Articles by Dan Adler

Technology

“What Did Anyone Think Was Going to Happen?”: The NBA Gambling Scandal Hiding in Plain Sight

As federal prosecutors claimed in an indictment unsealed on Thursday, the building was later where “Flappy,” “the Wrestler,” and “Juice,” among other evocatively nicknamed alleged members of the Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese, and Genovese New York mafia families, assembled to carry out a Hollywood-ready scheme that rigged poker games with card-reading contact lenses and X-ray tables and used the attendance of an active NBA coach, Chauncey Billups, as bait for their marks. In a separate but simultaneous indictment, prosecutors alleged that an active and a former player, Terry Rozier and Damon Jones, provided insider information on NBA games to bettors and, in Rozier’s case, manipulated his performance to the gambler’s benefit. (All the defendants in the two cases—which include Billups, Rozier, Jones, and alleged organized-crime affiliates—who have entered a plea thus far have pleaded not guilty on fraud, money laundering, extortion, and gambling charges.) Perhaps, as alleged, the set-up was even stranger than fiction, a relic from a bygone era when Gottis in courthouses dominated the tabloid pages, or when betting scandals rocked professional baseball several times over. And yet, in some sense, the alleged behavior was taking place right under our noses. Vanity Fair spoke with veterans of the gambling and mafia underworlds to help situate the relative absurdity—and predictability—of the scandal that has ricocheted across sports, business, and politics. The new sports gambling landscape “What did anyone think was going to happen?” New York sports radio host Craig Carton asked me on Friday. Carton’s career as a leading local drive time personality was upended in 2017 when he was arrested for running a ticket reselling Ponzi-like scheme in order to cover millions of dollars in gambling debts. He was sentenced to 42 months of prison for fraud, ultimately serving 10 of them, at what was a fairly quaint time by the standards of today’s gambling industry. In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a federal sports betting ban, and the gold rush across the major leagues and their media apparatuses was immediate. The legal sports gambling industry is commonly valued at over $100 billion, and advertisements for major sportsbooks such as FanDuel and DraftKings are an inescapable feature of nearly all corners of the viewing universe. (As ESPN covered the indictments on Thursday, a promo for the company’s sportsbook momentarily flashed across the screen.) Gambling is by now the air that fans breathe—and, as Carton argued, that players do too. “We’re foolish to think that there aren’t active players in all four of the major North American sports,” he said, “that are gambling regularly on the outcome of their own games and other games within their respective leagues.” Part of Carton’s post-prison push to raise awareness around gambling addiction is itself hosted by FanDuel, which supports a recovery podcast that he co-hosts with former NBA player Randy Livingston. As a duo, they speak to NBA rookies and college students about the risks that Livingston saw up close as he struggled with a gambling problem during his playing career. One question he often gets, Livingston told me, is why an athlete making millions in NBA money would get mixed up with gambling. “Addiction is addiction,” Livingston said, and he found that the “ultra competitive nature of what we do” compounded the dangers and “really lends to why people gamble.” Still, he emphasizes that this online gambling landscape is here to stay. “The alcohol brands didn’t go anywhere, the cigarette brands didn’t go anywhere,” Livingston said. “We just have to do a better job from the stigma standpoint.” The FBI cinematic universe Kash Patel’s tenure as FBI director has to date been shaped by the Trump administration’s troubled relationship to the Epstein files and the unfulfilled promise of their release. He had spent years insisting on the disclosure of those same documents in his prior post as a wide-eyed podcaster, and during a press conference announcing the gambling charges on Thursday, he displayed a similarly feverish temperament. “It’s not popular to go after some of the defendants that we went after today,” Patel told reporters with no small measure of pride. “This is the insider trading saga for the NBA,” he continued. “That’s what this is. That’s why we are going to take heat.” Rozier, a guard for the Miami Heat, was previously investigated and cleared by the NBA for one of the allegations brought against him by federal prosecutors: that he purposely exited a 2023 game early in order to make good on a betting tip that he gave ahead of time to a childhood friend. (An NBA spokesperson noted in a statement on Thursday that the league, which had previously indicated that it was cooperating with the criminal investigation, “does not have the same authority or investigatory resources as the federal government, including subpoena power to obtain information from anyone, law enforcement surveillance, wire-tapping, and search warrants.” Rozier’s lawyer Jim Trusty said last week that his client “is not a gambler.”) But even before he was arrested last week, the possibility of such maneuvering among players had become an ever-present concern for NBA observers, with former Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter pleading guilty to wire fraud last year after providing pregame heads-ups on his performance. (He is currently awaiting sentencing.) Aside from the obstacles to fairness that the dynamic presents, the players increasingly travel in an ambient sense of suspicion. “If you can get all your homies rich” by faking an injury for one game, Porter’s brother Michael, also a professional player, said on a podcast this year, “that is so not OK, but some people probably think like that. They come from nothing and all their homies have nothing.” In the statement he provided to several media outlets, Trusty emphasized the undeniably cinematic aspect of the case, claiming that the FBI would not allow Rozier to self-surrender and instead insisted on arresting him in a hotel. (The FBI’s press offices are not fielding inquiries during the government shutdown, citing “the current lapse in appropriations.”) “They wanted the misplaced glory of embarrassing a professional athlete with a perp walk,” Trusty said. “That tells you a lot about the motivations in this case.” The 2025-era mafia The resulting coverage of the scandal has understandably revolved around the cocktail of mafia intrigue and gambling, which has sometimes obscured that the charges related to organized crime were made in a separate indictment from the case dealing with sports betting allegations. The particulars as to what degree of overlap exists between the indictments remain to be seen. Gene Borrello, a former Bonanno crime family henchman turned cooperator who has served 13 years in prison, crossing paths with Sam Bankman-Fried along the way, insisted to me that the emerging vision of mobsters rubbing shoulders with athletes was too nostalgic to be true. “Yeah, you have some NBA players maybe doing some crooked stuff to make some sports money,” Borrello said. “I guarantee you cannot show me one surveillance picture of Chauncey Billups with a guy from the Gambino family.” Borrello is not involved in the case, but he has refashioned himself as an online commentator on mafia matters and carries a certain bravado as his bona fides. He grew up with several of the defendants in the new indictment, whom he described as predominantly “absolutely peons” relative to the popular image of the mob. He was with Nicholas “Fat Nick” Minucci on 9/11 when Minucci was arrested for shooting paintballs at Sikhs outside a Queens temple, for which Borrello expressed some regret while maintaining, “We didn’t know any better.” (Borrello said he was arrested that day in a separate assault but ultimately cleared. Minucci, then a minor, had his conviction reversed but was later sentenced to 15 years in prison for another hate crime in 2005.) In 2012, Borrello carried out what he said was the last Bonanno shooting, one of 21 to which he ultimately confessed. “The mob is dead,” Borrello said. Touting his own mafia case as the “last real one that you’re going to see,” he argued that “they have to trump these charges up because mafia is so high-profile and everything you do goes front page, but there’s no more front page cases.” If we spoke again in a year, Borrello guaranteed me, “everybody will get five years at most.” In the meantime, interest in the case has made its way to Congress, with the House Committee on Commerce quickly asking NBA commissioner Adam Silver for a briefing by the end of this week. Billups and Rozier have been placed on indefinite leave, and at the center of a brewing storm in which many minds have already seemed to be made up. For his part, Silver was left to explain in an interview with Amazon’s sports streamer on Friday how it could be that the league had cleared Rozier. Silver noted, as the NBA had earlier, that his league does not wield subpoena power. “He still hasn’t been convicted of anything, in fairness to Terry,” Silver added, though he acknowledged, “Obviously, it doesn’t look good.”

Technology

Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s Memoir, ‘Nobody’s Girl,’ Offers a Graphic Picture of a Life of Abuse

What often went unsaid at these junctures was that, in many instances, the documents in question were the product of one Epstein victim’s quest, over several years, to bring attention to the horrors she said she suffered at the hands of the late financier and his convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s account of her relationship with Maxwell and Epstein is out in a new memoir Nobody’s Girl, which details some of the inner workings of their operation. After Giuffre accused Maxwell of sexual abuse in 2015, the British socialite went beyond denying the allegations and branded Giuffre a full-blown liar. That claim, in turn, prompted Giuffre to sue Maxwell for defamation, leading to the streams of discovery and depositions that animated so much of the criminal scrutiny and amateur sleuthing that followed. (The defamation suit was settled in 2017. Maxwell was ultimately charged for child sex trafficking among other infractions and is serving a twenty year prison sentence.) It was one of the many ways in which Giuffre, who grew up in Palm Beach and died by suicide in Australia in April, shaped the conversation around Epstein and Maxwell. Giuffre claimed that she was forced into sex with Prince Andrew at 17 years old after Epstein trafficked her to him among other wealthy and prominent friends. (Andrew has repeatedly denied this.) In 2022, Giuffre and Andrew settled a lawsuit she brought against him, but the allegations sent the royal family into an ongoing spiral. On Friday, just days before the publication of Giuffre’s much-awaited memoir, Andrew announced that he would no longer use his royal title. Giuffre met Maxwell while working as a spa attendant at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, as she recounted in an excerpt from Nobody’s Girl, which Vanity Fair exclusively published last week, and after breaking free from Epstein’s clutches, she became the foremost voice in the fight for justice for his scores of victims. Amid the current wave of outrage surrounding Trump, Maxwell, their prior relationship, and the possibility of a presidential pardon, Giuffre’s posthumous memoir may offer few surprises. Still, the book is among the fullest and most vivid pictures to date of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s modi operandi. “Writing a book with someone is always an intimate exercise,” Giuffre’s co-author Amy Wallace writes in the memoir’s foreword. Doubly so given the subject matter at hand, and the complications in this instance go even further. Shortly before her death, Giuffre claimed that her husband, Robert, was violent with her for years, and after her suicide, her family members said that she wanted to revise the book to that end. (A lawyer for Robert has said he cannot comment amid ongoing court proceedings.) Wallace mostly dispenses with this tension in the prologue, writing that the finished product represents a manuscript that Giuffre had previously approved. But as Giuffre’s many loving recollections of Robert unfurl—she portrays him as the key figure in helping her move past her time with Epstein and Maxwell—the unresolved matter inevitably hangs over the book. Maxwell’s 2021 federal trial often revolved around a grim pattern. Her victims testified about troubled childhoods involving addiction and abuse and how an elegant and cultured woman suddenly appeared in their lives to exploit them, as if seeming to smell the vulnerability. In harrowing detail, Giuffre offers her own experience of that template by describing a long trail of sexual assault that she says began when she was 7 years old and her father and a family friend took turns molesting her. (Giuffre’s father has denied this; the family friend was convicted for abusing another minor.) The intrigue around Epstein has naturally centered on his connections to the global elite, but here Giuffre tells a less sensational but perhaps more damning story of privilege. Maxwell, Giuffre recalls, taught her how to hold a knife and a fork and fold a napkin in her lap. “I’d be lucky, I thought, if I could grow up to be anything like” Maxwell, she writes. “This only makes sense, of course, when you consider how little I’d grown up hoping for. Giuffre refers to a “Billionaire Number One” to whom she says she was trafficked by Epstein. Sending her by taxi from his Palm Beach mansion to a nearby luxury resort, Giuffre writes, Epstein instructed her to “give him whatever he wants…just like you do for me.” The book does not significantly change the account Giuffre had long given of being assaulted by Andrew, but she tells it here at a more relaxed—and therefore more excruciating—pace. She also resurfaces some not altogether new but comparatively little noticed allegations about what she witnessed in her time with Epstein and Maxwell. She was trafficked, she writes, to a man whom she “also saw having sexual contact with Epstein himself.” Amid Maxwell’s boasts of her friendships with famous men, Giuffre claims, Maxwell enjoyed “repeating that once, at some random event, she’d taken the actor George Clooney into a bathroom and given him a blow job. Whether that was true or not, we'd never know.” This alleged boast of Maxwell's initially surfaced in a manuscript of Giuffre's memoir that had been submitted to the court in her defamation suit, and which the court released some years ago. (A representative for Clooney did not return a request for comment.) President Trump’s friendship with Epstein remains a fascination for the media and speculators alike. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein’s crimes and is suing the Wall Street Journal over its report that his name adorned a sexually suggestive contribution to a book of well-wishes that Maxwell organized for Epstein’s 50th birthday. Giuffre revisits the news-dominating dust-up from Trump’s first term, when his Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who signed off on Epstein’s notorious sweetheart deal as a federal prosecutor in Florida in 2008, resigned over the scandal. But for the most part, Trump, the dominant character in today’s intrigue around the case, is a bit player in Giuffre’s memoir, connected to the story only insofar as his club provides the setting for her initial encounter with Maxwell. In a footnote, Giuffre even commends Trump to a degree, citing reporting that Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago in 2007 after Epstein hit on the teenage daughter of another member. In 2010, she notes, three years after Epstein became a registered sex offender, he held a party attended by Andrew, Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, and Woody Allen. “Only later would it become clear that Epstein had been shunned by at least one powerful person he’d previously wooed,” Giuffre writes. “Donald Trump.” The task is beyond the scope of the memoir, but it is difficult to arrive at the end of Nobody’s Girl and not be left with additional questions about the final days of Giuffre’s troubled and highly dissected life. The month before her suicide, Giuffre said on Instagram that a car accident had left her with only four days to live, a sudden development that sent Epstein conspiracists into overdrive. While in the hospital, she first made her abuse allegations against her husband. After her death, which her attorney described as not “suspicious in any way,” her father claimed that “somebody got to her.” As with so much of the broader Epstein case, the fogginess ensures that conjecture will outstrip restraint.