Mafia, X-ray specs & FBI: Inside NBA gambling scandal

14:44Andy Hughes:their main tactic is intimidation and exploitation. They will see highly paid sports stars who frankly don't know a lot about the real world as easy prey. And this has been happening, again, since the 50s and 60s where boxers were throwing matches. And then in the 80s, the FBI looked into what was happening in the NBA because they knew that the five mafia families were trying to infiltrate it. So this is a common tactic that we see time and time again, these organized, intimidating criminals going after, they see vulnerable people with lots of money and maybe not much sense and also i mean you talk

15:24Gabby:about the intimidation i mean you go to the pakistani spot fixing the players involved there you know muhammad amir was 18 when when he got embroiled in that um and it you talk about intimidation it is it's threats it's threats to family back on the subcontinent isn't it it's it's you don't do this we will we will hurt people you love that's how that happened it tends to be more

15:50Andy Hughes:intimidation than financial oh yeah totally and what they will do is they will get in touch with the families of these players or associates of these players they will find out who they are and then they then make threats to their family and not to them then then they're entrapped and this is what happened with the Pakistani scandal and as you say he was 18 years old and he went to jail for that and he was banned for like 4 or 5 years so I mean he managed to actually come back and salvage some sense of his career but that's very rare

16:21Mark:30 indicted players, coaches what does that actually mean? How does this process work?

16:29Andy Hughes:Well the tricky thing about this the FBI and the gambling companies it would be easy for them to identify these trends these niche bets that are losing loads of money then therefore you look into that what's tricky for the fbi is are these participants willing or unwilling are they being exploited and that is much harder to get their heads around because again these organized criminals will be leaning on these people involved saying if you talk about us if you tell us then And we're going to hurt your family. So people who may be unwilling in this, they may have to be going through this whole procedure because they're scared.

17:08Mike Vorkunov:I guess to me, the question has always been how did they get involved in the first place? You know, we know we know some outlines of the alleged scheme. But you take like John T. Porter, like, you know, he ran up gambling debts. And in some of the texts that the federal government had and shared, he mentioned that he was being threatened for it. right and so this is an mba player who was put in that position i did a hansi i may have mentioned

17:32Gabby:this before gabby i can't remember i did a hansi crony documentary 10 years ago more than 10 years ago and i met the bookmaker in a hotel room in london i mean me and my producer before we went into that room were slightly nervous before we went in there but we met the bookmaker involved with Hansi Cronje and he took me through so many different games that he was either involved in influencing or assumed would have been influenced and one of the reasons why he could influence it was because of the nature of what you could bet on at the time you know how many runs a team would score after 10 overs over under how many runs a team would score in 15 overs and a bit like what mike said there andy you know if you have a market on whether the first pitch of a baseball game is going to be a ball or a strike you're you're an idiot because because it's well you are only because it's easily manipulated if you want it to be so is the onus and cricket and bookmakers and cricket did change the markets that could be better could be better is it simply don't make

18:46Andy Hughes:your markets so specific i actually think i spoke to a detective about this and he says the way the betting system is certainly set up in this country and how niche you can make these bets it's actually designed to be exploited it's designed to actually be corrupt because it's why else would you bet on someone who's going to take a corner in the eighth minute of a game or something like that other than you know more than you should

19:18Mark:I was just thinking there about and Mark and I we know we will have experienced this kind of at the same time through the kind of progression of our sports that we cover and careers that we've had the number of stats that become available to us all the time you know whether it's in rugby you know it's kind of meters made after dominant tackles you know that kind of thing that wasn't a thing when I first started covering rugby. It was a thing in terms of the eyes. You could see players were doing that. You know, there's so much more to bet on if you look at kind of the huge range of stats that are delivered throughout a game.

19:50Mark:So, you know, anything in the underworld, like in the kind of like, you know, below the legal betting markets can happen, can't it? And that is something that, you know, I imagine is almost impossible to police, isn't it?

20:02Andy Hughes:Well, exactly. I mean, it just provides opportunities, doesn't it? It provides opportunities for these schemes to happen. It's just, it's making it very easy for criminals to do what they're doing.

20:14Gabby:What's the damage there, Mike, at the moment? Is there a sense at the moment of basketball fans in particular thinking, I don't believe half the stuff that's going on at the moment now. The new season's just got underway.

20:26Mike Vorkunov:I think they were thinking that even before all this. Not to be glim, but I think NBA fans are perhaps the most conspiratorial of all fan bases. You know, you guys might disagree with me, but there's always a bit of, you know, conspiratorial lore involved with the NBA in certain parts. And so whenever you have, you know, almost objective verification of your own conspiracies, right? Like in here, it's in the small cases, you know, Terry Rozier taking himself out of a game that didn't matter or Jonte Porter impacting two games. It just allows you to build on that. And so, look, I think it will make fans more wary, even if you're not able to find any evidence of a larger scheme, which we haven't seen to this part.

21:07Mike Vorkunov:And also, like reputationally for the league, you know, maybe it's it just happened to them instead of baseball or football down the line. But still, they're the first league that's genuinely impacted by sports gambling on such a large scale when you have, you know, FBI arrests, poker rings all in the same headline involving.

21:27Mark:It's not what the more wholesome brands want to be associated with, is it? No. So, you know, if you crack down on the advertising of gambling around the sport, as has happened over here, as you alluded to, then it's something which I'm sure they're going to go through a process of kind of discovery. Because at the moment, it feels and smells like crisis in crisis management.

21:47Mike Vorkunov:They're already kind of, you know, starting a little bit, maybe trying to control the path through which injuries are reported. Right. Like we saw that was something that was exploited. you know, who might not play in a game. I think there's a limit to it because ultimately, can you really control everyone who finds something out who's around the team? You can't just ban players from having friends and family and not finding out information. It's impossible, right? Like it's, that's not even like the NBA's fault. That's just, that just is. You say that, you say that, right?

22:19Mark:But a friend of mine recently, it was involved in a major merger of two companies. Had he told us and we put money on one of those companies, He would be implicated. We could be implicated. And for that reason, he did not tell us. We did not press him to do that. Now, obviously, that's because I would like to think we've got good moral compasses, right? But because the fallout for him as somebody who was leading a major stock market merger would be criminal, would be huge. I'm not talking about sharing with your auntie that you've got a bad knee. But, you know, to not be relaying that information.

22:52Mark:And also, sports fans are notoriously secretive, aren't they? Footballers whisper to each other on the pitch, you know. They don't let the team out. A football team doesn't go out until an hour before kickoff, for goodness sake.

23:02Gabby:But weirdly, Gabby, I mean, without bringing it back to us, which I know we like to do, there was a market for Match of the Day presenter. Good point well made. There was, wasn't there? And, you know, I mean, I didn't talk to anybody about it. And I said they'll never give it to Davina McCall. but but even like strictly at the moment yeah yeah it's i suppose andy again i go back to if you run a book on it then you're a bit vulnerable aren't you there's a name for it or everything

23:33Andy Hughes:you're talking about it's insider trading and if if if you know what's going to happen then how are you basically going to prove that someone knew that they there was going to be an injury in the eighth minute unless someone actually admits it how are you going to actually prove it just by the stats just by looking at the amount of money that was made if everyone denies it i mean it's going to be pretty difficult legally to actually get over the line and sorry the other

24:01Gabby:thing that we we're doing here we're talking about sort of above above board bookmakers and books and gambling you know there will always be the under the table gambling which still leaves athletes susceptible and that was one of the big things with cricket obviously back in the day was because there was no official betting market in in india for example um the one thing as well about this

24:29Mark:that has really struck me as somebody whose favorite film is goodfellas is just how that kind of unsophisticated the development of the mafia money-making machine is in the sense that to my mind I would have thought they were well into like kind of cybercrime by now right I would have thought they'd have moved away from kind of x-ray glasses on a poker table and they're almost in plain sight aren't they these crimes well yeah I mean they kind of always have been they're old

24:55Andy Hughes:school and they I mean betting has always been a staple for them and the reason they got involved It was just a steady stream of income for them. And it was actually relatively low risk, way less risky than drug trafficking or extortion or anything like that. So they've always seen this as just, listen, we're not going to make easy money. I mean, even back in the 70s, John Gotti was making 15 million quid a year. And he was saying, that's just a little steady earner for me. So that kind of tells you how big their enterprise is.

25:28Mark:So they use the big name coaches and players often as kind of big fishes to lure in and get people to come and play in a game because they want to play with a celebrity effectively. So they're not even asking them within that game necessarily to do very much. The table and the other tricks they've got around it will do that.

25:46Andy Hughes:Yeah, exactly. And I assume the agents and the entourage of these players, because they've all got big entourages now, I'm assuming they will be getting dragged into this because how else would you get to them? And once they've got their claws in, once they organise criminals, when people like the Gambino family in New York are getting their claws into you, it is very hard to get out there. Well, if your agent's worth their salt, your agent's going,

26:11Mark:why are you going to Vegas on a Tuesday night on a private jet? What's going on? So, yeah, they don't act in silos, do they?

26:18Gabby:No, no. Is there any way, Mike, that this works out as a positive in the end? I mean, the NBA statement says this is an opportune time to carefully reassess how sports betting should be regulated and how sports leagues can best protect themselves, their players and their fans. Is that the positive?

26:40Mike Vorkunov:If anything actually happens, we'll see. But I haven't seen any interest from sportsbooks as of now or even maybe in the leagues to just limit, let's say, even prop bets. right? That's the most exploitable one. You're betting on one person specifically to do or not do something.

26:54Mark:The conspiracy theorists are having a field day now, aren't they? And one of those doing the rounds is that, why did Michael Jordan leave the league in 94 to play baseball? That's one that's been doing the rounds. Have you noticed any more unusual ones that have reared their head?

27:10Mike Vorkunov:The NBA is just a history of conspiracies. You know, why did the Knicks win the NBA draft lottery in 1995 the Jordan one you know the Lakers beat the Kings in the 2002 Western Conference Finals the NBA has had like you know their their gambling scandals before Tim Donaghy if you remember him

27:26Gabby:like this just comes up all the time we did it we did it earlier this year didn't we who won the

27:31Mark:draft this year that seemed the Mavericks that's right yeah the bizarre odds that ended up with

27:36Gabby:Dallas getting the first pick after they traded Dontich to the Lakers yeah I think it was roughly

27:42Mike Vorkunov:one percent if i remember the answer correctly that's right yeah um yeah listen back to that

27:46Mark:episode of the sports agents to prove that we haven't just jumped on the story no exactly we've

27:52Gabby:been across it all along i also love in the midst of that you sort of um suggested to the mafia that they could up their game a bit i mean there's part of me that feels quite nostalgic for their

28:05Mark:old-fashioned ways. And the movie of this will, of course, be excellent. Thank you so much, Mike, for joining us. And of course, you can listen to The Crime Agents, which is another of the global podcasts fronted by Andy Hughes.

28:24Andy Hughes:The Sports Agents

28:28Andy Hughes:The Sports Agents

28:30Mike Vorkunov:with Gabby Logan and Mark Chapman

28:34Gabby:OK, that's it for today. Make sure you subscribe or follow and leave a review and you can catch up with all of our past episodes on YouTube, Global Player or wherever you get your pods.

28:43Mark:And you can always get in touch with us at thesportsagents at global.com or messages on social media via the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.

28:52Andy Hughes:This has been a Global Player original production.