By Paul Daugherty
The Cincinnati Enquirer

On Sunday afternoon, Paul Janszen called John Dowd at home in Washington, D.C. "Do you hear what I'm hearing?" Janszen asked. Dowd had. The sigh of relief they shared shook the phone lines.

You can imagine how it felt to be Paul Janszen on Sunday, when the definitive word leaked about Pete Rose's confession, and again Monday morning, when Janszen heard Rose say it himself, during a TV interview to be broadcast Thursday night. You can imagine, but you can never really know.

PETE ROSE

DAUGHERTY COLUMN • Truth for sale ENQUIRER EDITORIAL • Rose's confession doesn't change a thing ENQUIRER COVERAGE • He bet on baseball • Rose grooves one for Selig • Rose felt heat in summer of '89 (WEB) • Roadblocks still occupy Rose's Cooperstown path • Gambling problems underestimated • Straight from Pete • Admission brings redemption • Hometown support strong • Rose memorabilia value should remain high • Revelation evokes relief, shock (WEB) • Attention will shift to Selig's decision • What others are saying • Pete Rose timeline (WEB) = Extended version-Web exclusive

In early 1989, while serving six months in a halfway house for filing a false tax return, Janszen blew the whistle on Rose's baseball betting. He spoke to investigator Kevin Hallinan, and to Dowd, a D.C. lawyer heading up Baseball's investigation.

By 1989, Baseball had been looking into Rose's gambling habits for more than three years. It wasn't until Janszen's testimony that the case became solid. "A lot of people had pieces of the puzzle," Janszen said Monday. "I was the border. You know how hard it is to put the puzzle together (without) the border? They needed someone to tell the truth."

Almost every day for the first three months of the 1987 season, Janszen placed baseball bets for Rose, $2,000 a game, generally five to seven games a night. The two were fast friends, practically inseparable. When Rose needed money to cover his losses, Janszen loaned Rose $44,000, only $10,000 of which Rose ever repaid. By the time Hallinan and Dowd arrived at the halfway house, Janszen was ready to sing.

He has paid for it ever since.

"When Pete betrayed his fans, what was their consequence?" Janszen asked. "They were a little sad. What's mine? A lot. Libeling and slandering me, (saying) I was betting using his name, saying I owed the money. Then you add 15 years to it. That's a long time to be taking someone's lies."

Janszen is not who he was in 1986, when he first met Rose. The former tax cheat and seller of steroids, whose shoulder-length hair, mustache and body-builder's physique was a menacing sight in the Reds clubhouse, is now slimmed down and thoughtful. His hair is clipped close.

Janszen is about to move into a house he just built on the West Side. His experiences during the Rose investigation and since have left him wary and private. He describes himself only as a "self-employed builder" and asks not to reveal where he lives.

Since Rose's banishment from Baseball in 1989, Janszen has spent a lot of time explaining himself to those who blame him for the Hit King's exile. Rose is quoted in the Dowd Report saying, "The whole thing started with Paul Janszen."

This was hard to face for a West Sider, Elder class of '75, who grew up believing the same myths about Rose that everyone else had. "I wanted to be close to someone who was bigger than life. You're a young kid, growing up on the West Side and all the sudden you're good friends with Pete Rose? It's a very big deal," Janszen said.

Janszen went to the track with his friend. He spent hours at Rose's Indian Hill home, watching games on which he and Rose had bets. His girlfriend Danita, now his wife, became friends with Rose's wife, Carol. Janszen traveled with Rose. He and Danita stayed at Rose's home during spring training in 1987.

After Janszen cashed some certificates of deposit and borrowed $4,000 from Danita's grandmother, to pay Rose's gambling debt, Danita expressed anger and disbelief. Janszen's response: "Don't worry. Pete's my best friend. He would never not repay me."

Seventeen years later, Janszen still doesn't have his money. But he has "reconfigured" his life, to borrow a term from the late Baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti. He wonders about his ex-friend Rose.

When a reporter told Janszen that Rose said, "Baseball had no fancy rehab for gamblers like they do for drug addicts," Janszen said, "What's his excuse for the last 15 years? If you're an alcoholic and you really want to slay the dragon, you just do it. In '89 they offered to get him help, and he didn't want any part of it."

Janszen said: "Pete loves money. But it's not his true love. He needs money to get to his true love: gambling. (Money) is a mistress. Gambling is his wife."

It was tiresome explaining and defending himself, Janszen said. "If anyone on the west side of town or Elder believes that lying for 15 years is better than being truthful, then maybe they need to move somewhere else. I'm sure a lot of those people feel used."

Now, perhaps, the explaining is done.

"You don't understand what you did," Janszen said Dowd told him when they talked Sunday. "You protected the integrity of the game."

Said Janszen, "The thing is, these guys that did the investigation didn't want this to be true. They wanted me to be a liar. But there is nothing in the Dowd Report or anything I've said for the last 15 years that I've lied about."

Janszen feels Rose owes his fans "an apology and an admission of guilt without profit motive attached." He says the media who "helped Pete continue this charade by attacking me and my family can go to Hell." Janszen credits his lawyer and Baseball for "showing me that integrity means something." To Danita, he says, "Honey, we can finally say, 'We told you so.'

"My biggest corroborator now is (Rose) himself."

Janszen has one last thought: "The most ironic thing is, Pete's book is called My Prison Without Bars. But he has been walking around for 15 years with the key in his back pocket."

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E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com