Along with the rest of the Animals, Battista had returned from Curaao in 2004 after PlayASAP had gone belly-up. (Rufo declined to comment for this story.) They were the gamblers and bookmakers closest to Battista. Donaghy rose from the table. According to the report, only one of those 17 games, Pistons at Nets on Dec. 16, 2006, "raised concerns that Donaghy's calls and substantial errors might have been aimed at favoring Detroit (which covered the point spread)." I accepted because Im an academic; we argue for a living. When Donaghy reffed and Concannon bet, the side he bet was covering the spread between 60 and 70 percent of the time. And: You don't want the NBA to find out about what you've been doing with Concannon. Because you're betting on the game, your judgment is off -- and you threw the game.'". In spheres other than the country-club set, he went by the nickname Rhino. Instead, Martino would be in the middle. Bombshell book says there are more dirty refs in NBA than supposed He gives the media a press packet, and they read him the questions from it, like its a PR campaign, Griffin said. Who besides Donaghy, Battista and Martino was in on it? 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. By Donaghy's own admission in his memoir, so much cash started rolling in that he had problems knowing physically where to stash it so his wife wouldn't start asking questions. IN A STATEMENT to ESPN at the end of January, the NBA said: "To be clear, the Pedowitz team and the NBA performed substantial statistical and data-based analyses to determine whether Donaghy attempted to manipulate games he officiated. The new material that ESPN has assembled to support its own conclusion that Donaghy manipulated games is not strong and adds little to the existing record. Another man who profited off Donaghy was a well-known New York and South Florida bookie and whale who sometimes went by the nickname Popeye on account of his oversize forearms. 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. But at the time of the visit, in late 2007, Kulle said, the men were close. (The last time he was arrested, the police dug up his yard and found sections of PVC pipe buried there. They are a form of broker that helps sports bettors by placing wagers on their client's behalf. In particular, a crew of Gambino thugs in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn had figured out the formula and was supposedly, from what this informant had heard, winning millions on this ref's games. To discuss Donaghy with more than a dozen of them now is to sense that their silence has more to do with the fact that they hate the guy. '", Back at the table, Martino and Donaghy told Battista that they needed to drive to a nearby gas station. In his memoir, Donaghy writes that he was standing on the first tee at his home golf club in Sarasota with a driver in his hands when he took the call from Martino. "I started thinking -- or should I say, rationalizing: S---, everyone on the staff bets," he wrote. They now had one job: Do not lose the edge by letting the information leak. 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. It touts interviews with Donaghy, Battista and Martino not Griffin. "And like everything else, when you make changes, initially you'll have an overreaction. ", The gambler added, "He also told me they were betting millions and he was an idiot not to ask for more.". One of them was the man that his ex-wife Kim Donaghy described as his forever "partner in crime" -Thomas "Tommy" Martino. And indeed, the chart for the Boston-Philly game on Dec. 13, 2006, shows the price for Boston spiking and then shrinking back. Donaghy worked the game. 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. Martino said Donaghy cheated on tests, too, at Villanova. This was an episode of gambling, yes, but almost assuredly not match-fixing. 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. He knew how to control it. "During all this s---," he said. By chance, over the years its members had all acquired animal nicknames: Tiger, Rooster, Rhino, Seal, Sheep. FBI special agent and head of the investigative unit focused on the Gambino crime family at the time of the investigation. Gambler, bookmaker and opener of offshore sportsbooks. Martino did recall Donaghy telling him that certain games would be unfixable. Donaghy, in August 2007, and Martino, in April 2008, would plead guilty to two charges: conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to transmit gambling information. Jimmy was ordered to spend 15 months in federal prison. In Sarasota, Kim Donaghy printed out for me the first 98 pages of her unfinished and unpublished memoir, The Ref's Wife. Tim Donaghy, 55, was born in Pennsylvania on 7 January 1967 and worked in the NBA from 1994-2007. Donaghy scandal's ringleader speaks - TrueHoop- ESPN The guy's career was ruined and his life in shambles. Griffin said, While it, too, is lacking, nothing can compare to Donaghys book for comic relief. Tim Donaghy Netflix docufilm returns disgraced ex-NBA ref to spotlight Martino would then relay the pick to Battista. And then one afternoon the case agent came into my office. Getty Images LAS VEGAS By January 2007, Jimmy Battista's NBA bets had attracted the attention of the world's heavyweight gamblers, who had connected referee Tim Donaghy to that action. That was when he told Popeye that, come the 2006-07 NBA season, Battista would need to increase the size of some of his NBA wagers. "He played golf and gambled.". Disgraced NBA Referee Tim Donaghy Revealed the Player He Almost Fought Battista hiking Donaghy's fee to $5,000 for each correct pick -- minuscule compared to the amounts Battista was now wagering Battista bowing his head to his desk and snorting a line of coke to stay alert, to stay awake. "Say hello to Johnny for me ". From here on out, Battista said, he and Donaghy would never communicate directly. "Our plans were blown up by the fact that somebody leaked this," Scala lamented to me. 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. In the car at the gas station, according to Gaming the Game, Donaghy had said: Bet the Celtics. Taylor "Popeye" Breton Where Is Tim Donaghy Now? The Former NBA Referee Worked In Pro - Bustle Battista and Donaghy were never to speak directly. There had to be a pattern. 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 . They'd known each other since high school. How Tim Donaghy's NBA Betting Antics Made Him A Target Of The Mob You want to get paid, you gotta cover the spread, Battista had told Donaghy. FAQ: How will legal gambling change the NBA and the way we watch it? " And still it went on Donaghy in Dallas on Jan. 30 calling one foul against the home team and 12 against Seattle, including six straight against the Sonics when the margin was 13 or fewer. When Donaghy had finished, Kulle leaned back in his chair. Short, squat, thick-necked, Ruggieri was built, some thought, like a small rhinoceros. "We were prepared to do some undercover things to corroborate Donaghy's story," Scala says. He was already thinking, How can I get a piece of this action? One of them was a man nicknamed Tiger. They would use, per Martino's statement to the FBI, a code. Perhaps the greatest is this: that Donaghy was the ref who colluded with gamblers on NBA games for one disgraceful season. Battista, after discovering this, had been following those bets for the better part of the past four years. 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. It was either sink or swim together for all of us. Its not like I was laughing at his calls if they helped us, or pissed at his calls if they hurt us. But the crucial betting information -- which sides of which games the ref favored -- had been seeping into the black-market gambling business. The Animals landed in Curaao, where they helped launch an online sportsbook known as PlayASAP. Ensuing betting-scandal headlines jolted the NBA. Donaghy, Griffin said, distracts and diverts. Each of the city's famous Five Families -- Genovese, Lucchese, Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino -- has a dedicated FBI unit investigating it full time, and Scala was the boss of the one focused on the Gambinos. All those gray-area decisions you have to make, Tim? One of its officials is dirty, film at 11. His name was Tim Donaghy. He'd acted alone. [3] During his career in the NBA, Donaghy officiated in 772 regular season games and 20 playoff games. Then people settle in. Not long ago, he brought them out, looked at them and told me about them over the phone. THEY CALLED IT The Office. SIX DAYS LATER, on June 21, Scala, Harris and their boss, Special Agent in Charge Kevin Hallinan, traveled to the NBA offices in midtown Manhattan and sat down with commissioner David Stern and three other league executives: deputy commissioner Adam Silver, president Joel Litvin and senior vice president of security Bernie Tolbert, a former FBI agent. A "free roll," as they call it. Watching would give him agita, he's said, at which point he'd have to turn off the TV: "I remember being like, 'Oh s---, he's getting out of hand.' In the early 2000s, the sports-betting world was undergoing its own equivalent of a dot-com boom. Rhino Ruggieri was booking bets made by an acquaintance from back home, a guy he knew from the golf course named Jack Concannon. ", "These analyses," the NBA told ESPN, "did not support your finding that an unbiased official would not have made the calls that Donaghy did.". Jimmy Battista Net Worth Jimmy Battista should have a net worth above $1 million. The Timmy Elvis Donaghy thing was only a small part of everything I had going on, and I didnt want anyone to find out. How Tim Donaghy's NBA Betting Antics Made Him A Target Of The Mob Scala won't say whether he believes the NBA leaked the story. When I asked, I expected Rush to answer much the same as Nunn had to me: Nothing out of the ordinary. And he could have been.". 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. Rush recalls watching maybe 10 such games. That, though, represented only one knot of the tangled webs. In early 2017, inspired by the 10th anniversary of the scandal, ESPN set out to reinvestigate it. As economist Wladimir Andreff of the University of Paris has written: "All economic analyses conclude that the more money there is inflowing to sport, the greater the sport corruption.". According to the league, the studies were based on "the entirety of the period during which Donaghy had admitted to gambling on games," including 194 games refereed by Donaghy himself, and entailed examinations of "officiating accuracy," "lopsided [foul] calling and the magnitude of lopsidedness," the timing of his calls during games, foul-call "streaks" and call volumes, along with an analysis of "all associated betting lines and movements. Tim Donaghy was unwittingly placing himself in harms way, Griffin wrote. Every foul call was logged, the resulting data analyzed, along with betting-market line-movement histories for every game Donaghy reffed that season. 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.. He has recently admitted that he wishes he was still an NBS referee. Tim sits down with Jimmy Battista and Tommy Martino hoping to find out new information about the relationship between referees Tim Donaghy and Scott Foster. 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. Popeye, who died of heart disease in 2014 at age 61, was born in Manhattan and raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, but remained estranged from most of his family for most of the rest of his life. The other, Chuck, lived in Delco. Nobody wanted to golf with him, Minutella said. "All I'm seeing," he said he told Donaghy, "is a movie. ESPN ignores this important distinction. The FBI started trying to determine who the crooked referee was, and they built a "spiderweb" of Gambino connections that eventually led them to Donaghy, per ESPN. Donaghy's story is that he bet on all kinds of things for years with his buddy, including NBA games. And I said, 'What?' Seth Wickersham on the Cleveland Browns' front office -- and where hope and history collide. It would have been great for me, great for sales, just for selfish reasons, Griffin said. But this referee didn't lose much. The NBA employees "examined every play and determined whether, in their view, Donaghy's calls (or absence of calls) were correct." LAS VEGAS By January 2007, Jimmy Battistas NBA bets had attracted the attention of the worlds heavyweight gamblers, who had connected referee Tim Donaghy to that action. At the Marriott, Battista thanked Donaghy for the gift. "Maybe the company never sat at a table together," he says. IT WOULD NOT be the only time Tim Donaghy would come clean. What did he see? They knew all about what he'd done, they told him; he was looking at 20 years. As Scala told me, "If you can envision a spiderweb -- it might not be directly, but one or two or three spheres out, you find a name. And so, controlling for blowouts by removing those games from the ledger, what we ultimately found was this: Donaghy favored the side that attracted more betting dollars in 23 of those 30 competitive games, or 77 percent of the time. ], Griffin, 52, said. Blessed with the right connections, and after four years officiating in the CBA, the NBA's minor league, he was called up to the majors in 1994. The closing line: Dallas by 8 Donaghy on New Year's Day in Charlotte calling 14 fouls against the Bobcats, five against the Timberwolves; the Wolves covering Battista usually watched these games at home, but sometimes not. And, if he did, what was his method? Just before tip-off, Battista bet $60,000 on Boston, bumping the line to 3.5 points. It was January 2007. Who is Jimmy Battista? Where Is Tim Donaghy's Partner Now? Tim Donaghy Our experts predict every series, 2023 NBA playoffs: Second-round series, Finals, MVP odds, 'He looks better than ever': Why the Orlando bubble was 'just the beginning' for Jamal Murray, Pregame chats, language arts and 'a lot of fines': Inside NBA player-ref dynamics, United States of sports betting: An updated map of where every state stands. By now the spreads were moving violently. But we also found that in 10 games during that 40-game span, one team was defeating the other team to such a degree that the spread was rarely in doubt. No line-movement data would be required. ACCORDING TO SCALA, the truncated probe meant the Feds left several lines of inquiry hanging. But now, when Battista arrived at Martino's house, he dropped the bomb. Although Jimmy first came across Tim while they were both attending Cardinal OHara High School in Springfield, Pennsylvania, it wasnt until years later that they even became acquaintances. Too many invested observers -- referee supervisors, coaches, players, owners, media, fans -- would be too quick to complain if they saw something fishy, the NBA argued. She struggled to recall exactly when, but she told me she probably started finding the cash in 2004, during the season. Tim Donaghy returns to spotlight in Netflix documentary but something They were the real moneymakers of the Donaghy scheme. Spiros "The Greek" Athanas He had the artwork. "Someone in the NBA notified the press [in order] to stop this investigation, in my opinion. Yet the number of games reviewed by Pedowitz's group of NBA employees was only 17. It opens in the morning and closes right before tip-off. Gaming the Game is definitive, vital to comprehending the NBA scandal and how sports-betting money zips around the world. Larry Pedowitz How former ref Tim Donaghy conspired to fix NBA games - ESPN If one assumes there should be no correlation between wagers and the calls made by a referee, the odds of that disparity* might seem unlikely. An attorney for Athanas wrote to ESPN that Athanas never "received information that Tim Donaghy was making wagers on games in which he was the referee," and so never made any bets based on any knowledge of the scheme. Griffin documented how Donaghy admitted to getting into Villanova, in part, by having someone take his SAT for him. Martino also penned a book in 2019. That couldve helped me and absolutely would have hurt Timmy, [but] I wasnt a rat.. They passed it back and forth -- Battista, who'd snorted some coke earlier, demurred -- and as the car filled with smoke, they made, Martino told me, "a pact." Martino couldn't remember, not exactly. Where is Tim Donaghy's Friend Tommy Martino Now? A ref, on the other hand, can effectively add points -- calling fouls that result in free throws. I can imagine TV producers were looking for an on-air mix-up. Back in Philly, Ruggieri had noticed that Concannon's bet sizes were an order of magnitude higher on certain NBA games. The latest updates, reviews and . Gambler, bookmaker and great-great grandson of the founder of Goldman Sachs, now deceased. ", Not every retired referee is reticent. He started small. He was what's known as a mover. When I visited her in Sarasota not long ago, at the office where she works, she made it clear the divorce was a long time coming. According to the FBI's investigation files, obtained in an FOIA request, some referees had to be served with subpoenas before they would talk to the Feds. About a month after the meeting with Stern, however, the New York Post blared news of the FBI investigation across its front page. And now, back to your regularly scheduled chants, Kahleah Copper is more than comfortable in the drivers seat for the Sky, Andrew Vaughn, White Sox end 10-game skid with 12-9 comeback win over Rays, What the Cubs April performance says about their identity, Shoplifter stabs Loop Target employee, leading to temporary store closure, The Edgar haircut is one more thing kids, parents can disagree on, Dear Abby: When I travel, friend checking my home also snoops through my things, Coffee machine broken? Donaghy was horrible betting every other sport. The Animals went so far as to study the box scores after each of Donaghy's outings. Premier underground bookmaker, now deceased, who, according to sources, profited from the scheme. ", The Celtics played the 76ers the night after the Marriott meeting. Griffin, a criminal justice professor at The Citadel and former Philadelphia cop, untangled much of that mess in his best-selling 2011 book, Gaming the Game.. I refuse to talk about him." The story examines Donaghy's relationships with professional gambler Jimmy Battista and Tommy Martino (the intermediary between Donaghy and Battista), the involvement of Italian-American crime families in the scheme, and the FBI's failed efforts to "flip" Battista into a cooperating witness. Several sports-betting experts -- two former underground movers and a longtime professional NBA gambler -- agreed that global markets contained enough liquidity in 2007 for an in-the-know bettor to win as much as $100 million. And then, twisting the knife, Battista told him how much Concannon was winning. So I didnt really have time to focus on it, let alone enjoy it., I dont want to say the NBA scandal was easy, he said, but once I got access to personnel in the U.S. attorneys offices and FBI agents, they were not only confirming what Battista said but were elaborating.. Twenty months later, all three had avoided trials and awaited sentencing, by U.S. District Judge Carol Bagley Amon, in Brooklyn. The Sun-Times Patrick Finley answers the biggest questions facing the Bears after the draft: On this International Workers Day, were committed to fighting for a better future for all workers in our city and state, two labor leaders write. Tim Donaghy, Tommy Martino, and Jimmy Battista had attended the same Catholic High School near Philadelphia. This scandal involved two childhood friends, Jimmy Battista, the gambler, and Tommy Martino, the go-between, who carried the money and information between Donaghy and Battista. Tommy Martino was tight with both Donaghy and Battista. In 2003 in Curaao, when the Animals had made their original deduction and followed the Donaghy-Concannon bets, Tiger had been the leader of the Animals' betting office. Crank's method boasted a certain elegance: It would capture any bias a ref might display in as simple a way as possible. And then there's the offseason. 'Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul' clip shows Tim Donaghy's relationship The methods of fixing are rather straightforward. Twice, Griffin said, he appeared in a television studio to partake in documentaries in which Donaghy was supposed to appear. I didn't find it.". Where is Tim Donaghy's Friend Tommy Martino Now? - The Cinemaholic The effort to hide it was in vain. One expert offers tips to brew the perfect cup at home. Gerry Donaghy, his father, for a long time wore stripes at the highest levels of NCAA men's basketball. Battista said that if Donaghy could keep games close or far enough to cover the spread, he'd give him $2,000 a game to do so. Over the course of the past decade, he's built a company that has become one of the biggest Planet Fitness franchisees in the nation, with more than 30 locations and exclusive rights to the regions of Philadelphia and Chicago. One of the three was always him. Lawyer, Battista replied. But examine that imbalance against the financial imbalances discovered in the trading histories-which side received the heavier betting -- and the important comparison isn't between Donaghy's foul calls and the team that won the game. ", Scala, at the time, was livid.

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