Pablo Torre

He's an eccentric fight promoter and trainer in Los Angeles.

And he's also close friends and partners with Vic Weiss.

I'll read from the police report.

According to Kabakov, Weiss made his money betting on some of the fights.

He would occasionally bet against his fighter, knowing he was going to lose.

But Kabakov feels personally and from his sources that the death is not related to boxing.

And this is where the story begins to escalate.

We've gone through college basketball, the NBA, and boxing, but it turns out that there is yet another sport, another professional sport of note that may have gotten Vic Weiss into trouble because he was also someone else's guy in a different context.

Yeah, the NFL.

So I just gotta jump in here to establish that no, Detective Leroy was not moved by the fixing fights theory of Vic Wiese's murder.

The question of why organized crime would kill the guy who was allegedly fixing fights for them to pay off his debts, it never totally added up in his view.

But this NFL angle,

seemed different.

Vic had an athletic career.

He had a stint with the Green Bay Packers in the early 50s and then was a semi-pro football player in Southern California for 10 years, kind of part-time.

And something to know about pro football in the 60s and 70s is that as messy and mobbed up as gambling and sports seems now, as we've covered on this show previously, in the legalized era, especially of the NBA...

In the NFL of the 60s, Commissioner Pete Rozelle suspended future Hall of Famers Paul Horning and Alex Karras for a whole season for betting on NFL games and associating with gamblers.

Rozelle also forced Jets quarterback Joe Namath to divest his ownership stake in a New York bar called Bachelor's III because it was frequented by bookies and gamblers.

Yet the craziest character in all of this, arguably, wasn't even a player.

It was an owner, an owner who became the subject of an FBI investigation, as PBS Frontline, in a piece called An Unauthorized History of the NFL, reported back in 1983.