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.”
