During the summer before the 1953 season, the Browns' original owners sold the team for a then-unheard-of $600,000. The buyers were a group of prominent Cleveland men: Dave R. Jones, a businessman and former Cleveland Indians director, Ellis Ryan, a former Indians president, Homer Marshman, an attorney, and Saul Silberman, owner of the Randall Park Race Track. McBride had been called in 1950 to testify before the Kefauver Committee, a congressional body investigating organized crime, which partly exposed his ties to mafia figures but did not result in any charges. While McBride never said so, the Kefauver hearings and the growing public association between him and the mafia may have played a role in his decision to get out of football.