Did "The Mick" Play Ball With Hookers?

MICKEY MANTLE when he retired from major league baseball. (AP Photo)

WASHINGTON - When he announced his battle with liver cancer in 1995, Baseball Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle told fans, hauntingly, "You want a role model? Don't be like me." He was referring to his years of heavy drinking and partying. But newly-released FBI documents indicate the bureau wondered at least once whether the New York Yankees great had ever indulged a taste for ladies of the evening.

The bureau's interest in the question occurred shortly after Mantle's retirement in 1968, when Richard Nixon's domestic affairs counselor, John Ehrlichman, asked the FBI for a background check on Mantle and other baseball luminaries invited to a July 1969 social function at the White House.

The FBI complied and checked Mantle, Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley, Pittsburgh Pirates broadcast legend Bob Prince, the widow of one-time Dodger president Branch Rickey, and future Yankee managers (and former Mantle teammates) Billy Martin and Clyde King, among others.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover answered Ehrlichman with a general report on most, but separate memoranda on a few, including Mantle and Martin - but Mantle's is the only memo released to the public so far.

The Mantle memo spoke of a confidential informant saying in 1957 that Mantle and other New York Yankees teammates were "been entertained" at a brothel in Washington, D.C. This informant told the bureau a local gambler and bookmaker had arranged the brothel dates. The memo also refers to a business deal in 1962, in which Mantle was said to have been one of the backers for a Texas nightclub operator and one-time boyfriend "of a notorious Dallas stripper" to buy the University Club.

But the memo says the bureau came up with no arrest record or other indications that these allegations had any hard basis, even though the informant on the prostitution reference was described by the FBI as one who'd provided reliable information previously.

The memo also refers to an alleged $15,000 blackmail attempt involving a reputed affair Mantle had once had with a married woman. Mantle admitted to "shacking up" with many women in New York, the memo concedes, but he denied the affair in question.

In the 1970s, Mantle's one-time Yankee teammate and roommate, first baseman Joe Pepitone, wrote in his own autobiography of being taken to parties by Mantle which featured free-wheeling sex in which they both indulged - despite the fact that the two players were married at the time.

Mantle's wild life ultimately ruined his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, though they stayed friends and may never have divorced. He once admitted he lived that way in large part because he feared a premature death. His father, an Oklahoma miner, had died of Hodgkin's disease at age 39, and the Yankee great was haunted by the specter of his own early death, possibly from the same illness, which is often hereditary. Mantle never turned up with the illness - but one of his sons, Billy, did.

"If I'd known I'd live this long," he said famously in the 1980s, "I would have taken better care of myself."

The FBI file on Mantle is one of the shortest in the bureau archives - only 29 pages total. As APBNews puts it, "The feds regularly developed hundreds of documents on stars of less importance than The Mick."

Most of the file, in fact, deals with a written threat Mantle received in 1960. A man claimed his own son with bad legs had been drafted and killed in action, while Mantle earned a controversial draft deferment over his leg problems in the Korean War era. The writer threatened to shoot Mantle's knees out over his resentment of the Yankee star being a "draft dodger."

Mantle himself reported the threat, turning in a note he received in Cleveland to the FBI. The threat turned out to be something of a hoax, but Mantle and his equally legendary Yankee manager, Casey Stengel, both cooperated with the FBI in the matter.

A three-time Most Valuable Player and 12-time World Series player, Mantle won the Triple Crown Award in 1956 and ended his career in 1968 with 536 home runs. His 1961 home run record chase with teammate Roger Maris electrified the country - Maris finished with 61 and Mantle, 56. He was inducted to the Hall of Fame in 1974 with his teammate, Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford.

Mantle finally gave up his wild lifestyle, including drinking, and settled down with a new girlfriend. But in 1995 it proved too little too late: he announced he had liver cancer and underwent a liver transplant. He died barely two months after the transplant.