Dowd Finally Is Vindicated

For more than a decade, Pete Rose insisted that the investigator whose report painted him as a baseball gambler was wrong.

If ever John Dowd wanted to say “I told you so,” Monday was his chance.

But as news broke that Rose had admitted to betting on baseball, a secretary at Dowd’s law firm in Washington said he was traveling and unavailable for comment.

It was left to Fay Vincent, Dowd’s friend and former baseball commissioner, to speak for him.

“It’s total vindication and it’s been 14 years in coming,” Vincent said from his winter home in Florida. “I mean, he took a lot of abuse and not just from Rose.”

Others had joined in criticizing Dowd and his 1989 investigation.

Roger Kahn, an authorized biographer of Rose, wrote that Dowd “played dirty pool with Pete” and that his probe was reminiscent of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s hunt for Communist Party sympathizers. Baseball historian Bill James contended for years that the report was flawed.

Rose claimed investigators had blackmailed witnesses against him and called the report a pack of lies, among other things, in interviews.

“Pete must think we all just fell off a turnip truck,” Dowd told The Times in 1999, adding: “The evidence was overwhelming and non-contradicted.”

A former Marine captain, Dowd earned his law degree at Emory University in 1965 and later worked for the Justice Department as a trial attorney in the tax division and chief of an organized crime strike force.

Vincent met him while serving as an associate director for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“He had convicted a bunch of mafia guys,” Vincent recalled. “That’s a tough game he played.”

Though they knew each other only casually, Vincent later called upon Dowd when rumors began circulating about Rose, who had retired as baseball’s all-time hits leader and was managing the Cincinnati Reds.

The commissioner’s office decided to launch an investigation and Vincent, a deputy commissioner at the time, recommended Dowd, who had left the government for private practice.

“We all thought Rose was telling us the truth and that we wouldn’t find anything to the contrary,” Vincent said. However, he added, “We needed a guy who was a good investigator, a tough cookie.”

Dowd, who calls himself a lifelong fan of the game, soon told baseball executives: “There’s a lot here.”

The evidence included interviews, telephone records and canceled checks. His voluminous report detailed hundreds of baseball wagers, and dozens on Cincinnati to win.

In August 1989, Rose agreed to a lifetime ban under the condition that he neither admit to nor deny the allegations.

By no means would that be Dowd’s last high-profile case.

His clients included Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the “Keating Five” scandal and former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, who faced bank fraud charges. Last year, he represented a former Enron executive who pleaded guilty to insider trading.

But it was the Rose investigation that most consistently kept his name in the news.

“I don’t think any of us could have imagined,” Vincent said.

Interest remained strong enough over the years that a Web site, dowdreport.com, was launched.

“I am making the Dowd Report and the agreement signed by Pete Rose and Commissioner [Bart] Giamatti available in this forum so that the public may draw its own conclusions,” Dowd states on the site.

There was another enduring effect on his life. Soon after Rose’s ban, the chain-smoking Giamatti died of a heart attack. Dowd had grown close to him.

“John, who smoked three packs of unfiltered Camels a day, gave up smoking the day Bart died,” Vincent said. “He went cold turkey and I don’t think he ever smoked again.”

Nor did Vincent believe Dowd regretted taking the Rose case.

“He’s taken a lot of shots,” Vincent said. “But the work he did was terrific.”