1910 Mecca (T218) Champions Abe Attell
Attell as a reigning featherweight champion, a decade before he became one of the gamblers at the center of the 1919 fix.
- Issue
- 1910 T218 Mecca "Champions"
- Year
- 1910
- Subject
- Abe Attell
- Grade
- Raw (ungraded)
1910 T218 Mecca "Champions"
A tobacco series of champion athletes and prize fighters, with boxers making up a large share of the checklist alongside other sports. Mecca and Hassan backs are the common ones; Tolstoi backs are rare. In this collection it represents Abe Attell as he was known in 1910: a reigning featherweight champion, not yet the gambler of 1919.
More on this issue →Abe Attell
"The Little Champ," a former world featherweight titleholder, sat at the center of the gamblers' side of the 1919 World Series fix. In the accounts that emerged after the scandal, Attell acted as Arnold Rothstein's go-between: he met with former pitcher "Sleepy" Bill Burns and Billy Maharg, and — whether or not Rothstein ultimately bankrolled the deal — Attell told the players' contacts that the money was coming, then handled (and shorted) payments as the Series went on. The promised bankroll was far larger than what the players actually saw. A Cook County grand jury indicted Attell in the fall of 1920 along with other gamblers and the eight White Sox. He fled toward Canada to avoid process and later fought extradition from New York, arguing in habeas proceedings that he was not the man named in the Illinois indictment. Witness problems and missing evidence helped him; he never stood trial in Chicago for the Series fix. He lived out a long public life afterward in New York business and vaudeville, always shadowed by the scandal he was never convicted for.
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