The NHL’s 1948 Gambling Penalties—and What Campbell Ruled Out

On March 9, 1948, NHL president Clarence Campbell announced two different penalties from the Michigan governor’s executive offices in Lansing. Billy Taylor of the New York Rangers was expelled from the league. Don Gallinger of the Boston Bruins was suspended indefinitely. Campbell’s investigation concerned hockey wagering and the players’ dealings with Detroit gambler James Tamer—not, he insisted, the fixing of games.

Campbell said Taylor had knowingly associated and communicated with Tamer and had been interested with him in a wager on an NHL game. His statement drew an explicit boundary around the finding: “There has not been any charge of ‘fixing’ or attempting to ‘fix’ a hockey game,” he said, adding that the evidence rejected that suggestion. Campbell also said the investigation had satisfied him that no other NHL player was involved in gambling on that or any other league game.

Taylor was 28; Gallinger was 22. Gallinger had reached the NHL at 17 and become good enough to lead Boston in scoring after World War II. In an interview with theScore, his biographer, hockey historian Fred Addis, described how the two players’ wagering arrangement developed while they were Bruins teammates in the fall of 1947. Addis said Taylor placed bets for or against Boston through Tamer in Detroit. “So, he was the pipeline,” Addis said.

Taylor’s trade to the Rangers early in February 1948 changed that arrangement. According to Addis, Tamer approached Gallinger in a restaurant after a Boston game in Detroit and gave him a telephone number, assuring him that nobody else answered it. Addis said Gallinger later placed a bet through Tamer while the Bruins were in Chicago, when Detroit police had Tamer’s phone tapped. But Addis also said the caller never identified himself and that his identity as Gallinger was never proven.

Gallinger denied wrongdoing to Bruins management and his teammates. Looking back in a 1999 Boston Globe interview, he described his calculation at the time: “The one thing that always crossed my mind was the only person who could involve me was Billy Taylor.” Gallinger believed Taylor would not do so because he would be implicating himself as well. The denial did not prevent Campbell from proceeding with league discipline.

Campbell said Michigan law-enforcement authorities had supplied valuable evidence on which his investigation was largely based, but had given it to him in strict personal confidence. The distinction between a league finding and a criminal case mattered. Addis said police and the governor had no interest in pursuing charges because they regarded the evidence against Taylor and Gallinger as circumstantial and insufficient for court. The NHL nevertheless expelled Taylor and suspended Gallinger indefinitely.

The NHL reinstated both men in 1970, 22 years after Campbell’s announcement. Gallinger had sought reinstatement during those years. Addis described unsuccessful business ventures and a reputation that left Gallinger regarded as an outsider. By 1970, he had moved to California, and the league did not know where to find him.

According to Addis, the NHL sent a letter to one of Gallinger’s former employers in hopes of reaching him. Gallinger learned the news another way. While calling about a job advertised in the Los Angeles classifieds, he was asked whether he was the same Don Gallinger whose NHL suspension had just been lifted. It was the first he had heard of it.