The announcement by FBI Director Kash Patel on Thursday, 23 October, caused a major ripple in American culture, even transcending political lines. At the press conference, Director Patel revealed that over 30 people had been arrested in two separate, but connected investigations into illegal gambling operations.
What really caught people’s attention was some of the individuals involved. Well-known figures in the professional basketball league NBA, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, were among those charged in the bust.
The salaries for NBA players are public information. Rozier is making $24.92 million a year playing for the Miami Heat. The exact terms for Billups’s coaching contract at the Trail Blazers have not been publicly disclosed. However, according to Oregon Live, he is (presumably was) getting $4.7 million per season.
The real shock for sports fans in America and beyond is the revelation that even those salaries are no guarantees for a safeguard against match-fixing and illegal gambling.
Here, it is important to make a distinction: Rozier and Billups are being criminally charged for completely different conduct.
What Did Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups Do in the NBA Gambling Scandal?
Rozier’s case is probably more disheartening for fans of basketball. According to allegations by law enforcement, he faked an injury while playing for the Charlotte Hornets early into a game against the New Orleans Pelicans in March 2023. He was colluding with an organized crime group, which had advance knowledge and placed fraudulent bets to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the ‘under’ options in his over/under markets for the game.
Billups’s allegations had nothing to do with NBA games. His celebrity status was allegedly used by organized crime groups to lure unsuspecting players into high-stakes, rigged private poker games. Players were enticed by the chance to play cards with a famous former NBA player and current head coach, and were unaware that rigged shuffling machines were actually relaying information about what cards were going to be dealt to members of the crime group in the game. The syndicate was also using small cameras built into the poker table to see their victims’ hole cards.
In the latter case, it was the fans and casual players of poker, the most popular card game in the world, who had new suspicions raised about the integrity of the game. However, the risks of playing in high-stakes private games outside a licensed and regulated facility have always been known to experienced players. Even well-known poker pros have openly talked about the possibility of cheating and collusion in such games, and many have advised staying away from them.
The connection between Terry Rozier’s and Chauncey Billups’s cases is a few defendants who have been named in both investigations.
Those slim connections, however, are also a testament to another revelation the public is reckoning with: organized crime is still alive in the United States. The crime groups involved in the latest illegal gambling scandals are the ‘traditional’ La Cosa Nostra families based in New York City, New York: the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families.
It has been a long time since the Italian mob has made national headlines in the United States, not since the 1992 conviction of the flamboyant boss of the Gambino family, John Gotti. Thus, most Americans assumed that the crime families were now dormant.
These two scandalous cases show that they are still active, and black market gambling remains a fertile ground for them.
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