More than 30 people have been charged on Thursday, including Chauncey Billups, an NBA Hall of Fame player and head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, and Terry Rozier, a guard with the Miami Heat, in connection with two separate but related federal gambling investigations that involved the league and the Mafia.
The schemes – one of them focused on insider sports betting and another that rigged poker games nationwide – spanned years and involved tens of millions of dollars in illicit gains from wire fraud, money laundering, extortion and gambling, FBI Director Kash Patel said at a news conference in Brooklyn on Thursday.
Rozier was one of several National Basketball Association insiders who allegedly provided non-public information about upcoming games to their criminal partners, who in turn used straw bettors to place multiple bets based on the tips, authorities said.
In March 2023, for instance, Rozier told associates in advance he would leave a game early with a supposed injury, allowing them to place more than $200,000 in bets that he would not reach his expected statistical totals for the game, officials said.
“This is the insider trading saga for the NBA,” Patel said.
Billups was charged in a separate case with helping to rig poker games to defraud unknowing players who were lured to the games with the promise of playing against celebrities, officials said. The defendants employed sophisticated technology to fix the games in New York, Las Vegas, Miami and elsewhere, including fraudulent card shufflers and x-ray tables.
That scheme also involved the Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese and Genovese organised crime families in New York, which controlled some of the underground poker games in the city where the rigging took place, officials said. The families took a cut of the profits, used extortion and robbery to collect unpaid debts and laundered proceeds through cryptocurrency and other means, according to prosecutors.
While the arrests stemmed from two separate indictments, a handful of defendants were charged in both cases, Brooklyn US Attorney Joseph Nocella said, including former Cleveland Cavaliers player and assistant coach Damon Jones.
In a statement, the NBA said Rozier and Billups had been placed on leave and that the league would continue to cooperate with authorities.
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