They are said to be the prominent faces of the scam: Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat player Terry Rozier and Damon Jones, ex-player of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Keystone
An elaborate scam that defrauded celebrities and athletes out of millions is reminiscent of a Hollywood movie. The perpetrators used state-of-the-art technology to deceive their victims.
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- More than 30 people, including NBA coach Chauncey Billups and player Terry Rozier, were arrested for illegal sports betting and mafia contacts. Both deny the allegations.
- With the help of high-tech equipment such as X-ray tables and special glasses, the mafia manipulated poker games in which celebrities served as decoys and the victims lost around 7 million dollars.
- Investigations also revealed that NBA players were faking injuries in order to influence betting odds.
Yesterday, Thursday, the handcuffs snapped shut. The coach of the NBA team Portland Trail Blazers, Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat player Terry Rozier, former Cleveland Cavaliers player Damon Jones and around 30 other people were arrested for banned sports betting and illegal gambling. Among them are several members of the Mafia in the USA from the Cosa Nostra families Bonnano, Gambino, Lucchese and Genovese, as reported by the BBC.
Basketball stars Billups and Rozier have been released on conditional release and maintain their innocence. However, the coach remains suspended. Rozier has already been investigated in 2023 for irregularities in connection with sports betting.
High-tech fraud in celebrity poker
In addition to the manipulation of sports betting, the activities of the alleged fraudsters also included poker games – and not simply illegal poker for large sums of money, but games falsified using high-tech.
The sports celebrities acted as decoys, luring wealthy players to the poker table with the prospect of playing a few rounds in this illustrious circle. What they didn’t realize was that they had no chance of leaving the table with more money.
With X-ray tables, hidden cameras, high-tech glasses and contact lenses, as well as manipulated card shufflers, they were cheated from A to Z. The level of technology at the Zinkerei seems straight out of a Hollywood screenwriter’s imagination. But this is what the FBI seized during their searches, according to celebrity.land and various other media outlets.
What the wealthy poker fans also didn’t know was that the mafia was at the table and, above all, in the background. The gambling fraudsters scammed a total of around 7 million dollars from their unsuspecting victims.
FBI chief Kash Patel describes the scale and meticulousness of the fraud as astounding. The US Attorney’s Office describes the case as “like something out of a Hollywood movie”.
The operator saw everything
The arrests were announced alongside another basketball fraud case in which NBA players allegedly faked injuries to manipulate betting odds. The poker games, which began back in 2019, were run by the mafia. Part of the profits flowed into their criminal activities.
The X-ray tables made it possible to see which cards were face down on the playing surface. Special glasses and contact lenses recognized invisible markings, and shuffling machines dealt the cards in such a way that the mafia always won in the end.
The scam also involved sophisticated secret communication between the accomplices at the table and an operator who controlled the game from the background. In this way, they also let a victim win once so as not to make them suspicious. In the end, everyone was several thousand to several hundred thousand dollars poorer.
Mafia methods
“And when people refused to pay, these defendants did what organized crime has always done,” “celebrity.land” quotes a police commissioner from New York. “They threatened, they intimidated and they resorted to violence. It’s the same pattern we’ve seen for decades: traditional mafia methods of enforcing their interests.”
The Portland Trail Blazers are cooperating with the investigation. Jones was indicted for his involvement in both fraud cases.
With material from dpa.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.bluewin.ch ’
