NBA Head Coach and Multiple Players Among 30-Plus People Arrested in Alleged Gambling Scheme Connected to the Mafia

Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former Cleveland Cavaliers player Damon Jones were among 31 people arrested on Thursday, Oct. 23 on suspicion of their involvement in a massive sports gambling operation with connections to the Mafia, authorities said.

Billups, 49, was arrested early on Thursday morning in Portland, hours after his team lost its season opener to the Minnesota Timberwolves. Rozier, in Orlando for the team’s first game of the season against the Magic, was arrested at his hotel.

“Today we are here in New York to announce a historic arrest across a wide sweeping criminal enterprise that enveloped both the NBA and La Cosa Nostra,” FBI director Kash Patel announced at a press conference Thursday morning. “As you now know, individuals such as Chauncey Billups, Damon Jones and Terry Rozier were taken into custody today, former current NBA players and coaches. What you don’t know is that this is an illegal gambling operation and sports rigging operation that spanned the course of years. The FBI led a coordinated take down across 11 states to arrest over 30 individuals today responsible for this case, which is very much ongoing.”

“We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars in fraud,” Patel added, calling the arrests “historic.” 

The indictments against 31 defendants in two major cases, are “both involving fraud,”  U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York Joseph Nocella Jr. said.

“One involves sports betting and the other involves illegal gambling,” Nocella Jr. said. “The first indictment involves six defendants who are alleged to have participated, one of the most brazen sports corruption schemes since online sports betting became widely legalized in the United States. This scheme is an insider sports betting conspiracy that exploited confidential information about National Basketball Association athletes and teams.”

He continued, “The second indictment involves 31 defendants alleged to have participated in a nationwide scheme to rig illegal poker games. These defendants, which include former professional athletes, used high-tech cheating technology to steal millions of dollars from victims in underground poker games that were secretly fixed. The gains in the New York area were backed by the Bonanno Gambino and Genovese crime families of La Casa Nostra.”

The cases are separate, he added, but three defendants — Jones, Eric Earnest and Shane Hennen —are suspected of having overlapping roles.

Billups, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame and played in the NBA for 17 seasons, is entering his fifth season as the Trail Blazers coach.

Authorities said that he participated in an illegal poker game in Manhattan, Miami, Las Vegas the Hamptons, according to CNN. The games involved members of at least three New York mafia families and Billups and Jones were allegedly paid for their participation.

Rozier, 31, was traded to the Heat in January 2024 and is in the final season of a four-year, $96.3 million contract he signed with the Charlotte Hornets in August 2021.

Authorities said that the Heat guard allegedly rigged games in connection with a sports bettor, allegedly shared information with bettors about game rosters and who would not play and allegedly faked an injury in a March 2023 game to benefit a betting ring, per CNN.

Jones, 49, played most of his career with the Cavaliers and was an assistant coach with the team from 2016-2018.

According to Nocella Jr., Jones was among a number of defendants who “perpetrated the scheme to defraud by betting on inside non-public information about NBA athletes and teams.”

“The non-public information included when specific players would be sitting out in future games or when they would pull themselves out early for purported injuries or illnesses,” he said. “The bets were placed through online sports books and also in person at casinos. The defendants relied on a network of strong bets to place the maximum amount of bets to increase their potential profits. Most of these guys succeeded and the intended losses were in the millions of dollars.”

On the eve of the NBA season on Tuesday, league commissioner Adam Silver appeared on The Pat McAfee Show and spoke about sports betting and its ongoing impact on the league.

“We’ve asked some of our partners to pull back some of the prop bets, especially when they’re on two-way players, guys who don’t have the same stake in the competition, where it’s too easy to manipulate something, which seems otherwise small and inconsequential to the overall score,” Silver said. “We’re trying to put in place – learning as we go and working with the betting companies – some additional control to prevent some of that manipulation.”