure you that these are very strong allegations. I would assume that there should be substantiation because, if there isn't, something like this might force us to look at other avenues for a response.”
Though the statute of limitations for federal or state prosecution would have expired years ago, the allegation of drug dealing is itself a stern sentence.
“I've been accused of everything, but I've never been accused of being a cocaine dealer and a drug dealer,” Rose said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “All I can tell you is, they better have credible evidence if they start writing that kind of stuff.”
Up till now, Rose's retaliatory threats have proved empty. Despite his continued assertions of innocence about betting on baseball and his claims of duplicity and undue process by the game's commissioners, he has yet to pursue legal redress of his grievances.
Rather than risk a trial, and confront baseball's case against him, Rose continues to seek a change of venue to the court of public opinion. There, he is free to distort the facts, deny the evidence, spin the story and play on the sympathies of the simple-minded, the senile and the sycophantic. This gets him no nearer reinstatement, but it does allow him the advantage of choosing who gets to cross-examine him.
Rose did not consent to an interview with Vanity Fair. Nor did he respond to Bissinger's writ ten questions, submitted in June. Weeks after declaring “baseball can't stand the fact that I'm still alive,” Rose's refusal to contest the charges prior to publication was curiously out of character.
“He's got to be so embarrassed,” Rose said of Gioiosa. “I treated him like a son, and for him to do this all these years later, it's unbelievable.”
Both Gioiosa and Bissinger insist Vanity Fair did not pay for the story. (The magazine did pay some of Gioiosa's travel expenses for promotional appearances Tuesday, as did the Today show.) This leaves open the question of motive.
After refusing to cooperate with the federal investigation of Rose, Gioiosa served close to two years on drug and tax charges. Presumably, he might have been able to negotiate a lighter sen tence had he been more forthcoming.
Gioiosa decided to tell the story when he determined that his loyalty was not reciprocated.
“For the past 11 years, people have thrown me in with the same guys who cut a deal to bring Pete down,” Gioiosa said. “I didn't cut a deal. I was looking for a friend and he was nowhere.
“I've lived with this and heard different people make me out to be a thug, a leech, a gorilla. We wouldn't have done this article if Pete Rose had thanked me (for protecting him). Instead, he called me Tony, and included me (as proof of his being a poor) picker of friends.”
Drugs. Gambling. Fraud. Betrayal. The Pete Rose scandal has now hit for the cycle.
“It's a one-of-a-kind story,” Bissinger said. “Always will be.”
E-mail tsullivan@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/sullivan.
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SULLIVAN: Still no conclusion to Rose saga
