"I'm appalled. I'm really appalled."
Gambling trouble
Gilbert Arenas is out on bail, after some pretty salacious charges concerning gambling and transnational crime and women hired to give massages. Coincidentally, that Arenas news dropped precisely as I was listening to an incredible episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out in which Pablo, Tom Haberstroh, and Amin Elhassan narrate how a guy called Moose and his crypto/gambling crew ended up knowing a lot of non-public information about a federal gambling probe into NBA guard Malik Beasley. And that story seems to have some deep ties to another NBA gambling scandal involving Johntay Porter.
All of which is to say: the world feels a little like what they warned us might happen if gambling got out of control.
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When I was new to covering the NBA, David Stern was commissioner, and gambling was more banned than fighting, drugs, or guns. It was beyond consideration, the north pole of wrong.
Stern had a way of being aghast as if in italics. “This is corruption in my opinion. I have to say to you: I’m appalled. I’m really appalled.” That was Stern’s reaction when the governor of New Jersey first considered legalized sports gambling.
I sat in so many Stern press conferences, so close, that I knew how recently he had trimmed his nose hair. And it was from that seat that I watched the indignance melt from his stance. In 2006, he announced the All-Star Game would be in Las Vegas. When a journalist asked what his concerns were he responded “well, we are most concerned about making sure there’s room at the Marriott for the media.” There’s a special “oh no you didn’t” kind of laugh for when things are more menacing than funny. Stern got a lot of laughs.
By February 2007, Stern had dragged us all to Sin City, where the commissioner shared the stage with the former mob lawyer mayor who traveled everywhere with showgirls.
Having personally led us to believe gambling was the worst, Stern could not have been surprised when he got a question about his “concerns about gambling” that included a reference to point shaving.
“If you’ve been around long enough,” came Stern’s reply, “you know that what you described has nothing to do with anything I’ve been saying for the last three years or every day this week in Las Vegas. So if you’d like to talk about it later, I’d be happy to. But I’m not worried about games being fixed and I’m surprised that you asked the question.”
I found it creepy and phony. Nothing in the real world had changed whatsoever, except the league’s business partners. And now we in the media are the assholes for surfacing concerns we learned from Stern? (In law school, sometimes the assignment is to argue a position, and then switch sides and argue the opposite. I bet Stern was amazing at that.)
Later we’d learn that at the very moment Stern had brought the league to Sin City, saying he wasn’t worried about fixed games, the FBI had become obsessed. Hundreds of millions in illicit NBA gambling gains were sloshing around the underworld, in ways that alerted the FBI agent in charge of keeping tabs on the Gambino crime family in New York.
Phil Scala and his team quickly found that the big money flowed from games refereed by Tim Donaghy. The FBI wiretapped, knocked on doors, and secured the cooperation of the mover who placed a million-or-so in bets on every Donaghy game. James Battista worked on behalf of an array of clients who were only named years later by an ESPN report. They also secured the cooperation of Donaghy, who had many to blame, and was reportedly on the hook to wear a wire to demonstrate just how far the corrupt referee crisis had spread.
Scala has regrets now. Scott Eden wrote for ESPN:
"If you're going to ask me if I would do it differently now, the answer is yes. I would not have gone to brief Stern," Scala told me. … About a month after the meeting with Stern, however, the New York Post blared news of the FBI investigation across its front page. "Our plans were blown up by the fact that somebody leaked this," Scala lamented to me. "I don't like to talk in terms of coulda, woulda, shoulda, but if the Post story didn't come out, [Donaghy] would have worn a wire, and I don't know where it would have gone. Things may have been different. That's the bottom line."
The meeting with the NBA was months after Stern’s Vegas All-Star game. Donaghy got in trouble, but the FBI never got Donaghy to wear a wire, never clawed back the ill-gotten gains nor slapped cuffs on the big winners.
From that day forward, Stern’s NBA presented a narrative that Donaghy acted alone, and there was not sufficient evidence to conclude he had fixed games. What a massive win for all the others involved, some of whom still have, by some estimates, well over $100 million in gambling proceeds from Donaghy’s actions.
It appeared Stern had lost the sword he had swung around to scare off the mobsters and villains who had long circled his league looking for openings. Later, Stern personally became an investor in some of the very sports gambling companies that once appalled him. If you click that last link, you’ll see people saying Stern brilliantly evolved with the times. Maybe.
Or maybe Stern was always a lawyer, taking positions that served his clients. In the years since that day, the NBA’s billionaires have developed more gambling entanglements than I can track. Tilman Fertitta owns the Rockets. Miriam Adelson owns the Mavericks. Apollo Global is a critical source of the riches that create NBA investors, and just bought a massive gaming company called IDT. And on and on.
Either way, the NBA commissioner once saw it as his job to keep gambling’s corruptions far from the league--with good reason. A shocking number of the big names of the 1950s in this sport had mob ties, secret gambling debts, or relationships with bad men struck up at summer basketball in the Catskills. (I went to NYU, a giant school that used to sell out Madison Square Garden but plays Division III basketball to this day, effectively because they’re still sorry about what happened with the Genovese crime family back in the day.)
Former NBA star Gilbert Arenas has been charged for his part in hosting illegal poker games in cahoots with an alleged mobster. Who played at those games? Did any of them end up in debt to the mob--and then go play in an NBA game on which it’s legal to bet? Do any of them invest in NBA teams? Are any of them referees? Are any of them family members of NBA players? Or trainers with insider information that might be useful to sports gamblers about who’s injured or not?
We still have a lot to learn about that Arenas game, but the narrative is familiar. A very similar-sounding game run by Molly Bloom proved Stern’s original idea that gambling opens Pandora’s Box.
First she hung out with movie stars like Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio and everything was funfunfun. One of her jobs became getting people to pay their debts. The Arenas game and the Bloom game both reportedly featured attractive young women to give massages and provide companionship. One of the players at the Bloom game, Dan Bilzerian, later told the Real Quick podcast that Bloom had a method:
“She had dirt on most of these motherfuckers like banging chicks while they had wives or whatever. So, like, if they didn’t want to pay, she had that fucking ace in the hole. She was smart.”
As Bloom got deeper into it, years passed, and next thing you know she had the pistol of a Russian mobster in her face as she was beaten up. Molly Bloom ended up being played by Jessica Chastain in a major motion picture, but only after her name appeared in a federal indictment alongside some very bad people, especially “Taiwanchik” Almzhan Tokhtakhounov. ABC News:
“He is a major player,” said Mike Gaeta, the agent who led the 2013 FBI investigation of Tokhtakhounov and his alleged mafia money-laundering and gambling ring, in a 2014 interview with ABC News. “He is prominent. He has extremely good connections in the business world as well as the criminal world, overseas, in Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, other countries.”
Tokhtakhounov was being investigated mainly for running a giant sports betting operation which had its US headquarters in Trump Tower. And he had an outstanding U.S. indictment for another alleged crime: fixing an ice skating contest at the 2002 Olympics (for which he was briefly arrested by the Italian police but then released).
Bloom ran various games where the players reportedly included, over the the years, Rockets billionaire Leslie Alexander, Bucks billionaire Marc Lasry, and current Wolves investor Alex Rodriguez—people who literally make the rules in the NBA, who boss the commissioner around, who in the name of sport shouldn’t have any connection whatsoever to a game-fixer like Tokhtakhounov.
Once upon a time, Stern might have waved his indignance around and promised to keep the league far from such entanglements. Then the world adjusted, and we’re not so prudish.
So, now that the NBA seems to have little interest, who has the stomach, and the economic disinterest, to genuinely bust the bad guys? What stands between the people who run sports gambling and our league? For now the people who might keep watch are:
The NBA itself, which is an amalgam of billionaires many of whom have giant gambling investments, and which assigned lawyers to poke the silliest holes in the truest public version of the Donaghy story. With a game-changing 2014 Op-Ed, current NBA commissioner Adam Silver was literally the tip of the spear in making sports betting legal in the United States.
Sports media, which is nothing these days without gambling money. ESPN runs its own sportsbook.
The government, which is run by Donald Trump, who still owns the building that hosted the Russian mob figures charged in the Molly’s Game scandal. Trump pardoned a key figure from that scandal, Helly Nahmad.
The trend is good news for whoever is the evil mastermind upstream in the crime world from the Arenas game. Tokhtakhounov remains at large, not just living openly in Russia, but on the red carpet at Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Nahmad is free. Whoever profited most from the Donaghy scandal is still out there—Scott Eden reported that one guy owned a giant collection of Planet Fitnesses in the Philadelphia area.
“This is corruption in my opinion,” Stern said before all this happened. “I have to say to you: I’m appalled. I’m really appalled.”
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!
Chef's kiss on this one, Henry.
Really informative read. Thanks for taking the time to detail this out.