He Gambled--and Lost : Television: Chet Forte, former Emmy-award winning director for ABC, faces possible prison term for fraud and tax offenses.

For more than two decades, Chet Forte’s life was a stretch limousine. He was the director of ABC television’s Monday night football as it became an American institution. He won nine Emmy awards, earned a salary that reached $900,000 a year, lived in a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom house in fashionable Saddle River, N.J., and rarely left home without that chauffeur-driven limo.

Today, Forte--the national collegiate basketball player of the year in 1957, when he was known as “Chet the Jet”--is $1.5 million in debt, shunned by the TV industry and facing a possible prison term for federal fraud and tax offenses.

“My life,” he said, “has become a horror story.”

Forte said his downfall is the result of an illness he did not recognize until he could no longer make payments on his million-dollar house: compulsive gambling.

From 1960 to 1988 Forte said there were days that he wagered as much as $100,000 on football, basketball, baseball and hockey as well as boxing and horse racing.

He phoned illegal bookmakers in front of his ABC-TV colleagues, made wagers from the football production truck, even instructed network employees to place bets on his behalf when he was overseas.

Forte, who left ABC in early 1987, said he lost upward of $4 million as a sports and casino gambler, betting on as many as 70 college and pro games in a single day.

“Everybody knew I was gambling; my life was an open book,” Forte, 55, said in an interview near his home in this Richmond suburb. “Nobody at ABC had the guts to tell me to stop, and I can understand that. I was an intimidating person, and they were intimidated by me. They were afraid to even approach me.”

Forte said he agreed to a detailed discussion of his gambling life to offer a glimpse into an activity that is largely misunderstood.

“I feel like I went through a period of insanity,” he said. “I don’t believe the gambler gets the respect that the alcoholic and the drug addict gets. Some people don’t believe it’s a sickness. How could I have gone through the money I went through if I wasn’t sick? Why would I have wanted to destroy my family?”

Gambling has drawn considerable attention in recent months.

In February Pete Rose was ruled ineligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame because of his earlier suspension from the game for gambling. In March the Philadelphia Phillies’ Lenny Dykstra was placed on probation by the baseball commissioner after revelations that he lost $78,000 in poker betting. Just recently, two Wall Street investment firms fired four employees for betting on college basketball games in high-stakes office pools.

The American Psychiatric Assn. defines compulsive gambling as an impulse disorder. Most experts agree that 2.5% to 3% of the U.S. adult population, or approximately 5 million persons, gambles compulsively, according to a spokesman for the National Center for Pathological Gambling.

Forte’s story isn’t unusual, according to Arnie Wexler, executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey.

“I hear a few stories like Chet’s every day,” said Wexler, who counsels gamblers over a telephone hotline. “The amount of money that’s bet varies. The average person who called us last year had gambling debts of $41,000 and a salary of $47,000. But one guy who made $800,000 last year had a $400,000 debt.”

Sports betting creates a potential conflict of interest for media employees because it can affect how they cover events. During NFL games, for example, television network directors and producers decide which instant replays to show. The NFL’s “replay official” relies on these replays to review controversial plays. The networks play an indirect role, therefore, in the officiating of games.

Forte said his gambling did not affect his performance as a director or producer.

On “ABC Monday Night Football,” he said, the producer--not the director--made instant replay decisions.

“What we were doing--’Monday Night Football’--was more important than my bet,” he said. “I’d make my bets, then forget about them. I know it might be morally not right for me to direct a game and bet on the game. . . . But I wasn’t going to live and die with one game.”

If his work didn’t suffer, his relationship with his family did.

“I was almost like three persons,” Forte said. “I was a gambler. I was a television director. And then there’s this guy that’s married, that has a family. And my family was always third. My wife shouldn’t be with me, with what I’ve done to her.”

Far from the lifestyle he once relished, Forte lives here in virtual seclusion in a rented house with his wife, Patricia, 12-year-old daughter, Jacqueline, and 78-year-old mother, Ida.

He has not made a bet since 1988, he said, and he attends weekly Gamblers Anonymous meetings. He supports his family with an ABC pension check, the salary from his wife’s part-time job, his mother’s social security payment and handouts from family members. He wouldn’t allow any of his family to be interviewed.

“I can’t get any damn lower than I am now,” Forte said, sitting in a hotel room near his house, dressed in jeans, sneakers and a blue sweatshirt. “What do I do all day? Nothing. I wake up early in the morning, get my daughter off to school, go to the mall, wait for the phone to ring, jumping on it when it rings.”

The phone has rung with only one full-time job possibility, he said: to become a radio talk-show host in San Diego. There have been no TV offers, Forte said, perhaps because of his reputation as a hot-tempered, at times ruthless, director, perhaps because he’ll be sentenced at U.S. District Court in Camden, N.J., later this year on charges of mail and wire fraud and failure to pay income tax. The charges could send him to prison for up to 11 years.

“I’m hoping for probation,” Forte said. “But whatever happens, there’s only one person I can blame for all of my problems. Chet Forte.”

The name was known to basketball fans in the mid-1950s, when he was a fiery 5-foot-9 all-American guard at Columbia University. With a two-handed jump shot, Chet the Jet averaged 28.9 points per game, beating out Wilt Chamberlain as United Press International’s 1957 college basketball player of the year.

The son of a New Jersey pediatrician, Forte joined CBS-TV as a production assistant in 1958. He said he placed his first bet two years later at the suggestion of a friend.

“Some of my friends gambled and we used to go to a bar in Hackensack (N.J.), where I lived,” Forte said. “One guy said, ‘Hey, how about betting a couple of games?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll bet a couple.’ I bet 20 bucks, 50 bucks at the most. That’s how it started.”

He was hired by ABC Sports in 1963. Over the next two decades, he would produce or direct the World Series, the Summer and Winter Olympics, space shuttles, political conventions and -- his claim to fame -- Monday night football. But as his stature and income at ABC grew, so did his fervor for gambling.

“There is an excitement to it,” he said. “The thrill is that you can beat them. You want to beat them. Whether it’s the system or the bookmaker, you want to show them.”

Wexler said limited research has been done on the progression from casual bettor to compulsive bettor. “One theory is that it happens when the bettor makes what we call ‘the big win,’ ” he said. “The win could be a big gambling bet he won or an advancement in his salary or career.”

By the late ‘60s Forte said he was a compulsive gambler who wagered between $500 and $2,000 on every game in every team sport.

“I had to bet the entire card,” he said. “That’s the difference with compulsive gamblers. There are gamblers who can sit down and watch the Washington Redskins and bet their $100 and be happy with it. I couldn’t do that.”

Forte said ABC didn’t have a formal gambling policy during his early years at the network.

“About 10 years ago they put out a memo because there was rampant gambling” by employees, he said. “It said you could bet up to $50--or something like that--but not on games you were working on. Which actually in a way was condoning gambling. They were setting a limit.”

ABC officials declined to comment on any matter related to Forte. Former ABC president Roone Arledge, who now heads ABC News, declined through a spokesman to be interviewed.

Though he once won $50,000 on a Super Bowl wager, Forte said his bets usually lost.

“Let’s face it, I’m just a very bad picker,” he said. “Do I know sports? Do I know my industry? I think I know it cold. Did I know gambling? I didn’t know anything.”

As director of “ABC Monday Night Football” from its inception in 1970 through 1986, Forte said he had pregame meetings with the competing coaches “who told us what they’re going to do, who’s not playing, what’s happening.”

But Forte said the information did not help him as a gambler and he lost about 80 percent of his Monday night bets.

“I had no system for picking teams,” he said. “I bet based on whether I liked the team or not. I’d talk to other guys who bet, but gamblers never agree. That’s why there are a plethora of losers out there. Because there’s really no bona fide way to pick winners.”

Forte recalls an NBA Game of the Week he produced for ABC in the late ‘60s between the then-Cincinnati Royals and the Jerry West-led Lakers:

“Cincinnati’s a one-point favorite at Cincinnati. I love the Lakers plus the one point. Love them. So I make bets on the Lakers for myself and for the guy who’s directing the game for ABC. He’s betting also. Maybe we bet $15,000 between the two of us.

“The game’s going on at 2 p.m. At 1:30 I walk past the Lakers bench and I see Jerry West. I say, ‘How you doing?’ He said, ‘Well, I feel all right but I’m not going to play.’ I said, ‘Ohhhhh, my God. Jerry, excuse me, I’ve got to go.’ ”

Forte raced to a phone and called his bookie to reverse the bets. “And you know what happened,” Forte said. “West’s substitute came in and scored 37 points and the Lakers won by about 30 points.”

As the “Monday Night Football” director, Forte helped create a prime-time phenomenon that changed the social habits of millions of Americans. With Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford and Don Meredith in the announcing booth, Monday became a national party night.

TV critics praised Forte for humanizing football telecasts by introducing sideline closeup shots of players, coaches and cheerleaders. Though he was disliked by some colleagues for his abrasive, hard-driving style, Forte became a network big shot, and he liked to play the role, dining in the finest restaurants, holding his wedding reception in a ballroom at Las Vegas’s Caesars Palace Hotel.

“I fell in love with limousines,” he said. “I didn’t like to drive to New York (to ABC headquarters) so I had a limousine pick me up, take me to work, wait for me and take me home. My limousine bills were out of sight. But I was in limousine heaven, you might say.”

While Monday was the focal point of his professional life, Saturday was his busiest day as a gambler, especially in the fall and winter when he could “get down”--place bets--on dozens of pro and college basketball and football games.

Forte described a typical Saturday:

“I completely ignored my family when I was at home. I’d wake up early in the morning, get the (betting) line as soon as possible, out of the paper most of the time. I’d go over the line. Twelve o’clock comes, I’d call up the bookmaker and get the (updated) line. Then I’d make my decisions on the games, call back and bet the afternoon games.

“Come nighttime, 6 o’clock, I’m getting the line again and betting the night games. If I was home I would call 976-1313 (in New York) every two minutes, getting an update. I found myself like a moron calling for scores, putting the phone down, picking it up and calling again. I’d make 50 calls in a night.

“I bet between $50,000 and $100,000 on a Saturday, less on weekdays when there weren’t as many games. For no reason, I just had to gamble. Of course, I felt some emotion when I lost. But I’d say: Hey, I’ll get it back next week.

“My wife used to say, ‘What did you need this for?’ I’d say, ‘I need the excitement, I really do.’ She’d say, ‘Chet, you need the excitement? You do Monday night football. You do Ali fights. You do Monday night baseball. You’re living high off the hog. So why do you need this? And look at what you’re doing to your family.’

“I’d tell my wife, ‘Leave me alone. Get away from me.’ ”

Forte said he spent most of his ABC earnings on gambling but often couldn’t afford to pay his bookies on time.

“So they carried me,” he said. “If you’re a bookmaker, do you want to lose Chet Forte because he can’t pay this weekend? Do you want him to go to another bookmaker? You don’t want to lose him, so you let him pay one-tenth of it, half of it, or whatever.”

Forte’s job often took him to cities where betting is legal: Las Vegas, for example, where he directed ABC’s coverage of championship fights. Forte said several casino hotels, including Caesars Palace, granted him a $25,000 line of credit, which he usually exceeded, playing blackjack.

“Whether it’d be $70,000 or $40,000, I’d lose consistently,” he said.

One night at Caesars, Forte said, a blackjack dealer deliberately gave him a peek at the dealer’s “down card” on every hand. “The pit boss was right over his shoulder,” Forte said. “They felt so sorry for me, I guess the whole place had gotten together . . . to allow me to win.”

Forte said no ABC Sports colleague ever urged him to stop gambling. In previously published interviews, several former ABC employees, including Cosell--the best man at Forte’s 1977 wedding--said they were aware he was betting heavily.

“At Monday Night Football, they saw me work the phones,” calling bookmakers, Forte said. “Some heard me do it. Or someone would come into my room and I’m making my bets. I don’t know if everyone knew I was taking big losses. But people who were close to me, who did shows all the time, knew I was betting every single solitary time.”

“Some months ago I said to Chuck Howard (former Monday Night Football producer), ‘You all knew I gambled. Why didn’t you guys do something about it?’ Chuck said: ‘We discussed it. We didn’t do anything about it because we felt you would leave us and go to CBS or NBC.’ ”

Howard, now executive producer of TWI, a production company in New York, said of Forte’s gambling habit: “We all knew he gambled. I didn’t think it affected his work and nobody dreamed that somebody making the kind of money he was making would go down the path he did. Maybe we were naive. . . . And, yes, Chet was a hot enough property that (ABC officials) felt he might go to NBC or CBS.”

By the mid-1980s Forte owed more than $1 million to bookmakers, casino hotels and friends. With his gambling debts rising, he borrowed $1.47 million from banks and mortgage companies. On some loan applications, he overstated his income and failed to disclose the correct amount of his debts. One year, he failed to file a federal tax return.

“Paying the bookmaker became the most important thing in my life,” he said. “My mentality was: Hey, I’ve got to pay the gambling debts so I’ll mortgage the house. I didn’t think that, hey, I’m taking this house away from my family.”

In early 1987, as he fell further in debt, Forte said he negotiated a $300,000 buyout of his ABC contract. “I left ABC because I needed money to pay gambling debts,” he said.

His legacy at ABC included the nine Emmy awards and the reputation of being perhaps the finest director in television sports. But his glory days were over. He suffered three heart attacks shortly after leaving ABC. “I’m sure my gambling had something to do with it,” he said.

Forte formed his own TV production company, which failed. He continued to gamble, and lose. In a desperate attempt to make everything right, he headed to Atlantic City to play blackjack. He lost $200,000 in one day.

Finally, aware that FBI agents were on his trail, investigating the loans he’d secured from banks and mortgage companies, Forte said he quit gambling. “I just couldn’t take any more,” he said.

He lost his house on 2.1 acres in Saddle River to foreclosure. His daughter, a riding champion, was forced to give up her pony. He left New Jersey last April and settled with his family in this Richmond suburb, where the lights are dimmer and the rents cheaper.

In May he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Newark on charges that he fraudulently obtained loans from banks and mortgage companies. “One of the people who helped the government with its case against Chet was Chet’s bookmaker,” said Forte’s public defender, Larry Lustberg. After agreeing to cooperate with federal authorities on an unrelated case, Forte pleaded guilty to the fraud and tax charges.