Shaw’s workroom was about 20 feet from the men, who sat at a circular table. Through the window to the darkened bag room door, he could see them, but they couldn’t see him. Shaw says he was “petrified” as he tried to remain completely still, worrying that the men would find him lurking there. Then Shaw heard something he’d keep secret for the next 40 years: Bobby Riggs owed the gangsters more than $100,000 from lost sports bets, and he had a plan to pay it back.
Shaw, now 79, told the story of what he saw and heard that Tampa night to a friend late last year for the first time. This spring, he told it to Outside the Lines.
The men, Shaw says, used an array of nicknames for Riggs—“Riggsy,” “BB,” “Bobby Bolita.” Ragano told the men that “Riggsy” was prepared to “set up two matches . . . against the two best women players in the world,” Shaw says. “He mentioned Margaret Court—and it’s easy for me to remember that because one of my aunt’s names was Margaret so that, you know, wasn’t hard to remember—and the second lady was Billie Jean King.”
Ragano explained that Riggs “had the first match already in the works . . . and the second match he knew would follow because of Billie Jean King’s popularity and everything that it would be kind of a slam-dunk to get her to play him bragging about beating Margaret Court,” Shaw says Ragano told the men. Shaw also says he heard Ragano mention an unidentified mob man in Chicago who would help engineer the proposed fix.
“Mr. Ragano was emphatic,” Shaw recalls. “Riggs had assured him that the fix would be in—he would beat Margaret Court and then he would go in the tank” against King, but Riggs pledged he’d “make it appear that it was on the up and up.”
At first, Trafficante and Marcello expressed skepticism, Shaw says. They wondered whether Riggs was in playing shape to defeat Court or King, but Ragano, now deceased, assured them Riggs was training. The men also wondered whether there would be enough interest in exhibition tennis matches to generate substantial betting action. In the early 1970s, as it does today, tennis attracted a tiny fraction of sports betting dollars. Ragano assured them that there was ample time for Riggs to get the media to promote the matches so enough people would be interested to place bets with the mobsters’ network of illegal bookmakers.
Finally, Shaw says, the men asked about Riggs’s price for the fix. “Ragano says, ‘Well, he’s going to [get] peanuts compared to what we’re going to make out of this, so he has asked for his debt to be erased.’” Riggs “has also asked for a certain amount of money to be discussed later to be put in a bank account for him in England,” Ragano told the men, according to Shaw.
After nearly an hour, the four men stood up, shook hands, and agreed they’d move forward with Riggs’s proposal, Shaw says.
Lamar Waldron, an author of several books about the Mafia, says Shaw’s account of the meeting rings true. “In the early 1970s, proposed deals were usually brought to Trafficante and Marcello by other cities’ mob leaders, businessmen and lawyers for the mob,” says Waldron, whose book Legacy of Secrecy is being developed into a film by Leonardo DiCaprio, with Robert De Niro slated to play Marcello. “They’d accept some, pass on others. I know Marcello and Trafficante also met during that period in the Tampa area.”
After the men left the pro shop, Shaw says he stayed hidden in the darkened room for a half-hour until he was certain they were gone.
“Mobsters have been here for centuries,” Shaw says of Tampa, where he has lived his entire life. “There were gangland murders on top of one another. I was brought up with the fear factor. You don’t mess around with these people. You stay clear of them, and you don’t do anything that would make them angry.”
But as he approaches his 80th birthday this December, Shaw says he is motivated to tell his story. “There are certain things in my life that I have to talk about, have to get off my chest,” he says of the meeting, which he says occurred during the last week of 1972 or the first week in 1973. “It’s been 40 years, okay, and I’ve carried this with me for 40 years . . . The fear is gone . . . And I wanted to make sure, if possible, I could set the record straight—let the world know that this was not what it seemed to be.”
Robert Larimore Riggs, the youngest of six children, was born in Los Angeles in 1918. His father was a minister, but young Bobby ignored his father’s warnings about the evils of gambling. He won nickels racing boys in a Los Angeles park, played marbles and penny-ante poker, and mastered his own invented games of chance. After winning his first racket on a bet at the age of 11, Riggs played the game nonstop, using smarts and guile to compensate for his five-foot-seven-inch frame, and became a dominant amateur tennis player.