NEW YORK -Chauncey Billups, an NBA Hall of Fame player and head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, and Terry Rozier, a guard with the Miami Heat, are among more than 30 people charged on Thursday in connection with two separate but related federal gambling investigations that involved the league and organized crime.
The schemes – one of them focused on insider sports betting and another that rigged poker games nationwide – spanned years and involved tens of millions of dollars in illicit gains from wire fraud, money laundering, extortion and gambling, FBI Director Kash Patel said at a press conference in Brooklyn on Thursday.
Rozier was one of several National Basketball Association insiders who provided non-public information about how they would perform to their criminal partners, who in turn used straw bettors to place multiple bets based on the tips, authorities said.
In March 2023, for instance, Rozier told associates in advance he would leave a game early with a supposed injury, allowing them to profit when he did not reach his expected statistical totals for the game, officials said.
“This is the insider trading saga for the NBA,” Patel said.
Billups was charged in a separate case with helping to rig poker games to defraud unknowing players who were lured to the games with the promise of playing against celebrities, officials said. The defendants employed sophisticated technology, including fraudulent card shufflers and x-ray tables.
That scheme also involved the Bonano, Gambino, Lucchese and Genovese organized crime families in New York, which took a cut of the profits, used extortion and robbery to collect unpaid debts and laundered proceeds through cryptocurrency and other means, according to prosecutors.
While the arrests stemmed from two separate indictments, a handful of defendants were charged in both cases, Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said, including former Cleveland Cavaliers player and assistant coach Damon Jones.
Representatives of the Heat, the Blazers and the NBA did not immediately answer requests for comment.
Rozier’s lawyer, James Trusty, said prosecutors “appear to be taking the word of spectacularly incredible sources rather than relying on actual evidence of wrongdoing. Terry was cleared by the NBA and these prosecutors revived that non-case.”
The arrests are likely to increase scrutiny of the relationship between online sportsbooks and professional sports leagues, which have reaped the benefits of a massive expansion in legalized betting even as they have also sought to assure fans and gamblers that the integrity of their gameplay remains unaffected.
Some lawmakers have expressed concern about the proliferation of bets that could be most easily manipulated by players, such as prop bets, in which bettors can wager on whether an individual player will hit or miss specific statistical totals in a given game.
Several players in the “Big Four” North American men’s leagues – the NBA, the National Football League, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League – have faced punishment for gambling in recent years.
Former NBA player Jontay Porter was banned from the league for life and pleaded guilty in 2024 after he was accused of manipulating his performance to help associates win wagers on his play, a case that officials said was linked to Thursday’s indictment.
Pete Rose, Major League Baseball’s all-time hits leader, was barred for life from MLB in 1989 after he was caught betting on games while he was the manager of the Cincinnati Reds. After repeated calls from U.S. President Donald Trump, Rose was posthumously removed from MLB’s permanently ineligible list earlier this year, making him eligible for the Hall of Fame.
Billups, 49, is in his fifth year as Portland’s head coach. He played for seven teams during his NBA career and won a championship with the Detroit Pistons in 2004, when he was named Most Valuable Player of the NBA Finals.
He was expected to make an initial court appearance later on Thursday in Portland.
Rozier, 31, is in his 11th NBA season and has averaged 13.9 points a game in his career. He had been under scrutiny for a a March 2023 game after several online sports books flagged an unusual number of bets that he would go under his projected stats for the day. He left the game after only nine minutes, citing an injury.
He was arrested in Orlando, Florida, where the Heat played the Magic on Wednesday night, and was expected to appear in court there on Thursday afternoon.
(Reporting by Julia Harte, Joseph Ax, Maria Tsvetkova, Jack Queen and Amy Tennery in New York; Editing by Frank McGurty)
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