Arthur B. McBride
| Arthur B. McBride | |
|---|---|
McBride testifying before the Kefauver Committee, 1951
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| Born |
March 20, 1888 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | November 10, 1972 (aged 84) Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. |
| Occupation | Businessman, original owner of the Cleveland Browns of the AAFC and the NFL |
| Spouse(s) | Mary Jane Kane |
| Children | Three |
Arthur B. "Mickey" McBride (March 20, 1888 – November 10, 1972) was the founder of the Cleveland Browns professional American football team in the All-America Football Conference and National Football League. During McBride's tenure as owner of the Browns from 1944 to 1953, the team won five league championships and reached the championship game two more times. It was the most successful period for a Cleveland sports team in the city's modern history. McBride was also a real estate developer and investor active in Cleveland, Chicago and Florida. He owned taxi-cab companies in Cleveland and a horse racing news wire that sold information to bookmakers. He had ties to organized crime figures arising from the wire service, but was never arrested or convicted of a crime.
McBride was born in Chicago, where he worked as a newsboy from the age of six. His first real job was for publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst's organization in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. He moved to Cleveland in 1913, when he was in his mid-twenties, to be circulation manager for the Cleveland News. It was a time when circulation battles over newsstands and street corners often turned violent. He started with the News on a $10,000 salary ($242,323 in today's dollars) and was charged with organizing the paper's newsboys. "This meant choosing strong young men comfortable fighting with fists, clubs, knives, chains and, when they could get them, handguns," author Ted Schwarz wrote. "They were the business equivalent of the street gang, and McBride's salary depended on how well he organized his newsboys to avoid losing their corners to one or more violent rivals."
Having built up a fortune in newspapers and purchased apartment buildings in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood, McBride in 1930 went into business for himself. In 1931, he bought a majority stake in Cleveland's Zone Cab Company, which later merged with the Yellow Cab Company to form the city's biggest taxi operator. He also had taxi businesses in Akron and Canton, two cities southeast of Cleveland. As his taxi businesses prospered, McBride invested in real estate in Cleveland, Chicago and Florida. In the late 1930s, he leveraged his newspaper connections to launch a wire service that supplied bookmakers with the results of horse races. This put him in contact with organized crime figures who were behind gambling operations that relied on such services. He invested in the Continental Press and Empire News, both based in Cleveland and run by mobsters Morris "Mushy" Wexler and Sam "Gameboy" Miller. James Ragen, another friend and associate in the wire business, was murdered in 1946 in a Chicago gangland feud. A federal grand jury in 1940 indicted 18 people, including McBride and Wexler, over the supply of information used in gambling. The allegations were based on federal laws that forbade interstate transmission of lottery results; prosecutors treated the race results as lottery lists. He was never arrested or tried over his role in the business, however.
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