[3] There's also Scala, who told me he heard from his informants that underground gamblers "could have been making over a hundred million dollars" on Donaghy's games. The effort to hide it was in vain. Probably Donaghy's closest friend in this crowd was a man named Jack Concannon. Ensuing betting-scandal headlines jolted the NBA. Then later in the day, with the price right, you gobble up all the Boston you can. The research entailed interviews with more than 100 people, including current and former NBA referees, current and former NBA staff, gamblers, bookmakers, lawyers, law enforcement officials and friends and relatives of Donaghy. Same with the season after that and the season after that. This report was based on an extensive review of game data and video as well as approximately 200 interviews, thousands of pages of documents, and consultation with various gambling and data experts. The pact was: "Don't tell anybody. It opens in the morning and closes right before tip-off. Gaming the Game: Baba, Elvis, and the NBA Betting Scandal Martino would receive a year and Donaghy and Battista 15 months each in federal prison. To the gambler's enduring surprise, Donaghy acknowledged that, yes, he deliberately called more fouls against the side he'd bet against. Illegal sports gambling was not Scala's focus. And indeed, the chart for the Boston-Philly game on Dec. 13, 2006, shows the price for Boston spiking and then shrinking back. According to Scala, his and the FBI's position has always been that Donaghy's deals with Concannon and Battista irrevocably "tainted" his capacity for officiating, even if only subconsciously. Tim Donaghy, NBA Ref and Convicted Gambler - The Sports Column | Sports Where is Tim Donaghy's Partner Jimmy Battista Now? Martino had two brothers. "Uh, no.") Large sums but, if handled deftly, not large enough to alert the broader market that something screwy might be going on. It is likely Tim did not know just how influential Jimmy had become, or how Battistas words and deeds now affected bettors and bookies worldwide.. "If I thought we were going to get caught, then I'd like to think I wouldn't have ever done it," Donaghy said. That way, the gambler said, Donaghy could force the side he'd picked against to play a little less aggressively on defense. Just before tip-off, Battista bet $60,000 on Boston, bumping the line to 3.5 points. You want to get paid, you gotta cover the spread, Battista had told Donaghy. That's the bottom line. Donaghy and. The methods of fixing are rather straightforward. Every foul call was logged, the resulting data analyzed, along with betting-market line-movement histories for every game Donaghy reffed that season. They'd gone to the same parochial high school in the working-class Catholic neighborhoods of Delaware County, just outside Philadelphia -- Delco, as it's sometimes called -- where the sports bars are abundant, where a certain easy familiarity with all forms of gambling prevails, where guys have bookies like they've got dentists. It's widely believed that the ruling will lead to a lifting of the interstate prohibition on sports betting, which, in turn, would give rise to a massive increase in the money wagered on American sports. Gambler, bookmaker and great-great grandson of the founder of Goldman Sachs, now deceased. Editor's note: This two-year investigation, which revealed how disgraced referee Tim Donaghy conspired to fix NBA games, whom he did it with and the millions of dollars that flowed from the conspiracy, was originally published on Feb. 19, 2019. A few years ago, he bought its rights and original digital files. The best movers spend years compiling vast networks of clients and "outs," or counterparties, with whom the movers can trade. If there is a cradle of basketball refereeing, it is here. Normally this meant making a few "head fake" bets. When Donaghy had finished, Kulle leaned back in his chair. James "Bah-Bah" "Sheep" Battista Battista wired and staying up all night and obsessively, blank-mindedly playing online blackjack and poker and even putting bets down on sports for which he had no special insight or inside information, and losing, losing, losing And then Donaghy whistling fouls on the visiting Heat 12 times in Madison Square Garden compared to four against the Knicks; the Knicks covering Martino flying to Toronto to pay Donaghy and to party, ordering prostitutes from a website Donaghy on March 14 in Indianapolis calling four straight fouls in the fourth against the underdog Pacers when they were losing by six to the visiting Wizards. 2 documentary Operation Flagrant Foul, on the 2007 gambling scandal centered on former NBA referee Tim Donaghy, is how it's not just about Donaghy. How Much Did Tim Donaghy Earn From Each Bet? 'Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul' clip shows Tim Donaghy's relationship It matters all the more now. It was situated in a house a block off the beach. We found the referee.'" And those bets won -- won like Concannon had never won before. It took a second for me to comprehend what Martino was telling me. When I asked, she said she never counted the money, never confronted him about its existence. The Animals landed in Curaao, where they helped launch an online sportsbook known as PlayASAP. Lawyer, Battista replied. When Donaghy reffed and Concannon bet, the side he bet was covering the spread between 60 and 70 percent of the time. James "Jimmy" "Bah-Bah" "The Sheep" Battista was a stressed-out, overweight, Oxy-addicted 41-year old, in the hole to some underground gamblers for sums he'd sort of lost track of, when he settled in to watch an NBA game for which he believed he'd just put in the fix. One, Johnny, lived in Jersey. Favored by 6, the visiting Wizards covering Battista on March 15 confessing to his wife that he'd lost $7 million of his clients' money Battista on March 16 strung out and sleepless at Martino's house and surrounded suddenly by almost his entire immediate family. I have incredibly low expectations for whatever they produce, Griffin said by phone from Charleston, South Carolina. The guy's career was ruined and his life in shambles. One more incident, and Stern would sack Donaghy. Like so many others in Donaghy's life, Kulle and the referee would eventually have a vitriolic falling-out; at one point, Donaghy won a stalking injunction against Kulle. "Maybe the company never sat at a table together," he says. Vercher told me that, in December 2009, after questioning from reporters, including ones from ESPN, she had wanted Donaghy to take a polygraph that asked point-blank whether he'd fixed games. In the NBA markets, betting experts say, any move of 1.5 points or more is considered unusually severe -- the result of millions of dollars pouring in. He had many lucrative gambling-related businesses. Tim Donaghy Netflix docufilm returns disgraced ex-NBA ref to spotlight And how, in turn, could you uncover evidence of it years, even a decade, later? We also passed along our data to Keith Crank, who served for 15 years as the program director in statistics and probability at the National Science Foundation. Mendy Rudolph, Yogi Strom, Jake O'Donnell, Billy Oakes, Ed. It's like looking at a stock chart. Inside the pipes was $1.1 million.) That relationship would eventually turn acrimonious, winding up in court, with Donaghy successfully suing Vercher in 2010 and accusing her of stealing his book proceeds. "I said to him, 'Listen, don't tell me that you have some independent, decision-making ability in your mind's computer that's going to be unbiased, because that's not going to f---ing happen. At the club he developed a circle of golfing pals. He details the genesis of the scheme involving Donaghy, Battista and Tommy Martino, onetime classmates at Cardinal OHara High in Springfield, Pennsylvania, and how Battista manipulated global-betting markets. Unfortunately, it is replete with errors, beginning with its statement that the Pedowitz Report "concluded that Donaghy, in fact, did not fix games." According to Martino and Battista, after such wagering was complete, Battista, via Martino, would then inform Donaghy of the spread he needed to cover. I knew what it would mean, Battista told Griffin, if I had an NBA ref on my side.. In total, according to a person with knowledge of their operation, he hoped to get down about $1 million of his investors' money in each of Donaghy's games. Convicted Jimmy "the Sheep" Battista Lifts The Lid On NBA Games. The NBA employees "examined every play and determined whether, in their view, Donaghy's calls (or absence of calls) were correct." The . James "Jimmy" Ba . There is, for one, Ed T. Rush, former NBA director of officials, a Philadelphia native and, for 32 years, a referee at the highest level, starting in 1966. It was Donaghys 13th NBA season. White Sox win! To Martino, Battista seemed desperate, even frightened. If you think the Celtics are the side that's likely to cover, then you go to market as early in the trading session as possible and put some money on Philly. Griffin has dogged determination. And then, twisting the knife, Battista told him how much Concannon was winning. story youve been telling for the past 10 years.. But I didn't give a s---, because it was great information. They were now entering the sixth week of the scheme -- what you might call a sustained period of time. Kim filed for divorce in late 2007, a few months after the scandal became public. Once Tim, Jimmy, and Tommys betting scheme came to light in 2007, the professional gambler was the only one who refused to speak or cooperate with the FBI in any way, shape, or form. How Tim Donaghy's NBA Betting Antics Made Him A Target Of The Mob But Battista refused to squeal on Donaghy. At the time, she told herself the money was from golf-course betting. They came out of the station bearing a packet of rolling papers, and right there inside the car, under the fluorescent gas station lights, in the rental-return sprawl adjacent to the Philadelphia International Airport runway, Martino rolled a joint. However, when Jimmy had a falling out with the betting institution around 2006, he decided to approach Tim through their mutual school friend Thomas Tommy Martino with a lucrative idea. Dear Abby: Is it cheating if nothing physical ever happened? They now had one job: Do not lose the edge by letting the information leak. Namely, they were going to wire up Donaghy so he could get other allegedly corrupted NBA referees to incriminate themselves. In Donaghy's many conversations with the Feds through these weeks, he had begun pointing fingers and making allegations about other referees -- other refs who may have been corrupt. Privately, however, he has at times taken a different position. If the pick won, the ref got his two dimes. Next, we pulled game videos for all 40 games and employed a researcher with an extensive background in officiating to watch them closely, logging all of Donaghy's and his fellow referees' foul calls. It's impossible,'" Scala says. In this, Pedowitz followed the lead of federal investigators, who had analyzed video of Donaghy's games -- recruiting Nunn himself to review eight of them -- based on Donaghy's admission to the Feds that he'd wagered on just 16 of his own games in the final season of his career. He'd been raptly listening to the referee's story -- the gambling, the cash, the secrecy, the corruption, the endless search by human beings to gain an edge, the gross opportunism that seemed almost contagious, the almost shockingly easy fixing of a major American sport -- but now there was one big thing on Kulle's mind, and it wasn't the moral of the story. '", Back at the table, Martino and Donaghy told Battista that they needed to drive to a nearby gas station. Tim Donaghy James "Jimmy" "Bah-Bah" "The Sheep" Battista was a stressed-out, overweight, Oxy-addicted 41-year-old, in the hole to some underground gamblers for sums he'd sort of lost track of, when he settled in to watch an NBA game for which he believed he'd just put in the fix. They were among his biggest brokerage clients and most trusted outs. James Battista, who was charged as a co-conspirator in the 2007 case, told HBO's "Real Sports" that he and Donaghy bet on 47 games over four months and won 37 times. "You wanna get paid?" Who is Jimmy Battista? Where Is Tim Donaghy's Partner Now? Battista was a creature of that world. Sure enough, there he was. Larry Pedowitz This was an episode of gambling, yes, but almost assuredly not match-fixing. Crank's method boasted a certain elegance: It would capture any bias a ref might display in as simple a way as possible. Litvin then filled him in on the worst of it and told him there was an ongoing investigation, instructing him to say nothing about any of it to anyone. It has been more than 15 years since Tim Donaghy's NBA betting scandal made headlines. And he could have been.". Griffin has never spoken with Donaghy. So the FBI had worked out a plan. FAQ: How will legal gambling change the NBA and the way we watch it? The Defense of Tim Donaghy - Whistleblower - Podcast Rather, the investigation found no basis to disagree with the finding of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office that "[t]here is no evidence that Donaghy ever intentionally made a particular ruling during a game in order to increase the likelihood that his gambling pick would be correct." Tommy Martino Print length 320 pages Language English Publisher UNKNO They're a species of broker that provides services to sports bettors, laying down wagers on their clients' behalf with bookmakers of various types around the world, legal and not. Iguodala heading to the bench; Boston covering the spread Donaghy in Seattle, the Sonics hosting the Mavericks, calling 11 straight fouls against Seattle as well as the last foul of the night, with 23 seconds to go. Per an account in New York magazine in 2015, the NBA somehow persuaded Random House to kill the book. Accounts of the meeting differ. By June 15, Donaghy was sitting inside the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York in downtown Brooklyn, naming names and making a statement. He would start before dawn with the enormously liquid Asian betting markets, an amorphous group of black- and gray-market internet sportsbooks based in places like Manila and Kuala Lumpur. The other, Chuck, lived in Delco. And then one afternoon the case agent came into my office. Gaming the Game: The Story Behind the NBA Betting Scandal and the A high roller named Mike Rinnier, who'd made his fortune in Delaware County supermarkets, decided to bankroll a small sports-betting syndicate in the 1980s. Griffins three-year descent into offshore betting was triggered by his curiosity about the mafias involvement with sports wagering, stemming from an FBI wiretap of the Gambino crime family. The Feds made no mention of game-fixing. Premier underground bookmaker, now deceased, who, according to sources, profited from the scheme. Ronnie Nunn Where is Tim Donaghy's Friend Tommy Martino Now? Joe Vito cannot speak to that today; he was busted in 2012 at age 63 for illegal bookmaking in an unrelated federal case. For all their desire to ply their trade in secrecy, sophisticated gambling syndicates often leave traces. There will almost always be an imbalance of calls. The Pedowitz Report made no such conclusion. High school friend of Donaghy and Battista who served as the go-between in the betting scheme during the 2006-2007 NBA season. Instead, Martino would be in the middle. Kulle's eyes were practically dollar signs. Not exactly the Enigma cipher but better than yapping about specific teams and risking someone overhearing. Joseph "Joe Vito" Mastronardo He had to use the bathroom, he said, and motioned for Martino to please come along. Guess which one contains footnotes, source notes, cross-referenced facts from many officials and resources and exhaustive due diligence conducted by a forensic expert with a Ph.D. in Administration of Justice from Penn State? Twenty months later, all three had avoided trials and awaited sentencing, by U.S. District Judge Carol Bagley Amon, in Brooklyn. After it hit the fan and the legal process dragged on, Battista hoped to expose Donaghys mountain of lies by testifying. I accepted because Im an academic; we argue for a living. Operation Flagrant Foul: Where is Tim Donaghy now? | GoodTo These games would be mostly winners, so Popeye should feel free to move them -- and copy them too. In-season, it is demanding, tiring, high stress. If the pick missed, the ref owed nothing; Battista would eat the loss. The whole thing had been merely insinuated, a matter of strong innuendo. Or, actually, it was the moral of this story. But that was the company line.". Kulle got up, crossed the room and closed the blinds. The next season, though, the volume rose sharply -- he made between 30 and 40 wagers on games he worked. Martino said Donaghy cheated on tests, too, at Villanova. Battista referred to Donaghy, 43, as "Elvis" because the ref was "The King" for how often his picks won. That never really flew with us." (This notion even found its way into the Pedowitz report itself.) He was already thinking, How can I get a piece of this action? Based in an anonymous office building in Kew Gardens, Queens, Scala and his agents had spent years assembling a network of informants inside the gang. Then, at some point in 2003, Donaghy and Concannon crossed the Rubicon. A month or so back, not long before Christmas, he'd done something audacious: He'd sat down and cut a deal with an NBA referee. "He gets so pale sometimes, he turns yellow, I swear to god," Martino told me. Seated around a table at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott's Riverbend Bar and Grille, Jimmy Battista, Tommy Martino and Tim Donaghy made their deal: Donaghy would get $2,000 per game -- but only . Moreover, it was indicated he made $20 to $30 million in total for the mob families. Its absurd. "My life is ruined," Kulle recalled Donaghy saying. One expert offers tips to brew the perfect cup at home. If Donaghy talked about Chuck, bet the home side. They were an organized crime squad, dealing with murder and mayhem. It came from above,' " Scala recalls. ", Proponents of legalization have long argued that regulation leads to transparency, which helps root out game-fixing schemes. In July of 2018, he announced a multiyear deal for MGM Resorts to be the "official gaming partner of the NBA.". But the genesis of their falling-out occurred when Donaghy was still making the rounds to promote the book, according to documents filed in court as part of the lawsuit. Tommy, Tim, and James "Jimmy" "Baba" Battista had attended the same Cardinal O'Hara High School, but the former was the only mutual link a few years later since he was friends with both. Or even put him in any kind of limelight at all. Tim Donaghy - Wikipedia That's what they were looking for. And then there's the offseason.