Transcript of NBA Scandal Unveiled & Another Drug Boat Dusted | 10.24.25

A massive Mafia-tied gambling scheme in the NBA leads to charges for dozens of people, including some of the league's biggest names.

We're talking about tens of millions of dollars in fraud and theft and robbery across a multi-year investigation.

I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Friday, October 24th. This is Morning Wire.

The US military strikes again, hitting another drug boat the administration says intends to bring poison to our shores. I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country.

Okay? We're going to kill them.

They're going to be dead. How much will this week's fiery debate for New York City mayor sway the high-stakes race?

I have not yet taken a position on those ballot women. What a shocker. All right. What a shocker. We're going to move on. Don't worry. Once he takes it, it'll change it anyway.

Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.

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A sprawling NBA gambling scandal was announced yesterday, resulting in dozens of arrests, including former and current NBA players and coaches and members of the Italian Mafia.

Here are the details as DailyWire reporter Amanda Presa Giacomohe. Amanda, just an absolute Absolutely wild story coming just days after the NBA tipped off its 2025 season. What exactly is the scope of all this? How far-reaching is this?

Well, we're talking about over 30 people who were arrested just yesterday, and that included Miami Heat Point Guard, Terry Rozier, and Portland Trailblazer's head coach, Chauncey Billups. He was a former player himself and in the NBA Hall of Fame. People connected to the Mafia were arrested as well. Charges from the entire investigation include wire fraud, money laundering, during extortion, robbery, and illegal gambling. Here's FBI Director Kash Patel with a general overview during a press conference yesterday.

The FBI led a coordinated takedown across 11 states to arrest over 30 individuals today responsible for this case, which is very much ongoing.

We also entered and executed a system of justice against La Casa Nuestra to include the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovesi, and Luceci crime families.

Now, there were two separate indictments here. The first relates to an insider betting scheme. Defendants charged in this scheme allegedly received non-public information, like when certain players would be sitting out for injuries or planned absences, and they would use that to try to profit from gambling bets. Here's New York City Police Commissioner, Jessica Tisch. One example occurred on March 23, 2023. In Charlotte, Terry Rozier, an NBA player, now with the Miami Heat, but at the time, playing for the Hornets, allegedly, But others, close to him, know that he planned to leave the game early with a supposed injury. Using that information, members of the group placed more than $200,000 in wagers on his under statistics. Rozier exited the game after just nine minutes, and those bets paid out, generating tens of thousands of dollars in profit.

You mentioned a second indictment. Tell us about that aspect of this.

Yeah, this one relates to Mafia-backed fixed poker games where more than $7 million was stolen. This apparently included a lot of new technology, and current and former NBA players like Chauncey Billups were used to draw people in to play these rigged games. Here's United States attorney Joseph Nocela on that.

The defendants, in this case, orchestrated a scheme to use wireless cheating technology to run rigged poker games across the United States. What the victims, the Fish, didn't know is that everybody else at the poker game, from the dealer to the players, including the face cards, were in on the scam. Once the game was underway, the defendants fleeced the victims out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per game.

Some of the technology included in these games were self-shuffling machines that had been secretly altered, poker chip trays that read cards using a hidden camera, special contact lenses or eye glasses that could read pre-marked cards, and an X-ray table that could read cards face down. The poker games that were played in the New York area, they were backed by at least four of the five so-called five families, the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovesi, and Luccaisi, Italian crime families. Now, as for the reverberating effects from all of this. Morning Wire was able to speak to David Cohn, co-host of Crane & Company. He really emphasized how this could further put a spotlight on legalized gambling.

Legalized gambling has been a hot button issue for many across the country over the last few years. And that contention will certainly be exacerbated when you're talking about gambling schemes at the highest levels of sports, such as the NBA.

And no doubt there will be more fallout in the days to come. Again, Cash Patel did say that this is an ongoing investigation.

Yeah, it won't be surprised if this ends up being even more widespread than they've already uncovered. Meanwhile, a massive scandal for the NBA. It's pretty hard to overstate how big this is. Amanda, thanks for reporting.

You're welcome.

The US military carried out its ninth strike this week against what it said was a drug boat from a known terrorist entity heading toward the United States. Meanwhile, President Trump has enacted new sanctions on Russia for the first time. Since he took the oval office.

Daily Wire reporter Tim pierce is here to talk about the latest moves the President has made on the international stage. So, Tim, let's first start with these kinetic strikes on drug boats. This time it was in the Pacific. What do we know so far?

Right. War Secretary, Pete Like Seth announced on Wednesday, the eighth and ninth strikes that the US military has carried out against these drug boats. Like you said, these strikes took place in the Pacific Ocean, and that's a first. Here's Daily Wire reporter, Jennie Tear, with more on that.

Up until now, the strikes have been targeted in the Caribbean, which is a known smuggling corridor for narco traffickers in Venezuela and Colombia. The Trump administration has carried out strikes in international waters, but that hasn't stopped the leaders of the Latin American countries from criticizing him. The Colombian President Gustavo Petro even called to potentially, quote, get rid of Trump over his campaign of pressure. Trump has accused Petro of playing a role in the drug trade and has pulled US funding to Colombia over the issue. On Thursday, Trump responded to the Colombian President residents threats, telling Daily Wire Whitehouse correspondent Mary Margaret Olahan that the Latin American leader is, quote, thug and bad guy who should, quote, watch it. For now, the strikes will continue, Secretary of War, Pete Hegset, says.

Now, there's still pushback to these strikes for for moral and legal reasons. But the White House is defending them. Here's Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

If people want to stop seeing drug boats blow up, stop sending drugs to the United States. Does it matter if it's in the United States? Well, these are all in international waters. When you do a strike in the United States? Well, that's a different matter. Now, you're talking about a law enforcement matter. In this particular case, there are people traveling on international waters headed towards the United States with hostilities in mind, which includes flooding our country with dangerous deadly drugs, and they're going to be stopped. And that's what's happening.

So a pretty clear message there from Rubio. Now, President Trump recently levied some pretty harsh sanctions on Russia. What do those sanctions do and how are they expected to affect Russia?

So the Treasury Department announced the first new sanctions on Russia since Trump took office in January. The sanctions target Russian oil giants, Rosneft and Lukoil, and dozens of their subsidiaries. It came alongside additional sanctions from the EU, as well as sanctions from the UK last week. This was a welcome move in Washington and across Europe. Here's House Speaker Mike Johnson. You have to compel Russia to engage in the peace process.

They've shown they cannot be trusted. There's a big appetite in Congress to have sanctions like this, and I think it's a very important step.

Nato Secretary General, Mark Ruta, said that Trump is the only person who to bring Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table and that these sanctions will help make that happen.

Alaska happened when the President decided to put secondary traves on India. We saw a phone call last week that happened when the President started to contemplate, yes or no, sending Tomahawk missiles into Ukraine. So it means you can change Putin's calculus.

More important than the sanctions is the message that they send. It's worth pointing out that in the Treasury's announcement of the sanctions package, it also threatened secondary sanctions on any entity that does business with Rosnaff or Lookoil. That threat will probably have a bigger impact than the sanctions themselves on Russia's bottom line.

Now pivoting a little bit to domestic news, President Trump was going to send the National Guard to San Francisco But he's since reversed on that. Why did he make that reversal?

Well, Trump said he was talked out of it, essentially. He said in a post on Truce Social that, Friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with a surge in that the mayor, Daniel Loury, was making substantial progress. He said he also spoke to Loury, who is a moderate Democrat who took office in January and decided to give him a chance to turn the city around, which means Trump could change his mind in the future if he doesn't like what he sees in San Francisco.

Well, hopefully new leadership can make a difference there. Tim, thanks for joining.

Good to be on.

The front runner in New York's mayoral debate, Zoran Mamdani, faced a barrage of criticism in the final televised debate on Wednesday. The question now, did his performance manage to shake his lead? Or reinforce doubts about his readiness for the job.

Here to break it all down is Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham. Hey, Megan. So obviously, New York's last mayoral debate was highly contentious. Plenty of viral moments are coming out of it. I think the big question is, what's the fallout for Mom Donnie? Does this impact him?

Yeah, John, the atmosphere was very much charged here, and I would say that that wasn't just because of some of the policies that were on the table, but also because Andrew Cuomo really kept up the pressure on Zora and Mamdani. He obviously had good reasons for that. Mamdani is far and away the leader in the polls. But we are also seeing some polls that if Curtis Sliwa were to shock the world and drop out, that they would actually be neck and neck. A lot of media analysts and politicos were saying that Mamdani looked uncomfortable, that he looked nervous. Just to give you my own particular analysis of what I saw, I thought he looked very rushed. At moments, it almost looked like he was a video that you were watching at double speed, just speaking very, very quickly. Then some of what these outlets have said, like the New York Post, they wrote that he broke a sweat, that he failed to give specifics, and that his rivals repeatedly pinned him into corners. That said, you did have some left-leaning outlets like Politico saying that they felt that Mamdani won this debate. And then you had the New York Times saying that even though Cuomo did score some points here, they don't feel like it's going to be enough to change the trajectory of this race right now.

But I do want to note that a lot of viral clips from this debate have received brutal responses, and they're circulating prominently on social media, painting Mamdani as as an unprepared left-wing extremist. I would say one of the most damaging that's circulating out there came when Cuomo directly confronted Momdani on his inexperience.

You have never had a job. You've never accomplished anything. There's no reason to believe you have any merit or qualification for eight and a half million lives. You don't know how to run a government. You don't know how to handle an emergency. You've literally never proposed a bill on anything that you're not talking about in your campaign. You had the worst attendance record in the assembly, and you gave yourselves the highest raise in the United States of America. You went from $110,000 to $140,000, and then you never showed up for work, and you missed 80% of the votes. Shame on you.

Cuomo also pinned Mamdani down on his rent freeze policy, basically painting it as blather.

Zoran is a great actor. He missed his calling. Freeze the rent sounds great. Yeah, it affects about 25% of the number of housing units in the city of New York. It's not a new idea. Bill De Blasio did it. It turned out to be a debacle.

Then there were other times that Mamdani really didn't help himself, like when he described his policy plans for 911. Basically, he said that dispatchers will first have to decide whether it's appropriate to send police or maybe they should send mental health care providers instead.

Yet what we have in our city is asking those same police officers who are being asked to respond to shootings, respond to murders, to also respond to these calls.

I trust the dispatchers who would be receiving these calls to make the determination as to whether there was any indication of violence.

If there is no indication of a threat of violence, then we would set the mental health experts and providers to respond to those same incidents.

Of course, the problem is you can't always predict when violence might occur. So this policy proposal raising a lot of eyebrows.

It's not hard to see why that is. So has this debate taken any of the air out of Mondani's lead?

I would say it's a little too soon to tell when we're looking at polls His team maybe seems a little bit nervous. And at the same time, we're seeing reports out there that Chinese-owned TikTok is deliberately pulling out stops for Mondani, that they're boosting clips that paint him in a favorable light, and that Andrew Cuomo clips are getting deemphasized. The New York Post is one of those outlets that's saying that this is part of TikTok's algorithmic thumb on the scale. So that might be something to read into.

Well, if Mamdani does hold on to this lead, it will certainly mean an even further left turn for New York. There's no doubt about that. Megan, thanks so much for reporting.

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

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