Rick Kuhn, a Boston College basketball player who was convicted for taking part in a headline-making point-shaving scandal that was largely organized by Henry Hill, the mobster played by Ray Liotta in the 1990 movie “Goodfellas,” died on Dec. 22 at his home in Ligonier, Pa. He was 69.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Chuck Finder, who collaborated with Mr. Kuhn on a recently completed memoir.
Mr. Kuhn was a 6-foot-5 backup forward and center for the Boston College Eagles in 1978 when he agreed to participate in a plot to help make sure his team won by fewer points than the spread — the number of points by which oddsmakers make a team a favorite or an underdog in certain games — or lost by more.
Small subterfuges, like a player deliberately committing a critical foul or appearing to try to steal a ball but letting his opponent get around him to score, could alter the margin of victory.
The scandal began unfolding when Mr. Kuhn took a teammate and close friend, Jim Sweeney, to a hotel room near Logan Airport in Boston to meet Mr. Hill; Paul Mazzei, a narcotics trafficker Hill had met in a federal prison; and Tony Perla, a small-time gambler.
“You’re thinking, the initial phase, they want insider information,” Mr. Kuhn wrote in a memoir. But two hours into the meeting, the subject of point shaving came up, and the players were asked how much money they would want to participate in such a scheme.
“I said, ‘One hundred thousand,’” Mr. Kuhn recalled telling them, to which Mr. Hill replied, “I like this kid.”
Examining Boston College’s 1978-79 schedule, Mr. Hill, Mr. Mazzei and Mr. Perla discussed “how much they were going to wager and how much we would make,” Mr. Kuhn wrote. He added, “As we left, Tony gave us $1,000 for coming” — the equivalent of just under $5,000 today, and a lot of money for students like Mr. Kuhn and Mr. Sweeney.
Mr. Hill was not only the self-proclaimed “Boston College basketball fixer,” as he declared in an article in Sports Illustrated in 1981 (written with Douglas S. Looney); he was also an associate of the Lucchese crime family. He soon brought in James (Jimmy the Gent) Burke — a convicted extortionist who was the suspected mastermind of the multimillion-dollar Lufthansa heist in 1978 at John F. Kennedy Airport — to make the bookmaking portion of the point-shaving scheme work. (Mr. Burke was played by Robert De Niro in “Goodfellas.”)
Mr. Hill had been indicted in 1980 on narcotics charges in Nassau County, N.Y., and implicated in the Lufthansa robbery when he was questioned about the Lufthansa case by the federal prosecutor Edward A. McDonald and an F.B.I. agent. Surprisingly, Mr. Hill also revealed the point-shaving scheme, and his role in it, and was given immunity in all cases.
After Mr. McDonald’s office corroborated Mr. Hill’s story, a federal grand jury in Brooklyn, in July 1981, indicted Mr. Kuhn, Mr. Mazzei, Mr. Burke, Tony Perla and his brother Rocco, a high school friend of Mr. Kuhn’s, on charges of racketeering, conspiracy to commit sports bribery and interstate travel in aid of racketeering.
The indictment cited six games during the 1978-79 season as evidence of the fix.
Mr. Kuhn, who had already confessed to his role in the scheme, turned down Mr. McDonald’s offer to cooperate against the other defendants.
“I knew if I didn’t say anything, I was going to jail,” Mr. Kuhn wrote. “If I did say something, those other guys could’ve given me a life sentence as in: shortening my life.”
After a monthlong trial, the defendants were convicted in November on all three charges. Mr. Kuhn, Mr. Mazzei and Tony Perla received 10-year sentences, Mr. Burke received a 20-year sentence, and Rocco Perla was sentenced to four years. Mr. Kuhn served 28 months.
Two other players — Mr. Sweeney and Ernie Cobb, the team’s star player — also took money as part of the point-shaving scheme, Mr. McDonald said. Mr. Sweeney, who was not indicted, testified that he had felt tricked by Mr. Kuhn into joining the airport hotel meeting and then too frightened of Mr. Hill to say no.
Mr. Cobb was indicted in a separate but similar federal case in 1983. He was acquitted. Mr. Kuhn testified in that case.
Richard John Kuhn was born on July 18, 1955, in Swissvale, Pa., east of Pittsburgh. His father, Frederick, worked on railroad signals. His mother, Geraldine (McGuire) Kuhn, ran the home and, after raising her youngest son, held jobs as a bartender and a bookkeeper and owned a beauty salon.
Rick played basketball and baseball in high school and was drafted in 1973 by the Cincinnati Reds. His pitching career in the Reds’ minor league system ended after two seasons, when he tore the rotator cuff in his pitching shoulder.
He was soon hired as the assistant baseball coach at the Boyce, Pa., campus of the Community College of Allegheny County. He also took some business courses and played on the school’s basketball team. Boston College recruited him during the 1976 National Junior College Basketball Tournament in Hutchinson, Kan.
In his three years at Boston College, Mr. Kuhn averaged just 4.3 points a game. But he played enough minutes to influence the betting scheme, Mr. McDonald said.
Mr. Kuhn did not graduate. He played basketball in Argentina before his indictment and was reportedly managing a nightclub in Pittsburgh while he was on trial.
In 1985, two years into his imprisonment, he testified to the President’s Commission on Organized Crime that college basketball players were most vulnerable to financial pressure from gamblers “in their junior and senior years, when it becomes reality that they’re not going to have lucrative careers” as professional players.
In 1990, speaking to the ABCD Camp, a showcase of top high school basketball recruits, Mr. Kuhn said he thought his sentence had been too harsh. But he added: “I did make a mistake. I did commit a crime.”
After being released from prison, he owned apartment buildings and held jobs in security and construction.
The scandal was the subject of a book, “Fixed: How Goodfellas Bought Boston College Basketball” (2000), by David Porter, for which Mr. Kuhn did not grant interviews, and an ESPN documentary, “Playing for the Mob” (2014), which Mr. Liotta narrated.
Joe Lavine, a director of the documentary, said in an interview that he spoke to Mr. Kuhn in person and on the phone. Mr. Kuhn declined to speak on camera but “would lead me in directions and let me know certain things,” Mr. Lavine recalled. He added, “He had a daughter in junior high or high school who was playing sport, and he didn’t want to become a story that impacted anything she was doing.”
But Mr. Finder, the collaborator on Mr. Kuhn’s memoir, wrote in an email that in his last months Mr. Kuhn “wanted to tell the true story he never told before. The story he never even completely shared with his own family.”
The first draft of the manuscript was finished two weeks before his death.
Mr. Kuhn is survived by his wife, Patti Jo (Bean) Kuhn; two daughters, Annie Kuhn and Kari Kuhn-Wagner; a son, John; two brothers, Frederick and Jerry; and three grandsons. A previous marriage ended in divorce.
Mr. Hill died in 2012, Mr. Liotta in 2022.
Mr. McDonald, the prosecutor, who played himself in “Goodfellas” and who earned a bachelor’s degree from Boston College in 1968, became friendly with Mr. Kuhn after the trial.
“He made a stupid mistake as a senior in college,” Mr. McDonald said in an interview. “I felt sorry for him. Most of the guys I convicted, I didn’t feel bad for.”
One day, he recalled, Mr. Kuhn was being interviewed by F.B.I. agents at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn while still serving his prison sentence. Mr. McDonald told him that he and some friends were going to see Boston College play that afternoon in the Big East Conference basketball tournament at Madison Square Garden.
Jokingly, Mr. Kuhn asked, “Can I come with you?”
