Leonard Tose

Many of us had our idea of casinos formed by James Bond movies, in which the incredibly cool superspy wins a jillion dollars at baccarat while at the same time suavely sipping a martini (shaken, not stirred), clinching the sexual conquest of the most beautiful spy in all of Monte Carlo and frustrating a plot by a brilliantly homicidal mad genius who is doing the bidding of SMERSH. Reality is considerably different. Whether they bring them in by the busload, low-rollers with dreams of riches and illusions of having entered some secret society of the classy, or bring them in by private jet for the full treatment, the system is the same.

You remember Leonard Tose. High roller who used to own the Eagles. Great year-round tan. Made a fortune, lost a fortune, but had a helluva good time on the way up and the way down. Or so he liked people to believe. Tose, 77, is now offering a new image of himself, a stark contrast to the proud, dashing persona he tried to keep in public. This Leonard Tose has experienced crying spells up to three times a week. He's a hopeless drunk and compulsive gambler who after binges in Atlantic City took to bed and stayed there for two days.

Leonard Tose, the former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, sat in a leather chair inside Courtroom 2 at U.S. District Court in Camden yesterday, quietly fiddling with his 1981 NFC championship ring. Those were the days of Dick Vermeil and Ron Jaworski and Harold Carmichael and Wilbert Montgomery, of a city in love with its football team and its wonderfully benevolent owner. The ring, though, was like a distant memory - a sign of how far Tose's public image has fallen. In previous days in this courtroom, Tose had confessed to the world that he is a drunken, abusive man who can't control his gambling habits.

Leonard Tose, 88, the dapper hedonist who owned the Philadelphia Eagles through some of their greatest triumphs and most pronounced financial difficulties, died yesterday. Mr. Tose, whose hard-living and soft heart helped him squander millions, passed away yesterday at 4:30 p.m. at St. Agnes Hospital in Philadelphia. He had been in failing health since Jan. 1. His finances, tapped by too many losing nights in too many casinos, ran out long ago. It was only with the willing assistance of friends such as Dick Vermeil and Jim Murray, two men Mr. Tose had hired as the Eagles' coach and general manager, that he was able to spend his final years in Center City's Radisson Plaza-Warwick Hotel.

Leonard Tose's estranged wife, Julia, said yesterday that Tose shoved her away when she tried to persuade him to leave the gambling tables at the Sands Hotel Casino in Atlantic City. "No one in the casino helped," she said, testifying in a trial in Camden federal court, in which her husband is suing the casino over a gambling debt. "No one came to my rescue. " Leonard Tose, former Eagles owner, contends that the casino lured him into gambling away millions by taking advantage of his love of drinking and gambling.

Six p.m. was approaching, Leonard Tose was looking forward to his regular evening Scotch, and the call-waiting device on his telephone, in his house in Villanova, was clicking away madly. To Tose, it was music. "Everyone wants to know what I think," said Tose, the former owner of the Eagles, now twice removed. This is what Tose thinks: The pending sale of the Eagles to movie producer Jeffrey Lurie from car mogul Norman Braman for $185 million is potentially excellent news for local football fans, and in that group he includes himself.

Former Eagles owner Leonard Tose walks back to federal court in Camden yesterday after a lunch recess in the retrial of his civil suit against the Sands Casino, where he lost $1.2 million on three dates in 1985. Yesterday his former stepson, Thomas Tracy, testified that he slammed his hand on a gaming table and begged Sands personnel to stop serving drinks to an intoxicated Tose and stop letting him gamble. But, said Tracy, his pleas were ignored.

Former Eagles owner Leonard Tose was a nasty drunk who swore at his wife and put his hands around her throat in the gaming area at the Sands Hotel & Casino, a former Sands blackjack dealer testified yesterday. "He was quiet, and then as the night went on, he got nastier," said Joanne Heim, who said she had sometimes dealt cards to Tose in the high-roller pit. "He called (Julia Tose) a whore and told her to get out of his face," Heim said. "He wanted to gamble. He didn't want her to bother him. " It was during that confrontation that Leonard Tose put his hands around Julia Tose's throat, Heim testified.

So, guess who thinks the city's getting a bum deal on the new Eagles stadium? Leonard Tose. Yes, that Leonard Tose, the trucking magnate and former owner of the team who once threatened to take the Eagles elsewhere unless the city built new skyboxes at Veterans Stadium. Tose, 85, is long retired from football, having sold the Eagles in 1985. But he wants to share his thoughts with City Council on the matter of new stadiums, and he plans to testify at Council's stadium hearings, which start today.

The jury in former Eagles owner Leonard Tose's lawsuit against the Sands Hotel Casino deliberated for 6 1/2 hours yesterday without reaching a verdict. The five-woman, four-man panel adjourned shortly before 5 p.m. and will reconvene this morning. Tose is suing the Atlantic City casino to reclaim $2.4 million he says he lost on seven separate days in 1985 and 1986. He contends that the Sands shouldn't have allowed him to gamble because he was drunk. Earlier in the trial, U.S. District Judge Joseph Irenas ruled that casinos are liable for betting losses incurred by any patron who is "visibly and obviously intoxicated.

Jerome Grossman, 90, of Drexel Hill, owner of the Red Lantern sports bar in Folcroft, died of a stroke Wednesday, Sept. 28, at Bryn Mawr Rehabilitation Center. Mr. Grossman grew up in Olney and graduated from Central High School. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Force. While stationed in England, he was a navigator on B-17s and flew more than 30 bombing missions over Germany. After his discharge, he was a salesman for Wildstein Cheese Co. in Philadelphia. In 1954, he and partners purchased the Red Lantern.

THE EAGLES were up to their chin straps in red ink because Leonard Tose couldn't say "No!" Yo, if he'd been a woman, he'd have been pregnant all the time. But he was a man, flamboyant as a peacock - a smoker, a drinker, a gambler, which is one brutal trifecta. "They were losing money every year," Susan Tose Spencer recalled the other day. "The group he was surrounded by were very loyal. The qualities they had . . . were not designed to run a football team. They were designed to be running a boy's club.

CLEARWATER, Fla. - Every honeymoon should start with some quality fourplay. And yesterday, what could be the best collection of starting pitchers ever assembled stood at the media altar and delivered a big man-hug. The Four Aces Plus Joe did everything but roll over and smoke cigarettes. Hey, if it was good for the Phillies' 24-karat-gold rotation, it was probably good for you, as well. On the sun-scrubbed day pitchers and catchers began a journey Phillies Nation seems confident will not end until the leaves of brown have tumbled down, what used to be known as R2C2 and other quad-leaning and equally lame nicknames is off the boards.

Sometime on Jan. 3, as the Arizona Cardinals were defeating the Atlanta Falcons in their NFC divisional playoff, Bob Hurt died at 84. Eagles fans never got the chance to thank him. As unimaginable as it might seem amid the green-tinged mania preceding Sunday's NFC championship matchup with the Cardinals, there might not be a Philadelphia Eagles today if it weren't for Hurt. An Arizona Republic columnist who long had lobbied for an NFL team in this desert boomtown, Hurt became the Eagles' unintentional savior 25 years ago, when a cash-strapped Leonard Tose secretly made plans to move his team to Phoenix.

Editor's note: This story originally appeared in the Daily News on July 12, 2005. IT WILL BE remembered as one of the great lies in Philadelphia sports history, uttered by a man whose only concern at the time was appeasing his creditors and getting back to the blackjack table so he could lose what was left of his fortune. In 1984, a forgettable 6-9-1 Eagles season was interrupted by the unsettling news that financially strapped club owner Leonard Tose was considering selling a chunk of his team to Phoenix-based real-estate developer James Monaghan and - gulp - moving it to the Valley of the Sun. The Eagles in . . . Phoenix?

ANOTHER South Philly guy is in the news for getting jammed up. And while everybody else is wondering what one Dougherty's guilty plea means to another Dougherty, I'm thinking about the eagle on my desk. Until the end of last week, I hadn't kept close track of the criminal case against Donald "Gus" Dougherty. Like everyone else, I've now read that he's pleading guilty to 98 of 100 counts of theft and tax offenses - just not the two that allege illegal payments to John J. Dougherty.

I'VE READ that Ed Snider and Pat Croce are interested in getting a piece of the gambling action that's coming to Philadelphia. Now I can understand Mr. Croce, since he has no interest in the Sixers anymore, and he doesn't have much going on right now besides "Feeling Great," but Ed Snider, what's a stand-up guy like him thinking? As a matter of fact, he and the other team owners in our city should be up in arms with those knuckleheads who brought this plague upon us - and here are a few reasons why. Take your average Joe. He gets a call from his buddy who wants to go to a Flyers, Sixers, Eagles or Phillies game.

Leonard Tose, 88, the dapper hedonist who owned the Philadelphia Eagles through some of their greatest triumphs and most pronounced financial difficulties, died yesterday. Mr. Tose, whose hard-living and soft heart helped him squander millions, passed away yesterday at 4:30 p.m. at St. Agnes Hospital in Philadelphia. He had been in failing health since Jan. 1. His finances, tapped by too many losing nights in too many casinos, ran out long ago. It was only with the willing assistance of friends such as Dick Vermeil and Jim Murray, two men Mr. Tose had hired as the Eagles' coach and general manager, that he was able to spend his final years in Center City's Radisson Plaza-Warwick Hotel.

Leonard Tose, who owned the Eagles at the time of their only Super Bowl appearance in 1981, is hospitalized at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and has been for more than two weeks. Hospital officials, while confirming the presence of the 87-year-old Tose, would not release any information about his condition or the nature of his ailment, citing the wishes of the family. Friends who have visited the former owner there say that his health is failing. "It's up and down," former Eagles general manager Jim Murray said yesterday, shortly after leaving the hospital.

Someone should have seen it coming. The combination of Leonard Tose, Howard Cosell, 16-degree temperatures, and a Philadelphia policeman carrying jugs of vodka martinis and cognac into Franklin Field's unheated Monday Night Football booth was a volatile one. Combustion occurred about 10:30 the night of Nov. 23, 1970. Don Meredith's cowboy boots were historically soiled. A reeling Cosell departed at halftime on a $94 cab ride to Manhattan. And a legendary broadcasting story had been born.