The head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, NBA Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups, has been charged with helping to cheat high-stakes poker players out of millions of dollars through rigged card games allegedly operated by underworld crime figures.
A 22-page indictment, one of two unsealed on Thursday in separate but related federal gambling investigations, outlines alleged schemes to defraud high rollers lured to the games with the promise of playing with NBA celebrities only to be swindled through sophisticated cheating technologies.
Here’s a look at how federal prosecutors say the games were fixed:
THE MARKS
The schemes targeted high-wagering, often-wealthy gamblers who believed they were participating in non-rigged “straight” poker games that were illegal but otherwise well established. These included weekly gatherings known as the “Washington Place Game” and the “Lexington Avenue Game” in Manhattan.
THE BAIT
To attract the unwitting players in some instances, the indictment alleged, well-known former professional athletes were advertised as celebrity card-game participants, referred to as “Face Cards.”
Among the alleged “Face Cards,” who received a portion of the criminal proceeds in exchange for their participation, was Billups, who played for the New York Knicks and six other NBA teams during his career and won a championship with the Detroit Pistons in 2004.
Another was former NBA guard Damon Jones, who played for 10 different teams but was best known for his tenure with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
THE INSIDERS
Other defendants named in the rigged-poker indictment include accused Gambino crime family associate Ammar “Flappy” Awawdeh, alleged Genovese crime family associate Matthew “The Wrestler” Daddino, and suspected Bonanno crime family associate Thomas “Juice” Gelardo.
Other defendants went by such nicknames as “Sugar,” “Albanian Bruce,” “Doc,” and “Pookie.”
THE SCAM
According to the indictment, some of the rigged games employed card-shuffling machines that were secretly altered with concealed technology to read the cards in the deck and predict which player at the table had the best poker hand. That information was then relayed by wire to an off-site operator, who then communicated it by cellular telephone back to a member of the cheating team, referred to as the “quarterback” or “driver.” The quarterback in turn used secret signaling to share the information with the rest of the cheating team.
Other cheating technologies included:
* electronic poker chip trays that could secretly read cards placed on the table;
* card analyzers that used technology loaded onto decoy cellular telephones that could surreptitiously detect which cards had been dealt;
* playing cards with markers visible only to individuals wearing specially designed contact lenses or sunglasses.
THE TAKE
The scheme involved associates of the Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese and Genovese organized crime families in New York, which controlled some of the underground poker games in the city where the rigging took place.
The families took a cut of the profits and used extortion, robbery and other forms of intimidation to collect unpaid debts and laundered proceeds through cryptocurrency and other means.
