Leonard Tose, 88, Is Dead; Owned Philadelphia Eagles
Leonard Tose, a son of an immigrant peddler who built a multimillion-dollar trucking business, bought the Philadelphia Eagles pro football team in 1969 and later sold the business and the team to pay off more than $25 million in gambling debts at Atlantic City casinos, died yesterday in Philadelphia. He was 88.
A slim, suave man who always dressed impeccably, Mr. Tose was, by his admission, a compulsive gambler and an alcoholic, with a lifestyle others called flamboyant and he called comfortable. He and the fourth of his five wives had matching Rolls-Royces.
”I have a limousine,” he once said. ”It’s eight years old, and it’s got 300,000 miles on it. I move around by helicopter sometimes because it’s quicker. I like to go to Acapulco on vacations. To me, that’s not flamboyant.”
By 1985, the Eagles and the trucking company were gone. A decade later, there was no mansion in the exclusive Main Line suburbs, no limousine, no helicopter, no Dom Pérignon.
In recent years, Mr. Tose lived modestly in a hotel in Philadelphia’s Center City. The bills were paid by three or four friends led by Dick Vermeil, his former Eagles coach and now coach of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Through it all, Mr. Tose remained upbeat. In April 2002 he told The Philadelphia Inquirer: ”I’m doing all right for a man my age, 87. I’m alive. I have an income. Low, but I have one. I’m trying to get a job. I don’t need $1 million a year.”
