Today Portland Trail Blazers Head Coach Chauncey Billups was arrested by the FBI, accused of participation in an illegal gambling ring. Billups was not the only NBA figure swept up in the accusations.
Miami Heat veteran Terry Rozier and former NBA player Damon Jones were also arrested on separate charges. Multiple other non-sports figures were also apprehended.
A couple hours after the news broke, the FBI held a press conference in Brooklyn, New York detailing the charges. The conference was extensive, dotted with posturing and self-affirming language complimenting the agency and castigating wrongdoers. In the midst of those descriptions, the bureau also went into specifics about the investigation. Two of their descriptions related to the Blazers and Billups specifically.
The first allegations, less clear in provenance, relate to illegal bets on the outcome of NBA games. Rozier and Jones were implicated by name, with the FBI alleging that the duo used professional connections to obtain information not available to the general public. They then used that information to facilitate rigged bets among fellow defendants.
Here is a machine-generated transcript from the FBI press report:
Between December, 2022 and March, 2024, these defendants perpetrated a screen, a scheme to defraud. By betting on inside non-public information about NBA athletes and teams, the non-public information included when specific players would be sitting out future games or when they would pull themselves out early for purported injuries or illnesses.
They relied on corrupt individuals, including Jones and Rosier. They also misused information to obtained through longstanding friendships that they had with NBA players and coaches, and in at least one instance, they got their information by threatening a current player because of his preexisting gambling debts.
Defendants used this non-public information to place hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent bets, mostly in the form of prop bets on individual player performance. The bets were placed through online sports books and also in person at casinos. The defendants relied on a network of straw bets to place the maximum amount of bets to increase their potential profits.
Most of these bets succeeded, and the intended losses were in the millions of dollars. The defendants then laundered their illegal winnings in various ways: peer-to-peer platforms, bank wires, and simple cash exchanges. The indictment details specific examples where the defendants profited from illegal gambling and illegal betting on various NBA games about the performance of players: on, among other things, the Charlotte Hornets, the Portland Trail Blazers, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Toronto Raptors.
Though the Blazers were among four teams listed as targets of these illicit bets, Billups was not mentioned specifically as a source of information. Other reports have indicated that information came from somewhere within the Blazers organization, but the origin is, at this time, unreported.
The charges relating to Billups instead stem from involvement in an illegal poker ring, allegedly connected with the Bonanno, Gambino, and Genovese families of La Cosa Nostra, or the Mafia. Billups was supposedly one of the faces, or lures, attracting players to rigged games and splitting profits with game organizers.
The press conference included the following details:
The defendants in this case orchestrated a scheme to use wireless cheating technology to run rigged poker games across the United States, including in the Hamptons, Las Vegas, Miami, and Manhattan. The scheme targeted victims known as “fish” who were often lured to participate in these rigged games by the chance to play alongside former professional athletes who were known as “face cards”.
The so-called face cards included the defendant Chauncey Billups, who at the time of the scheme was a former NBA player and is currently the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers and also Damon Jones, a former NBA player and coach.
What the victims, the fish, didn’t know is that everybody else at the poker game–from the dealer to the players, including the face cards–were in on the scam. Once the game was underway, the defendants fleeced the victims out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per game.
The defendants used a variety of very sophisticated cheating technologies, some of which were provided by other defendants in exchange for a share of the profits from the scheme. For example, they used off-the-shelf shuffling machines that had been secretly altered in order to read the cards in the deck, predict which player at the table had the best poker hand, and relay that information to an off-site operator. The offsite operator sent the information via cell phone back to a co-conspirator at the table. And that person at the table was known as the quarterback. The quarterback then signaled secretly the information he had received from others at to others at the table. And together they used that information in order to win their games and to cheat the victims.
Defendants used other cheating technologies such as poker chip tray analyzers, which is a poker chip tray that secretly reads cards, using a hidden camera, special contact lenses or eyeglasses that could read pre-marked cards, and an x-ray table that could read cards face down on the table. What you see depicted on a screen right now is an example of the x-ray table that, uh, reveals the cards, although they are face down on the table.They can be read because of the x-ray technology.
The mafia–specifically members and associates of the Bonanno, Gambino, and Genovese organized crime families–had preexisting control over non-rigged illegal poker games around New York City. As a result, they also became involved in the rigged poker games, helping to organize the games and taking a cut of the proceedings and working to enforce the collection of debts.
The defendants laundered their proceeds, including through cash exchanges, the use of multiple shell companies, and through cryptocurrency transfers. As part of the scheme, some of the defendants and their co-conspirators also committed acts of violence, including the gunpoint robbery of a person in order to obtain a rigged shuffling machine and extortions that were perpetrated against victims in order to ensure that they repaid their gambling debts.
Defendants who participated in the rigged poker scheme are charged with wire fraud conspiracy. Other defendants have been charged with crimes including illegal gambling, money laundering, Hobbes Act, robbery, and extortions.
We will share more details on this story as they become available.
