More Muck

One damp-eyed notion about the basketball scandal was that the players who dumped games for fixers' gold were just poor little lambs led astray by evil gamblers. Last week in Manhattan, the police dredged up enough new muck to drown the idea. The latest batch of basketball crooks, it appeared, had been just as eager to doublecross each other over the payoff money as to rig games to fit gambling odds.

The fresh muck came to the surface when District Attorney Frank Hogan gathered in two more Long Island University stars, Nathan Miller and Lou Lipman. During the 1948-49 season, said Hogan, these two, plus the ubiquitous Ed Gard (TIME, Feb. 26) and two other L.I.U. players identified as "X" and "Y," made a deal to rig the L.I.U.-Duquesne game. The players decided to ask for $5,000--$1 ,000 apiece. But after the game, four of them held a little powwow without "X." "The boys," said Hogan, "were working out a cute one on 'X' ": Gard, Miller, Lipman and "Y" were to take $1,100 apiece and give "X" only $600.

This cute doublecross might well have worked, Hogan thought, if player "Y," assigned to pick up the money from the fixer, hadn't been even cuter. He told his chums, said Hogan, that he didn't have the money--"Yes, I got the $5,000 but I gave it back." After a long hassle, Lipman managed to get $300 instead of the $1,100 he thought was coming to him.

At week's end, Hogan was still looking for "X," "Y" and others, and fans were going to hear still more of shameful behavior on the basketball court.

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