The accounts of their actual meeting vary, yet the one thing Jimmy did not shy away from conceding was that while Tim made $2,000 per successful bet initially, he made at least $2 million. "Uh, no.") "I think there's enough that's been written about Tim Donaghy. For that reason, he had a lot of cash on hand. Donaghy rose from the table. "Tiger was the brains behind that group," says one gambler who knew them well. But at the time of the visit, in late 2007, Kulle said, the men were close. I knew what it would mean, Battista told Griffin, if I had an NBA ref on my side.. 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.. Kulle got up, crossed the room and closed the blinds. 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? One morning in early July 2007, Ronnie Nunn was asleep in a hotel room in Las Vegas when his cellphone buzzed him awake. "It was a job I was born to do," Donaghy wrote in his 2009 memoir, Personal Foul, but the sentence carries a double meaning. 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. How Much Did Tim Donaghy Earn From Each Bet? He said his old squad had received the initial ref-in-the-pocket tip in October 2006 -- almost two months before Battista had made his marriage with Donaghy. . 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. "How's Chuck doing?" The other, Chuck, lived in Delco. Who besides Donaghy, Battista and Martino was in on it? ", Proponents of legalization have long argued that regulation leads to transparency, which helps root out game-fixing schemes. He already knew of the NBA referees gambling issue owing to his profession, and they soon somehow agreed to work together for some extra cash Tim would give him picks, and hed run with it. 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. (Through the NBA, Stern declined an interview request for this story.) Netflix's Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul revisits . The final game, Martino remembers, was a loss. "I was warned," Weiss told me, "that if I stumbled, Stern would do anything he could to crush me. Three. "But Donaghy changed our working relationship. Because this edge, this treasure, was in danger of evaporating, Battista had decided that he needed to assume direct control over the referee. Tommy Martino But the gig is well-paid -- even rookies in 2007 could make six figures. Griffin already had published a bestseller in 2005 with Black Brothers, Inc. about the violent rise and fall of Philadelphias black mafia. Im not nave, Griffin said. But the person who knows more about the case than anyone isnt on the show and wont be watching. 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. . ", Scala, at the time, was livid. 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 . Joe Vito cannot speak to that today; he was busted in 2012 at age 63 for illegal bookmaking in an unrelated federal case. His body turned numb. "They were intelligent guys who just couldn't have full-time day jobs," says a former gambler who knew them. He had to use the bathroom, he said, and motioned for Martino to please come along. The referee's life has its contradictions. 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. Tim Donaghy was unwittingly placing himself in harms way, Griffin wrote. Twenty months later, all three had avoided trials and awaited sentencing, by U.S. District Judge Carol Bagley Amon, in Brooklyn. "Our plans were blown up by the fact that somebody leaked this," Scala lamented to me. F---ing Donaghy. Then later in the day, with the price right, you gobble up all the Boston you can. Still, in Scala's telling, the FBI eventually just had to move on. It's possible, through Don Best Sports, a betting information service, to pull the line-movement data for individual NBA games going back years. Battista called him a strange, mean-spirited guy.. (Donaghy himself declined repeated requests for an interview.) Favored by 12, Dallas covering Donaghy in Miami calling 12 fouls against visiting Charlotte, two against the Heat. 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. It was January 2007. For 11 years, the official plotline has been that Donaghy was a rogue, gambling-addicted ref who made some bets on his own games -- and nothing more. Hours later, he called up Donaghy to tell him. Both Battista and Martino have said that there were no threats, that everyone was nervous but the situation seemed copacetic, and that what sold Donaghy on the deal was Battista saying to him: We know you're giving the games to Jack Concannon. T. Rush, Joey Crawford, Steve Javie, Tom Washington, Mark Wunderlich, Duke Callahan, Ed Malloy, Mark Lindsay, Aaron Smith, Tim Donaghy -- all NBA referees current, retired, dead or (in the last case) disgraced, all born and/or raised in the environs of Philadelphia. He told me Monday that those producers called him, they talked for maybe 90 minutes and Griffin provided relevant notes and potential lines of inquiry. ", "These analyses," the NBA told ESPN, "did not support your finding that an unbiased official would not have made the calls that Donaghy did.". At the same time, at the request of the NBA, former prosecutor Larry Pedowitz conducted an independent investigation of Donaghy's misconduct and issued publicly a 133-page report. Seth Wickersham on the Cleveland Browns' front office -- and where hope and history collide. People know I have documents and files, and they constantly ask me questions whose answers they dont like. "But you know what? They knew all about what he'd done, they told him; he was looking at 20 years. He even contacted Murray Weiss, the Post reporter who wrote the story, to uncover the source of the leak. 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. Martino also penned a book in 2019. 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. (This notion even found its way into the Pedowitz report itself.) "I started thinking -- or should I say, rationalizing: S---, everyone on the staff bets," he wrote. Donaghy didnt like betting through former St. Josephs hoopster Jack Concannon, but he couldnt have known Battista had been tracking his NBA wagers with Concannon since 2003, when Battista was in Curacao. In the NBA markets, betting experts say, any move of 1.5 points or more is considered unusually severe -- the result of millions of dollars pouring in. ", Weiss disputes that; he told me his tipster wasn't affiliated with the NBA "as far as I know." "In the bathroom, Donaghy is like, 'Tom, you f---ing believe it?' Whether Donaghy was using his whistle to fix games was beside the point. But stomping out a Mafia profit center was. Holy s---! Ensuing betting-scandal headlines jolted the NBA. However, when Jimmy had a falling out with the betting institution around 2006, he decided to approach Tim through their mutual school friend Thomas Tommy Martino with a lucrative idea. Making bets at the highest levels of sports gambling is akin to the trading of any financial instrument. In his endeavors, Battista had a sometime assistant, another high school chum, Tommy Martino, who acted as a liaison in the Donaghy scheme. Now there's a Netflix documentary on the subject, . Murray Weiss The person wanted to deliver a message about Weiss' more critical reporting on the scandal. He'd acted alone. The guy's career was ruined and his life in shambles. That way, the gambler said, Donaghy could force the side he'd picked against to play a little less aggressively on defense. 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. Thats what bothers me. Reportedly born in 1966, Jimmy Battista is 56 years old in 2022. He would start before dawn with the enormously liquid Asian betting markets, an amorphous group of black- and gray-market internet sportsbooks based in places like Manila and Kuala Lumpur. An interesting part of the Untold: Vol. Dear Abby: Is it cheating if nothing physical ever happened? The heart of labor is beating strong in Chicago and Illinois, Why were launching The Democracy Solutions Project. Jimmy was ordered to spend 15 months in federal prison. The data chronicle price fluctuations. 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. One of Rufo's business partners in the gyms was his old Animals colleague Rhino Ruggieri. It is normal, of course, for a referee to call more fouls against one team than the other. And those bets won -- won like Concannon had never won before. Embarrassing, Griffin said. They were the gamblers and bookmakers closest to Battista. Tommy, Tim, and James "Jimmy" "Baba" Battista had attended the same Cardinal O'Hara High School, but the former was the only mutual link a few years later since he was friends with both. Then, at some point in 2003, Donaghy and Concannon crossed the Rubicon. Kim filed for divorce in late 2007, a few months after the scandal became public. 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. Or, actually, it was the moral of this story. The Celtics, favored by 2.5 points, went on to win in a blowout. You don't want anyone "from New York" coming to your house, Battista told him. No line-movement data would be required. Along with the rest of the Animals, Battista had returned from Curaao in 2004 after PlayASAP had gone belly-up. On Feb. 22, 2019, the NBA issued a statement in response to the ESPN story on the Donaghy scandal: "The Tim Donaghy matter concluded over a decade ago with a full investigation by the federal government, Donaghy's termination from the NBA, and his conviction for criminal acts. ", In the early 2000s, Rush went on to explain, the NBA undertook a wholesale revision of its refereeing guidelines, changes that would naturally lead to the entire NBA referee corps calling a greater volume of fouls, at least initially. And then one afternoon the case agent came into my office. For slipping him winning football picks, Donaghy had sent to Battista a Kobe Bryant-signed Lakers jersey. -- wins and wins and wins and wins, his picks almost 100 percent wins. By now the spreads were moving violently. What does it mean to "fix" a game? I was like, 'If anyone's watching this, we've got a problem.' Two years of reporting later, the story can now be told: This is the definitive account of how Tim Donaghy conspired to fix NBA games -- and how, in so doing, he unwittingly enriched an array of gamblers to the tune of likely hundreds of millions of dollars. In Martino's words, "Blowouts, he can't control." I accepted because Im an academic; we argue for a living. 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's when Donaghy "laid everything out" and "spilled everything," Kulle said. Twice, Griffin said, he appeared in a television studio to partake in documentaries in which Donaghy was supposed to appear. . (The last time he was arrested, the police dug up his yard and found sections of PVC pipe buried there. Battista, who'd drifted as a bartender, restaurant manager and small-time hustler after high school, was in his early 20s when, according to Gaming the Game, a book about the Donaghy scandal by former Philly police detective Sean Patrick Griffin, Rinnier recruited him to join the group. "He said he'd pick on the big center, or the most valuable player of each team, and he'd try to get them in foul trouble. Unlikely but not outrageously so. At the same time, the NBA -- which once balked at gambling -- has now openly embraced legalized sports betting more than any other U.S. pro sports league. Based on information from Tommy Martino, among others, there were reasons to suspect Donaghy had money on the vast majority of his games during the fateful 2006-07 season, from the very beginning until as late as April 11 -- 65 games in all.
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