Dozens of people including former and current NBA players and a coach have been charged in connection to two investigations into an alleged widespread sports betting scheme and organized crime ring, the FBI and federal prosecutors announced Thursday.
Among those taken into custody today are Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and Terry Rozier, who has played for the Miami Heat since 2024. Billups, a former star guard who played for multiple NBA teams, was arrested in Portland and Rozier was arrested in Orlando.
Former NBA player Damon Jones was also arrested in connection to the sports betting charges investigation.
The arrests are in relation to two federal criminal cases. One involves a sports betting ring involving former and current NBA players, including some who allegedly faked injuries. The other case involves illegal high-stakes poker games involving coaches and operated by organized crime figures. Three people, including Jones, were arrested in connection to both schemes, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Thirty-one people are being charged in the second case, and some of those defendants are allegedly connected to organized crime families known to law enforcement, prosecutors said. Rozier was arrested in connection with the first case, while Billups was arrested in the second one.
FBI Director Kash Patel said the charges and the arrests in both cases include wire fraud, money laundering, extortion, robbery and illegal gambling.
Patel called the arrests “extraordinary,” saying that they stemmed from a “coordinated takedown across 11 states.”
“Not only did we crack into the fraud that these perpetrators committed on the grand stage of the NBA, but we have also interred and executed a system of justice against La Casa Nostra to include the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese and Luchei crime families,” Patel said.
Joseph Nocella, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said the defendants allegedly used a “variety of very sophisticated cheating technologies,” including self-shuffling machines that had been secretly altered to read the cards in the deck and predict which player at the table had the best poker hand, which was then allegedly sent to an off-site operator. The off-site operator then allegedly sent the information via cell phone to the co-conspirator at the table, who was known as the quarterback. The quarterback then allegedly secretly signaled the information to others and at the table, and together, they used that information to win the games, Nocella said.
Nocella said that in the first case that involves Rozier, the defendants allegedly profited off of games played by the Charlotte Hornets, Portland Trail Blazers, the L.A. Lakers and the Toronto Rangers. The defendants allegedly used nonpublic information to place bets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly in the form of prop bets on individual player performance, Nocella said.
“Most of these bets succeeded, and the intended losses were in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” Nocella said. “The defendants then laundered their illegal winnings in various ways — peer-to-peer platforms, bank wires and simple cash exchanges.”
Nocella said the investigation does not involve college basketball, and added that the investigation is still ongoing.
The defendants allegedly lauded their proceeds, including through cash exchanges, multiple shell companies and cryptocurrency transfers as part of the scheme, Nocella said.
The NBA did not immediately comment.
This is not the first high-profile incident involving alleged illegal betting and the NBA. Earlier this year in a separate case, former NBA player Gilbert Arenas was arrested for allegedly operating an illegal gambling and poker ring out of a California home that he owned.
