This guy I once knew said it was better than sex. And he wasn’t kidding.
Way back then, before sports betting was “respectable,” he’d call a phone number, identify himself only as “94,” and place his bets on the weekend’s football games. He’d bet a “nickel” on this game, and a “dime” on that other game, the one he had a really good hunch about. And on Tuesday, after a good weekend, he’d saunter into that muffler shop, ask for “John,” and the big guy would walk through the door with a smirk on his face, make sure no one was looking, and hand over a wad of hundies.
“Nice work,” the muffler man would say. It wasn’t work, of course — at least not in the traditional sense. And the euphoria was short-lived because next week’s games — and an all-new rush of adrenaline — were already on the horizon, already luring him toward the new spreads and the injury reports and the head-to-head histories. Maybe he’d have another great weekend, or maybe he’d have a brutal beatdown, and maybe he’d finally wonder what the heck he was doing with his life.
That’s the “demand” side of sports gambling, and it encompasses millions of mostly anonymous schlubs like us — the so-called recreational gamblers, the guys just looking for some fun. But then there are the more serious ones, the more vulnerable ones, the ones who are looking for a way to win something for nothing. It’s these guys who end up addicted and who sometimes get lured over to the supply side.
That’s where NBA Hall-of-Famer and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups comes in. It’s where current Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier comes in. And it’s where the honest-to-badness Mafia — with four of the five crime families working together — comes in.
Yesterday, as Fox News reports, these three were arrested, along with more than two dozen others, in a federal investigation involving “multiple agencies and the NYPD as they targeted the La Cosa Nostra crime families in two separate operations across several states.”
The report continues: “Billups was arrested as part of the illegal poker takedown. [U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Joseph] Nocella said the alleged schemers targeted victims known as ‘fish’ who lured victims by giving them the chance to play alongside former pro athletes known as ‘face cards.’ He said Billups and Jones were dubbed as a ‘face card’ by the schemers.”
Sal Paicente, a self-described cheating expert and casino consultant, explained how the poker thievery worked: “That machine has a camera in it that’s used by casinos, and they can tell you exactly what card is missing. However, the cheaters altered that machine to use that camera to know what cards the players have, and the machine would relay that information” to the cheaters.
Billups, Rozier, and Jones all face charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Sports gambling is, needless to say, a hugely lucrative industry. Just count all the gambling advertisements during a televised college or pro football game, and you’ll get a sense of what kind of money is out there. How much money? This much: Legal sportsbooks took in nearly $150 billion in bets last year.
But there’s nothing to see here, says idiotic blowhard and former NBAer Charles Barkley. “Under no circumstances can you fix basketball games. Under no circumstances.”
Really? Tell that to Terry Donaghy, the longtime NBA ref who served 13 months in federal prison years ago for doing just that. Barkley knows, just as every sports gambler knows, that a player doesn’t have to “throw” a game. All he has to do is influence the outcome as it pertains to the spread — that is, the point differential between the two teams as determined by professional oddsmakers. If the Miami Heat are expected to lose a game by five points, a starter like Rozier can certainly influence that outcome — by playing poor defense, by throwing a couple of errant passes, by having a bad shooting night — and he can thereby “help” his team lose by more points than they’re supposed to lose by, and thereby help Carlo Gambino’s guys clean up.
It’s hard to say where this investigation will go or what it will do to an already beleaguered NBA, whose popularity and whose TV ratings are but a shadow of what they once were during the days of Magic and Larry and Michael.
In one sense, who cares about the woke NBA? But in another sense, we should all care — because it’s a dishonest game with a demonic lure, and because gambling addicts are alienating their friends and wrecking their families and ruining their lives over it. And, frankly, we should wonder about the two-tiered system that sees guys like Billups and Rozier and Jones get rolled up, while the likes of Nancy and Paul Pelosi somehow manage to outperform even the very best investors on Wall Street to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
Why, it’s almost as if Nancy and Paul knew something that the rest of us didn’t. Almost as if they were running some sort of rigged gambling scheme.
Nah. That would be illegal.
POSTSCRIPT: Sports gambling is likely here to stay, but the opportunity for corruption could be significantly reduced by eliminating the so-called prop bet, which allows gamblers to wager on a particular player’s performance in a particular game — such as whether Terry Rozier will score fewer than 12 points, or Patrick Mahomes will throw fewer than two touchdown passes. Not even an apologist like Charles Barkley can argue that the prop bet is just begging to be exploited by organized criminals and a relative handful of dishonest players.
