Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat point guard Terry Rozier were among the 34 people charged and arrested by the FBI Thursday for two different but linked cases involving illegal sports betting and rigged poker games that were backed by the Mafia.
Billups, 49, is accused of participating along with other defendants in a nationwide scheme designed to rig illegal poker games, U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. announced at a press conference in New York City on Thursday.
Those involved, including many former professional athletes like Billups, are said to have used technology to steal millions in underground New York poker games backed by members and associates of the Gambino, Lucchese, Bonanno and Genovese crime families.
“Bringing four of the five families together in a single indictment is extraordinarily rare,” New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Thursday, the Associated Press reports. “It reflects how deep and how far this investigation reached and the skill and the persistence it took to get here.”
According to Tisch, the operation used “traditional mob enforcement methods, combined with new technology to expand the reach of their operations.” Former and current pro athletes were brought into the games to make them look legitimate, while hidden cameras and bar-coded decks were used to rig the tables.
“Victims believed that they were sitting at a fair table,” Tisch told reporters Thursday. “Instead, they were cheated out of millions.” When victims refused to pay their losses, they were allegedly threatened and intimidated with violence.
Rozier and at least six other defendants, meanwhile, are accused of participating in an insider sports betting operation. They are said to have used their access to feed game-affecting private information known only to NBA players and coaches to outside conspirators in exchange for flat fees or shares of their subsequent betting profits. Nocella Jr. called it “one of the most brazen sports corruption schemes since online sports betting became widely legalized in the United States.”
“This is an illegal gambling operation and sports rigging operation that spanned the course of years,” FBI Director Kash Patel said at the Thursday press conference. “Everyone will be held to account.”
“It’s not hundreds of dollars. It’s not thousands of dollars. It’s not tens of thousands of dollars. It’s not even millions of dollars,” Patel said of the money lost due to the illegal gambling and poker operations, which allegedly included instances of crypto fraud. “We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars in fraud and theft and robbery across a multi-year investigation.”
As part of the sports betting scheme he is accused of participating in, Rozier sometimes allegedly took himself out of games early in order to affect their outcomes and the bets made on his performance. One instance cited involved a game Rozier played for the Charlotte Hornets in which he told one of his co-conspirators that he planned to leave it early with a “supposed injury,” which allowed others to make advance bets on that exact outcome.
According to ESPN, Rozier’s attorney Jim Trusty previously told the sports network that NBA and FBI officials found after an initial investigation into his conduct in 2023 that Rozier had done nothing wrong. In a statement released Thursday, Trusty condemned the FBI’s conduct toward his client.
“A long time ago we reached out to these prosecutors to tell them we should have an open line of communication,” Trusty said. “They characterized Terry as a subject, not a target, but at 6 a.m. this morning they called to tell me FBI agents were trying to arrest him in a hotel. It is unfortunate that instead of allowing him to self surrender, they opted for a photo op. They wanted the misplaced glory of embarrassing a professional athlete with a perp walk. That tells you a lot about the motivations in this case.”
The wide-ranging case was, notably, brought by the same U.S. attorney’s office that already prosecuted ex-NBA star Jontay Porter on charges that he withdrew from games early to help his gambling co-conspirators win big on their bets. Porter, who pled guilty to the charges against him, is named in Thursday’s indictment as one of the “other relevant individuals” connected to the case.
