The NBA, one of the world’s most prominent sports leagues, found itself associated with illegal gambling again on Thursday after two prominent stars were arrested in a sweeping federal investigation. Chauncey Billups, a Hall of Fame player who is now coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, was arrested in connection with a poker operation linked to the mafia, while Miami Heat star Terry Rozier is accused of taking part in a scheme to manipulate games.
“Today, we are here in New York to announce a historic arrest across a wide sweeping criminal enterprise,” the FBI director, Kash Patel, said at a news conference on Thursday unveiling the charges. “This is an illegal gambling operation and sports rigging operation that spanned the course of years.”
Federal prosecutors unsealed two indictments on Thursday, and announced that they had arrested “over 30 individuals” across multiple states as part of a federal investigation into “sports rigging” and illegal gambling operations that authorities say involved the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese crime families.
Patel said on Thursday that defendants are facing charges including wire fraud, money laundering, extortion, robbery and illegal gambling
“The fraud is mind-boggling,” Patel said. “We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars in fraud and theft and robbery.”
Joseph Nocella, the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, said on Thursday the first indictment involves sports betting and six defendants whom he said were involved in a sports-betting scheme that “exploited confidential information about National Basketball Association athletes and teams”.
The New York police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said the alleged operation centered on “professional basketball, where players and associates allegedly used inside information to manipulate prop bets on major sports betting platforms”.
Tisch described an alleged March 2024 incident involving Rozier, currently a guard for the Miami Heat but who was then playing for the Charlotte Hornets.
Tisch said Rozier “allegedly let others close to him noted know that he planned to leave the game early with a supposed injury”.
“Using that information, members of the group placed more than $200,000 in wagers on his under statistics,” she alleged, adding: “Rozier exited the game after just nine minutes, and those bets paid out, generating tens of thousands of dollars in profit.”
“The proceeds were later delivered to his home,” she alleged.
The second indictment, authorities said, “involves 31 defendants” including Billups and the former NBA player Damon Jones.
The defendants are alleged to “have participated in a nationwide scheme to rig illegal poker games”.
According to prosecutors, the alleged illegal rigged poker games began in 2019 and occurred across the US, including in the Hamptons, Las Vegas, Miami and Manhattan, and were backed by the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese crime families.
The defendants,prosecutors said on Thursday, allegedly used hi-tech cheating technology to “steal millions of dollars from victims in underground poker games that were secretly fixed”.
Officials said the operation targeted victims, known as “fish”, who were “lured to participate in these rigged games by the chance to play alongside former professional athletes” , who, he said, were referred to as “face cards”.
The so-called “face cards”, officials said, included Billups and Jones.
“What the victims 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,” Nocella said. “Once the game was under way, the defendants fleeced the victims out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per game.”
Prosecutors claim that the defendants used “very sophisticated cheating technologies” including rigged shuffling machines, poker chip tray analyzers, special contact lenses and an X-ray poker table that could read cards.
The Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese crime families, Nocella said, “had pre existing control over non-rigged illegal poker games around New York City” and so “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”.
Authorities say that the defendants “laundered their proceeds, including through cash exchanges, use of multiple shell companies and through cryptocurrency transfers as part of the scheme”.
Nocella also alleged that 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 debt”.
Nocella emphasized that all defendants are presumed innocent until they are proven guilty in a court of law.
On Thursday, the NBA issued a statement saying it was reviewing the indictments. It said Rozier and Billups had been placed on immediate leave. “We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority,” the organization said.
Rozier was taken into custody in Orlando early Thursday morning. His team did not immediately comment on the arrest.
Rozier’s lawyer, Jim Trusty, said prosecutors “appear to be taking the word of spectacularly incredible sources rather than relying on actual evidence of wrongdoing. Trusty previously told ESPN that Rozier was told that an initial investigation determined he did nothing wrong after he met with NBA and FBI officials in 2023.
The case was brought by the same US attorney’s office in Brooklyn that previously prosecuted the ex-NBA player Jontay Porter. The former Toronto Raptors center pleaded guilty to charges that he withdrew early from games, claiming illness or injury, so that those in the know could win while betting on him to underperform expectations. The NBA later banned Porter from the league for life.
A game involving Rozier that has been in question was played on 23 March 2023, a matchup between the Hornets and the New Orleans Pelicans. Rozier played the first 10 minutes of that game – and not only did he not return that night, citing a foot issue, but he did not play again that season. Charlotte had eight games remaining and were not in playoff contention, so it did not seem particularly unusual that Rozier was shut down for the season’s final games.
In that 23 March game, Rozier finished with five points, four rebounds and two assists in that opening period – a productive quarter, but well below his usual total output for a full game.
Rozier has $160m in career earnings, and is in the final year of a four-year $96m contract. Billups was a five-time All-Star during his playing career and won a championship with the Detroit Pistons in 2004. He retired in 2014 and has been Portland head coach since 2021.
