The FBI dropped a bombshell indictment on Thursday, announcing arrests and criminal charges against dozens of people allegedly involved with gambling and rigging NBA games. The whole thing involved not only some of basketball’s biggest names, but also the mob.
At a press conference in New York, FBI Director Kash Patel announced “a historic arrest across a wide-sweeping criminal enterprise that envelopes both the NBA and La Cosa Nostra, more commonly known as the Sicilian Mafia. Among some of the high-profile individuals indicted are Chauncey Billups, an NBA Hall of Fame player and current head coach of the Portland Trailblazers, and Terry Rozier, who currently plays for the Miami Heat. Former NBA player Damon Jones was also arrested and indicted.
A statement from the NBA, per CNBC, says that both Billups and Rozier have been placed on “immediate leave from their teams” and the league “will continue to cooperate with the relevant authorities.”
The indictments arose from two fraud-related investigations that included sports betting and underground poker games. In the first instance, it appears that insider information related to player injuries (including one involving an injury to LeBron James) was leaked to sports bettors, effectively giving those bettors an advantage—an injury to James, for instance, could impact his level of play and turn the outcome of a game.
The underground poker games, on the other hand, sound like a scheme Tony Soprano’s crew cooked up at the Bada Bing Club.
“As alleged, members and associates of organized crime families fixed illegal poker games as part of a highly sophisticated and lucrative fraud scheme to cheat victims out of millions of dollars and conspired with others to perpetrate their frauds,” said U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr., in a statement.
“Well-known former NBA players and former professional athletes acted as ‘Face Cards’ to lure unsuspecting victims to high-stakes poker games, where they were then at the mercy of concealed technology, including rigged shuffling machines and specially designed contacts lenses and sunglasses to read the backs of playing cards, which ensured that the victims would lose big. Today’s indictment and arrests sound the final buzzer for these cheaters.”
It’s a huge shake-up in the world of professional sports, particularly as sports betting has become increasingly mainstream in recent years and has been legalized in several states and jurisdictions. Since the Supreme Court struck down a ban on sports betting in 2018, data from Goldman Sachs shows that, as of last year, it’s become a $10 billion industry. Big sports betting companies—such as FanDuel, DraftKings, and others—have also become seemingly synonymous with names like Wynn, MGM, and Caesars.
It’s also another blow to the NBA, which was already contending with the news that superstar Kawhi Leonard, who plays for the Los Angeles Clippers, was using an investment firm to circumvent the league’s salary cap—an investigation that has also snared Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, and has ties to entertainers like Drake and Leonardo DiCaprio, who were financial backers.