But he couldn’t take Charlie Finley’s meddling, and so, like Johnny Keane nine years earlier, he quit right after the triumph. Using a middleman named Nat Tarnopol, a record-company executive, Gabe Paul made overtures to Williams and began to sense that this could be Houk’s successor. (Tarnopol employed Williams as a VP and was a Yankee season box holder.) It would be a blockbuster announcement, to be sure. In the weeks following the Series, as speculation increased on Williams coming to New York, pressure was also growing on Bowie Kuhn to follow the progress of Steinbrenner’s Watergate-related entanglements. Although all allegations had occurred prior to his coming into baseball, Kuhn was concerned about integrity issues involving an owner. On August 23, 1973, Steinbrenner pled guilty to authorizing $25,000 of illegal campaign contributions to the Nixon reelection campaign, filtering the money through American Ship Building employees as phony bonuses that allowed him to exceed the contribution limit.
