According to multiple reports, President Donald J. Trump has given former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward J. DeBartolo Jr. a full pardon from his involvement in a decades-old gambling scandal. In 1998, DeBartolo pleaded guilty to a felony charge of failing to report an alleged extortion attempt. The attempted extortion had come from former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, and it regarded DeBartolo’s attempt to gain a riverboat gambling licence in the state.
Former 49ers players Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott and Charles Haley, as well as NFL legend Jim Brown, were on hand for the announcement.
UPDATE: The President has signed an executive order granting clemency to Edward John "Eddie" DeBartolo Jr., the former owner of @49ers. Several players met with Trump about it, including Jerry Rice. pic.twitter.com/OXL1C8pw3L
— Weijia Jiang (@weijia) February 18, 2020
In 1999, the NFL fined DeBartolo $1 million and suspended him for the season. In a settlement, DeBartolo transferred ownership of the team to his sister, Denise DeBartolo York, and her husband, John York.
DeBartolo avoided jail time by coming to terms on a plea deal. He served two years of probation and testified against Edwards.
Why did this pardon come now, seemingly out of nowhere? Trump’s desire to win California and Ohio in the 2020 Presidential election might have something to do with it. The DeBartolos were based in Youngstown, Ohio, and as Washington Post columnist Philip Bump points out:
In Youngstown, the DeBartolos weren’t quite royalty, but they weren’t quite not. I knew the name DeBartolo within weeks of moving to the area. They were a family that had risen to national prominence from an area that was more often the subject of mopey songs or depressing news articles about the American economy. Youngstown was a big loser in the economy of the 1970s and 1980s — but could also boast of being the home to the family that owned a team that kept winning the Super Bowl …
… In the 2016 election, Mahoning County, where Youngstown is located, narrowly voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump, though Trump benefited from a 25-point swing in his favor. Trumbull County, where Warren and Howland are located, voted Republican for the first time since 1972. Trump won Ohio by eight points, but polling last year had him trailing some potential Democratic opponents. Locking down Mahoning County, 2 percent of the state’s population, doesn’t hurt Trump’s chances.
“Youngstown is … a 49ers town,” Bump concluded. “It is a 49ers town because of the DeBartolos. And, days after heading to Daytona to woo NASCAR fans, Trump on Tuesday tied himself more closely to that family.”
DeBartolo could have returned to the team, but he decided against it.
“I just figured there was more to do with my life at that time,” DeBartolo said in 2016, before he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “I had succeeded and done a lot with the 49ers. It meant the world to me, but I just figured with my daughters getting older and having grandchildren … that it would be best for me to be a grandfather, a good husband and a dad and do what I wanted to do, maybe travel a little bit and spend more time with my family.”
The DeBartolo family bought the 49ers for just $13 million in 1977, when it was one of the league’s most downtrodden franchises. In 1979, Edward Jr., who had control of the team, took a chance on former Cincinnati Bengals offensive coordinator Bill Walsh as head coach, leading to one of the more remarkable dynasties in league history. The 49ers won three Super Bowls with Walsh, and another at the end of the 1989 season, the year after Walsh retired, under head coach George Seifert. Another Super Bowl win came at the end of the 1994 season, also under Seifert.
Combative and competitive, DeBartolo gained the love of his players, but he constantly had to be talked out of firing Walsh if a Super Bowl win wasn’t the ultimate season outcome. Eventually, his life away from football got in the way of everything else.
In an August 1999 interview with the San Francisco Examiner, Cal State Hayward business administration Professor Paul Staudohar, said that DeBartolo’s “biggest failing was his business interests outside of the team. The league didn’t like that. They viewed him as a sinister influence. The NFL is the most public relations-conscious of all sports leagues. Eddie’s peccadilloes troubled them.”
But as we so often see, peccadilloes can be mitigated. They were in DeBartolo’s case with his Hall of Fame induction, and they were again today.
We’ll know in the coming months if this is more political strategy than anything else, but either way, it’s certainly an interesting move.