It took just two days after tipoff for the NBA to get rocked by one of the most shocking and existential criminal scandals in the league’s 80-year history. On Thursday morning, the feds did a sweep that rounded up a whopping 34 people in connection with two separate FBI probes: the first, into sports-betting schemes that benefited from inside information; the second, into fixed poker games backed by members of four New York–based Mafia families. A few of those implicated are high-profile basketball faves: Hall of Famer and Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, and former Cleveland Cavaliers assistant coach Damon Jones. Billups and Rozier, who were arrested in their teams’ respective states, have since been released on bail under “substantial” conditions and placed on leave from the league, with future federal court dates on the horizon.
What they were involved in, as FBI Director Kash Patel attested at a press conference, was “a wide-sweeping criminal enterprise that envelops both the NBA and La Cosa Nostra.” Even outside the mob ties, these arrests cast a pall over the league’s cozy associations with the sportsbooks that dominate the business of American athletics—and tease even more arrests, investigations, accusations, and trials to come, as unnamed co-conspirators with explicit team ties run rampant across legal filings. An FBI assistant director warned that this is all “just the tip of the iceberg.” And the paranoia within the league has ramped up—if a legend like Billups and a veteran like Rozier are caught up, who else shares the guilt?
The details that we know now are troubling enough. Billups—already notorious for his involvement in 2004’s “Malice at the Palace” and for a sexual assault allegation dating back to the 1990s—has been accused of money laundering and wire fraud conspiracies, having allegedly defrauded underground poker players of nearly $7 million by deploying sophisticated surveillance tech on behalf of various Mafia members (some of whom were also arrested Thursday). Billups, who wore a Hornets hoodie while appearing in court, denied everything through his attorney. Rozier, who’s facing the same charges as Billups, purportedly ran a scheme much closer to the NBA: faking an injury in a 2023 game while playing for the Charlotte Hornets and informing a close friend—named in the indictment as De’Niro “Niro” Laster—beforehand so he could win “prop” bets on Rozier’s game-time stats. Per the indictment, Laster then took a collective of fellow insider bettors to Rozier’s North Carolina home to count their tens of thousands of dollars in winnings. (The player’s lawyer has countered that Rozier is “not a gambler.”)
Cavaliers assistant coach Jones, who’s also facing the same two charges, has been connected to both the Mafia and sports-betting plots. The latter, however, is perhaps most damning: As a former teammate and longtime confidant of LeBron James, Jones apparently used his privileged access to James and his most recent team, the Los Angeles Lakers, to help a friend win some money during the squad’s February 2023 matchup against the Milwaukee Bucks. He reportedly texted a bettor to place a “big bet on Milwaukee tonight before the information is out” after learning of James’ ankle injury, which caused the Laker to soon leave the game. In early 2024, Jones also shared “non-public” information about a showdown between the Lakers and the Oklahoma City Thunder with another now-indicted gambler. James was not made aware of Jones’ deeds or explicitly named in the indictment, but a behind-the-scenes source told ESPN that Jones’ NBA info indeed revolved around his superstar friend. (On the Mafia-poker front, Jones served a similar role as Billups and earned illicit funds for participating in the fix.)
It all goes pretty deep. Billups was not explicitly named in the sports-gambling indictment that targeted Rozier, but he does match the description of the anonymized “Co-Conspirator 8,” who tipped off a charged gambler, Eric Earnest, that the Trail Blazers’ top players would sit out a March 2023 game against the Chicago Bulls; the Midwestern team emerged triumphant. Rozier was charged through the course of the same federal investigation that, just two years ago, led to a lifetime NBA ban for Toronto Raptors center and eager financial trader Jontay Porter—who, like Rozier, pretended to have a debilitating condition during two different games and informed some gambling associates beforehand so they could cash in on player-performance bets.
Additionally, current free agent Malik Beasley was revealed in June to be the subject of gambling probes from the NBA and from federal prosecutors with the U.S. district attorney for the Eastern District of New York, the same court that brought this Thursday’s charges. To be clear, Beasley has not been named in any connection with the latest specific schemes—and yet, as one Bluesky user noted, he’d just so happened to be traded to the Lakers on the exact same date that Jones sent those insider texts alluding to James’ injury. In a July episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, the namesake host looked into Beasley’s case and noted the major role brokered Ammar Awawdeh, an associate of the Gambino crime family—who was just named in the indictment that roped in Billups and Jones. On Bluesky, Oregonian sports editor Nik Streng also noted that Awawdeh was part of the ring that led to Porter’s ban.
Yet what’s especially chilling for the NBA this time is that Billups and Rozier are far more famous and renowned than Porter or Beasley. Rozier, once the sole record holder for the most 3-pointers made during a season-opening game, had to be mentioned in an awkward Inside the NBA broadcast after Denver Nuggets forward Aaron Gordon tied that record Thursday night in a face-off with the Golden State Warriors. Those who are not basketball fans may also recognize Rozier as the author of a classic tweet from the date of Osama bin Laden’s assassination. (“Osama shouldve hooped instead of tryna kill ppl cause he tall as hell!”)
Plus, the entire sportsbook industry has saturated and propped up basketball and sports media as we know it. As I wrote back in August, this situation will only escalate as prediction markets like Kalshi, Polymarket, and Robinhood also elbow their way into pro athletics, whether through advertising blitzes, straight-up league partnerships, or even special arrangements with sports bettors themselves. (Peep the Robinhood logo on Rozier’s Heat jersey, part of a teamwide, multiyear patch sponsorship.) During ESPN’s Thursday night Get Up! discussion, the show’s producers quickly, suddenly deleted a promotional banner for the ESPN Bet service after host Mike Greenberg noted that gambling was formerly “something that networks like ESPN would stay far away from,” leaving a conspicuous gap at the bottom of the screen.
As legalized sports betting has expanded across the country, so have the inevitable conflicts of interest. Damon Jones’ leverage of his relationship with LeBron James is reminiscent of last year’s fiasco with international baseball star Shohei Ohtani, whose interpreter bilked him of millions of dollars to pour into America’s sportsbooks. The compounding of NBA-specific suspensions and investigations over the past two years, plus the heightened name recognition of those either actively involved or inadvertently caught up—it really doesn’t get bigger than LeBron—make this now an inescapable issue for the NBA and its sportsbook friendliness. Warriors figureheads Draymond Green and Steph Curry may dismiss the broader salience (Curry: “The integrity of the game is fine … I wouldn’t worry about that too much”), but the intrigue and suspicion won’t settle down. Take Marves Fairley, one of the indicted bettors who benefited from Rozier’s and Billups’ tips, who also got inside info for a 2023 game from a “then Orlando Magic player” who’s still unidentified. In addition, Fairley was recorded by various sportsbooks themselves as having allegedly spearheaded a “syndicate” that made suspicious, repeated bets throughout the past couple of seasons of men’s college basketball, according to ESPN. (“Fairley denied any involvement.”) And yet, just this Wednesday, the NCAA changed its rules so that players and university-athletics staffers can themselves bet on games.
As these cases progress, the basketball ecosystem will remain on edge for a while yet, faced with the urgent need to reckon with how deeply American pro sports has been enmeshed with gambling—and whether it wants to acquiesce to the other betting companies rapidly closing in. Per an anonymous executive quoted by NBC News: “It’s a nightmare for the league.”