That's the bottom line. And then, twisting the knife, Battista told him how much Concannon was winning. Better to cooperate. James "Bah-Bah" "Sheep" Battista He had an unhappy marriage, four daughters and a $260,000 salary. An intervention Battista two days later wearing a bathrobe in rehab. Embarrassing, Griffin said. Battista was a creature of that world. 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. An NBA referee, according to the informant, was "in the pocket" of some people in the sports-gambling underworld. 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. They'd studied his wagers. "There were lots of whistles in the game, by him, that did not fit the game," he says. That, though, represented only one knot of the tangled webs. "If you looked at the stats," said one gambler in The Office at the time, "you could see he was calling more fouls on the team he bet against and less fouls on the team he bet on. "The only concern I had," he wrote, "was saving my own selfish sorry ass." July 9 is the anniversary of Donaghy's resignation from the NBA. Hundreds of hours were spent watching every NBA game Donaghy officiated in the 2006-07 season. The latest updates, reviews and . It was 0.232. (Concannon declined comment for this story.) "But you know what? Popeye, no dummy, asked the obvious question: Who's the handicapper behind these games? He was sentenced to 15 months in prison for his role in the gambling ring. The important comparison is to the team that received the greater amount of betting dollars. Short, squat, thick-necked, Ruggieri was built, some thought, like a small rhinoceros. The office's windows looked out onto a basketball court, where children on youth teams were just then practicing. A former gambler that was unquestionably tied to the biggest betting scandal in NBA history, is of the opinion that disgraced referee Tim Donaghy did not act alone and had help from other game officials. The commissioner promised the league's full cooperation. Accusations, innuendo and lies come from a cast of lawyers and characters, including Donaghy's co-conspirators Tommy Martino and Jimmy Battista, telling a story that many have long ago wanted to . Ed T. Rush In any case, Ruggieri before long decided to shut the whole thing down. NBA commissioner David Stern kept Donaghy from working the second round of the 2005 playoffs because of the sheer volume (Sterns words) of such reports. Perhaps this is why the men who formed Battista's loose, disorderly investor group, the men who were "on the ticket," have, for all these years, remained in the shadows. 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. And how, in turn, could you uncover evidence of it years, even a decade, later? There was this NBA referee named Tim Donaghy Popeye's eyes grew wide. ", But Scala, the FBI agent who pursued the case, has doubts. Thats when Battista started calling Donaghy Elvis, The King of prognosticating NBA games including his own, Battista told Griffin. 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. Martino did recall Donaghy telling him that certain games would be unfixable. The big problem, Battista said, was that the betting markets appeared to be getting wise to the emergence of an astonishingly accurate NBA handicapper. The other, Chuck, lived in Delco. FBI special agent and head of the investigative unit focused on the Gambino crime family at the time of the investigation. 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. ESPN ignores this important distinction. NBA director of officials at the time of the scandal. I believe this guy was almost soulless.. 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. He knew how to get into other referees' heads too, about different players because [the other refs] would follow him. "He knew what the spreads were going to be. Move along. 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.". Tommy Martino was tight with both Donaghy and Battista. They would use, per Martino's statement to the FBI, a code. Donaghy faced 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines. By most accounts, Tony "Tiger" Rufo is no longer a gambler. Donaghy was horrible betting every other sport. Gambler, bookmaker and great-great grandson of the founder of Goldman Sachs, now deceased. He'd been raptly listening to the referee's story -- the gambling, the cash, the secrecy, the corruption, the endless search by human beings to gain an edge, the gross opportunism that seemed almost contagious, the almost shockingly easy fixing of a major American sport -- but now there was one big thing on Kulle's mind, and it wasn't the moral of the story. Dallas making both free throws, increasing its lead to eight. Donaghy then found another publisher: a small, independent, newly established outfit -- so new that Personal Foul would be its inaugural volume -- based in Tampa, Florida, and operated by a political consultant and publicist named Shawna Vercher. But there is much evidence to suggest the opposite. "No one wants to talk about that. 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. What is his Net Worth? In high school, during a trip to the Jersey Shore, Donaghy got drunk and scavenged through neighbors homes, stealing items. Around the same time as Stern's news conference, the NBA also commissioned an investigation, to be led by Larry Pedowitz, a partner with the elite New York law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. But he has kept the investigative notes he took on his FBI cases, including the Donaghy case. The FBI started trying . Griffin already had published a bestseller in 2005 with Black Brothers, Inc. about the violent rise and fall of Philadelphias black mafia. Twenty months later, all three had avoided trials and awaited sentencing, by U.S. District Judge Carol Bagley Amon, in Brooklyn. "I said to him, 'Listen, don't tell me that you have some independent, decision-making ability in your mind's computer that's going to be unbiased, because that's not going to f---ing happen. Much later on he would come to call this meeting "the marriage.". In his book, Donaghy wrote, I knew I was screwed and in a tight spot . Every foul call was logged, the resulting data analyzed, along with betting-market line-movement histories for every game Donaghy reffed that season. It hadn't taken long to deduce. If the pick missed, the ref owed nothing; Battista would eat the loss. Now, after Donaghy's downfall but before he headed to prison, Donaghy broke down and wept inside Kulle's office. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. Hes publishing it independently. (Pedowitz, who has retired from his firm, did not respond to requests for comment. 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. Based in an anonymous office building in Kew Gardens, Queens, Scala and his agents had spent years assembling a network of informants inside the gang. If the score in a game widened too far beyond the betting line, Donaghy told Martino, Donaghy would be powerless to rein it back in. The gambler described the conversation with Donaghy to me on the condition that I not use his name in the story. 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. There's also Scala, who told me he heard from his informants that underground gamblers "could have been making over a hundred million dollars" on Donaghy's games. They'd shut down a Gambino profit center. High school friend of Donaghy and Battista who served as the go-between in the betting scheme during the 2006-2007 NBA season. The notes taken by the agents during these interviews have a mantra-like similarity: "recalled feeling 'shocked' when he learned about Donaghy did not discuss this matter with other referees" "described his initial reaction as 'surprised' and 'shocked,' and stated that he did not discuss this matter with any other referees" "described Donaghy as a very accurate referee with few missed calls" "did not hear other refs discuss TD thought he was a good ref. And normally this guy lost. So the FBI had worked out a plan. 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. Because that's how you get in trouble. Jimmy "the Sheep" Battista & NBA Revelations In "Gaming The Game". they thought. 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. Favored by 6, the visiting Wizards covering Battista on March 15 confessing to his wife that he'd lost $7 million of his clients' money Battista on March 16 strung out and sleepless at Martino's house and surrounded suddenly by almost his entire immediate family. That is incorrect. Popeye's real name was Taylor Breton, and he was the great-great-grandson of Marcus Goldman, the founder, in 1869, of Goldman Sachs. "We were prepared to do some undercover things to corroborate Donaghy's story," Scala says. After learning about the suspicious circumstances surrounding the leak of the original Donaghy story and Jimmy Battista's plea deal, the crew investigates the most controversial game in . The Timmy Elvis Donaghy thing was only a small part of everything I had going on, and I didnt want anyone to find out. They produce whatever theyre going to produce, independent of the evidence. In the casino, Donaghy wore a baseball cap low to hide his eyes; everyone knows about the cameras in casinos, and the NBA forbade any gambling by its refs (with the exception, oddly, of horse racing). And so it is that May's Supreme Court decision demands a review of the Donaghy affair. 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. To Martino, Battista seemed desperate, even frightened. Martino said Donaghy cheated on tests, too, at Villanova. Whether or not Battista made them explicitly aware of his agreement with Donaghy, their money was used to make one very specific genre of bet: games refereed by Tim Donaghy. Since moving to Sarasota in 2005, Donaghy had often volunteered for the local youth sports leagues that Kulle ran out of a community center. Through them, we deduced which side Donaghy had picked for Battista to bet on. It was too obvious. Rush, as director of refs, took notice but didn't think much of it at the time. Another key figure was Joseph "Joe Vito" Mastronardo, a major black-market bookie who served as Battista's most significant out. By June 15, Donaghy was sitting inside the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York in downtown Brooklyn, naming names and making a statement. None of them says anymore that Donaghy "was a good ref. One of them was the man that his ex-wife Kim Donaghy described as his forever "partner in crime" -Thomas "Tommy" Martino. There is, for one, Ed T. Rush, former NBA director of officials, a Philadelphia native and, for 32 years, a referee at the highest level, starting in 1966. Jimmy Battista, nickname "The Sheep," is a professional gambler. Donaghy officiated in 40 games between the marriage on Dec. 12, 2006, and March 21, 2007, which according to one source is likely the last game before Ruggieri took control of the scheme. Do it right and you can drive down the price of Boston. The dubious mafia threat. It's impossible,'" Scala says. Netflix, to me, is the next iteration of that., Donaghy published a book in June 2010, nine months before Gaming.. They came out of the station bearing a packet of rolling papers, and right there inside the car, under the fluorescent gas station lights, in the rental-return sprawl adjacent to the Philadelphia International Airport runway, Martino rolled a joint. To control for bias, he performed what's called a hypothesis test on these numbers, which would produce a P value, or a probability, for Donaghy's calls in each game in the 2006-07 season. The referee's life has its contradictions. The informant didn't know any names, and the people with the ref in their pocket did not appear to be made members of the Gambino crime family. Jimmy was ordered to spend 15 months in federal prison. It's despicable." Whatever his issue was, Battista said he couldn't talk about it over the phone. "Maybe the company never sat at a table together," he says. In that first March, he bet on only two or three games. Donaghy rose from the table. ", Said another: "Did I assume he was fixing the games? Then later in the day, with the price right, you gobble up all the Boston you can. 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. Using burner phones, Donaghy would call Martino and inform him of his pick for the game he was officiating. Watching games for Pedowitz, Rush noticed the same propensity to call "literally interpreted" fouls in situations where they were not warranted -- ones that ran counter to the flow of the game. The Feds' job, on this one, was done. Today, Scala considers that meeting a mistake. A PROFESSIONAL GAMBLER once confronted Donaghy about the scandal. All those gray-area decisions you have to make, Tim? That couldve helped me and absolutely would have hurt Timmy, [but] I wasnt a rat.. And they are. According to Martino and Battista, after such wagering was complete, Battista, via Martino, would then inform Donaghy of the spread he needed to cover. 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 . TIM DONAGHY HAS always publicly denied that he deliberately manipulated games so as to win bets, arguing that he based his picks on insider information. Wife of Tim Donaghy at the time of the scandal. He felt the trends were embodied in the stats: The volume of Donaghy's calls was noticeable; it must be obvious to all. According to Martino, if Donaghy mentioned out-of-state Johnny's name, the pick was for the visiting team. Tim Donaghy was unwittingly placing himself in harms way, Griffin wrote. He had many lucrative gambling-related businesses. He was ready to face trial for up to 25 years in prison in the hopes of having the most severe charges against him dropped, but the prosecutors eventually came through with a deal. An old classmate, Jimmy Battista, had extorted him into making NBA betting picks for him by saying, "You don't want anyone 'from New York' coming to your house" (via ESPN). Ill never understand that., Battista, who called Donaghy a pathological liar with bottomless greed, told Griffin, I knew that Timmys demand for money far exceeded his ability to get it. Griffins three-year descent into offshore betting was triggered by his curiosity about the mafias involvement with sports wagering, stemming from an FBI wiretap of the Gambino crime family. Black-market street bookies from all over the U.S., sharp pro gamblers and digital-savvy entrepreneurs with coding skills were all setting up online sportsbooks, often establishing themselves in places with little regulatory oversight, like Costa Rica, Antigua, Jamaica and Curaao. Battista demanded that Donaghy never bet with Concannon again, and in exchange for providing Battista with his betting "picks," Donaghy would receive $2,000 per game -- but only if the pick won. What Battista, Ruggieri and the rest did was follow the Concannon-Donaghy bets with bets of their own -- $30,000, $50,000, $100,000 a game, according to a person familiar with the betting. I can imagine TV producers were looking for an on-air mix-up. 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. Favored by 12, Dallas covering Donaghy in Miami calling 12 fouls against visiting Charlotte, two against the Heat. Griffin has never spoken with Donaghy. Conspiracy theories about corrupted refs have dogged the league for decades. A month or so back, not long before Christmas, he'd done something audacious: He'd sat down and cut a deal with an NBA referee. Things may have been different. He was [expletive] shrewd and believed everyone owed him the world.. And if a ref were to target one particular team with fouls, he could push the score for the opposing side higher than it otherwise would be. (The Feds never said which 16 games they were, so Pedowitz's team had to deduce them from court documents and FBI requests for game videos, and the set of possible games it came up with was 17.). 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. Probably Donaghy's closest friend in this crowd was a man named Jack Concannon. David Stern The falling-out involved a polygraph test. Griffin documented how Donaghy admitted to getting into Villanova, in part, by having someone take his SAT for him. The Celtics, favored by 2.5 points, went on to win in a blowout. "It was a job I was born to do," Donaghy wrote in his 2009 memoir, Personal Foul, but the sentence carries a double meaning. One morning in early July 2007, Ronnie Nunn was asleep in a hotel room in Las Vegas when his cellphone buzzed him awake. (Ruggieri did not respond to requests for comment.) Like many in their cohort, Concannon had a bookie, Peter Ruggieri, who also golfed frequently with Donaghy and Concannon's crew. It was January 2007. 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.. The referee at the time, Timothy "Tim" Donaghy, was betting on his own game for about a year, if not more, to satisfy his addiction and benefit the two co-conspirators. Just before entering rehab, according to Martino and law enforcement documents, Battista had handed over the reins of the operation to Rhino Ruggieri. Pete "Rhino" Ruggieri 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. Battista had since decided to set up shop on his own as a bet broker. They checked the games. AND THEN THERE was a former friend of Donaghy's named Aron Kulle, who recalled the time Donaghy came to his office in Sarasota in a state of high anxiety. They had possibly just stumbled on the ultimate edge. I knew what it would mean, Battista told Griffin, if I had an NBA ref on my side.. Phil Scala had been investigating organized crime in New York City for almost 30 years when his squad received the tip. In other words, there was a 23.2 percent chance these foul calls would happen randomly. The NBA employees "examined every play and determined whether, in their view, Donaghy's calls (or absence of calls) were correct." 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. Battista called him a strange, mean-spirited guy.. But the longtime crime reporter says he did at one point talk to a person "involved with Stern and the NBA in that era." Everything from drugs to money to gambling was prevalent in the area he served, which ultimately kickstarted his love affair with the latter as well he actually grew into a thriving bookmaker. Their sneakers squeaked on the hardwood. Had Nunn heard anything about Donaghy's resignation? 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?