THE FALL OUT

Author

Matthew Garringer
November 29, 2023

Good evening. This is Dead Legends. The daily newsletter that loves baseball as much as Yogi Berra loved winning the Fall Classic.

Let’s dive in.

Today’s story is part two of a three-part series on Pete Rose.

If you missed part one, here it is.

Alright, picking up where we left off…

After Tommy Gioiosa met Pete Rose at a Florida hotel in ’77, he quickly became an extended member of the family.

Rose invited Gioiosa to his home in Cincinnati in ’79 and then subsequently invited him to stay long term.

Later that year, Pete separated from his wife, and he and Gioiosa moved into a condo together.

In the years that followed, Tommy was Pete’s right-hand man for pretty much everything.

He would pick up Rose’s girlfriends at the airport, receive bags of cash from his business partners, and fill prescriptions for amphetamines, which Pete admitted to taking before games.

Finally, Gioiosa thought his hard work was paying off when Pete arranged for him to get a tryout with the Orioles in ’81.

They signed him, but the next year he was released.

Tommy’s big league dreams were over, just like that.

He returned back to the condo, and back to his life with Pete Rose; this is the part where things started getting sketchy AF.

By this time, Rose had already broken Stan Musial’s hit record (3,630) so he was signing a lot of autographs.

He taught Gioiosa how to forge his signature, and Tommy signed tons of items for Pete to keep the memorabilia money coming in.

Years later, he also started placing bets for Rose.

In ’84, Pete returned to the Reds as a player-manager, and was betting thousands of dollars a day through middle men like Tommy.

Initially, Gioiosa says it was all football and basketball, but eventually Rose started instructing him to place bets on baseball.

To add to the list of shady shit, Tommy alleged that Pete had also started corking his bats to help him break Ty Cobb’s record.

He claims Rose showed him corked bats first hand in the clubhouse.

Around this time, Tommy started taking steroids and got a job at Gold’s Gym.

He introduced Pete to his colleagues, Donald Stenger and Michael Fry.

In addition to running Gold’s, Stenger and Fry were in the cocaine business; both went to prison for it.

According to Tommy, Rose wanted to invest in the cocaine business because of the return and the fact that it wasn’t subject to income tax.

Cause if there’s one thing Pete Rose hates, it’s those bastards at the IRS.

Gioiosa even claims that him and Stenger picked up a bunch of cash from Rose’s house, drove down to Florida, and bought kilos with the money.

Pete Rose denies these claims and police never found evidence confirming this in their investigations.

By ’87, 10 years after they had met, Rose and Gioiosa’s friendship was on the rocks.

Some say it was because Tommy’s steroid use — and the rage that came with it; others think that Rose had simply replaced him with a new sidekick, Paul Janszen.

Either way, Rose’s gambling habit was out of control by this point — he was betting as much as $50,000 a week.

One night, Gioiosa, Rose, Janszen, and a few others were at the Turfway racetrack and Pete hit a big win for $47,646.

He didn’t want to show the income on his taxes, so he had Gioiosa cash the ticket.

Ultimately, that would be the nail in the coffin for Tommy.

Pete Rose owed a lot of people money, and one of them was Paul Janszen.

Everyone was investigating him, and unfortunately for Rose, he had stiffed the wrong guy.

After not getting the full amount for the $42,000 that Pete owed him, Janszen decided to help the feds with their case against Pete and his accomplices.

On April 6, 1989, Tommy Gioiosa was arrested on his way to the gym; he ended up getting five years in prison for transporting cocaine and conspiring to hide Rose's racetrack winnings from the IRS.

Rose got five months.

After all that, it was still unclear whether or not Rose bet on his team to lose.

For many years, Rose denied the allegations altogether, then he finally admitted to betting while he was managing.

He has always maintained that he never bet on baseball as a player, and that he NEVER bet on his team to lose.

However, the lead investigator in the case, John Dowd, had evidence showing that he was betting on games as a player too.

Regardless, Rose made a deal with Commissioner Giamatti that voluntarily placed him on baseball’s ineligible list with the stipulation that he would be on the Hall of Fame ballot when it was his turn.

It seemed like everyone got what they wanted, but no one could’ve predicted what came next…

PETE ROSE BASEBALL GIVEAWAY

In case you missed it last night, we’re giving away an autographed baseball by the hit king himself.

After this story, you might be thinking, “Could this ball actually be signed by Tommy Gioiosa?”

Luckily, this is a baseball from my personal collection, and I saw Pete stroke the signature himself at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

If you want a chance to win, it’s a one-step process.

Just subscribe to The Underdog Newsletter and you’ll automatically be entered into the giveaway.

BASEBALL TRIVIA

Find the answer at the bottom of this email!

STRANGE NAMES

If you're just joining us, we play this game every day where we try to find the weirdest names throughout baseball history.

Why? Don't ask us, it's just something we like to do.

If you've been rocking with us for awhile now, you know what time it is.

Today's winner is:

Double “R” didn’t put up great numbers, and honestly we don’t know much about this guy other than he was extremely average at baseball.

His Wikipedia page is a ghost town, and even Baseball Reference doesn’t have specific dates, but we do know that he played most of his career with the Highlanders, aka the Yankees.

He skipped the ‘13 and ‘14 seasons, then made a short-lived comeback with the Buffalo Blues in ‘15.

THE DEAD LEGENDS ARCHIVE

If you like this story, check out some of our past favorites:

BASEBALL TRIVIA ANSWER: Harry Stovey