Bart Hubbuch, who once regularly wrote a column for the New York Post, has written in Deadspin that Rupert Murdoch 15 months ago personally killed a story he wrote about New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s connections to gambling.
Hubbuch wrote that he was given a tip that Kraft was a secret investor in Caesars Entertainment, which would violate NFL rules that go back to its founding nearly a century ago. He wrote that Goodell and the NFL know about Kraft’s ownership.
He wrote in Deadspin: “It goes without saying (hey there, Las Vegas Raiders!) that the NFL’s gambling policy is a hypocritical mess. But now that I no longer work for Rupert Murdoch, I can plainly state that every word out of Roger Goodell’s mouth about legalized sports betting for the past 20 months has been nothing but lip service.
“Every lawsuit challenging it. Every threat to discipline players for so much as looking at a casino without permission. Every time Goodell used his pulpit to demonize gambling, or called it the sport’s ‘number one threat,’ as he did in a 2012 deposition in his battle to prevent New Jersey from legalizing sports betting.”
Murdoch, who owns one of the largest media empires in the world, controls Fox and News Corp, which owns the Post. He is considered a friend of both President Trump and Kraft.
Hubbuch was fired from his Post job after 10 years on the job when he made a “tweet” critical of Donald Trump’s inauguration.
But before his firing he was told that Murdoch personally spiked his column that chronicled that Kraft has a connection with Caesars due to being on the board of a private equity group that holds a 60 percent ownership in the casino corporation.
When he wrote his column: “I was told that ‘Mr. Murdoch’ had ordered the story spiked. And not only was it dead, but I was angrily informed that I wasn’t to ask why, or to pursue Kraft’s casino connections any further.”
A spokesman for the NFL denies that Kraft is in violation of its rule, telling Deadspin: “This was not an issue then and is not now due to the small investment in Apollo Global Management, a publicly traded and diversified company with assets under management of nearly $200 billion.
“Any NFL personnel may own interests in a diversified enterprise where less than one-third of its gross revenues or operating profit is attributable to gambling-related operations so long as the individual does not own more than 5 percent of the company’s stock. This is the same threshold for serving as an officer or director of a company.”
