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. Because that's how you get in trouble. The Celtics played the 76ers the night after the Marriott meeting. Donaghy worked the game. It was his first pick for Battista. The Celtics, favored by 2.
We had a big bet on every fing game. Making bets at the highest levels of sports gambling is akin to the trading of any financial instrument. There's a defined trading session. It opens in the morning and closes right before tip-off. It's possible, in effect, to buy and sell bets, to go long or go short, to hedge. The best movers spend years compiling vast networks of clients and "outs," or counterparties, with whom the movers can trade. Battista had such a network.
It's possible, through Don Best Sports, a betting information service, to pull the line-movement data for individual NBA games going back years. It's like looking at a stock chart. The data chronicle price fluctuations.
If the spread widens during the trading session, then you know that demand among gamblers for betting on the favorite has intensified. And indeed, the chart for the Boston-Philly game on Dec. Huge bets on Boston in the middle of the trading session, between a. In the NBA markets, betting experts say, any move of 1. The night after the Boston victory, according to all parties, the conspirators met once more, at Martino's house in the Philly suburb of Boothwyn.
From here on out, Battista said, he and Donaghy would never communicate directly. Instead, Martino would be in the middle. They would use, per Martino's statement to the FBI, a code.
Martino had two brothers. One, Johnny, lived in Jersey. The other, Chuck, lived in Delco. According to Martino, if Donaghy mentioned out-of-state Johnny's name, the pick was for the visiting team. If Donaghy talked about Chuck, bet the home side. Not exactly the Enigma cipher but better than yapping about specific teams and risking someone overhearing.
Ideally, Donaghy should make his pick as early as possible, preferably the night before his games, or at least the morning of. That way, Battista could begin to prepare the markets, to manipulate the prices in their favor. 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.
Normally this meant making a few "head fake" bets. If you think the Celtics are the side that's likely to cover, then you go to market as early in the trading session as possible and put some money on Philly. Do it right and you can drive down the price of Boston. Then later in the day, with the price right, you gobble up all the Boston you can.
According to Martino and Battista, after such wagering was complete, Battista, via Martino, would then inform Donaghy of the spread he needed to cover. And so it began From Philadelphia, Donaghy hopping to a Nets home game, then 1, miles west to Denver, then over to Seattle, then transcontinental to Atlanta, then southwest to Houston, then back east to DC -- Donaghy zigzagging across the country, in and out of NBA arenas, making his picks to Martino over those cheap bodega burner phones, but not always, because sometimes they'd forget and use their own regular phones, because who cared?
Battista bowing his head to his desk and snorting a line of coke to stay alert, to stay awake. Martino late at night on the phone with Donaghy, the pair having developed a nightly before-bed ritual: If Donaghy's pick was a winner, if the spread had been covered, Martino calling the ref and whispering "Good boy," and Donaghy echoing "Good boy" and then hanging up Donaghy calling two fouls 50 seconds apart against the 76ers' leading scorer, Andre Iguodala, in the third quarter against Boston , with the score's margin right on the spread.
Iguodala heading to the bench; Boston covering the spread Donaghy in Seattle, the Sonics hosting the Mavericks, calling 11 straight fouls against Seattle as well as the last foul of the night, with 23 seconds to go. Dallas making both free throws, increasing its lead to eight. The closing line: Dallas by Battista usually watched these games at home, but sometimes not. 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.
I was like, 'If anyone's watching this, we've got a problem. Donaghy in Dallas on Jan. Favored by 12, Dallas covering Donaghy in Miami calling 12 fouls against visiting Charlotte, two against the Heat. 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.
Toronto, favored by Money now pouring into games Donaghy is refereeing, the lines during trading sessions swinging violently, like stocks beset by takeover rumors-widening and narrowing by 1. Battista popping pills, Vicodin and OxyContin, sometimes falling asleep at the dinner table at restaurants, sometimes vomiting blood.
Battista wired and staying up all night and obsessively, blank-mindedly playing online blackjack and poker and even putting bets down on sports for which he had no special insight or inside information, and losing, losing, losing And then Donaghy whistling fouls on the visiting Heat 12 times in Madison Square Garden compared to four against the Knicks; the Knicks covering Martino flying to Toronto to pay Donaghy and to party, ordering prostitutes from a website Donaghy on March 14 in Indianapolis calling four straight fouls in the fourth against the underdog Pacers when they were losing by six to the visiting Wizards.
Favored by 6, the visiting Wizards covering Battista on March 16 strung out and sleepless at Martino's house and surrounded suddenly by almost his entire immediate family. An intervention Battista two days later wearing a bathrobe in rehab. Phil Scala had been investigating organized crime in New York City for almost 30 years when his squad received the tip. 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.
And now, Scala would later tell me, one of the squad's snitches had divulged this new tip, too delicious to be ignored. An NBA referee, according to the informant, was "in the pocket" of some people in the sports-gambling underworld. 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.
But the crucial betting information -- which sides of which games the ref favored -- had been seeping into the black-market gambling business. 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.
Illegal sports gambling was not Scala's focus. But stomping out a Mafia profit center was. Scala reached the FBI's mandatory retirement age in and is now a private detective based on Long Island.
But he has kept the investigative notes he took on his FBI cases, including the Donaghy case. Not long ago, he brought them out, looked at them and told me about them over the phone. When I asked if I could see the notes myself, he laughed. Scala's squad went to work. Phone records of gamblers said to have connections with the Gambino crime family were obtained and analyzed, phone numbers traced back to names.
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 then one afternoon the case agent came into my office.
He said, 'We found the guy. We found the referee. They knew all about what he'd done, they told him; he was looking at 20 years. Better to cooperate. Lawyer , Battista replied. Just before entering rehab, according to Martino and law enforcement documents, Battista had handed over the reins of the operation to Rhino Ruggieri.
Ruggieri was to play the same role Battista had -- mover, fund manager. Ruggieri did not respond to requests for comment. But soon enough, Martino says, Rhino learned about the nature of Battista's deal with Donaghy. He and the other Animals who'd been following the bets were not happy. By now the spreads were moving violently. Word about Donaghy had permeated the market, followers following followers.
Battista "was just ruining something that was totally quiet, that nobody knew about," said one of the Animals. It was like: Why would you do that? In any case, Ruggieri before long decided to shut the whole thing down.
The final game, Martino remembers, was a loss. The effort to hide it was in vain. A grand jury in the case had been convened as early as February, according to FBI documents, and on May 30, Tommy Martino testified before it.
Hours later, he called up Donaghy to tell him. 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.
His body turned numb. He thought he was having a heart attack. The agents informed Stern that it had come to their attention that one of their veteran refs, Tim Donaghy, had been betting on his own games and giving inside information to a gambling ring, for a fee. The Feds made no mention of game-fixing. The commissioner promised the league's full cooperation. Today, Scala considers that meeting a mistake. I would not have gone to brief Stern," Scala told me. Through the NBA, Stern declined an interview request for this story.
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. So the FBI had worked out a plan. Namely, they were going to wire up Donaghy so he could get other allegedly corrupted NBA referees to incriminate themselves. Things may have been different. That's the bottom line. Scala, at the time, was livid. He even contacted Murray Weiss, the Post reporter who wrote the story, to uncover the source of the leak.
But Weiss, a veteran newsman, protected his source. It came from above,' " Scala recalls. Scala won't say whether he believes the NBA leaked the story. But Warren Flagg, a private investigator and former FBI agent who worked with Donaghy's attorney during the case, will. To shut it down. Weiss disputes that; he told me his tipster wasn't affiliated with the NBA "as far as I know. I was told, 'They're the kind of people who will do anything they can to protect themselves and the game.
Among them: Who made the real money? Who besides Donaghy, Battista and Martino was in on it? There have been hints and suggestions.
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. 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. They were the gamblers and bookmakers closest to Battista. They were among his biggest brokerage clients and most trusted outs.
Larry Brown was tough, but off the floor, he seemed to be a good guy. Karl and Brown were two notoriously hot-headed coaches who would spar with anyone if they were not getting their ways, so a referee like Donaghy was bound to get under their skin every once in a while. Donaghy brought a lot of the ire on himself, and he has paid the price many times over.
He has been fired from the NBA , sent to prison, and become synonymous with corruption by officials. The bell rang at the end of the Caribbean Strap match and Donaghy raised the hand of the cocksure co-conspirator Richard Holliday.
But for the year-old Donaghy, the decision to tap into his heel persona for a payday and have some fun was a lock. Donaghy pleaded guilty in to wire fraud and transmitting betting information for taking thousands of dollars from a gambler for inside tips on games, including games he worked.
He was sentenced by a federal judge to 15 months behind bars. Laurent late last year about making an appearance. Saturday on beIN Sports. In a Caribbean Strap match, Vega and Holliday were tethered together with leather and the objective was to touch all four turnbuckles in succession.
I was going out and doing what the league wanted me to do along with other officials. On his time in prison:. He was shackled and shipped off to a maximum-security prison for the attack.
Definitely there were some difficult times and situations. Because my case was so public and in the newspapers and it was reported before prison that I had cooperated with the FBI.
On his life now:. I lost my job. I paid restitution back to the NBA.
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