US details betting inquiries involving mafia families, NBA athletes

By SANTUL NERKAR, MARIA CRAMER, TANIA GANGULI and JONAH E. BROMWICH

Indictments against current and former NBA players, including a well-known head coach in the Basketball Hall of Fame, were unsealed on Thursday, in a pair of criminal cases that involved the coordination of Mafia families and professional athletes.

The charges were unveiled at a news conference in Brooklyn, New York, where Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, called the scale of the fraud “mind-boggling,” adding that the schemes involved “tens of millions of dollars” in theft, fraud and robbery.

The investigation has been developing for years, coordinated by the FBI and the New York Police Department’s Joint Organized Crime Task Force. But it exploded into public on Thursday morning when Terry Rozier, a guard for the Miami Heat, was arrested in Orlando, Florida, and Chauncey Billups, the coach of the Portland Trail Blazers and a former star for the Detroit Pistons, was arrested in Portland, Oregon.

Rozier was involved in a sports betting scheme in which the defendants used nonpublic information about NBA athletes and teams to set up fraudulent bets, said Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. For example, the defendants knew when players would be sitting out or leaving a game early, allowing them to set up the fraudulent bets.

Rozier left one game early and let other gamblers know so that they could bet on the game and make hundreds of thousands of dollars that they later split with him, said Jessica Tisch, the commissioner of the New York Police Department.

Billups, who was inducted into the basketball hall of fame last year, and another former NBA player and coach, Damon Jones, participated in the other scheme, involving rigged illegal poker games that were set up by organized crime families — the Bonano, Gambino, Lucchese and Genovese families — who would take cuts of the profits and use force to go after debtors, Nocella said.

Officials said the investigation began four years ago. Victims were cheated out of at least $7 million, officials said.