The Fixer

A hood sings of point shaving

"I'm the Boston College basketball fixer. It was a day's pay, it was interesting and it gave me a nice feeling."

With those smug words, a small-time criminal with big Mob connections claimed that he pulled off a scheme to attempt to fix the scores of nine Boston College basketball games during the 1978-79 season. In a first-person account in last week's SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, Henry Hill says he bribed three Boston College players, including Co-Captains Ernie Cobb and Jim Sweeney, to shave points so that Hill and his friends in the Tommy Lucchese crime family could gamble successfully against the point spread.

Hill, described by New York City police as a "knockabout felon," served as an errand boy for the Paul Vario faction of the Lucchese family. When Hill was arrested on narcotics charges last year, he agreed to testify against his former friends in exchange for federal protection.

Among Hill's revelations--which included solid leads in a $5.85 million heist from a Lufthansa terminal at New York's Kennedy International Airport in 1978--were charges that almost as a sideline, he had rigged the outcome of Boston College games. According to Hill, he became involved in the scam when a former penitentiary pal introduced him to a friend of a Boston College reserve forward, Rick Kuhn. Kuhn allegedly enlisted the services of Sweeney, an honors graduate who proved to be a sharp negotiator, Hill asserted, indicating games that could easily be rigged and bargaining for payoffs even when the point shaving was unsuccessful.

Sweeney and Kuhn suggested cutting Cobb in on the deal because, as the team's top scorer, he could most affect their attempts to beat the spread. In fact, of the nine games involved, three times the players were unable to deliver, and the spread held. The deal, Hill contended, was struck at meetings in various Boston hotel rooms and netted the players as much as $2,500 a game. Hill said he cleared some $100,000 in eleven weeks of placing bets on the rigged games. The players deny all of Hill's allegations of payoffs and point shaving.

Boston College Coach Tom Davis has reviewed the allegedly fixed games anc has said he can find nothing to indicate that his players had done less than their best. But he and other college coaches no doubt shuddered at Hill's succinct summation of his scam: "Point shaving is sneaky ... Kids have made thousands of bad passes by mistake for nothing, so what was so bad about making just one more bad pass and getting paid for it?"

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