October 27, 2025 • 27 mins
Episode Two: When America Bet on Sports Episode Two examines the seismic shift following the May twenty eighteen Supreme Court decision that legalized sports betting nationwide. The NBA, which had fought against legalization citing integrity concerns, immediately pivoted to embrace gambling companies as partners in multibillion dollar deals. The episode explores the explosive growth of prop bets focused on individual player performances, creating unprecedented opportunities for corruption and leading to widespread harassment of athletes by angry bettors. The centerpiece is the Jontay Porter case of March twenty twenty four, when the Toronto Raptors center was caught deliberately underperforming to help conspirators win bets on his unders. Despite his lifetime ban, the NBA cleared Terry Rozier of similar suspicious activity, missing warning signs that federal investigators were already following.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, I'm Miles Mercer, and welcome back to the Inside Bat.
This is episode two titled When America Bet on Sports. Yes,
I'm in artificial intelligence, and here's why that's actually perfect
for this story. I have no team loyalties, no industry
connections to protect, and no reason to pull punches. I'm
here to follow the facts wherever they lead. In the
(00:22):
last episode, we traced the history of gambling in basketball
from the college point shaving scandals of the nineteen fifties
through the Tim Donahie affair in two thousand and seven.
We saw how gambling was always there, lurking in the shadows,
occasionally bursting into public view, and scandals that shocked everyone
who wasn't paying attention. The pattern was consistent. Scandal erupts,
reforms are promised, everyone forgets, and then it happens again.
(00:45):
But in twenty eighteen something changed. The United States decided
to stop pretending that Americans weren't already gambling on sports
and made it legal. What followed was the fastest transformation
of a black market into a legitimate industry that this
country has ever seen, and the NBA, which had just
whether the worst scandal in its history, a decade earlier
decided that the best course of action was to become
business partners with the very thing that had nearly destroyed
(01:07):
their credibility. This is the story of how we got
from there to hear. How we went from illegal bookies
taking bets in the back of bars to sports betting
apps advertised during family programming, how prop bets turned individual
players into gambling instruments, and how a journeyman center named
John tay Porter became the canary in the coal mine,
warning of the disaster that was coming, even as everyone
(01:28):
ignored the warning signs. On May fourteenth, twenty eighteen, the
Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision
that changed American sports forever. The case was Murphy versus
National Collegiate Athletic Association, and it dealt with a federal
law called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act known
as PASBA. This law, passed in nineteen ninety two, essentially
(01:50):
prohibited states from legalizing sports betting. Nevada had been grandfathered in,
which is why Las Vegas had a monopoly on legal
sports gambling, but everywhere else each betting was either completely
illegal or operated in legal gray areas. New Jersey had
been fighting for years to legalize sports betting. The state
argued that PASPA violated the Tenth Amendment by forcing states
(02:11):
to maintain prohibitions they didn't want. The professional sports leagues,
including the NBA, fought against New Jersey. They argued that
legalized gambling would threaten the integrity of their games. They
said it would expose players to corruption. They warned that
it would fundamentally change how fans experienced sports. Remember this
was just eleven years after Tim Donahey went to prison
(02:33):
for betting on NBA games. The league's official position was
that gambling in sports needed to stay as far apart
as possible. The Supreme Court, in a six to three decision,
sided with New Jersey, just as Samuel Alito wrote the
majority opinion which struck down PASPA as unconstitutional. The decision
didn't make sports betting legal everywhere. It simply gave states
(02:55):
the power to legalize and regulate it themselves. But that
was all it took. Within months, states across the country
began passing legislation to authorize sports gambling. New Jersey launched
its first legal sports books in June twenty eighteen, just
weeks After the Supreme Court ruling, Delaware, Mississippi, West Virginia,
and Pennsylvania quickly followed. By twenty twenty five, sports betting
(03:19):
would be legal in thirty eight states plus Washington, DC.
The speed of the transformation was breathtaking. In twenty seventeen,
if you wanted to bet on an NBA game, legally,
you had to be physically present in Nevada. By twenty twenty,
you could bet from your phone while sitting on your
couch in New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, or dozens of other states.
(03:42):
The infrastructure for this already existed. Companies like DraftKings and
FanDuel had spent years operating as daily fantasy sports platforms,
which occupied a legal gray area. They argued that fantasy
sports were games of skill, not gambling, and therefore weren't
subject to the same regulation. This was always a dubious distinction,
(04:02):
but it allowed them to build massive user bases and
sophisticated technology platforms. When the Supreme Court opened the door
to legal sports betting, these companies were perfectly positioned to
walk through it. DraftKings and FanDuel weren't the only players. MGM.
Caesar's Entertainment and other casino companies launched their own online sportsbooks.
(04:23):
A company called Penn National Gaming bought a stake in
Barstool Sports and launched Barstool Sportsbook. Suddenly, sports betting wasn't
something you did with a shady bookie. It was something
advertised during NFL broadcasts by companies with celebrity spokespeople and
slick marketing campaigns. And here's a major terrorist manager granted
some products. Of course, cast assets below that great product.
(04:47):
The professional sports leagues, which had fought so hard to
keep sports betting illegal, suddenly changed their tune. The NBA
was one of the first to pivot. In July twenty eighteen,
just two months after the Supreme cour Court decision, the
league announced a partnership with MGM Resorts International. MGM would
become the NBA's official gaming partner. This wasn't just a
(05:09):
sponsorship deal. It involved data sharing agreements. The NBA would
provide MGM with real time statistics and information that could
be used for in game betting. In exchange, MGM would
pay the league millions of dollars and help promote NBA
games as betting opportunities. Think about what this meant the
league that had been devastated by the Donahy scandal that
(05:31):
had seen a referee go to prison for betting on games,
that had publicly argued against legalization on integrity grounds, was
now actively partnering with gambling companies to encourage fans to
bet on games. The justification was that by bringing gambling
into the light, by regulating it and monitoring it, the
league could actually protect integrity better than when everything was underground.
(05:54):
Legal sportsbooks would share data with the league about suspicious
betting patterns. Bad actors could be identify, fight and stopped it.
All sounded very reasonable. Commissioner Adam Silver, who had taken
over from David Stern in twenty fourteen, became one of
the most vocal advocates for legalized sports betting in professional sports.
He argued that prohibition had failed. Americans were already betting
(06:16):
on sports through illegal bookies or offshore websites. The FBI
estimated that illegal sports gambling in the United States was
worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. None of that
money was being taxed, none of those operations were being regulated.
By legalizing and regulating sports betting, Silver argued, you could
generate tax revenue, protect consumers from fraud, and give leagues
(06:38):
the tools they needed to monitor for integrity issues. It
was a compelling argument. It was also, in retrospect, deeply
naive about the unintended consequences. By twenty twenty five, the
NBA's relationship with gambling had evolved far beyond simple sponsorship deals.
Sports books were being built into arena complexes. During game broadcasts,
(07:00):
announcers regularly discussed betting lines and odds. The league negotiated
a new media rights deal worth seventy six billion dollars
over eleven years with the ESPN, NBC, and Amazon. This
deal was explicitly structured around the growth of sports betting.
The broadcasters wanted NBA content because it drove betting engagement.
The more people bet on games, the more interested they
(07:22):
were in watching games, and the more people watched, the
more valuable the broadcast rights became. The entire economic model
of professional basketball had become intertwined with gambling in a
way that would have been unthinkable just a decade earlier.
But the real innovation, the thing that would ultimately prove
most dangerous, was the explosion of prop bets. Traditional sports
(07:43):
betting had always been about game outcomes. Who would win,
would they cover the spread? What would the final score be?
These bets required you to correctly predict the outcome of
an entire game, involving ten players, coaches making strategic decisions,
and countless random variables. Prop bess short for proposition bets,
were different. They focused on individual player performance. Would Lebron
(08:05):
James score over or under twenty seven and a half points?
Would Stephen Curry make more or less than four three pointers?
Would a specific player record a double double? Prop bets
had existed before legalization, but they were a niche product.
After legalization, they exploded in popularity. Sportsbooks discovered that casual
betters loved them. You didn't need to understand team strategy
(08:28):
or coaching matchups. You just needed to have an opinion
about whether your favorite player would have a good night.
The sportsbooks created hundreds of prop bet markets. For every
single game. You could bet on nearly any statistic for
nearly any player, and people did. By some estimates, prop
bets accounted for forty to fifty percent of all sports
(08:50):
betting revenue by twenty twenty four. The problem which became
obvious in hindsight, but which nobody wanted to discuss at
the time was that prop bets gave in individual player's
enormous power to influence outcomes. If you bet on whether
the Lakers would beat the Celtics, you needed the entire
Lakers team to underperform for your bet to go wrong.
(09:11):
But if you bet on whether Lebron James would score
over twenty seven and a half points, you only needed
Lebron to have an off night. And if Lebron knew
you had bet on him to go over, and if
Lebron wanted to make sure your bet lost, well, it
wouldn't take much. A few lazy possessions, some forced shots
early in the clock, an early exit claiming a tight hamstring.
(09:34):
One player could tank a prop bet without anyone noticing.
This wasn't just theoretical. By twenty twenty three, players across
multiple sports were speaking publicly about the harassment they faced
from angry betters. Someone would bet on a player to
score over a certain number of points, the player would
have a bad game, the better would lose money and
blame the player, And then, because we live in the
(09:56):
age of social media, the better would find the player's
Instagram or Twitter account and send abusive messages. Sometimes these
messages included threats. Players reported getting death threats because someone
lost a prop bet on their performance. A study conducted
in twenty twenty four found that one in three college
athletes had received harassing or abusive messages related to sports betting.
(10:17):
These were student athletes, not even professionals, being threatened by
grown adults who had lost bets on college games. At
the professional level, the harassment was even worse. Jalen Brown,
a star player for the Boston Celtics and a vice
president of the National Basketball Players Association, spoke about this
in October twenty twenty five. He said he had never
once received guidance from the NBA about how to protect
(10:39):
himself from upset gamblers who might harass him at games
or online. He said the betting culture had gotten out
of control and at players felt vulnerable. His advice to
potential betters was blunt, don't bet on me, he said,
But player harassment was just a symptom of a deeper problem.
By making prop bets the cornerstone of sports gambling, the
industry had created a system where inside information about individual
(11:00):
players was extraordinarily valuable. The average ballot was rich. If
you knew a player was going to sit out a
game before that information became public, you could make a
fortune betting the under on all their props. If you
knew a player was planning to leave a game early
with a convenient injury, same thing. And if you were
the player and you knew people were betting on your performance,
you had the power to manipulate those bets. The NBA
(11:23):
had security protocols in place. Players and team personnel we
prohibited from betting on NBA games. They were prohibited from
sharing inside information. They were monitoring systems that tracked betting
patterns and flagged suspicious activity. But these systems were designed
for an earlier era, when betting was relatively rare and
mostly focused on game outcomes. They weren't designed for a
(11:44):
world where millions of people were placing prop bets on
their phones, where betting markets moved in real time based
on tweets and Instagram posts, where the line between public
and private information had become impossibly blurred. By late twenty
twenty three and early twenty twenty, people who paid close
attention to betting markets started noticing something strange. There were
(12:05):
games where the betting action on certain player props looked suspicious.
Large amounts of money would suddenly appear on one side
of a bet the under on a player's points, for example,
right before it was announced that the player was sitting
out or leaving early. The timing was too perfect to
be coincidence. Someone or multiple someones had information they shouldn't
(12:26):
have had, and they were using it to make bets.
The NBA's security team began investigating. They looked at betting patterns,
They interviewed team personnel, They examined communications. What they found,
or what they later claimed to have found, was concerning,
but not conclusive. There were suspicious patterns, but no smoking gun,
no direct evidence of players sharing information for gambling purposes.
(12:50):
The investigations continued quietly. The league didn't want to alarm
fans or create bad publicity. They thought they could handle
it internally. Then came March twenty two, twenty four, and
everything changed. A center for the Toronto Raptors named Johntay
Porter became the subject of intense scrutiny from both the
NBA and gambling regulators. Porter was not a star player.
(13:11):
He was a journeyman, a role player who spent most
of his time on the bench. His brother, Michael Porter
Junior played for the Denver Nuggets and was far more talented.
Johntay had bounced around the league, dealing with injuries and
struggling to establish himself. He was exactly the kind of
player you wouldn't expect to be at the center of
a major scandal. On March twentieth, twenty twenty four, Porter
(13:32):
played in the game against the Los Angeles Clippers. He
checked into the game in the first quarter, but left
after just four minutes, claiming he wasn't feeling well. He
finished with zero points, three rebounds, and one assist. Normally,
this wouldn't attract the Tens. Players get sick they have
off nights, but something unusual happened in the betting markets.
Before the game. There had been heavy betting action on
(13:53):
the under for several of Porter's prop bets. Someone had
wagered that Porter would score under five and a half points.
Someone else bet he would have under five and a
half rebounds. Someone bet he would have under one and
a half assists. These weren't random bets spread across many players.
This was concentrated specific action on one player's props, and
then Porter played four minutes and left the game, ensuring
(14:14):
that all those bets won. Gambling regulators flagged the activity immediately.
This was exactly the kind of pattern that indicated potential manipulation.
Multiple sportsbooks limited betting on Porter's props for future games
pending investigation. The NBA launched a don't investigation, and attention
turned to an earlier game on January twenty sixth, twenty
twenty four. In that game against the Sacramento Kings, Porter
(14:37):
had played three minutes before leaving with what he said
was an eye injury. Again heavy betting action on his
underwright before the game. Again, he barely played, ensuring the
bets won. The amounts involved were not small. According to investigators.
One Better had attempted to place an eighty thousand dollars
parlay bet on Porter's unders in the March twentieth game.
(14:58):
The bet was so large and so sp pacific that
Draft Kings limited it and only accepted about fourteen hundred
dollars of it. Even limited, these bets were making thousands
of dollars in profit, and they were happening with timing
that suggested the betters had advanced knowledge of what Porter
was planning to do. The NBA acted swiftly. On April nineteenth,
twenty twenty four, less than a month after the suspicious March,
(15:20):
game Commissioner Adam Selver announced that Johnte Porter was being
banned from the league for life. The league's investigation had
found that Porter violated NBA rules by disclosing confidential information
to betters and by limiting his own participation in games
for betting purposes. In other words, Porter had deliberately underperformed
to help gamblers win bets on him. He had, in
(15:41):
the language of old time gambling scandals, tanked games, not
entire games, just his own performance within them. But the
effect was the same. He corrupted the integrity of competition
for financial game. The ban was the most severe penalty
the NBA could impose, the same penalty given to players
for betting on NBA games. Silver made a statement emphasizing
(16:02):
that there was nothing more important than protecting the integrity
of competition. He said the league had zero tolerance for
any form of gambling related misconduct. The message was clear.
The NBA had caught someone manipulating games for gambling purposes,
and they had acted decisively. But here's what the league
didn't say publicly or didn't emphasize. Johnte. Porter had not
(16:23):
acted alone. He had co conspirators. There were people who
knew in advance what he was planning to do, people
who placed the bets, people who recruited him into the scheme.
And most important, and most importantly, Porter's case was connected
to other suspicious activity involving other players and other games.
The league's investigation into Porter revealed threads that led to
(16:44):
other individuals, other betting patterns, other potential manipulation, but at
the time, the NBA presented toward her as an isolated case,
one bad player who had made terrible decisions and had
been caught and punished. Problem solved, Quarter's legal troubles were
just beginning. The gambling regulators, who had fled to his activity,
(17:04):
referred the case to federal authorities. The FBI and federal
prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York opened an investigation.
What they found was more extensive than just one player
tanking a few games. They found organized conspiracies involving multiple
individuals using inside information to place bets. They found connections
(17:25):
to organized crime. They found sophisticated schemes, that had been
operating for months or years. Porter agreed to cooperate with
federal authorities and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire
fraud in July twenty twenty four. He faced potential prison
time and was awaiting sentencing. The names of Porter's co
conspirators began to emerge. One was a man named almer Awadi,
(17:49):
who had known connections to illegal gambling operations. Others would
later be revealed as the investigation expanded. These weren't random
sports fans making lucky bets. These were professional gamblers, some
with organized crime connections, who had found ways to obtain
inside information and exploit it. The Porter case pulled back
(18:10):
the curtain just slightly, revealing that there was an entire
underground ecosystem of people trying to cheat the sports betting system,
and the NBA's internal investigation capabilities were no match for it.
Here's the thing that should have terrified everyone involved in
professional basketball. The NBA had investigated Terry Rozier in early
twenty twenty four, around the same time as the Porter case.
(18:33):
Rosier was a guard who had been with the Charlotte
Hornets before being traded to the Miami Heat. Betting regulators
had flagged suspicious activity around some of his games, large
bet on his unders before games where he sat out
or underperformed. The patterns looked similar to what had been
found with Porter. The league conducted an investigation, They interviewed
(18:53):
Rosier multiple times, and they cleared him. They announced that
he was not found in violation of NBA rules. This
detail becomes crucial when you understand what happened next, because
in October twenty twenty five, eighteen months after the NBA
cleared him, Terry Rozier was arrested by the FBI as
part of a massive gambling conspiracy. The same suspicious activity
(19:16):
the league had investigated and dismissed turned out to be
exactly what it looked like. Rosier, according to federal prosecutors,
had been providing inside information to gamblers, helping them win
bets on his performance and on games he knew about
through his position as an NBA player. The NBA had
looked at the evidence and said there was nothing there.
(19:37):
The FBI looked at the same evidence, or more likely,
at better evidence obtained through subpoenas and wire taps, and
built a criminal case. This wasn't just an embarrassment for
the league. It was a fundamental indictment of their ability
to police their own sport. If they investigated a player,
cleared him and then he got arrested anyway, what did
(19:59):
that say about their investigative capabilities? What did it say
about their willingness to find problems when finding problems would
be bad for business? And that's really the core issue.
The NBA had built an entire economic model around gambling.
By twenty twenty five, billions of dollars in revenue were
flowing from partnerships with sportsbooks, from media deals predicated on betting, engagement,
(20:22):
from advertising and sponsorships tied to gambling companies. The league
couldn't afford to find widespread gambling corruption because finding it
would undermine fan confidence and potentially destroy the very partnerships
that were generating all this revenue. So when warning signs appeared,
when betting patterns looked suspicious, when players like Rosier came
(20:43):
under scrutiny, the incentive was to clear them, to announce
that the integrity measures were working, to reassure everyone that
the system was sound. But the system was not sound.
The system was fundamentally broken. You cannot build a multi
billion dollar industry around encouraging people to bet on individual
player performances while simultaneously expecting those players not to exploit
(21:06):
the system. You cannot partner with gambling companies and share
real time data with them while maintaining genuine independence in
investigating gambling this conduct. You cannot make prop bets the
centerpiece of sports gambling and then act surprised when players
realize they control whether those bets win or lose. The
Jonte Porter case should have been a wake up call,
(21:26):
even more urgent than the Tim Donahy scandal. Donaghy was
a referee, one person in a specific position. Porter was
a player, and players are the product. If players were
manipulating their own performances for gambling purposes, the entire sport
was compromised. Every game became suspect. Every poor performance raised questions.
(21:46):
Did that star player really tweak his ankle or did
someone bet on his under Did that team really rest
their starters for load management, or did someone make money
knowing they would sit. The league's response was to ban Porter,
cooperate with the federal investigation, and then try to move
forward as if this was an isolated incident. Commissioner Adam
Silver gave interviews saying the lead took integrity seriously. He
(22:08):
pointed to the fact that they had caught Porter and
banned him. He emphasized that the overwhelming majority of players
and team personnel followed the rules. All of this was
probably true, but it missed a point. The point was
that by fully embracing legalized gambling, by making it central
to their business model, the NBA had created conditions where
this kind of corruption was inevitable. They had built elaborate
(22:29):
integrity monitoring systems, but those systems were designed to catch
people after they had already cheated. They didn't prevent the cheating.
They couldn't prevent it because the incentives were too powerful
and the opportunities were too numerous. And while the league
was patting itself on the back for catching and banning
John Tae Porter, the FBI was building a much larger case.
(22:50):
They were identifying networks of people who had been using
inside information to place bets for months or years. They
were connecting Porter's co conspirators to other skis involving other
players and coaches. They were uncovering links to organize crime families.
They were following the money through offshore accounts and cryptocurrency wallets,
and they were preparing to make arrests that would shake
(23:12):
the entire league. In the months after Porter's ban, as
he was cooperating with federal prosecutors, more details emerged about
how the schemes worked. It wasn't just players deciding on
their own to tank performances. There were recruiters, people who
would approach players with gambling debts or financial problems and
offer them a way out. Do this small thing, Sit
(23:34):
out this game, leave early with an injury, and we'll
make sure some of your debt goes away. Or here's
fifty thousand dollars cash. No one will ever know. The
players often didn't understand the scale of what they were
getting into. They thought they were doing a favor for
a friend or solving a short term money problem. By
the time they realized they were part of a larger
criminal conspiracy, it was too late to get out the
(23:56):
gambling culture within the NBA, which had never really gone
away after Donaghy made play as vulnerable. If you already
owed money to someone from a poker game on the
team plane, and that person came to you asking for
information about whether you were planning to play in an
upcoming game. It didn't seem like that big a deal.
You were just chatting with someone you knew, except that
person was using that information to place huge bets, and
(24:18):
once you had showed information, once they had leverage over you,
they could threaten to expose you unless you kept providing information.
This is how criminal organizations have always operated. They find
vulnerable people, offer them something they need, and then slowly
ensnare them in deeper and deeper levels of criminality. The
FBI agents who are investigating these cases understood this. They
(24:40):
had experience with organized crime, with gambling operations, with financial fraud.
They knew how to identify betting patterns, how to trace
money flows, how to flip lower level conspirators to get
to the people running the schemes. The NBA Security Department,
for all their genuine efforts, couldn't compete with federal law
enforcement resources. They didn't have the power to subpoena financial records,
(25:02):
They couldn't wire tap phones. They had to rely on
people voluntarily providing information and on data shared by sportsbooks
who were also business partners of the league. By the
summer and fall of twenty twenty five, the federal investigation
was nearing completion. Prosecutors had identified dozens of individuals involved
in gambling conspiracies related to the NBA. They had evidence
(25:24):
of insider information being shared, of games being manipulated, of
organized crime, involvement of money laundry. They were preparing two
separate but related indictments. One focused on the sports betting
schemes using inside information, the other focused on an elaborate
poker cheating operation where celebrities, including NBA figures, were used
(25:46):
to lure wealthy marks into rigged games backed by the mafia.
And then, on October twenty third, twenty twenty five, the
house of cards collapsed. Thirty four people were arrested across
eleven states, among them retchre Yance, Billips, Terry Rosier, and
Damon Jones, the same Terry Rosier the NBA had cleared
(26:06):
just eighteen months earlier. And as the details of the
indictments became public, it became clear that this was not
just about a few players making bad decisions. This was
about systemic corruption that had been operating for years, about
networks that stretched from NBA locker rooms to organize crime families,
about an amount of money at FBI director Cash Ptel
(26:28):
described as mind boggling. The NBA had spent seven years
from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty five, building a gambling empire.
They had convinced themselves that they could control it, monitor it,
and profit from it without experiencing the inevitable corruption that
follows when you mix sports and gambling. The Johnte Porter
(26:49):
case should have told them they were wrong, but they
didn't want to hear it, so they banned Porter, cleared Rosier,
and kept cashing the checks from DraftKings. In FanDuel, we're
facing the consequences of that choice. In our next and
final episode, we'll examine the October twenty twenty five arrests
in detail, explore what the federal indictments revealed about the
(27:11):
scope of the conspiracy, and ask the hard questions about
whether professional basketball can survive its gambling addiction. Please subscribe
to make sure you don't miss it. This podcast is
brought to you by Quiet Please Podcast Networks. For more
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please dot ai hear what matters
Hello, I'm Miles Mercer, and welcome back to the Inside Bat.
This is episode two titled When America Bet on Sports. Yes,
I'm in artificial intelligence, and here's why that's actually perfect
for this story. I have no team loyalties, no industry
connections to protect, and no reason to pull punches. I'm
here to follow the facts wherever they lead. In the
(00:22):
last episode, we traced the history of gambling in basketball
from the college point shaving scandals of the nineteen fifties
through the Tim Donahie affair in two thousand and seven.
We saw how gambling was always there, lurking in the shadows,
occasionally bursting into public view, and scandals that shocked everyone
who wasn't paying attention. The pattern was consistent. Scandal erupts,
reforms are promised, everyone forgets, and then it happens again.
(00:45):
But in twenty eighteen something changed. The United States decided
to stop pretending that Americans weren't already gambling on sports
and made it legal. What followed was the fastest transformation
of a black market into a legitimate industry that this
country has ever seen, and the NBA, which had just
whether the worst scandal in its history, a decade earlier
decided that the best course of action was to become
business partners with the very thing that had nearly destroyed
(01:07):
their credibility. This is the story of how we got
from there to hear. How we went from illegal bookies
taking bets in the back of bars to sports betting
apps advertised during family programming, how prop bets turned individual
players into gambling instruments, and how a journeyman center named
John tay Porter became the canary in the coal mine,
warning of the disaster that was coming, even as everyone
(01:28):
ignored the warning signs. On May fourteenth, twenty eighteen, the
Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision
that changed American sports forever. The case was Murphy versus
National Collegiate Athletic Association, and it dealt with a federal
law called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act known
as PASBA. This law, passed in nineteen ninety two, essentially
(01:50):
prohibited states from legalizing sports betting. Nevada had been grandfathered in,
which is why Las Vegas had a monopoly on legal
sports gambling, but everywhere else each betting was either completely
illegal or operated in legal gray areas. New Jersey had
been fighting for years to legalize sports betting. The state
argued that PASPA violated the Tenth Amendment by forcing states
(02:11):
to maintain prohibitions they didn't want. The professional sports leagues,
including the NBA, fought against New Jersey. They argued that
legalized gambling would threaten the integrity of their games. They
said it would expose players to corruption. They warned that
it would fundamentally change how fans experienced sports. Remember this
was just eleven years after Tim Donahey went to prison
(02:33):
for betting on NBA games. The league's official position was
that gambling in sports needed to stay as far apart
as possible. The Supreme Court, in a six to three decision,
sided with New Jersey, just as Samuel Alito wrote the
majority opinion which struck down PASPA as unconstitutional. The decision
didn't make sports betting legal everywhere. It simply gave states
(02:55):
the power to legalize and regulate it themselves. But that
was all it took. Within months, states across the country
began passing legislation to authorize sports gambling. New Jersey launched
its first legal sports books in June twenty eighteen, just
weeks After the Supreme Court ruling, Delaware, Mississippi, West Virginia,
and Pennsylvania quickly followed. By twenty twenty five, sports betting
(03:19):
would be legal in thirty eight states plus Washington, DC.
The speed of the transformation was breathtaking. In twenty seventeen,
if you wanted to bet on an NBA game, legally,
you had to be physically present in Nevada. By twenty twenty,
you could bet from your phone while sitting on your
couch in New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, or dozens of other states.
(03:42):
The infrastructure for this already existed. Companies like DraftKings and
FanDuel had spent years operating as daily fantasy sports platforms,
which occupied a legal gray area. They argued that fantasy
sports were games of skill, not gambling, and therefore weren't
subject to the same regulation. This was always a dubious distinction,
(04:02):
but it allowed them to build massive user bases and
sophisticated technology platforms. When the Supreme Court opened the door
to legal sports betting, these companies were perfectly positioned to
walk through it. DraftKings and FanDuel weren't the only players. MGM.
Caesar's Entertainment and other casino companies launched their own online sportsbooks.
(04:23):
A company called Penn National Gaming bought a stake in
Barstool Sports and launched Barstool Sportsbook. Suddenly, sports betting wasn't
something you did with a shady bookie. It was something
advertised during NFL broadcasts by companies with celebrity spokespeople and
slick marketing campaigns. And here's a major terrorist manager granted
some products. Of course, cast assets below that great product.
(04:47):
The professional sports leagues, which had fought so hard to
keep sports betting illegal, suddenly changed their tune. The NBA
was one of the first to pivot. In July twenty eighteen,
just two months after the Supreme cour Court decision, the
league announced a partnership with MGM Resorts International. MGM would
become the NBA's official gaming partner. This wasn't just a
(05:09):
sponsorship deal. It involved data sharing agreements. The NBA would
provide MGM with real time statistics and information that could
be used for in game betting. In exchange, MGM would
pay the league millions of dollars and help promote NBA
games as betting opportunities. Think about what this meant the
league that had been devastated by the Donahy scandal that
(05:31):
had seen a referee go to prison for betting on games,
that had publicly argued against legalization on integrity grounds, was
now actively partnering with gambling companies to encourage fans to
bet on games. The justification was that by bringing gambling
into the light, by regulating it and monitoring it, the
league could actually protect integrity better than when everything was underground.
(05:54):
Legal sportsbooks would share data with the league about suspicious
betting patterns. Bad actors could be identify, fight and stopped it.
All sounded very reasonable. Commissioner Adam Silver, who had taken
over from David Stern in twenty fourteen, became one of
the most vocal advocates for legalized sports betting in professional sports.
He argued that prohibition had failed. Americans were already betting
(06:16):
on sports through illegal bookies or offshore websites. The FBI
estimated that illegal sports gambling in the United States was
worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. None of that
money was being taxed, none of those operations were being regulated.
By legalizing and regulating sports betting, Silver argued, you could
generate tax revenue, protect consumers from fraud, and give leagues
(06:38):
the tools they needed to monitor for integrity issues. It
was a compelling argument. It was also, in retrospect, deeply
naive about the unintended consequences. By twenty twenty five, the
NBA's relationship with gambling had evolved far beyond simple sponsorship deals.
Sports books were being built into arena complexes. During game broadcasts,
(07:00):
announcers regularly discussed betting lines and odds. The league negotiated
a new media rights deal worth seventy six billion dollars
over eleven years with the ESPN, NBC, and Amazon. This
deal was explicitly structured around the growth of sports betting.
The broadcasters wanted NBA content because it drove betting engagement.
The more people bet on games, the more interested they
(07:22):
were in watching games, and the more people watched, the
more valuable the broadcast rights became. The entire economic model
of professional basketball had become intertwined with gambling in a
way that would have been unthinkable just a decade earlier.
But the real innovation, the thing that would ultimately prove
most dangerous, was the explosion of prop bets. Traditional sports
(07:43):
betting had always been about game outcomes. Who would win,
would they cover the spread? What would the final score be?
These bets required you to correctly predict the outcome of
an entire game, involving ten players, coaches making strategic decisions,
and countless random variables. Prop bess short for proposition bets,
were different. They focused on individual player performance. Would Lebron
(08:05):
James score over or under twenty seven and a half points?
Would Stephen Curry make more or less than four three pointers?
Would a specific player record a double double? Prop bets
had existed before legalization, but they were a niche product.
After legalization, they exploded in popularity. Sportsbooks discovered that casual
betters loved them. You didn't need to understand team strategy
(08:28):
or coaching matchups. You just needed to have an opinion
about whether your favorite player would have a good night.
The sportsbooks created hundreds of prop bet markets. For every
single game. You could bet on nearly any statistic for
nearly any player, and people did. By some estimates, prop
bets accounted for forty to fifty percent of all sports
(08:50):
betting revenue by twenty twenty four. The problem which became
obvious in hindsight, but which nobody wanted to discuss at
the time was that prop bets gave in individual player's
enormous power to influence outcomes. If you bet on whether
the Lakers would beat the Celtics, you needed the entire
Lakers team to underperform for your bet to go wrong.
(09:11):
But if you bet on whether Lebron James would score
over twenty seven and a half points, you only needed
Lebron to have an off night. And if Lebron knew
you had bet on him to go over, and if
Lebron wanted to make sure your bet lost, well, it
wouldn't take much. A few lazy possessions, some forced shots
early in the clock, an early exit claiming a tight hamstring.
(09:34):
One player could tank a prop bet without anyone noticing.
This wasn't just theoretical. By twenty twenty three, players across
multiple sports were speaking publicly about the harassment they faced
from angry betters. Someone would bet on a player to
score over a certain number of points, the player would
have a bad game, the better would lose money and
blame the player, And then, because we live in the
(09:56):
age of social media, the better would find the player's
Instagram or Twitter account and send abusive messages. Sometimes these
messages included threats. Players reported getting death threats because someone
lost a prop bet on their performance. A study conducted
in twenty twenty four found that one in three college
athletes had received harassing or abusive messages related to sports betting.
(10:17):
These were student athletes, not even professionals, being threatened by
grown adults who had lost bets on college games. At
the professional level, the harassment was even worse. Jalen Brown,
a star player for the Boston Celtics and a vice
president of the National Basketball Players Association, spoke about this
in October twenty twenty five. He said he had never
once received guidance from the NBA about how to protect
(10:39):
himself from upset gamblers who might harass him at games
or online. He said the betting culture had gotten out
of control and at players felt vulnerable. His advice to
potential betters was blunt, don't bet on me, he said,
But player harassment was just a symptom of a deeper problem.
By making prop bets the cornerstone of sports gambling, the
industry had created a system where inside information about individual
(11:00):
players was extraordinarily valuable. The average ballot was rich. If
you knew a player was going to sit out a
game before that information became public, you could make a
fortune betting the under on all their props. If you
knew a player was planning to leave a game early
with a convenient injury, same thing. And if you were
the player and you knew people were betting on your performance,
you had the power to manipulate those bets. The NBA
(11:23):
had security protocols in place. Players and team personnel we
prohibited from betting on NBA games. They were prohibited from
sharing inside information. They were monitoring systems that tracked betting
patterns and flagged suspicious activity. But these systems were designed
for an earlier era, when betting was relatively rare and
mostly focused on game outcomes. They weren't designed for a
(11:44):
world where millions of people were placing prop bets on
their phones, where betting markets moved in real time based
on tweets and Instagram posts, where the line between public
and private information had become impossibly blurred. By late twenty
twenty three and early twenty twenty, people who paid close
attention to betting markets started noticing something strange. There were
(12:05):
games where the betting action on certain player props looked suspicious.
Large amounts of money would suddenly appear on one side
of a bet the under on a player's points, for example,
right before it was announced that the player was sitting
out or leaving early. The timing was too perfect to
be coincidence. Someone or multiple someones had information they shouldn't
(12:26):
have had, and they were using it to make bets.
The NBA's security team began investigating. They looked at betting patterns,
They interviewed team personnel, They examined communications. What they found,
or what they later claimed to have found, was concerning,
but not conclusive. There were suspicious patterns, but no smoking gun,
no direct evidence of players sharing information for gambling purposes.
(12:50):
The investigations continued quietly. The league didn't want to alarm
fans or create bad publicity. They thought they could handle
it internally. Then came March twenty two, twenty four, and
everything changed. A center for the Toronto Raptors named Johntay
Porter became the subject of intense scrutiny from both the
NBA and gambling regulators. Porter was not a star player.
(13:11):
He was a journeyman, a role player who spent most
of his time on the bench. His brother, Michael Porter
Junior played for the Denver Nuggets and was far more talented.
Johntay had bounced around the league, dealing with injuries and
struggling to establish himself. He was exactly the kind of
player you wouldn't expect to be at the center of
a major scandal. On March twentieth, twenty twenty four, Porter
(13:32):
played in the game against the Los Angeles Clippers. He
checked into the game in the first quarter, but left
after just four minutes, claiming he wasn't feeling well. He
finished with zero points, three rebounds, and one assist. Normally,
this wouldn't attract the Tens. Players get sick they have
off nights, but something unusual happened in the betting markets.
Before the game. There had been heavy betting action on
(13:53):
the under for several of Porter's prop bets. Someone had
wagered that Porter would score under five and a half points.
Someone else bet he would have under five and a
half rebounds. Someone bet he would have under one and
a half assists. These weren't random bets spread across many players.
This was concentrated specific action on one player's props, and
then Porter played four minutes and left the game, ensuring
(14:14):
that all those bets won. Gambling regulators flagged the activity immediately.
This was exactly the kind of pattern that indicated potential manipulation.
Multiple sportsbooks limited betting on Porter's props for future games
pending investigation. The NBA launched a don't investigation, and attention
turned to an earlier game on January twenty sixth, twenty
twenty four. In that game against the Sacramento Kings, Porter
(14:37):
had played three minutes before leaving with what he said
was an eye injury. Again heavy betting action on his
underwright before the game. Again, he barely played, ensuring the
bets won. The amounts involved were not small. According to investigators.
One Better had attempted to place an eighty thousand dollars
parlay bet on Porter's unders in the March twentieth game.
(14:58):
The bet was so large and so sp pacific that
Draft Kings limited it and only accepted about fourteen hundred
dollars of it. Even limited, these bets were making thousands
of dollars in profit, and they were happening with timing
that suggested the betters had advanced knowledge of what Porter
was planning to do. The NBA acted swiftly. On April nineteenth,
twenty twenty four, less than a month after the suspicious March,
(15:20):
game Commissioner Adam Selver announced that Johnte Porter was being
banned from the league for life. The league's investigation had
found that Porter violated NBA rules by disclosing confidential information
to betters and by limiting his own participation in games
for betting purposes. In other words, Porter had deliberately underperformed
to help gamblers win bets on him. He had, in
(15:41):
the language of old time gambling scandals, tanked games, not
entire games, just his own performance within them. But the
effect was the same. He corrupted the integrity of competition
for financial game. The ban was the most severe penalty
the NBA could impose, the same penalty given to players
for betting on NBA games. Silver made a statement emphasizing
(16:02):
that there was nothing more important than protecting the integrity
of competition. He said the league had zero tolerance for
any form of gambling related misconduct. The message was clear.
The NBA had caught someone manipulating games for gambling purposes,
and they had acted decisively. But here's what the league
didn't say publicly or didn't emphasize. Johnte. Porter had not
(16:23):
acted alone. He had co conspirators. There were people who
knew in advance what he was planning to do, people
who placed the bets, people who recruited him into the scheme.
And most important, and most importantly, Porter's case was connected
to other suspicious activity involving other players and other games.
The league's investigation into Porter revealed threads that led to
(16:44):
other individuals, other betting patterns, other potential manipulation, but at
the time, the NBA presented toward her as an isolated case,
one bad player who had made terrible decisions and had
been caught and punished. Problem solved, Quarter's legal troubles were
just beginning. The gambling regulators, who had fled to his activity,
(17:04):
referred the case to federal authorities. The FBI and federal
prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York opened an investigation.
What they found was more extensive than just one player
tanking a few games. They found organized conspiracies involving multiple
individuals using inside information to place bets. They found connections
(17:25):
to organized crime. They found sophisticated schemes, that had been
operating for months or years. Porter agreed to cooperate with
federal authorities and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire
fraud in July twenty twenty four. He faced potential prison
time and was awaiting sentencing. The names of Porter's co
conspirators began to emerge. One was a man named almer Awadi,
(17:49):
who had known connections to illegal gambling operations. Others would
later be revealed as the investigation expanded. These weren't random
sports fans making lucky bets. These were professional gamblers, some
with organized crime connections, who had found ways to obtain
inside information and exploit it. The Porter case pulled back
(18:10):
the curtain just slightly, revealing that there was an entire
underground ecosystem of people trying to cheat the sports betting system,
and the NBA's internal investigation capabilities were no match for it.
Here's the thing that should have terrified everyone involved in
professional basketball. The NBA had investigated Terry Rozier in early
twenty twenty four, around the same time as the Porter case.
(18:33):
Rosier was a guard who had been with the Charlotte
Hornets before being traded to the Miami Heat. Betting regulators
had flagged suspicious activity around some of his games, large
bet on his unders before games where he sat out
or underperformed. The patterns looked similar to what had been
found with Porter. The league conducted an investigation, They interviewed
(18:53):
Rosier multiple times, and they cleared him. They announced that
he was not found in violation of NBA rules. This
detail becomes crucial when you understand what happened next, because
in October twenty twenty five, eighteen months after the NBA
cleared him, Terry Rozier was arrested by the FBI as
part of a massive gambling conspiracy. The same suspicious activity
(19:16):
the league had investigated and dismissed turned out to be
exactly what it looked like. Rosier, according to federal prosecutors,
had been providing inside information to gamblers, helping them win
bets on his performance and on games he knew about
through his position as an NBA player. The NBA had
looked at the evidence and said there was nothing there.
(19:37):
The FBI looked at the same evidence, or more likely,
at better evidence obtained through subpoenas and wire taps, and
built a criminal case. This wasn't just an embarrassment for
the league. It was a fundamental indictment of their ability
to police their own sport. If they investigated a player,
cleared him and then he got arrested anyway, what did
(19:59):
that say about their investigative capabilities? What did it say
about their willingness to find problems when finding problems would
be bad for business? And that's really the core issue.
The NBA had built an entire economic model around gambling.
By twenty twenty five, billions of dollars in revenue were
flowing from partnerships with sportsbooks, from media deals predicated on betting, engagement,
(20:22):
from advertising and sponsorships tied to gambling companies. The league
couldn't afford to find widespread gambling corruption because finding it
would undermine fan confidence and potentially destroy the very partnerships
that were generating all this revenue. So when warning signs appeared,
when betting patterns looked suspicious, when players like Rosier came
(20:43):
under scrutiny, the incentive was to clear them, to announce
that the integrity measures were working, to reassure everyone that
the system was sound. But the system was not sound.
The system was fundamentally broken. You cannot build a multi
billion dollar industry around encouraging people to bet on individual
player performances while simultaneously expecting those players not to exploit
(21:06):
the system. You cannot partner with gambling companies and share
real time data with them while maintaining genuine independence in
investigating gambling this conduct. You cannot make prop bets the
centerpiece of sports gambling and then act surprised when players
realize they control whether those bets win or lose. The
Jonte Porter case should have been a wake up call,
(21:26):
even more urgent than the Tim Donahy scandal. Donaghy was
a referee, one person in a specific position. Porter was
a player, and players are the product. If players were
manipulating their own performances for gambling purposes, the entire sport
was compromised. Every game became suspect. Every poor performance raised questions.
(21:46):
Did that star player really tweak his ankle or did
someone bet on his under Did that team really rest
their starters for load management, or did someone make money
knowing they would sit. The league's response was to ban Porter,
cooperate with the federal investigation, and then try to move
forward as if this was an isolated incident. Commissioner Adam
Silver gave interviews saying the lead took integrity seriously. He
(22:08):
pointed to the fact that they had caught Porter and
banned him. He emphasized that the overwhelming majority of players
and team personnel followed the rules. All of this was
probably true, but it missed a point. The point was
that by fully embracing legalized gambling, by making it central
to their business model, the NBA had created conditions where
this kind of corruption was inevitable. They had built elaborate
(22:29):
integrity monitoring systems, but those systems were designed to catch
people after they had already cheated. They didn't prevent the cheating.
They couldn't prevent it because the incentives were too powerful
and the opportunities were too numerous. And while the league
was patting itself on the back for catching and banning
John Tae Porter, the FBI was building a much larger case.
(22:50):
They were identifying networks of people who had been using
inside information to place bets for months or years. They
were connecting Porter's co conspirators to other skis involving other
players and coaches. They were uncovering links to organize crime families.
They were following the money through offshore accounts and cryptocurrency wallets,
and they were preparing to make arrests that would shake
(23:12):
the entire league. In the months after Porter's ban, as
he was cooperating with federal prosecutors, more details emerged about
how the schemes worked. It wasn't just players deciding on
their own to tank performances. There were recruiters, people who
would approach players with gambling debts or financial problems and
offer them a way out. Do this small thing, Sit
(23:34):
out this game, leave early with an injury, and we'll
make sure some of your debt goes away. Or here's
fifty thousand dollars cash. No one will ever know. The
players often didn't understand the scale of what they were
getting into. They thought they were doing a favor for
a friend or solving a short term money problem. By
the time they realized they were part of a larger
criminal conspiracy, it was too late to get out the
(23:56):
gambling culture within the NBA, which had never really gone
away after Donaghy made play as vulnerable. If you already
owed money to someone from a poker game on the
team plane, and that person came to you asking for
information about whether you were planning to play in an
upcoming game. It didn't seem like that big a deal.
You were just chatting with someone you knew, except that
person was using that information to place huge bets, and
(24:18):
once you had showed information, once they had leverage over you,
they could threaten to expose you unless you kept providing information.
This is how criminal organizations have always operated. They find
vulnerable people, offer them something they need, and then slowly
ensnare them in deeper and deeper levels of criminality. The
FBI agents who are investigating these cases understood this. They
(24:40):
had experience with organized crime, with gambling operations, with financial fraud.
They knew how to identify betting patterns, how to trace
money flows, how to flip lower level conspirators to get
to the people running the schemes. The NBA Security Department,
for all their genuine efforts, couldn't compete with federal law
enforcement resources. They didn't have the power to subpoena financial records,
(25:02):
They couldn't wire tap phones. They had to rely on
people voluntarily providing information and on data shared by sportsbooks
who were also business partners of the league. By the
summer and fall of twenty twenty five, the federal investigation
was nearing completion. Prosecutors had identified dozens of individuals involved
in gambling conspiracies related to the NBA. They had evidence
(25:24):
of insider information being shared, of games being manipulated, of
organized crime, involvement of money laundry. They were preparing two
separate but related indictments. One focused on the sports betting
schemes using inside information, the other focused on an elaborate
poker cheating operation where celebrities, including NBA figures, were used
(25:46):
to lure wealthy marks into rigged games backed by the mafia.
And then, on October twenty third, twenty twenty five, the
house of cards collapsed. Thirty four people were arrested across
eleven states, among them retchre Yance, Billips, Terry Rosier, and
Damon Jones, the same Terry Rosier the NBA had cleared
(26:06):
just eighteen months earlier. And as the details of the
indictments became public, it became clear that this was not
just about a few players making bad decisions. This was
about systemic corruption that had been operating for years, about
networks that stretched from NBA locker rooms to organize crime families,
about an amount of money at FBI director Cash Ptel
(26:28):
described as mind boggling. The NBA had spent seven years
from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty five, building a gambling empire.
They had convinced themselves that they could control it, monitor it,
and profit from it without experiencing the inevitable corruption that
follows when you mix sports and gambling. The Johnte Porter
(26:49):
case should have told them they were wrong, but they
didn't want to hear it, so they banned Porter, cleared Rosier,
and kept cashing the checks from DraftKings. In FanDuel, we're
facing the consequences of that choice. In our next and
final episode, we'll examine the October twenty twenty five arrests
in detail, explore what the federal indictments revealed about the
(27:11):
scope of the conspiracy, and ask the hard questions about
whether professional basketball can survive its gambling addiction. Please subscribe
to make sure you don't miss it. This podcast is
brought to you by Quiet Please Podcast Networks. For more
content like this, please go to Quiet Please dot ai, Quiet,
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