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By Max Towey
On March 23, 2023, the New Orleans Pelicans faced off against the Charlotte Hornets at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans. It seemed like it would be a forgettable game. Now we know it was anything but.
Nine minutes and 36 seconds in, Hornets guard Terry Rozier exited the game with a foot injury. He was not listed on his team’s injury report before the game, and it wasn’t clear what caused the injury during the game. Nevertheless, he left and wouldn’t return to the court for the rest of the season.
Earlier that day, a bettor at a sportsbook in Biloxi, Mississippi, placed $13,759 in bets on all of Rozier’s “unders.” If you’re not among the 22% of Americans with an active sports betting account – including 48% of men ages 18-49 – an “under” is a bet that a player will fall short of his or her expected stat totals. For example, if a player is expected to score 14 points on a given night, an “under” bet wins if the player scores fewer than 14 points that night.
This particular bettor in Biloxi placed 30 separate bets on Rozier’s unders. They all won.
It turns out that Rozier’s “unders” were a popular pick that night. A ring of bettors made similar wagers, and they all won. The unusual betting activity caught the NBA’s attention and prompted an investigation. However, the initial investigation cleared Rozier’s name.
NBA spokesman Mike Bass said in January of this year, “In March 2023, the NBA was alerted to unusual betting activity related to Terry Rozier's performance in a game between Charlotte and New Orleans. The league conducted an investigation and did not find a violation of NBA rules. We are now aware of an investigation by the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York related to this matter and have been cooperating with that investigation.”
So was it all luck? Not quite.
On Thursday morning, the FBI arrested Terry Rozier, along with Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and 34 others in what will likely be the biggest scandal in NBA history. For comparison, the infamous Tim Donaghy gambling scandal – which earned a full Netflix documentary – netted the disgraced referee just $300,000.
The scale of this scandal appears orders of magnitude larger. In a Thursday press conference, FBI director Kash Patel described it as such:
“This is an illegal gambling operation and sports-rigging operation that spanned the course of years. The fraud is mind-boggling. It's not hundreds of dollars. It's not thousands of dollars. It's not even millions of dollars. We're talking about tens of millions of dollars in fraud and theft and robbery across a multi-year investigation.”
Sports betting was just one part of the FBI’s investigation. In the second indictment, the FBI claims that a ring of NBA figures – including former star and current head coach Chauncey Billups – ran a series of rigged poker games in New York alongside the Cosa Nostra, aka The Mafia. The group, per the FBI, used sophisticated technology, including an X-ray poker table, rigged shuffling machines, and secret surveillance cameras, to cheat victims out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per game.
So what exactly happened? How did it all come together? What role did the explosion of sports betting play? We seek to answer these questions in today’s deep-dive.
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Editor’s Note
So was it just a matter of time? That having entrenched itself in sports media and the general public, sports betting would take over the sports themselves? Or is this nothing new, just part of the centuries-old tradition of rigging games to make some extra cash? Let us know by replying to this email.
Also, a correction: As a few readers pointed out, we wrote yesterday that Milei oversaw Argentina’s first deficit in over a century. That should have said surplus. As mentioned, he’s slashed government spending, eliminating the deficit and achieving a surplus.
Some other replies to our story on why the US bailed out Argentina:
Tomas from Argentina wrote:
Some of that good things that you mention happened here are not that good. Recession hasn't stopped and local businesses and industries are collapsing and closing, people stopped consuming and the way poverty is measured is outdated and it's believed that it doesn't really reflect the reality of most argentinians. i live in buenos aires capital and the truth that you can see is that there are way more homeless people than before and on my own case, i have a really good paycheck and my ability to save is gone, i have savings that i couldn't make grow in the past six months, the dollar is cheap but prices in pesos are skyhigh. Argentinians are travelling a lot because the rest of the world is cheaper, it's crazy that food is cheaper in most other countries when we produce a wide variety of food at a surplus.
Also is the always increasing debt that has always been a ghost for Argentinians, we believe that the consequences of this swap with the US means loss of natural resources and sovereignty in the future.
If you could inform more of the deep results of milei's presidency i think it would be great for everyone to know what is happening. most polls give that in the next midterm this sunday milei's party will lose astonishingly.
i love your work. I've followed you since you started and thank you for what you do!
And Donna said:
The president supplying $20B to a foreign country after campaigning on “making America great again” is tough to watch, in and of itself. Doing it during one of the longest government shutdowns ever, while constructing a literal ballroom at the White House, after stripping away healthcare coverage from millions, and removing subsidies making health insurance payments even remotely affordable for Americans is enraging. I see this over as sacrificing Americans’ wellbeing while supplying billions to another country.
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—Max and Max
