In a perfect world, current NBA head coach and player names would not be on a federal indictment alongside comedy villain names like “Flappy” Awawdeh, Matty “the Wrestler,” Thomas “Juice” Gelardo, “Albanian Bruce,” and “Pookie.”
“Let’s not, you know, mince words,” said FBI director Kash Patel, mincing words just a little at a press conference in New York. “This is the insider trading saga for the NBA. That’s what this is.” The investigation is ongoing.
One indictment outlines a sports gambling scheme wherein players like Johntay Porter and Terry Rozier allegedly conspired with bad people to make sure certain prop bets fell a certain way. They did this, for instance, by leaving games early with injury.
Someone named as “Co-Conspirator 8,” whose biography matches Blazer head coach Chauncey Billups’ perfectly, allegedly had a relationship with Eric “Spook” Earnest and allegedly told Earnest, before it was public, that the Blazers would sit key players for a March 24, 2023 game against the Bulls. If that proves to be Billups, and if it really happened, it’s hard to imagine he’ll coach again in the NBA. (The Blazers have announced that new assistant coach Tiago Splitter will coach in Billups’ absence.)
Earnest was also named in the other indictment, about rigged poker games that allegedly used NBA celebrities like Billups to lure victims (“who,” the indictment notes oddly, “were often wealthy”) to games right out of a heist movie. This is my favorite part:
At the Rigged Games, the members of the Cheating Teams—including the defendants and their co-conspirators—used card shuffling machines that were purportedly randomly shuffling the playing cards to ensure fairness (the “Rigged Shuffling Machines”). However, the Rigged Shuffling Machines were secretly altered to use concealed technology to read the cards in the deck, predict which player at the table had the best poker hand, and relay that information via interstate wires to an off-site operator (the “Operator”). The Operator then communicated that information by cellular telephone to a member of the Cheating Team seated at the Rigged Game poker tables, referred to as the “Quarterback” or “Driver,” who used secret signaling to share the information with the other members of the Cheating Teams playing in the Rigged Games. The Cheating Teams used the information from the Quarterback to defraud the Victims, who believed they were playing “straight” illegal poker games. At times, the defendants also utilized other cheating technologies such as electronic poker chip trays that could secretly read cards placed on the poker table; card analyzers that utilized technology loaded onto decoy cellular telephones that could surreptitiously detect which cards were on the table; and playing cards that had markers visible only to individuals wearing specially designed contact lenses or sunglasses.
Some of those games, the indictment says, paid protection money to La Cosa Nostra, who also collected debts.
The Trail Blazers played hard against the Wolves last night, led most of the game, showed real improvement, and then lost their head coach to a double-whammy of federal handcuffs and NBA suspension today. The main poker allegation concerning Billups is that:
In furtherance of the Rigged Poker Scheme, in or around April 2019, several of the defendants participated in Rigged Games in Las Vegas, Nevada, at which they defrauded Victims of at least $50,000. The defendants CHAUNCEY BILLUPS, ERIC EARNEST, JAMIE GILET, ROBERT STROUD and SOPHIA WEI organized and participated in these Rigged Games using a Rigged Shuffling Machine supplied by STROUD.
At the time, Billups was five years into retirement as a player, and had yet to start his coaching career as an assistant with the Clippers. (That June, Billups was on ESPN talking about the Zion Williamson draft.)
It’ll be a while until all the details come out. Was Billups there, and in on the scam?
“We are in the process of reviewing the federal indictments announced today,” the NBA said in a statement. “Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups are being placed on immediate leave from their teams, and we will continue to cooperate with the relevant authorities. We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority.”
Oh, please.
I sincerely doubt there is a single NBA team that is not at least indirectly in the gambling business. The NBA has not done a serious job keeping basketball far from people with credible ties to the mob or gambling.
Some highlights:
The Gambinos and Tim Donaghy
The Tim Donaghy referee gambling scandal came to light because FBI investigators pursuing the Gambino crime family found that gambling on NBA games had become an important income source for the Gambinos. The FBI official who ran that investigation, Phil Scala, says they never got to the bottom of it, in part because after a meeting with the NBA, the whole thing leaked. Scott Eden writes:
Today, Scala considers that meeting a mistake. “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. (Through the NBA, Stern declined an interview request for this story.) In Donaghy’s many conversations with the Feds through these weeks, he had begun pointing fingers and making allegations about other referees -- other refs who may have been corrupt. So the FBI had worked out a plan. “We were prepared to do some undercover things to corroborate Donaghy’s story,” Scala says. Namely, they were going to wire up Donaghy so he could get other allegedly corrupted NBA referees to incriminate themselves.
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.
A lot of bad people who made a lot of money from Donaghy, who had wonderful NBA connections, remain at large. I guess it’s possible they all just walked away from the NBA for good, but why would they?
The Fertittas
One of the most notorious Texas crime clans–with historic allegations of illegal gambling, violence, prostitution, and bribing authorities–is the family of Tilman Fertitta. While Tilman himself has never been accused of being part of the mob, in Texas Monthly, Robert Draper writes that in the past his family was “indisputably an organized-crime syndicate.” The movie “Casino” is reportedly based on the Fertittas’ foray into Las Vegas. The NBA approved Fertitta as lead investor in the Houston Rockets.
The Oligarch
About the same time Billups was accused of being at this game in Las Vegas, TrueHoop was publishing a multi-part series about the ties between the mob, intelligence, and then-Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov. Prokhorov made his first fortune in banking at a time that U.S. officials readily acknowledge the banking sector was overrun by the mob.
One of the stories involves a longtime friend of Prokhorov’s going out in Las Vegas with Donald Trump. As David Corn and Michael Isikoff reported for Mother Jones, the evening took a turn at their next stop, a nightclub:
The Act was no ordinary nightclub. Since March, it had been the target of undercover surveillance by the Nevada Gaming Control Board and investigators for the club’s landlord—the Palazzo, which was owned by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson—after complaints about its obscene performances. The club featured seminude women performing simulated sex acts of bestiality and grotesque sadomasochism—skits that a few months later would prompt a Nevada state judge to issue an injunction barring any more of its “lewd” and “offensive” performances. Among the club’s regular acts cited by the judge was one called “Hot for Teacher,” in which naked college girls simulate urinating on a professor.
The Adelsons
Sheldon Adelson, before his death, bragged that he was, as discussed in a much more detailed TrueHoop report, the largest investor of any kind in the history of China. Adelson’s Macau casino license reportedly made him a million dollars an hour, but also stirred an array of accusations about kickbacks, triads, and a hit man. Adelson bought a newspaper in Las Vegas that then stopped investigating his casino business, and another in Israel that reportedly sides with Benjamin Netanyahu on just about everything. There have been multiple stories about alleged corruption around Las Vegas Sands. Sheldon’s widow Miriam Adelson runs the firm that owns the Dallas Mavericks.
Apollo Global
There’s a massive TrueHoop investigation in the archives about the NBA’s most important source of cash. Billionaires who run the 76ers and Hawks made their fortunes at Apollo. Adam Silver’s college roommate is the firm’s president. Meanwhile, Apollo Global founder Leon Black financed Jeffrey Epstein. Apollo has also long been an enormous player in the world of gambling. Until 2019, Apollo was the key investor in Caesar’s Palace. Now Apollo reportedly owns the Venetian as well as a gambling services company called IGT which, among other things, manufactures slot machines.
The Ho Family of Macau
In 2010, investigators in New Jersey objected to an MGM proposal to do business with a woman named Pansy Ho. Deena Beasley reported for Reuters:
Sometimes known as the godfather of gambling, Stanley Ho, a patriarch of mixed European and Chinese parentage, heads an extended clan of 17 children born to his four wives.
The report from the New Jersey enforcement division cites documents such as 1992 testimony at a U.S. Senate Subcommittee hearing stating that Stanley Ho had direct associations with known members of Chinese triads.
It concluded that Pansy Ho’s relationship and financial ties to her father, as well as “her associations with persons alleged to be associated with organized crime render her susceptible to influence by unsuitable persons.”
Another of Stanley’s children, his son Mario, is part of Bill Chisholm’s group that recently purchased the Boston Celtics.
We have barely scratched the surface. Don’t forget that Gilbert Arenas was arrested with Yevgeni Gershman, who the Department of Justice called at the time “a suspected organized crime figure from Israel.” Another part of today’s FBI indictments was about money laundering and crypto, and we don’t have time to get into the degree to which those things pervade the NBA.
I don’t know how Chauncey Billups met figures from the gambling underworld, but it could have happened at almost any NBA arena, even in the owner’s suite. And wherever that 2019 game happened in Las Vegas, it’s very possible an NBA-connected entity—Apollo, Las Vegas Sands, Blackstone, the Fertittas, or others—owned the joint.
This week, NBA commissioner Adam Silver sounded a wee bit responsible in telling Pat McAfee he had asked the NBA’s gambling partners to “pull back some of the prop bets” for lower paid players. If they do, it’d be removing a teaspoon from the ocean.
Almost 20 years ago on TrueHoop I interviewed one of the smartest economists in the world. Justin Wolfers also happens to be a former bookie, who has thought deeply about sports gambling. His take: prop bets and point spreads make cheating too easy. You can corrupt a player or coach merely by getting them to do things that mean nothing to athletes and coaches, like fake an injury in the second quarter or place a call about someone not starting. The economic incentives are misaligned: I can tell you something I care little about in exchange for money I care a lot about.
Wolfers’ recommendation: legalize gambling on wins and losses only. His guess is that coaches and players have genuine passion for those things, and would be very tough to corrupt.
That’s advice that has come from many experts over the years, but the NBA didn’t follow it, and today’s scandal is the result.
Here’s where, in another time, I’d close this story with the conviction that the truth will come out in time. But will it? The NBA’s investigation, which reportedly cleared Terry Rozier of any wrongdoing in June, has now been exposed as a complete waste of time.
And the other, more serious investigation, is led by Kash Patel.
It’s a good time to support journalism.
Thank you for reading TrueHoop.
As always, your connecting way more dots than any surface level reporting I've seen. Maybe your old friends at ESPN will have you back on to talk about this? 😆
I certainly agree with connecting the dots. I hope you will continue to keep us updated. Coverage in the media is sort of all over the map.