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If youre in a pinch and lack a coffee machine and a grinder, you can try making whats called cowboy coffee. This might not be the tastiest cup of joe, but itll certainly get the job done. He has recently admitted that he wishes he was still an NBS referee. 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. Griffin already had published a bestseller in 2005 with Black Brothers, Inc. about the violent rise and fall of Philadelphias black mafia. But the person who knows more about the case than anyone isnt on the show and wont be watching. The Philly ref blood runs deep. "Indeed," Stern assured the assembled media, "as a matter of his on-court performance, he's in the top tier of accuracy.". Barricade Books, his publisher, had issues. But he'd remained close friends after high school with both Donaghy and Battista, who, in turn, were never that close with each other. The Feds wanted to talk to me and go against him, but I wouldnt, Battista told Griffin. They are a form of broker that helps sports bettors by placing wagers on their client's behalf. They produce whatever theyre going to produce, independent of the evidence. Twice, Griffin said, he appeared in a television studio to partake in documentaries in which Donaghy was supposed to appear. "Someone in the NBA notified the press [in order] to stop this investigation, in my opinion. There is a footnote buried deep in Gaming the Game that refers to someone taking home in excess of $200 million. In July of 2018, he announced a multiyear deal for MGM Resorts to be the "official gaming partner of the NBA.". The other, Chuck, lived in Delco. Battista "was just ruining something that was totally quiet, that nobody knew about," said one of the Animals. 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. Phone records of gamblers said to have connections with the Gambino crime family were obtained and analyzed, phone numbers traced back to names. And then, twisting the knife, Battista told him how much Concannon was winning. "David Stern and I had never interacted much, and when we did it was not positive," McMorris told me. He had the artwork. Reportedly born in 1966, Jimmy Battista is 56 years old in 2022. In 2013, Athanas was indicted as part of a federal sports-betting case that was unrelated to Donaghy. . Gerry Donaghy, his father, for a long time wore stripes at the highest levels of NCAA men's basketball. Money drops and cash settlements in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania; in New York City; in Las Vegas; in San Francisco. Suburban Philadelphia insurance salesman and friend of Donaghy who, in spring 2003, partnered with Donaghy to bet on NBA games that the referee was working. Illegal sports gambling was not Scala's focus. 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. 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). After Donaghy, the NBA put into place a host of new measures designed to detect any nascent game-fixing schemes. But Battista never used the word "fix." He gives the media a press packet, and they read him the questions from it, like its a PR campaign, Griffin said. And, if he did, what was his method? That clip has Donaghy saying "Tommy was one of those guys all the girls loved, athletic, funny, good-looking kid that everybody liked." It then has Battista saying "He had good street smarts,. Rush recalls watching maybe 10 such games. She said there was no extortion, no conspiracy and you were more culpable than the others. Several people from the sports-betting underworld had, in effect, staked Battista a bankroll -- a fund he was now using to bet on games officiated by this one NBA referee. And so their syndicate came to be known by some as the Animals. He knew how to get into other referees' heads too, about different players because [the other refs] would follow him. Battista and Donaghy were never to speak directly. It took a second for me to comprehend what Martino was telling me. Ever since Donaghy emerged from prison in 2009, he has lived in the same unit in a town house apartment complex in Sarasota. It has been more than 15 years since Tim Donaghy's NBA betting scandal made headlines. 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. But stomping out a Mafia profit center was. In our case, it means there's just a 4.1 percent chance that an unbiased ref would have randomly made the calls that Tim Donaghy did during his crooked run. For all their desire to ply their trade in secrecy, sophisticated gambling syndicates often leave traces. Pete "Rhino" Ruggieri 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. It came from above,' " Scala recalls. Scala recalls that he and Donaghy went around and around on the issue. 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 Celtics won 101-81. This was an episode of gambling, yes, but almost assuredly not match-fixing. The Feds made no mention of game-fixing. "I started thinking -- or should I say, rationalizing: S---, everyone on the staff bets," he wrote. At the Marriott, Battista thanked Donaghy for the gift. Or "influence" or "manipulate" or in any way discussed the mechanics of fixing. They were an organized crime squad, dealing with murder and mayhem. In 1998, Donaghy joined a country club in West Chester, Pennsylvania, called Radley Run, along whose fairways the Donaghys built a spacious home. Battista and Donaghy were never to speak directly. Much later on he would come to call this meeting "the marriage.". Short, squat, thick-necked, Ruggieri was built, some thought, like a small rhinoceros. With Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul delving deep into the way the 2007 NBA betting scandal played out, we get an insight into not just the individuals involved but also gambling as a concept. Sometimes, Battista told Griffin, Donaghy would ring Martino from an NBA locker room to know the spread of a game he was moments from starting. What is his Net Worth? 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. It was January 2007. Normally this meant making a few "head fake" bets. I accepted because Im an academic; we argue for a living. Ed T. Rush In Donaghy's many conversations with the Feds through these weeks, he had begun pointing fingers and making allegations about other referees -- other refs who may have been corrupt. 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. Battista rolled $7,000 in a rubber band two for the Celtics tip, five as a signing bonus at the edge of Martinos couch for Donaghy. So where to begin? White Sox win! Martino also penned a book in 2019. Along with the rest of the Animals, Battista had returned from Curaao in 2004 after PlayASAP had gone belly-up. But that was the company line.". The one thing we do know for sure, though, is he has a family and children, so he might just be focusing on caring for and spending quality time with them these days. Gambler, bookmaker and great-great grandson of the founder of Goldman Sachs, now deceased. To Scala, Stern seemed mostly upset that the NBA's in-house security people had failed to discover Donaghy's wrongdoing before the FBI. It was only later, in 2007, after Donaghy had been exposed, that Donaghy's letter-of-the-law foul-calling acquired a darker hue. One expert offers tips to brew the perfect cup at home. There had to be a pattern. It was situated in a house a block off the beach. I had a good personality to get information out of people on a one-to-one basis [no matter the league], the then-member of The Animals syndicate said, explaining the reason behind his success. But Warren Flagg, a private investigator and former FBI agent who worked with Donaghy's attorney during the case, will. 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. One of them was a man nicknamed Tiger. What did he see? Among them: Who made the real money? They were the real moneymakers of the Donaghy scheme. And normally this guy lost. A high roller named Mike Rinnier, who'd made his fortune in Delaware County supermarkets, decided to bankroll a small sports-betting syndicate in the 1980s. But it isnt really a debate. In October 2002, Donaghy and Concannon decided to pool their money and wager on Ruggieri's picks. It's possible, in effect, to buy and sell bets, to go long or go short, to hedge. [But] nothings there.. And if you exclude two split-foul calls -- the same foul called by two refs simultaneously and credited to both -- the P value for Donaghy's calls in that set of games was 0.041, or 4.1 percent. Battista was a creature of that world. Donaghy worked the game. 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. 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. Even if it made them strange bedfellows, then, Donaghy's denials of match-fixing guilt were, in the end, a gift. The data chronicle price fluctuations. Battista had such a network. Their sneakers squeaked on the hardwood. It cost Griffin to produce that book. How Much Did Tim Donaghy Earn From Each Bet? One source with knowledge of the conspiracy says that Battista moved as much as $500,000 in wagers on this game: "We had a big bet on that. His name was Tim Donaghy. But for many in and around the league, suspicions have remained that the full story has not been told, that what really happened has been suppressed. "Tiger was the brains behind that group," says one gambler who knew them well. Still, in Scala's telling, the FBI eventually just had to move on. Nobody wanted to golf with him, Minutella said. IT WOULD NOT be the only time Tim Donaghy would come clean. Tony "Tiger" Rufo Crank then calculated the P value for just Donaghy's calls for the entirety of the season in question. That's why, according to someone close to both men, Battista had no choice but to apprise Mastronardo of the Donaghy situation, to tell Joe Vito that this ref was picking sides in his own games-and, most likely, using his whistle to help the bet win. The Animals landed in Curaao, where they helped launch an online sportsbook known as PlayASAP. The next night, the trio convened at Martinos house to set terms. Battista would spend the day betting heavily on Donaghy's selection. But this referee didn't lose much. ", "These analyses," the NBA told ESPN, "did not support your finding that an unbiased official would not have made the calls that Donaghy did.". 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. Battista had known the ref, Timmy Donaghy, for 25 years. In 2015, Mastronardo had a stroke and died in prison. The whole thing had been merely insinuated, a matter of strong innuendo. "Uh, no.") The office's windows looked out onto a basketball court, where children on youth teams were just then practicing. The methods of fixing are rather straightforward. I can imagine TV producers were looking for an on-air mix-up. When I asked, I expected Rush to answer much the same as Nunn had to me: Nothing out of the ordinary. "How's Chuck doing?" "I don't like to talk in terms of coulda, woulda, shoulda, but if the Post story didn't come out, [Donaghy] would have worn a wire, and I don't know where it would have gone. 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. But now, when Battista arrived at Martino's house, he dropped the bomb. He did well. Larry Pedowitz Because you're betting on the game, your judgment is off -- and you threw the game.'". "Say hello to Johnny for me ". 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. James Battista, who was charged as a co-conspirator in the 2007 case, told HBO's "Real Sports" that he and Donaghy bet on 47 games over four months and won 37 times. Twenty months later, all three had avoided trials and awaited sentencing, by U.S. District Judge Carol Bagley Amon, in Brooklyn. The big problem, Battista said, was that the betting markets appeared to be getting wise to the emergence of an astonishingly accurate NBA handicapper. I believe this guy was almost soulless.. What does it mean to "fix" a game? 2 documentary Operation Flagrant Foul, on the 2007 gambling scandal centered on former NBA referee Tim Donaghy, is how it's not just about Donaghy. It stuns Griffin how media, especially sports-talk radio, has provided Donaghy with a platform for his sensational fodder. He and the other Animals who'd been following the bets were not happy. Still, as Rush explained to me over the phone, these were just "trends," not "red flags," and the NBA and the Pedowitz people were interested only in red flags. Donaghy in Toronto calling four fouls against the visiting Nets' top scorer, Bob Costas was yanked from the Super Bowl, Deland McCullough's search for his biological parents. Or even put him in any kind of limelight at all. Battista knew Donaghy in high school, and he played football with Donaghy's brother, Jimmy. Jimmy Battista, to participate in the betting. And how, in turn, could you uncover evidence of it years, even a decade, later? And it drives them crazy. Gaming the Game is definitive, vital to comprehending the NBA scandal and how sports-betting money zips around the world. The Heat covering Donaghy in Toronto calling four fouls against the visiting Nets' top scorer, Vince Carter, forcing him to the bench, the last one called by Donaghy when the ref was on the opposite side of the floor with the Raptors leading by three. If the pick won, the ref got his two dimes. And those bets won -- won like Concannon had never won before. Conspiracy theories about corrupted refs have dogged the league for decades. "My life is ruined," Kulle recalled Donaghy saying. Nunn, then the director of NBA officials, was in town for the NBA summer league games held annually among the casinos, where referee candidates from the minors are assessed for possible promotion to the Show. When presented with that data, ESPN statisticians crunched the numbers and revealed: The odds that Tim Donaghy would have randomly made calls that produced that imbalance are 6,155-to-1. 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. 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."