Henry Hill passed away yesterday, one day after his 69th birthday. He is most commonly associated with having been a major part of the Lucchese Crime Family between the 60s and 80s, before he famously turned informant in the early 80s. While Hills was notorious for many crimes which were detailed in Wiseguy and the movie Good Fellas, one thing I didn't know about until recently was Hill's involvement in the Boston College point shaving scandal of the 1978-79 season. This year, I got back into sports betting (mostly unsuccessfully, so far) and I was curious as to what the major point shaving scandals had been in college over the years. I was happy to find that there have been very few in recent years, but more than a little surprised to find Hill's name attached to the Boston College scandal. I have watched Good Fellas several times in my life and the only mention I remember of this is Hill going to visit "his Pittsburgh guys" a lot before he turned rat. That was around the time that he (along with the help of Rocco and Tony Perla and Paul Mazzei) helped convince Rick Kuhn to recruit a couple of his teammates to get in on the scheme. Kuhn in turn got teammate Jim Sweeney to join in on the fix. Sweeney was a good, straight shooter so nobody would ever expect him to be involved with the fix. From the get go, Sweeney claims to never have wanted to be involved and he claims throughout the book that he didn't do anything to "fix" these games. Remember, many times in point shaving a team doesn't have to lose the game they simply have to not cover the spread. There was approximately 9 games involved in the point shaving scandal and with as many people involved of course things weren't going to go as planned. In fact, after the test game failed the gangsters also recruited Boston College's leading score Ernie Cobb. Cobb also claims his innocence quite a bit, although he did accept a large sum of money at one point or another. I don't know if it was because of the scouts knowledge of the point shaving or him being only 5'10", but Cobb didn't get drafted until 109th overall in the 1979 draft. The league still had ten rounds back then. Nobody else from this team ever sniffed the league. This was the last major college basketball point shaving scandal, although there were a few others. I don't want to give every detail of the book out because it is a good read if you're into sports betting or the mafia, but I will mention one extremely funny part to visualize. During one of the fixed games, Rick Kuhn's girlfriend got tickets for a bunch of the mafia people that were involved with the fix. The problem was that these seats were in the student section, you know the one you always see on TV where the students are all fired up. Now, this wasn't a game Boston College won and every time the other team was scoring here these guys were celebrating and high fiving each other. I can only imagine what a scene that would be now. If you don't have the time to read a whole book that is basically a blow by blow account of a whole season, you can check out the article
ANATOMY OF A SCANDAL . Of course, Hill did tell three different stories to SI, the FBI, and a Grand Jury, but the Fix was definitely in during the 1978-79 season.
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