New York FBI Assistant Director Christopher Raia said that "Operation Royal Flush" has arrested dozens of members of various crime families of "la Cosa Nostra" in an illegal gambling scheme. They allegedly used NBA stars as "bait" to get people into high-level poker games, where rigged card-counting machines and x-ray technology allowed unwitting gamblers to be fleeced out of millions of dollars
"We're talking about tens of millions of dollars in fraud and theft and robbery across a multi-year investigation in 11 states," FBI Director Kash Patel said.
Joseph Nocella Jr. was appointed the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York said:
NOCELLA: To be clear, we’re announcing today indictments in two major cases, both involving fraud. One involves sports betting, and the other involves illegal gambling—very specifically, rigged poker games.
The first indictment involves six defendants who are alleged to have participated in 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.
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 games in the New York area were backed by the Bonanno, Gambino, and Genovese crime families of La Cosa Nostra.
While the cases are separate, there are three overlapping defendants charged in both cases: Damon Jones, Eric Ernest, and Shane Hennon.
The indictments in these cases contain only allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent until they are proven guilty in a court of law. But my message to the defendants who’ve been rounded up today is this: your winning streak has ended. Your luck has run out. Violating the law is a losing proposition, and you can bet on that.
First, I would like to talk about United States v. Ernest, the NBA basketball gambling case. The defendants in this case are Eric Ernest, Marz Farley, Shane Hennon, Dairo Ler, Damon Jones—a former NBA player and coach—and Terry Rosier, a current NBA player. Other co-conspirators were previously charged for their roles in the scheme, including former NBA player Jontay Porter.
Between December 2022 and March 2024, these defendants perpetrated a 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 future games or when they would pull themselves out early for purported injuries or illnesses. They relied on corrupt individuals, including Jones and Rosier. They also misused information obtained through long-standing friendships that they had with NBA players and coaches. And, in at least one instance, they got their information by threatening a current player, Porter, because of his pre-existing gambling debts.
Defendants used this non-public information to place hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent bets, mostly in the form of prop bets on individual player performance. The bets were placed through online sportsbooks and also in person at casinos. The defendants relied on a network of straw bettors to place the maximum amount of bets to increase their potential profits. Most of these bets succeeded, and the intended losses were in the millions of dollars.
The defendants then laundered their illegal winnings in various ways: peer-to-peer platforms, bank wires, and simple cash exchanges. The indictment details specific examples where the defendants profited from illegal gambling and illegal betting on various NBA games about the performance of players on, among other teams, the Charlotte Hornets, the Portland Trail Blazers, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Toronto Raptors.
Each defendant in the NBA basketball gambling case has been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Now I would like to turn to the other case, United States v. Iel, the rigged poker game case. Beginning as early as 2019, the defendants in this case orchestrated a scheme to use wireless cheating technology to run rigged poker games across the United States, including in the Hamptons, Las Vegas, Miami, and Manhattan.
The scheme targeted victims known as “fish,” who were often lured to participate in these rigged games by the chance to play alongside former professional athletes who were known as “face cards.” The so-called face cards included the defendant Chauncey Billups, who at the time of the scheme was a former NBA player and is currently the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, and also Damon Jones, a former NBA player and coach.
What the victims—the fish—didn’t know was that everybody else at the poker game, from the dealer to the players, including the face cards, were in on the scam. Once the game was underway, the defendants fleeced the victims out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per game.
The defendants used a variety of very sophisticated cheating technologies, some of which were provided by other defendants in exchange for a share of the profits from the scheme. For example, they used off-the-shelf shuffling machines that had been secretly altered in order to read the cards in the deck, predict which player at the table had the best poker hand, and relay that information to an off-site operator. The off-site operator sent the information via cell phone back to a co-conspirator at the table, and that person at the table was known as the quarterback. The quarterback then secretly signaled the information he had received to others at the table, and together they used that information to win their games and cheat the victims.
Defendants used other cheating technologies such as poker chip-tray analyzers—which is a poker chip tray that secretly reads cards using a hidden camera—special contact lenses or eyeglasses that could read pre-marked cards, and an X-ray table that could read cards face down on the table. What you see depicted on a screen right now is an example of the X-ray table that reveals the cards. Although they are face down on the table, they can be read because of the X-ray technology.
The mafia—specifically members and associates of the Bonanno, Gambino, and Genovese organized-crime families—had pre-existing control over non-rigged illegal poker games around New York City. As a result, they also became involved in the rigged poker games, helping to organize the games, taking a cut of the proceeds, and working to enforce the collection of debts.
The defendants laundered their proceeds, including through cash exchanges, the use of multiple shell companies, and cryptocurrency transfers. As part of the scheme, some of 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 perpetrated against victims to ensure that they repaid their gambling debts.
Defendants who participated in the rigged-poker scheme are charged with wire-fraud conspiracy. Other defendants have been charged with crimes including illegal gambling, money laundering, Hobbs Act robbery, and extortion.
This case demonstrates our office’s unrelenting commitment to fighting the scourge of organized crime in whatever form it takes.
I’d like to conclude my remarks by thanking the incredible, hard work of our law-enforcement partners, including the FBI, Homeland Security, the NYPD, and the Waterfront Commission. I also want to thank the dedicated prosecutors who built these two cases and who are standing to my right: Benjamin Winrob, David Bourbon, Caitlyn Farrell, Michael Jabaldi, Iris Suchen, and Sean Sherman. They had the assistance of paralegal specialists Liam McNet, John Schneider, and Marlene Bosler.
Also deserving of our thanks, because of their outstanding investigative work on the NBA case, are FBI Special Agents Russell Lantier, Dominic Mariani, Amy GioRosa, Shane Wilkins, and Supervisory Special Agent Luke Cardison. On the rigged-poker-game scheme, outstanding work was performed by FBI Special Agents Thomas Kribbid, Jeff Boreola, Jonathan Corona, Alexander Silverman, Amy Campano, and Supervisory Special Agent Michael Mley, as well as NYPD Task Officer James McCulla; and from Homeland Security, Supervisory Special Agent Charles Fin; and from the Waterfront Commission, Detective Paul Shamborski.
Finally, I want to note that the investigations in both cases are ongoing, and we encourage anyone with information about either scheme to please contact the FBI.