BC and the Goodfellas: A Sports Scandal and Its Lingering Toll
Few in town seem to know that Kuhn once fell in with the notorious “Goodfellas” gangster Henry Hill in a plot to manipulate the outcome of BC basketball games for corrupt gamblers. Kuhn received a 10-year prison sentence, the longest ever for an American athlete convicted of sports racketeering.
“No, I didn’t know about him,” Ligonier Township constable Robert Amicone said, echoing others in the community.
Rick Kuhn (No. 35, fourth from left), Ernie Cobb (No. 14, left in first row), and Jim Sweeney (No. 21, right in first row) were part of the 1978-1979 BC basketball team.In one of collegiate sport’s darkest hours, Kuhn ensnared BC’s respected basketball captains Ernie Cobb and Jim Sweeney in the scandal, forever altering their lives, staining the Jesuit institution they represented, and producing a cautionary tale about the seductive power of the multibillion-dollar sports gambling industry.
Henry Hill, helped recruit Rick Kuhn into the point-shaving scheme. After his 1980 arrest, Hill disclosed the BC conspiracy as part of his testimony to avoid prison.
Hill later confessed the BC conspiracy to agents investigating the signature crime of his mob crew — the robbery of $5 million in cash and $1 million in jewelry from Lufthansa Airlines at Kennedy International Airport in 1978, then the largest cash robbery in US history. The crime was immortalized in the movie “Goodfellas.”
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