In this special episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins takes a deep dive into the life, career, and controversy surrounding Pete Rose, the legendary Major League Baseball icon who recently passed away at 83. Known as “Charlie Hustle,” Rose’s name is forever etched in baseball history with franchise records in games played, hits, and runs scored—primarily during his storied tenure with the Cincinnati Reds.

Gary reflects on Rose’s gritty, high-energy playing style, recalling key moments like his controversial performance in the 1980 World Series, a memory that holds special weight for Kansas City fans. But Rose’s career wasn’t just about records and accolades—it was also marked by one of the most notorious scandals in sports history.

This episode tackles the darker side of Rose’s legacy: his gambling addiction. Gary explores how Rose’s betting habits led him into dangerous territory, including associations with mob-connected bookies, mounting debts, and investigations that eventually culminated in the damning Dowd Report. With evidence linking his bets directly to baseball games—including some he played in—Rose’s choices ultimately cost him his place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Listeners will hear a detailed breakdown of Rose’s gambling spiraled out of control, the organized crime figures behind his wagers, and the broader integrity implications for the sport. Gary shares his perspective on the ongoing debate: Should Pete Rose be reinstated, or does the scandal outweigh his accomplishments?

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[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, there’s that little special extra for you guys. Because of the passing of Pete Rose, former MLB star, I want to talk about what happened to him. He died of natural causes last week at age 83. You know, this guy was a hell of a ballplayer. I’m sure most, I think everybody should know who he is, but if you don’t, I’m going to tell you a little bit about him. He mainly played with the Cincinnati Reds. He also played with the Phillies and maybe the Expos for a short period of time, but mainly the Phillies and the Reds. He set Cincinnati Reds franchise records like you couldn’t believe, and he became the face of the Reds. After he retired from baseball, he became the Reds’ manager for a period of time. We remember him pretty well in Kansas City because he played for the Phillies in 1980, and they beat us in the seventh game of the 80s series. He’s a Cincinnati native, and he was the all-time leader for the Cincinnati Reds in games played, 2,722, played appearances, 12,344.

[1:08] Runs scored, 1,741, hits, 3,358, singles, 2,490, doubles, 601, and walks, 1,210. I guess he wasn’t a big home run hitter, but anyhow, he was a hell of a player. Plus, defensively, he was magnificent. He was hustling all the time. And his whole career, he had 4,256 hits. Now, anybody that goes over 4,000 hits is a pretty big deal in baseball. He was a hustler like you couldn’t believe, both on the field and off the field. You know, once early in his career, he drew a lot of criticism for taking out a catcher in an all-star game when, you know, there’s nothing at stake there. But he is blasted home, and the ball beats him home, and he just takes out that catcher. He played with complete abandon, if you ever remember seeing him play.

[2:05] But he had an Achilles heel, and that’s why we’re here today. He was either a gambling addict, or at the very least, he wanted to gamble on sports so bad that he risked his entire career.

[2:17] Over several years as he placed bets on baseball and other sporting events. He liked basketball, too. But he placed these bets with mob-connected bookies, and either it was directly to a mob-connected bookie or it was to a guy who was like a picker would, but he was connected to the mob. Because if you’re going to bet with a sports bookie, trust me, you’re within one degree of the mafia.

[2:42] Because of his recent death, I want to take a look and see what evidence they had that caused Major League Baseball to react so strongly, because they banned him from ever participating in any league activities. He was already retired when this came out, and this ban has kept him from induction in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

[3:01] A lot of controversy about that. Now that he’s dead, I got a feeling they might put him in. But if he had not got caught up in the betting scandals and that hadn’t come out he would have gone in the hall of fame at the very earliest opportunity on the because of his skills on the field you know and i forgot i think i say i always think of him as being with the reds but i should remember that he played with the phillies in 1980 he played in the 70s and most of his career with the cincinnati reds but but he played with the phillies in 1980 he played against us beat the royals in the world series in 1980 i’d forgotten all about that i remember watching him he was he played with a passion that guy played at 150 000 miles an hour every play i don’t know you know i read somewhere about one of his wives or his wife was seen going to kmart wearing a you know like a ten thousand dollar fur coat driving a rolls royce so he was kind of uh kind of one of those kind of The guy is a guy from a humble background that made it big, but it’s hard for him to deal with that. I know a kid that played baseball up in about a little bit younger than my son, and I knew the family.

[4:13] And, you know, the dad worked at the Ford plant as a forklift driver, and they were from South Missouri, and they were just, they were nice people, and they were country people, and they lived real simply. And this kid went on to become a major league pitcher, and I think he’s gone now because they don’t last that long. But he was a big time. I won’t mention the names, but he was a big time pitcher, but he came from really humble backgrounds. So I had to imagine what effect that would have had on that family. I remember, like, you know, none of the kids went to college that I remember.

[4:45] The one brother is a little bit older, was more Scott’s age. He worked, he was an auto mechanic. I took my car to an auto shop up north there where I used to live, and he was working as the auto mechanic in there. So, you know, this kid goes on and becomes a multimillionaire in the end. Now, you know, you’ve got family with this really humble background, people that make working man’s wages, but yet you’ve got one family member who’s a multimillionaire. I wonder how that plays out. So I hope he took care of his family at Christmas time and I hope he set up his brother in his own repair shop if he wanted to do it. Back in the day, in the 70s, when he was this hotshot player, he was the king of baseball back then. He hooked up with a guy named Ronnie Peters out of Dayton, Ohio. And Ronnie Peters was actually controlled by the Chicago Outfit Gambling Organization. You know, a lot of these, you know, these Peckerwoods, Ronnie Peters, a guy like that, he’s pretty well got to be hooked up with a outfit in the Midwest like that with an outfit bookie.

[5:50] He’s got to kick bets up, but he’s got to kick money up. He’s got to have somebody to lay off to. He may need protection. But he was kicking up to a Chicago outfit mob crew leader named Dominic Basso. And Basso, he was in charge of all gambling operations in suburban DuPage County, Illinois, all of his life. But he also reached out into other places in the Midwest. You might wonder how they got on to Pete Rose. Not really going after Pete Rose, they were going after Dominic Basso. And they got his telephone.

[6:29] Back in the day, they had the mobile phones that you could put in your car. They weren’t really too mobile. They were pretty big. But they got on his mobile phone, got his mobile phone, and got some numbers, and started into it. And for some reason, I think Major League Baseball had already hired a thing called, a company called Business Risk International out of Oak Brook, Illinois. I think that’s a suburb of Chicago. And there’s a former FBI agent who met with one of the prosecutors, one of the DuPage County prosecutors, which that guy won’t confirm or deny. And he was able to inspect the Basso court file and all the evidence. In that evidence, they found a list of 130 bettors, all identified by co-names with amounts of money next to those numbers. And the prosecutor would say that those numbers, that amounts of money total more than $225,000, which is a lot of money for one person. It indicated to them he was more of a supervisor over other bookies.

[7:33] Which would then lend credence to the allegation that this Ronnie Peters out

[7:39] of Dayton, Ohio, was dealing with Dominic Basso out of Chicago. They ended up creating a report called the Dowd Report. The Dowd Report’s kind of the go-to document. If you want to look that up, folks, look up the DOWD Report. Talks about where Rose would even bet directly with Dominic Basso, phoning him and his Chicago residents to call in his bets. Now, he denied knowing Basso. His original bookie, Ronnie Peters out of Dayton, Ohio, he ended up getting shot. He survived it in 2002, but he got shot. I don’t know what he did exactly, but that happens to many of these guys. January of 1991, the Chicago Crime Commission public identified Dominic Basso in a report titled Organized Crime in Chicago, 1990. He was identified as working for mob chieftains Ernest Rocco Infelice, Donald Angelini, Dominic Cortina, and Salvatore De Laurentiis. When he ended up playing for the Phillies, that’s when he went to the Philadelphia mob guys. But let’s finish off with the Chicago connection because that’s really where they got him. He made calls, listed to Bassos.

[8:53] Home to other Basso-operated sports betting operations. He denied knowing Basso. Now, when he gets to Philly, he starts dealing with somebody else. When he first arrived in Philadelphia in 1979, he began betting through bookies connected to area mob figures Ralph Jr. Staino, Joseph Joypung Pungitore, and FBI and other street sources have confirmed that. During the 1980s, he got hooked up with a Staten Island, New York-based bookie named Richard Big Val Troy and began betting even larger amounts of money on different sports through him.

[9:35] Big Val Troy was linked to the Bonanno, Colombo, and Genovese crime families. By the mid-’80s, Pete Rose, according to this Dowd report, owed this Troy $200,000 in gambling debts. Troy was eventually busted in 2003 for illegal union activity, and it was connected with the organized crime family in New York. He was busted in the same investigation with three different mob guys of the Columbo and Genovese family. John Jackie Zambuca de Ross with the Columbos, Ernest Ernie Boy Muscalera, and Pasquale Scoop de Luca of the Genovese crime family.

[10:23] The Dowd report includes testimony from people that Rose bet as much as $2,000 on the Reds in every one of the 52 games over the two-month period of 1987, and he won 29 times. They also detail in that report baseball bets in 1985 and 1986. They never did accuse him of betting against his own team. It’s not really that he was…

[10:48] But how much he was betting, as much as it was as who he was betting with, that he put himself in danger and risk of exposure to these mobsters, which could then turn around and use it as blackmail. They had in a Dowd report, they have a taped conversation between a man named Bertolini, who was Rose’s partner in Hit King Market Incorporated. This is a company that represents autograph a member of baseball memorabilia shows. Now, Pete Rose is big in selling his autograph and baseball member a billion. That’s kind of how he made money after he got booted out of baseball. In this, his partner is a Mr. Jansen, and he will allege that he placed thousands of dollars in baseball bets for Rose. And in some of these taped conversations, Bertolini acknowledges Rose’s enormous indebtedness to New York bookmakers and said, he, Bertolini, is the only proof of Rose’s betting he would die before he told on Rose. When confronted with this tape, Rose said Bertolini was lying. This conversation was between Rose’s partner Bertolini and one of his bookies, a guy named Jansen. I don’t know how, I mean, Rose would have to say Bertolini was lying. When he said he knew that he was betting on baseball and he was the only proof of Rose’s betting. Otherwise, it just makes it true.

[12:15] Jansen alleged that he went to Rose’s attorney, a guy named Reuven Katz, in 1988, seeking payment of debts from Rose and told Katz that Rose had bet on baseball. So his little hidden secret was going to leak out sooner or later. Now, also in the Dowd Report, There’s copies of purported betting sheets.

[12:38] Obtained from Rose’s home, which contained baseball and basketball gambling activity with a win or a W or an L, a win or a lose next to each team. I did that once on a bookie. I got his trash and we had, he had all these betting sheets where he had been taking bets. I could decipher them and I could figure out how many bettors he had. I just had like code names, initials and in the mound, there’s 28 teams. And so they would play 14 games every week. So anytime, if you’re looking at something a bookie has, if there’s a list of numbers and there’s 14 numbers or how, you know, now there’s more, I believe, but there’s 14 numbers, then there’s, there’s 14 contests every weekend. You know, you’ve got the list that that’s like a giveaway. That’s something you could testify that, yeah, this is a list of the sporting events that weekend. Then you got to decipher the other numbers and what do those mean?

[13:29] And, you know, they’re pretty simple. Sometimes you put a W or L next to them. I’m not sure how this Dowd report came into possession of these sheets, but they got them, and they tied them to his home. It’s also included on these sheets were notations of April 10th, 11th, 1987, and next to those dates, it had the Cincinnati Reds, and they were designated with a W, and the Reds did beat San Diego on both those dates. Handwriting expert looked at those notes and testified that Rose was the author of the hand-printed and numerical entries on those sheets.

[14:03] I also had a statement of this Ronald Peters, who will leave by 2003, will get shot. Franklin, Ohio bookmaker Ronald Peters, and he testified that Rose won $27,000 in May of 1987 and $40,000 in June of 1987 on baseball bets, which include games on the Reds in which he was playing in that contest. Peter said that he refused to pay Rose all this money because Rose owed him from previous losses of $34,000. He actually filed a lawsuit on this. I probably filed for an injunction to lift the ban from baseball, more than likely, presented evidence, got a denial in lower court. They appealed it in the federal system, appealed it to the appellate court, and they denied any way to move it back to state court. So I’d say he was pretty well done, except for just the graciousness and the

[15:01] goodness of Major League Baseball, and they’re not giving in. Although if you noticed, he’s still trying to get reinstated in baseball, And if you notice during the World Series this last year, he has gotten a job as a commentator with one of the, I think, Fox News or somebody. But he’s in kind of a big-time job as a commentator. I’m not a big Pete Rose fan myself.

[15:26] 73 years old, still fighting to get reinstated. He’s written a book. He denied the accusations of his gambling on games that he actually participated in. But he did finally admit in this book that he bet on the Reds when he was managing them. He managed the Cincinnati Reds from 1984 to 1989. He’s got a book out, My Prison Without Bars, if you want to learn more about this. Now, guys, that was a short story about Pete Rose and his gambling activities. Now, any group of baseball fans will find both supporters and haters of Pete Rose. Me, I don’t particularly like him, probably because of the 1980 World Series.

[16:04] I don’t think that it’s much of a defense that he never bet against his own team. So, you know, I didn’t bet against my own team, so you can’t ever accuse me of throwing a game trying to win extra money. You know, I don’t know. I think that’s a pretty slim pig to hang your hat on.

[16:25] In my humble opinion, we’re trying to maintain a civilization here, guys. And just like the mafia or any law enforcement agency or political jurisdiction, we can only maintain a civilization if we have rules and everybody has to follow the rules. And if everybody that doesn’t follow the rules has to pay a penalty for the failure to follow the rules. Now, I understand some people get away with it for a long time, but mainly they don’t. And when they don’t, then the rest of society sees, hey, there’s a penalty to pay. And so I’m going to follow the rules. We’ve got to follow the rules. As Neil Delacroix said, you know, without the rules, we got nothing.

[17:06] But I do believe in mercy as long as justice has been served. In the case of Pete Rose, as much as we hated him here in Kansas City during that 80 World Series, I think it’s time to let up on his old dead body that lies moldering in the grave. And I think the message that was sent by MLB or Major League Baseball that kept him out of the Hall of Fame, kept him off the baseball field, kept him through his entire retirement, except for a few things here recently, last couple of three years, they wouldn’t allow him, you know, to be honored or anything in any stadium. And I think that is a message that has not been lost on other major league baseball players and other athletes in every sport. They let you know what this lets you know what proper behavior is and what it isn’t. And gambling on your sports that you’re playing is not proper behavior. In baseball, we have others like San Francisco giant Barry Bonds and Cardinal slugger Mark McGuire, who both got caught taking steroids when they broke major league home run records. So they get an asterisk, I believe, in the record book, and they probably will not allow them in the Hall of Fame until maybe after their death.

[18:24] So anyhow, you can always get in an argument, but other people think, oh, he never bet on his own team to lose. So, you know, who cares if he bets? Well, it’s like I said, in my opinion, my humble opinion, we’ve got to have rules. We’re going to have a civilization. And if you don’t follow the rules, then there’s a price to be paid. And for these guys and even their descendants, no matter what happens, their careers will always be stained by these scandals. Well, let me know what you think in the comments down below. We can probably get some real good discussions going on, pro and con on Pete Rose going into the Hall of Fame.

[19:00] If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, which I don’t think Pete did. He had a problem with gambling. There’s no doubt about it. You know, any addiction, if you have a problem with repeated use of activity of whatever you’re doing that’s causing you a problem, you just keep doing it over and over again, expecting different results, then it’s probably addiction. We won’t call him a gambling addict, but, you know. And if you do have that problem, if you go to the casino a lot and play those machines and you just, you can’t, you know, you need to know you need to stop, but you can’t seem to do it. You find yourself down there again. Why, you know, there’s help for you. There’s always, there’s 1-800-BETS-OFF-IN-MISSOURI and every state that has gambling. And on the betting apps, they’ve got some information about where you can get help for the gambling addiction.

[19:48] Because those are the guys that end up with loan sharks and those are the guys that end up getting beat up and losing jobs and losing businesses and that kind of thing. So, you know, it’s all up to you. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol only, you can go see Anthony Ruggiano down in Florida, former Gambino guy who’s now a drug and alcohol counselor. He has a hotline on his website or his YouTube page. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, Just be sure and go to the VA website and get that hotline. So thanks a lot, guys. You know, I always got stuff to sell. We don’t need to go down that path. Just check my name and Google my name or go to Amazon and see what I’ve got. You know, I tell you what I would like. I’d like to get some more reviews on my New York books. You’ve bought that book, a Kindle book or whatever. See if you can’t figure out how to get into Amazon and put a review or two on that book. So thanks a lot, guys.