Transcript of Mob Ties and Rigged Bets: Inside the N.B.A.’s Gambling Scandal

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From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrelef. This is The Daily. What's the story that rocked the sports world? A multi-million dollar betting scheme that led to more than 30 arrests, including current and former NBA players and coaches. Today, we go inside the federal investigation into a legal gambling that has rocked the NBA.

This is right out of a movie.

You're talking about mob stuff.

You're talking about cheating at poker games, rigging poker games. The alleged schemes involve the Mafia, high-profile players, and the manipulation of professional basketball games to rig and win bets. I understand betting is legal, but I don't think it's too much to ask of a player or a coach.

Do not engage in this. For me, it's all about trust. People watch this game because they think it's real and fair.

I'm just ashamed that they put themselves and put their family and put the NBA in this position.

There's all saying in the hood, all money ain't good money.

I talked to my colleagues, Jona Bromwich and Jenny Vrentis, about the shocking facts of the cases and the growing concern that the explosion of online betting may be compromising the integrity of the sport. It's Monday, October 27th. Jona, the NBA season started last week. Tons of story lines there, huge week for the league. But the biggest story at this moment for the NBA had nothing to do with the games. It was this massive announcement made by the FBI director, Cash Patel, on Thursday. Walk me through exactly what he said.

Sure. 6: 30 in the morning, we get this email. There's going to be this big announcement, and no one really knows what it is beforehand. We're getting bits and pieces of it. But then people to go into the room.

Good morning.

And Cash Patel is there, and he starts talking about these two enormously consequential schemes.

Today, we are here in New York to announce a historic arrest across a wide-sweeping criminal enterprise that envelops both the NBA and La Casa Nostra.

The first case is the poker case, and that is about a very complicated, Mafia-involved scheme to rig poker games and prominent NBA figures were used almost as bait to attract the victims to these games. There is no room for any type of criminal behavior be it on the world's largest stage or in the backrooms of tiny pallers where guard games are being played. Then the second one intrudes more closely on the life of the league because this is one player, various other co-consumers spiritors making bets about what's going to happen in games based on their relationships inside the locker room.

It's not hundreds of dollars. It's not thousands of dollars. It's not tens of thousands of dollars.

And what is immediately clear in what he's talking about is that the scope of this is enormous. We're talking about tens of millions of dollars in fraud and theft and robbery. And then it hits the league in a place that the league really doesn't want to be hit.

And look, let's not mince words. This is the insider trading saga for the NBA. Okay, let's take these schemes one by one, and we'll start with the illegal rigged poker games. How did this work? Who was there? What happened? I want to know everything.

What I'm about to describe, they haven't been proven, and I'm largely drawing on indictments from prosecutors. Defense lawyers have not yet had a say. It's not clear what they'll argue, and all these are just allegations for the moment. So this is a remarkable story in its own right, because this is a story about pretty high tech rigging of illegal poker games. They were held regularly at two locations in New York. And what would happen is using two NBA figures as bait, the many, many people involved in this scheme would have victims come to these games games, and they would use these advanced shuffling machines that could tell them which of them had the best hand and coordinate with that knowledge to win this game and defraud victims of their money.

Who's running these poker games? Who's everyone behind all this?

The Mafia is largely behind all this. There's four different Mafia families. There are Bananos, the Gambinos, the Genovesis, and the Lucases that are involved in poker games, and it does up this image of Tony Soprano and the games from that show. But this is really still happening. The Mafia still exists in New York. One of the things they do, one of the ways they make money is by getting these operations off the street, out of the public eye, and at the poker table.

Okay, so you have this old world aspect of this where the Mafia is involved, but it sounds like it was high tech. You mentioned these advanced shuffling machines, the mechanism by which the cheating happens. It was pretty technological.

Yeah, and there are a lot of crazy technologies involved in this. There are all these almost like James Bond-like gadgets mixed in with this Mafia movie that we're hearing about. They had decoy cell phones that could detect which cards were on the table at which time. They had playing cards that had these invisible ink markings that you would have to wear special contact lenses to see. What? And the rigged shuffling machines you I mentioned, it's funny, they're not rigged in the way that they shuffle. What they can do is analyze as they're dealing a hand, the strength of that hand relative to every other hand they've dealt. So the shuffling is above board. But what happens is that the machine sends a signal to an outside person known as the operator. The operator then sends that information back into the room to the person they call the quarterback or the driver, and everyone on the cheating team knows, Okay, we're going to coordinate this knowing who has the best hand here.

Can I ask how much money were these games raking in? I think I'm used to the idea of a $25 poker night. So just lay out for me, what amount is being stolen in this cheating?

A truly absurd amount. An amount that really makes us curious about who exactly is playing at these games. So for example, John Doe number one, is named in the indictment, that's the first victim. John Doe, number one, loses $1. 8 million in a single game. And so overall, we're talking about millions and millions of dollars at these games, which are held regularly, both in the New York locations I mentioned, But also all over the United States, the indictment says.

And you said that the NBA players involved, they were used as a draw for the other marks that came. They made the games cool. So the implication is that they were getting a cut of the winnings? Were they in business with the Mafia?

They're directly accused of getting a cut of the winning. So yes, exactly. They are accused of doing business with the Mafia, one of whom is quite well known to NBA fans. Chauncey Billups, NBA champion, current head coach for the Portland Trailblazers. And the collection of guys at this table is really fascinating because it's Mafia members. And then it's these almost sports betting nerds who love poker. So just imagine that game. Imagine the personalities that half the side is cheating. It's just an extraordinary scene to think about.

Okay, I want to turn to the other indictment. Cash Patel called this one Insider Trading for the NBA. Is that accurate? What are we talking about here?

This is a scheme where, according to the indictment, a NBA player and co-conspirators traded on information known only to them, known only to people who would be inside the locker room, and they used it to gamble on games an advantage that no one else had. That's exactly how insider trading works. You have information that is not available to the public, and you use that information to your financial advantage. It's actually a perfect explanation of what happened here.

Tell me a little bit more about how they used it to their advantage. Specifically in this case, what were they doing? How did they make money?

There are a couple of different ways that they used the information that they had access to. The first example is the most outrageous, and I think maybe the most troubling for the MBA Okay, so the one active NBA player who is a defendant here is a guy named Terry Rozier. Terry Rozier, he's currently a guard in the Miami Heat. But in 2023, he was a player for the Charlotte Hornets. And while playing for the Hornets, told his co-conspirators, Hey, I'm going to go out of this game early with an injury, and no one knows that I'm going to do that, including officials on my own team. So knowing that Rozier was going to go out of this game early was an enormous advantage. And it was an advantage because his co-conspirators then bet that he would score fewer points, that he would be less productive in this game than he usually was. Of course, they were right because when he went out early, there was no chance that he was going to make up those averages, and they were able to win hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So what you're talking about, those bets on how many points he's going to score at a certain point in the game, those are what's been referred to as prop bets. Can you just break down what prop bets Yeah.

I think when people who do not gamble on sports consider sports betting, when they consider it at all, they might think that the easiest way to do it is you're going to bet on who wins and who loses. But sports gambling has gotten a lot more sophisticated You can bet on all these different kinds of elements of a game, including an individual player's performance, an individual player's performance in a certain category, like points scored, rebounds. The amount of betting categories has become really vast. That's important here because it shows you that just Terry Rozier, one person on a team of at least 11 basketball players, can actively impact betting, even if he can't ultimately control the outcome of a game.

That's what's at issue here, not just with Rozier, right? The idea is that the information that was being traded was used to manipulate bets on individual events like this.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I'll give you another example. This one is eyebrow-raising not because it involves the obvious flagrant violation that Rozier is accused of, but because of the name it does involve. The other NBA figure involved in this scheme is a guy named Damon Jones. In February 2023, he was an unofficial assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers. While he was in that role, he got information that a prominent player, according to the indictment, named Player 3, was not going to play in a game. Jones then quickly spread that information to his co-conspirators. They just bet on the Lakers losing that game. The description of player three in the indictment perfectly matches LeBron James. Now, LeBron is not accused of any wrongdoing. He's not even implicated. But you can see why this is such a huge problem for the NBA, because even the specter of the possibility that a scheme like this touched on their most marketable star, the face of their sport for more than a decade, hints at the issues when the integrity of an NBA game begins to be called into question.

Jona, you've covered really big cases for us, including Trump trials, the LaTisha James arraignment. Where does this rank for you in the pantheon of all of the cases you've been looking at? How earth-shattering does it feel?

Yeah, in terms of the scale and high-profile nature of what I often cover, it doesn't quite touch those things. But criminal cases always in some way touch on what's going on in society. That seems like a silly thing to say, but it's actually what makes it so interesting. There's all this legality, there's all these specifics of these indictments, but it always touches back with something that's going on in the broader world. I just see that this case, like the other cases that I've covered, really speaks to something that's going on in the moment, in this case, exactly what's going on in sports gambling and why it poses such a problem for these the league in 2025.

Well, Jonah, thank you so much.

Of course. Thank you for having me.

After the break, I'll talk to my colleague, Jennie Vrentis, about exactly that, how the proliferation of sports betting may contribute to scandals like this and the impact that it's had on our culture. We'll be right back. Cáine, did you know if you're aged between 25 and 65, well, you can get a free HPV cervical check. It's one of the best ways to protect yourself from cervical cancer.

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Jenny, we are here to talk to you about the sports betting indictment. That just seems like it has really huge implications, definitely for the NBA and maybe for sports in general. In many ways, it does seem as though sports betting has proliferated in recent years, especially these prop bets that are central to this indictment. This is a question that I think a lot of people have been asking, what effect will it have on the integrity of the game? You've been covering this world for a very long time. Let me just ask you, do you think that the explosion of online sports betting enabled the criminal conspiracy that was just revealed?

I think it creates conditions in which gambling is more normalized, more part of society, and there are more chances for criminal activity. Obviously, these crimes are still in the stage where the people have been accused and the crimes haven't been adjudicated. But I do think what we're seeing now with this situation is this is what sports league didn't want to happen. This is what fans didn't want to happen. Now that it's happened, okay, it's one case, but it involves a lot of people. It involves multiple players, coaches, sharing information on multiple teams, on multiple games. I do think it's fair for fans and anyone who loves sports in the United States to wonder, is this just the tip of the iceberg?

Okay, I want to get to the question that you raise about whether this is possibly way more widespread than we even know. But just to slow down and pause for a moment, can we walk through exactly what this embrace of sports betting has looked like from the perspective of the league, fans, and the players themselves?

Absolutely. It wasn't that long ago that sports league were opposed to the legalization of sports betting in the United States. However, in 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a law that effectively banned sports betting in most of the country. As a consequence, there were significant business opportunities that came from that that sports leads wanted to take advantage of. So they built partnerships with sportsbooks. You want to make every game interesting?

Step one, open the Bet MGM sportsbook.

Step two, put some skin in the game.

And step three, showtime. There are licensed licensing deals.

New arena. How about a new network? Welcome to FanDuel Sports Network, your home for Clippers basketball.

There is signage all over stadiums. Some stadiums have sportsbooks inside of them.

You can even bet on games while they're still being played. Seriously.

During TV broadcast, there are prompts to bet during the game. Now you're in the ring with the king of sports books.

You know what to do.

How quickly this has changed in the last seven years is dizzying. I'm a person that has followed sports, covered sports for a long time. And even I am surprised by how quickly betting has become embedded into how we consume sports.

Yeah, I should probably at this point come out as a huge sports fan myself. I've also been shocked at just how much all of this is plastered everywhere, how unavoidable it is at halftime, at the games, it's everywhere. I think One of the things I didn't understand, though, was these smaller prop bets and how important they are to this new infrastructure, to this new industry.

Yes, absolutely. The volume and types of bets has exploded exponentially over the last few years. I think as a consequence of that, you are presenting more opportunities for individual occurrences in the game to potentially be manipulated because it's very hard to fix a game. You need cooperation of the entire team You can't control everything that happens in a game. But what you can do is you can control in some level your individual performance or the outcome of a single period of time or a single part of your game.

Right. If you're a pitcher, obviously, you can control the pitch you throw. If you're a point guard, you can decide who gets the ball at any point. I'm wondering if you can walk me through the engagement aspect of this. What does it do to a fan experience and to the overall watching experience if people are betting on each of these individual outcomes.

Right, exactly. I think that's a huge piece of this conversation because this is part of the reason that league have embraced sports betting, because they believe that if people are betting on games and during games, that they will watch more games for longer periods of time. We've also seen this increase in these bets that come during a game, keep people watching and keep people interested in a game maybe you would have no interest in watching otherwise. That all feeds into fan engagement. The more eyes that are on games, then the price of the media rights deals, which are the largest source of profit for the NBA and the NFL, that goes up. There you see why there has been this push of more betting opportunities throughout games.

Let's talk about the league's economic interests here. What has embracing sports betting done for their bottom line?

Yeah, I mean, sports betting has been a huge financial boom for sports league. I mean, they have partnerships with sports betting operators that net something around hundreds of millions of dollars a year. They have stakes in these data companies that sell statistics from sports games to sports books, which are used to create some of these prop bets, for instance. It's become this ecosystem where sports betting is so embedded in the business interests of the league that it would be hard to back out at this point.

They're just totally enmeshed.

They're totally enmeshed. Absolutely.

To just return to the conspiracy that has been laid out in this indictment, I can see a world in which people might look at what's happened and say, Look, actually, the rise of online sports betting, it allows you to track more easily unusual bets, and therefore, it's not the rise of online sports betting that enabled this. This is just gambling. Actually, we're in a position where we can catch this more easily. But on the other hand, it does seem as though from what you're saying, it's just become so much easier to bet on every little tiny thing. It's hard to imagine finding a bookie back in the day who's willing to take a bet on whether someone is going to hit a three in the last two minutes of the third quarter. There's a world in which the proliferation itself does pave the way for a scandal like this.

Yeah, I think it's both things are true situation here, and that it is true that sports books and sports colleagues work with integrity monitors that are catching suspicious betting activity and that those integrity monitors played a role in spotting this scandal. But I think the point that you're making, which I think is a true one, is that When you have this world in which you can bet on so many things through the course of a game, you have to consider the fact that there are more chances for manipulation, and it makes it harder to catch when there are so many more opportunities.

Let's talk about the options for the NBA right now because the incentives are interesting. On the one hand, you can see how they'd be worried if people start to en masse doubt that what they're seeing on the court is real. On the other hand, As you've said, this is just a huge business for them.

I think the interesting thing is that game integrity is actually something that all of the stakeholders care about. The sportsbooks care about it, the league care about it, the betters care about it. If fans start to believe that betting is an influence for players on the court or coaches of teams to start manipulating games, it really does undercut the trust and the experience that fans have when they watch. What I do think is a potential landing spot here is for sports league to come together and say, We are going to limit or ban prop bets. However, on the sportsbook side, prop bets are a big part of their business. I mean, one estimate that I received received would be if you limited prop bets, you would potentially be reducing the amount that people bet by around 20%. That's significant for sports books in their business. This could be an area where you see what is now a shared business interest colliding a little bit.

Okay, so we've talked about the implications for the league, for the fans. I want to ask about the players because watching this all unfold, it made me think that they're at risk from this, too. It raises the possibility that suddenly the players will be under more suspicion, right? That especially if they aren't doing well, if they're injured or even if they just miss a couple shots, that people might think they're setting up a bet.

Yeah, I think that's a really great question, and I'm glad you raised it. We've seen that players, they'll get harassing messages from angry betters who a bet didn't go their way. A lot of players have started to speak out about this. I think there's another element here, too, which is the pressure from people around you to get inside information from you. What we saw in the federal indictments is there were several cases in which people in somebody's entourage or a childhood friend or a trainer was sharing information about the players. I think where you could see the pressure being the hardest to navigate is for people who aren't paid millions of dollars, for college athletes or people in lower-tier pro-leagues who might be getting pressure from people for inside information, and maybe the money feels worth it to them. I do think there are a lot of consequences for the players dealing with how much sports gambling has become part of the sports worlds that they're in. I think they haven't had any input into that. I mean, this is the world that they're playing in, right?

Right. This has been totally foisted on them, and they have to deal with the consequences, it sounds like.

Exactly.

You mentioned this earlier, and I want to just come back to it. How worried are fans, are experts, are you that this could be more widespread than just this one scandal? This could be in many different sports? There's a world in which it seems like you have to be worried about that, wondering whether anything you're watching in any one of these weeks could be manipulated at any moment.

I think it's fair for any of us to ponder that. I think once you start to ponder that, then the cracks begin. Even in just this federal indictment, there were multiple teams, multiple games, multiple years, players, coaches. There were a lot of parts of the NBA affected by this. I think it's come up enough times that it is a persistent concern that the Leagues are going to have to confront and American sports fans are going to have to reckon with more and more.

Well, Jennie, thanks so much.

Thank you for having me.

Since the indictments were announced, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has requested a briefing on the scandal from NBA Commissioner Adam Silver by this Friday, October 31st. We'll be right back. Caleene, did you know if your age between 25 and 65, well, you can get a free HPV cervical check. It's one of the best ways to protect yourself from cervical cancer.

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Ie/cervicalcheck. This is Sarah Koenig, host of Serial. We have a new show. It's called The Preventionist. It's about something strange that happened in Eastern Pennsylvania. Parents claiming they'd walked into a hospital to get medical care for their children and then were forced to leave without them. Why were these parents suddenly losing custody of their kids? From serial productions and the New York Times, it's The Preventionist. Eligible time subscribers can listen right now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, so head there to subscribe or listen anywhere October 30th.

Here's what else you should know today. On Sunday, Chinese and American officials said they'd agreed to a framework of a trade deal ahead of a meeting planned between President Trump and China's top leader Xi Jinping later this week. Trade negotiators for the two sides met in Malaysia. An official said they discussed a range of issues, including Chinese restrictions on rare earth minerals, port fees that the US recently slapped on Chinese ships, and an extension of a truce on tariffs. The details of the framework remain unclear, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on ABC that he expected China to delay global export controls on rare earths and that the US threat of imposing 100% tariffs on China would be averted. And the French police made arrests in the brazen jewelry heist last week at the Louver, though the authorities didn't say how many people were taken into custody. The Paris prosecutor said in a statement that one man was taken into custody at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris as he was trying to leave the country. It was not immediately clear whether the police had recovered any of the stolen jewelry, which includes gem-studded royal tiarras, necklaces, and earrings dating back to the 19th century.

Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lynn, Anna Foley, and Diana Wyn. It was edited by Brenda Clinkenberg, Lexie Dau, and Mike Benoît. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Alishaba Itup, and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily. I'm Natalie Kitrowet. See you tomorrow. Cáine, did you know if your age between 25 and 65, well, you can get a free HPV cervical check. It's one of the best ways to protect yourself from cervical cancer.

And you know what? I actually checked it only recently when mine was due, and no exaggeration, it took me less than five minutes.

You go online to hsce. Ie/cervicalcheck, put in your PPS number, check in the date of birth, and then they tell you when your next appointment is due.

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I know. And you can check around the register on the website.

You can phone 1-800-4545-55.

If your test is due today, you can book today or hsce. Ie our hsie.

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