And as noted in the update to this post in the NBA betting scandal thread, which is already inactive, the rabbit hole goes deeper this week, much as expected.
The matter was papered over by the media on NFL Sunday of course, but it was noteworthy in my local media market that there were zero gambling ads at all until after the evening games, and then between games of general gambling not sports betting, with the first sports betting ad of the day the same annoying one with Kevin Hart and that Lebron during Sunday Night Football.
Now we’ll see if the NFL goes with business as usual after only one week, or if they overhaul their gambling ads on Sundays.
Here’s the link to more of the dirt, which is included in the linked thread below and summarized:
Here is a great opinion piece from a Las Vegas local, as in one who has had family there since basically day one. I always used to hear out these rare folks when living there. One time in 2008 for example, I met a retired Marine, aged 88, who had been there since 1924 when his family moved there when he was a small child!
John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.
With alleged illegal sports gambling and rigged high-stakes poker games backed by the Mafia, this NBA scandal might be hard to beat. If the world’s premier basketball league kept statistics on such things, this one would chart as a triple-double. All that’s missing is a horse’s head in the commissioner’s bed.
Some of the most naive folks who defend gambling by active athletes are those who say things like, “Well they didn’t bet on their own sport” or even worse, “Well they didn’t bet on their own team!”
Ah, in their sheltered world I suppose, they must not understand what happens to those who owe a gambling debt, which most who are heavy and hooked gamblers on sports indeed do.
You must pay your gambling debt. Repeat, you must pay your gambling debt.
The alternative for those who don’t is not one that even organized crime desires.
Enter the likes of rigged poker games and the like set up by organized crime figures, for whom one must do a “favour” so as to pay off some of that debt.
The video linked of Michael Franzese explains exactly how such coercion for corruption of an active athlete in debt works right from the source, who is not in character as he explains how the conversation had gone with many a current professional athlete in his day, in that case a former player of the New York Jets and an unidentified quarterback.
As Adam Silver feebly attempted damage control on lapdog ESPN, interesting in front of a suddenly very corporate Pat McAfee and not Stephen A. Smith as must have peeved the latter anew (and rightly so given his grifting, flip-flopping ass):
So far, at least 30 people across 11 states have been charged in the Eastern District of New York with wire fraud, money laundering, extortion and illegal gambling, but the multipronged investigation is ongoing. Knowledgeable sources tell me other players and illegal bookmakers remain subjects of the investigation.
Hey Adam Silver you IDIOT, there’s been this complaint for some time, which is NOT on those state regulators you blame, but on YOUR LAME ASS!:
One beef among legal bookmakers tasked to set a stable line is why the NBA continues to allow teams to delay announcing their lineups until late on game night. It gives insiders with special — and often illegal — knowledge an edge that lets them take advantage of the system. Even when it’s innocent, it adds to the overall suspicion.
Oh well, we can’t be so surprised when such a sour apple as Adam Silver did not fall far from the tree of David Stern, can we?
On the court, sources remind me that this latest announcement doesn’t name some other players on West Coast teams whose shady pals and erratic on-court efforts have raised red flags in recent years. So, want to bet there’s another expensive basketball sneaker to drop in this case?
My window’s open.
It’s all a reminder that legalizing sports betting hasn’t driven out the illegal bookies. But it certainly has raised the stakes now that the stigma surrounding sports gambling has faded. With the leagues and teams partnered with traditional and online bookmakers and billions hanging in the balance, don’t look for anything to change soon.
In other words, expect more scandals despite pious marketing by the leagues and the best efforts of the good guys.
As mentioned though overlooked in just about all major media reporting, there is a tax incentive to still using illegal books, for of course it’s all cash and those wins are illegally not being reported as income, as required by law even for illegal income (i.e. that’s how even Al Capone was ultimately sent to jail, not all his reportedly directed crimes).
Of course illegal income, as via illegal gambling, cannot be offset at all by losses via illegal activity, with gambling losses all the same now more limited in deductibility via the new law passed in July 2025 for even legal gambling.
It’s a good time to drop this here, for it is not revelation, but many fail to connect the dots on just how sensitive this matter is for the NFL now, who no doubt in my mind are quite likely in a more active discussion with the FBI now so as to secure their interests:
All I know is that if you want to gamble, especially on your own team, the CFL is the place to be. Say nothing, show no remorse, sit out a few games and and say a few middling and insincere words about possibly having done something wrong and Bob’s your uncle.
After the moronic Adam Silver’s lame attempted damage-control bit via ESPN last week before the rest of the recent scandal was revealed, a scandal which had his knowledge after a supposed NBA investigation back in March 2023, well it would not surprise me at all if this is Adam Silver’s last season as commissioner and if the NBA owners are figuring out a potential successor now so that he can see his way out next summer after a quite noisy NBA season.
Hopefully they can inform Lebron , shamelessly now on gambling ads with unfunny Kevin Hart for DraftKings every weekend, to go ahead and follow Silver out the door whilst it is still open.
Adam Silver will have legal counsel helping him no doubt instead of flubbing his way in front of lapdog media like Pat McAfee, who has a core audience whom they probably think is gullible enough to not be concerned as they continue to bet unabated.
Members of Congress wrote to NBA commissioner Adam Silver on Friday, asking him to provide a briefing by October 31 relating to the gambling scandal that engulfed the league earlier this week.
Sent by a bipartisan group of six representatives on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, the letter calls on Silver to further explain the NBA’s relationship with sports betting to “assist the Committee in its oversight.”
The letter lists five points for Silver to address, asking him to explain further details about the “alleged betting practices in connection with NBA players, coaches and officials,” as well as the actions the league intends to take to limit inside information being used for “illegal purposes.”
So Congress is going to ask Silver to do what Silver clearly should have done when the NBA got the warning sign back in March 2023?
Uh, Congress, Silver is not the person who is going to execute effectively only now.
And here’s a key point in the letter that is being overlooked now by two generations of NBA fans, who were kids or not born yet at the time of the NBA referee scandal, for which I highly recommend the documentary on Netflix that was out in 2022.
Despite focusing on the latest allegations, the letter also noted that “illegal sports betting based on non-public information in the NBA is not a new problem,” citing the cases of former referee Tim Donaghy in 2007 and Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter in 2024.
UFC Extends Partnership With Paramount Into Australia and Latin America in 2026
“The new deal builds upon the landmark agreement announced in August, which granted Paramount+ exclusive rights to all UFC events in the United States beginning in 2026. The expansion positions Paramount+ as a global destination for fight fans, strengthening its live sports portfolio and international streaming presence.”
The Heat Turns Up Even More on The NBA and All Sports Betting
After Congress yesterday requesting a briefing from the NBA, here’s the US Senate kicking things up today:
For those who want to play politics like usual, stop and actually read that each of these are bipartisan efforts, so save that common noise for the politics thread.
You can bet that the NBA legal team will be working overtime for the next two weeks.
Then there is this non-news news via reliable NBA media lapdog ESPN out on Monday, but after starting out slow, the article does share great details about the core nature of mob involvement with amateur and pro athletes on an institutional basis for decades now:
In this case, prosecutors allege, the intermediary was Robert L. Stroud, a 67-year-old Louisville man with a criminal history. In 1994, Stroud killed a man during an evening playing cards and gambling at a home in Louisville, according to local outlet WAVE News. The outlet also reported that when Stroud was pulled over in 2001 for having expired tags, a police officer found “sports betting cards, dice, playing cards and what appeared to be gambling records” in the back seat.
Stroud recruited Billups and Jones to take part in rigged poker games run by members of New York City’s most prominent crime families, according to an indictment and accompanying court documents made public last week.
Look at the choice of association by these professional athletes, who know better to avoid all the more all the predators and grifters that come with the life of a professional athlete, but in this situation it’s as if they are saying the following:
“Yeah, as a professional athlete, I also do my part to give back and help recovering violent felons who are experts in gambling.”
Come again!?
Oh the naivete in this paragraph via ESPN here, which of course has direct interests in a sports book, but the article does improve.
It is unclear why Billups and Jones got involved with mob figures, as federal prosecutors allege. Billups earned more than $100 million over his decorated career, and nearly $5 million a year as coach of the Portland Trail Blazers. Jones, a former journeyman player and assistant coach, earned more than $22 million during his 11-year playing career.
As Michael Franzese points out amongst others who are not former mobsters and convicted felons, and along the lines as quoted later in the article:
Pro athletes are by nature competitive and lured to gambling for its own sake AND
They think they can get away with it, which of course they have for a long time.
Of course number 3 is that they get into debt and desperate often, so they turn to illegal books even if they were betting legally, so here we are now.
The article does goes on in improved fashion here:
“It’s hard to figure out why this happens,” said Keith Corbett, a lawyer and former head of the federal Organized Crime Strike Force in Detroit. He said that in past cases many gamblers have become ensnared with the mob because they are addicted to the action.
“There is always a certain lure where people want to do something that’s a little shady so they can get the cash and not report it,” he added. “Or they might owe these guys money for some reason, maybe because they bet with them.”
Scott Burnstein, a Mafia expert and founding editor of The Gangster Report, a website that tracks organized crime, said underworld figures often begin cultivating relationships with athletes early – at youth sports events and other loosely regulated venues.
“These showcase events, AAU basketball or 7-on-7 football tournaments are sometimes staged by criminals, or people close to criminals,” Burnstein said. “They then can later tap those relationships.”
Often, the ask is not one that would necessarily affect the outcome of a game. If a player is asked to get under a certain number of rebounds or play fewer minutes by faking an injury, it can be easy to rationalize, Burnstein said.
“They can do mental gymnastics to the point where they don’t really think they are affecting the outcome of a game,” he said. “So, they are morally in the clear in their minds.”
Then look here for simply ONE of Michael Franzese’s interests in illegal sports betting back in the 1980s, simply one division of his many businesses as a heavy earner as a made man for the Colombo crime family:
In the 1980s, Michael Franzese, then a capo in the Colombo crime family, bought a share in World Sports & Entertainment, a sports agency, with an eye on fostering tight relationships with athletes. The agency secretly signed top college players it believed would go pro.
“I did it because I wanted to get close to the athletes,” Franzese said. “We knew if we could get close to these guys, they are going to end up in trouble. If they gamble, they are going to come to us.”
While the Mafia is widely perceived as waning, people who closely follow its activities say it has only evolved. There is less violence, some say, and more sophistication. “I don’t believe they’re at the apex of power like we were during our time,” Franzese said. “But they’re not going away.”
But, as always, gambling remains one of the Mob’s most profitable activities. Even with the proliferation of legalized wagering, underground betting still has an unshakeable allure.
In the past year or so, the leagues have begun to understand the dangers that the proliferation of prop bets poses to their respective enterprises. Over the most recent MLB All-Star Break, Commissioner Rob Manfred criticized prop bets as “unnecessary” and “particularly vulnerable” to manipulation. At the NFL’s request, Illinois regulators banned props on made kicks, incomplete passes, and other events in which the outcome is “100% determinable by one person in one play.” The NCAA has asked Congress to ban player props in college athletics; in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine has pushed for a total ban on props in both college and pro sports, calling the market for these bets an “experiment” that has “failed badly.”
The leagues did not “begin to understand” or similar language that excuses the leagues, who take millions from gambling firms, in only the past year. They have known all along, and now the gig is up via the NBA.
At least the NCAA via Charlie Baker and Governor Mike Dewine of Ohio were ahead of the curve on this front of prop bets.
The NBA’s betting scandal shows who really runs sports now
The league brought the Terry Rozier prop-betting scandal on itself, trading its credibility for easy money from the sportsbooks.
BY Jay Willis
It is true that leagues, sportsbooks, and regulators have procedures in place to try and ferret out cheating. Hours before the game from which Rozier removed himself, many sportsbooks stopped taking bets on his props after a third-party monitoring firm flagged unusual betting activity on his unders, including one bettor at one casino who wagered more than $13,000 across 30 separate bets in 46 minutes.
But the fact that these systems have caught some people cheating only raises the question in fans’ minds of how much cheating is actually going on. If Rozier’s friend had been a little more circumspect about placing his bets—or, at the very least, if he hadn’t passed the info on to God knows how many people who flooded gambling apps and casino floors, looking to get in on the action—perhaps no one would have found out.
As omitted and negligently so in this article in light of the news, organized crime has had superior systems all along to facilitate the cheating so as to fool all such parties in oversight of the gambling. So the core solution is simple - don’t offer bets that are very easy for a single player to compromise. Now the books indeed can still do that so long as legal by state law, but the leagues don’t need to take their money, which they have been doing all the more.
…at some point, if betting and non-betting fans no longer trust the on-field, on-court, or on-ice product, it won’t be. The question is whether the leagues will give up some of this easy money to protect what remains of their credibility, or whether they are willing to risk losing it for good.
Michael Franzese had made this same point last week. The video is linked in this thread.
It’s nice to see major media take to task their own to some degree like in this article, instead of using the kid gloves behind corporate veils and the like nonsense, all the while professing to be investigative or free media and so forth.
Despite the scandal breaking before 8 a.m. ET on Oct. 23, ESPN stuck with its weekday studio lineup of Get Up , First Take,The Pat McAfee Show , and SportsCenter before really digging in on NBA Today at 3 p.m. ET. The old ESPN would have gone all out with daylong breaking news coverage featuring the likes of anchor Bob Ley and legal analyst Roger Cossack, said critics. Today’s ESPN stuck with its morning studio lineup—even though the lineup of mostly non-NBA guests offered limited insight into a rapidly developing story.
But look how much ESPN ratings were up, probably from an audience waiting for more insight they did not always hear, along with all the damage control of course.
Now why people just don’t go somewhere else in 2025 other than some cable channel, well I don’t know.
Roberts says viewership was higher compared with a typical day across all of ESPN’s shows: Get Up (+28%), First Take (+33%), The Pat McAfee Show (+35%), 2 p.m. SportsCenter (+66%), NBA Today (+51%), 5 p.m. SportsCenter (38%), and Pardon the Interruption (+30%). They were all topped by a whopping 67% boost in viewership for Charles Barkley’s Inside the NBA .
ESPN’s coverage was holistic, Roberts says, with all of its biggest guns weighing in on the scandal, including Inside the NBA. “Ernie Johnson provided some of the smartest questions while the story was still evolving in the 6 p.m. hour. So we were in good shape. And NBA Today did a fantastic job,” he says.
Still, ESPN took plenty of heat for its slow-burning coverage last Thursday. ESPN “dropped the ball” on one of the biggest breaking news stories of the year, wrote Awful Announcing. Why didn’t ESPN go live with FBI director Kash Patel’s press conference at 10 a.m., asked AA, especially with Patel describing the scandal as the “insider trading saga for the NBA.”
I agree with the author Michael McCarthy here as well:
“Suffice it to say, the days of ESPN having the infrastructure to properly cover a breaking news story like this are long gone. The death by a thousand cuts that has happened to the network’s news division over the years in favor of investments in opinion programming came to bear yesterday,” wrote AA . “No one was ready to step in. The shows didn’t know how to handle a story so complex in nature. And viewers tuning in to learn about what the hell was happening and why the FBI arrested two active NBA figures were left with more questions than answers.”
They not only don’t know at ESPN. This ESPN does not want to learn either, for ESPN BET is a sports book after all!
Then there was the awkward on-air moment when Get Up host Mike Greenberg was discussing how leagues and networks have embraced the formerly verboten world of sports betting—while ESPN’s ticker touted ESPN Bet. As former ESPNer Joon Lee wrote on X/Twitter: “The industry can’t even talk about what gambling is doing to fans without selling it at the same time.”
Then at the end the author does let them off easy, but hey, that’s what Front Office Sports has to do to have new executives at ESPN to talk to them for such an article.
Disclosure:
I’ve been saying to ESPN consistently since they were East-Coast sports biased since monitoring that reality since 2004, which was a few years before the sports blogs hit big. And they never changed in that regard either, but they only got worse.
In 2004 that was one of the earlier times that I downgraded my cable subscription, yet still managed to have the channels because the cable company never sent anybody out to “downgrade” me back in those days. Rinse and repeat as long as I had cable over the years until 2021.
Well, maybe some hope, who knows, something to build on here maybe…
Jean-Philippe Linteau, Ambassador of Canada to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Yemen, and Ambassador to the Kingdom of Bahrain and the Sultanate of Oman - ”I am thrilled to announce that live Canadian lobster and all Canadian fish and seafood products can now be exported to hashtag#SaudiArabia effective immediately.
Congratulations to Canadian Food Inspection Agency and وزارة البيئة والمياه والزراعة for concluding negotiations allowing this to happen.
Under hashtag#Vision2030 Saudi Arabia is developing a world class tourism offering which will stimulate demand for high quality Canadian fish and seafood.
Canadian exporters can reach out to Nuha Osman Embassy of Canada to Saudi Arabia | Ambassade du Canada en Arabie saoudite to discuss their market entry strategy.” …
US: Paramount, PBR Strike Five-Year Media Rights Deal
“For the first time, Paramount+ will carry live coverage of the full Unleash The Beast schedule. A five-month, 19-city competition featuring the world’s top bull riders. The deal expands on a relationship between PBR and CBS Sports that dates back to 2013 and now runs through 2030.”
When professional bull riding has a better deal than the CFL that speaks volumes.
I don’t know, bull riding is quite popular as I understand, CFL pales in comparison to bull riding in the U.S. popularity wise just thinking off the top of my head. I’d have to look up some articles but I doubt it would be difficult to dispute this.
Doesn’t surpise me at all that bull riding would get a better deal than the CFL. Here’s one after a quick search:
Well, there we have it, you are now our new bull riding and stampede expert, Aerial.
We look forward also to your coverage on TSN next year of also the Stampede Bowl with Luke “Pornstache” Willson.
I knew you had it in you since your days of running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain in 1978 and your matador training, all in active celebration after the fall of the Franco regime in 1977.
What great times those were with those morning runs and your matador training, followed by ample tapas and vino tinto garnacha in late afternoons and siestas followed by dinner and nights out in the discotheques into the wee hours.
Very few know that The Most Interesting Man In The World once remarked that after he ran into you one night when out with his entourage in Barcelona, he had to stop and buy you a drink because he himself was interested in what you had to say.
Anyway, sorry everybody, I digress, but let’s put our hands together to welcome again our new bull riding and stampede expert, Aerial.
Hey, I’m no expert but just saying, When I met my wife, she didn’t know diddly about football but she absolutely loved watching bull riding and she grew up in a fairly large city Ottawa, downtown Ottawa and attended bull riding events with her ex.
She got me watching it on the, yes, sports channels here and there and it’s damn enjoyable to watch and I noticed does get good crowds and those riders are tough as nails. I’ve never done it and don’t plan to. I’m no expert but this is. Unless you think this is all one big lie? Wouldn’t it be nice one day when there is an article describing the CFL/Grey Cup as a global sports event or league for viewership. That’ll be the day I bet, I wish but I won’t bet a dime on it.:
”More than 100 million viewers annually watch primetime PBR programming on networks around the world, including CBS, CBS Sports Network, NBC and NBC Sports Network”
, shamelessly now on gambling ads with unfunny Kevin Hart for DraftKings every weekend, to go ahead and follow Silver out the door whilst it is still open.