Hoop Collective Q&A: What are the next steps in the NBA’s gambling investigations?

Over the past week, a pair of federal indictments involving an active NBA player in Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier; an active NBA head coach in Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups; and a former NBA player and coach in Damon Jones have dominated the news cycle.

To try to get a better understanding of what is contained in those indictments, how such cases come together and how each of them could proceed from here, we spoke to Kate Reilly, a partner at the law firm Pryor Cashman, for Wednesday’s episode of «The Hoop Collective» podcast.

Reilly works in Pryor Cashman’s white collar and regulatory enforcement group. What makes her a particularly compelling voice on this topic is her previous job, in which she spent 11 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.

authorities announced.

• FAQ: What we know about the cases
• Leaguewide reaction: Players, coaches weigh in
• Timeline: Sports betting scandals since 2018
• Wetzel: True cost of sports betting
• Greenberg: How FBI says poker games were rigged

In that role, which she left in January, Reilly was a federal prosecutor who handled fraud cases and, for her final few years in office, was the chief of the complex frauds and cybercrime unit. In other words, she oversaw cases in areas relating to financial crime and cybercrime.

So although Reilly did not, at any point, work on either of the indictments that were announced last week by the Eastern District office in Brooklyn, she does have intimate knowledge of these sorts of cases and walked us through her thoughts on the relative strength of both indictments; how the NBA would, theoretically, work with the government throughout the cases; and what could come next.

The questions and answers are below, lightly edited for clarity. Click here for the full interview:

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Q: Can you explain the charges, in as much of layman’s terms as you can, for basketball fans?

A: There were two separate indictments. An indictment is just a charging instrument that a grand jury returns. So the prosecutors presented evidence, and the grand jury voted through the indictments.

The first indictment, and I think the more traditional indictment, is related to illegal poker games. And the allegations are that some of the professional basketball players were being used to pull high-net-worth, big-deal players into these poker games, and they were part of cheating rings. So the players were in on the cheating, there were other gamblers in on the cheating, and the victims were putting money into a rigged game.

And that indictment ties those games to the Mafia and ties it to some pretty traditional organized crime activity, like forced extortion of paying debts, and also gunpoint robbery in one case of these sort of rigged shuffling machines they were using in the games.

That’s the first indictment. And then the second indictment, which is a little bit different, charges a number of individuals, including some coaches and players, with conspiring to defraud sports betting websites.

Essentially what it says is these guys had access to nonpublic information about things happening in the NBA, and they sold that information to people who used it to place bets. Or sometimes they took part in the betting themselves, and when they placed those bets knowing they had nonpublic information, they defrauded the sports betting websites they were placing the bets on, and then they laundered the proceeds.

So again, two different indictments with two very different sets of allegations, but clearly some overlapping people involved in them.

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Q: Can you explain what you mean when you say the poker indictment is more of a «traditional» indictment, whereas the betting indictment is not? And does that have any bearing on your opinion on the strength of both cases?

A: I say that the first indictment is more traditional because if you take out the NBA piece of it, and the big press conference they were able to do because of that, this is not that different than a typical organized crime indictment. They’re operating illegal gambling. They’re facilitating that by using force, threats of force and violence. Sometimes they’re using actual violence, in terms of the gunpoint robbery. It looks like an organized crime case.

And the interesting part of it from a press perspective, and certainly a sports fan perspective, is the involvement of these professional athletes — and they’re being used to lure people in. But this is the kind of indictment you’ve seen coming out of organized crime prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York for a long time.

The other indictment is less traditional, in that I think it pushes the boundaries of what can be considered wire fraud in a sort of interesting and different way.

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