Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups
Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups — now indicted for his alleged participation in a yearslong scheme said to involve members of four notorious mafia families in New York. Image: Bloomberg
By Myles Miller
One of the marks at the Las Vegas poker table — mafia associates called them “fish” — seemed happy to hand his money to the NBA Hall of Famer.
“He was star struck!” one of the men now accused of rigging the card game texted. “Yea I know,” replied an associate who the FBI says was secretly signaling cheats at the table. “They all were really!”
The basketball star who was holding the cards: Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups — now indicted for his alleged participation in a yearslong scheme said to involve members of four notorious mafia families in New York.
Just days into the 2024-25 season, US pro basketball was shaken by news Thursday of wide-ranging federal indictments involving alleged illegal gambling. The charges resulted in the arrests of Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Damon Jones, formerly a personal shooting coach for the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, LeBron James.
Rozier was charged in connection with a long-running investigation into players who allegedly alter their performance on the court so co-conspirators can win bets. Authorities characterized it as one of the most brazen ploys since online sports betting was widely legalized in the US.
The alleged poker fraud stretched from Vegas to Miami to the Hamptons and New York, where members of the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino and Genovese crime families struck an unusual deal to share in the profits, prosecutors said.
Billups, 49, was used to reading people. His ability to sense what a play would look like is part of what made him first a point guard and then a coach.
But in the private poker games, it was the cards that were getting read, authorities say.
The machine on the table looked ordinary, a $10,000 DeckMate shuffler, the kind found in casinos everywhere. In reality, prosecutors say, it had been rewired to scan every card in the deck and send the results to a laptop across town.
Court documents described how the operator there — known within the group as the Driver — transmitted the information to a player at the table, the Quarterback, who passed it along with the smallest gestures: a tap on the wrist, a brush against the chips, a glance held a second too long.
Prosecutors said texts between the alleged conspirators captured the essence of the scheme. Billups and former Cleveland Cavaliers guard Damon Jones weren’t simply playing the game — they were the attraction.
According to prosecutors, the two were paid from the proceeds of games that weren’t games at all but the front end of a multistate enterprise marrying high technology to old New York organized crime.
The four New York mafia families financed and protected the poker network, taking shares of the profits and ensuring that debts were paid, one way or another, prosecutors said.
New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch called the alliance “extraordinarily rare,” adding that it showed how much money was at stake.
Victims, she said, believed they were sitting at a fair table but were cheated out of millions. One lost $1.88 million. Total losses, she said, have surpassed $7 million and continue to climb.
The Bonannos controlled the so-called Lexington Avenue Game in Manhattan, prosecutors said. The Gambinos operated another nearby, on Washington Place. In 2023, the two merged, agreeing to divide the revenue from both rigged and legitimate tables.
Surveillance photographs later captured reputed Bonanno member Julius Ziliani and Gambino associate Lee Fama meeting at Sally’s Bar, a block away, where prosecutors said they discussed how to split the money.
What made the operation modern wasn’t its reach but its tools. The indictment included images recovered from the defendants’ iCloud accounts. They showed DeckMate shufflers taken apart on kitchen tables, their circuit boards exposed.
Another shows a computer screen running a program that allegedly displayed the order of the cards in play. A third shows what prosecutors describe as an x-ray poker table glowing from underneath the felt.
The texts authorities released read like stage directions. In one exchange, a member of the group allegedly warned that Billups and another player had “hit two gutshots on the river against the same guy,” an improbable streak that risked arousing suspicion. The member suggested they lose intentionally to deflect attention.
The leader of the ring allegedly agreed, and the member replied that the players already knew all the signals.
Before a separate game in Miami in 2024, the indictment says another conspirator listed the table code in a message: touching a $1,000 chip meant one player had the best hand, tapping the chin meant another, touching the black chips meant the victim — the “fish” — was ahead and the team should fold.
Over time, the crime families allegedly began to treat the rigged poker tables like any other revenue stream. Prosecutors said the Bonannos and Gambinos took percentages from each game; the Genovese and Colombo crews provided loans and protection. When debts went unpaid, the consequences were traditional.
In one case, a player was beaten for failing to repay what he owed, according to the indictment. Another man, who fell behind on a $10,000 debt, allegedly received threatening messages, then arrived at the card room in a black Range Rover to hand over a check for half the amount.
In another episode, gunmen allegedly robbed a rival operator at gunpoint to retrieve a stolen DeckMate machine. And when one organizer tried to start his own competing game, prosecutors said Bonanno and Gambino members stormed the venue with a gun and a baton while cards were still on the table.
“When people refused to pay, these defendants did what organized crime has always done,” Tisch said. “They used threats, intimidation and violence. It’s the same pattern we have seen for decades — traditional mob enforcement methods combined with new technology to expand the reach of their operations.”
Money from the games moved through shell companies and cryptocurrency accounts. One wire transfer cited in the filings shows $100,000 sent to a front company in exchange for $97,000 in cash.
The same day prosecutors unsealed the poker case, they announced a second indictment, accusing the Miami Heat’s Rozier and others of using nonpublic information about injuries and lineups to place illegal bets on NBA games.
Jones, already charged in the poker operation, appeared in both sets of filings — the bridge between the locker room and the card room.
James Trusty, a lawyer for Rozier, didn’t return an email and voicemail seeking comment. Contact information for lawyers for Jones and Billups were not immediately available.
Federal agents said the evidence shows that organized crime is still alive, applying their old hierarchies to new digital tools, and professional athletes are lending their celebrity to make it look legitimate.