U.S. Charges N.B.A. Figures in Gambling Schemes That Tainted Games

On Thursday morning, Mr. Rozier was arrested in Orlando, Fla., and charged with wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. He was one of dozens of people — including Chauncey Billups, the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers — named in two indictments aimed at illegal gambling.

The charges spanned the worlds of professional sports, Mafia families and online betting, pairing traditional smoky-room card cheating with corruption enabled by today’s ubiquitous betting apps and smartphones. Each indictment described schemes that the authorities said defrauded gamblers; one cast doubt on the integrity of N.B.A. games.

“This is the insider-trading saga for the N.B.A.,” Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., said at a news conference on Thursday announcing the charges at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn. He was flanked inside the office’s packed library by Jessica Tisch, the New York police commissioner; Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York; and officials from other agencies.

The law enforcement officials trumpeted the arrests as a major blow against organized crime, though the sums of money involved were relatively small, and the connection between the Mafia and the N.B.A. was tenuous.

The insider-trading indictment accuses Mr. Rozier and five other defendants of using nonpublic information about N.B.A. athletes and teams to set up fraudulent bets between December 2022 and March 2024. The authorities said the bets netted gamblers hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The second indictment, with 31 defendants, accuses Mr. Billups of participating in illegal poker games organized by Mafia families that defrauded victims of at least $7 million.

Three people are accused of participating in both schemes, including Damon Jones, a former N.B.A. player and assistant coach.

Mr. Rozier, 31, is in his 11th N.B.A. season and is now with the Miami Heat. He did not play in the Heat’s season-opener Wednesday night in Orlando. Mr. Billups, 49, is in his fifth season as a coach in Portland. He made five All-Star Games and led the Detroit Pistons to the 2004 N.B.A. title, when he was named the most valuable player of the finals. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame last year.

The investigation has been developing for more than a year, federal and state officials said, and was coordinated by the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department’s Joint Organized Crime Task Force. The investigation is continuing, and could result in more charges against other players, the authorities said.

The charges against Mr. Rozier and Mr. Billups are potentially the biggest hit to the N.B.A.’s reputation since 2007, when a referee, Tim Donaghy, was found to have bet on games. They also come at a crucial time for the N.B.A., during the opening week of its season and as it starts new broadcast deals worth $76 billion over 11 years.

In a statement, the N.B.A. said Mr. Rozier and Mr. Billups were being placed on immediate leave from their teams, and that the league would continue to cooperate with the authorities.

“We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority,” the league said in a statement.

Jim Trusty, a lawyer for Mr. Rozier, said prosecutors had relied on “spectacularly in-credible sources” rather than “actual evidence of wrongdoing.”

“Terry is not a gambler, but he is not afraid of a fight, and he looks forward to winning this fight,” Mr. Trusty said in a statement.

The seeds of the federal case came into public view in 2024, when a Brooklyn man was charged for his role in an illegal sports betting scheme involving Jontay Porter, a forward for the Toronto Raptors. Mr. Porter, who was barred for life by the N.B.A. that year, pleaded guilty to wire fraud.

Mr. Billups made an appearance in Federal District Court in Portland on Thursday and was released. He will be arraigned in Brooklyn on Nov. 24. A lawyer for Mr. Billups, Christopher Haywood, did not respond to a request for comment.

It was unclear who was representing Mr. Jones in court.

In a statement, the Trail Blazers said the team was cooperating with the investigation. Representatives for the Heat declined to comment.

‘Insider Trading’

Basketball’s most infamous betting scandals have historically come in the college ranks. Most scandals involved point shaving — or intentionally winning by a smaller margin than the bookmakers predicted.

In recent years, the style of betting has changed, enabled by gambling apps. So-called prop bets are wagers tied to an individual athlete’s performance or a specific moment or event in a game; they are often not directly tied to the game’s outcome.

With the rise of prop betting, information about individual players’ availability has become particularly valuable. The defendants were accused of knowing when certain players would be sitting out or leaving games early, allowing them to set up the fraudulent bets.

Along with the March 2023 game, when Mr. Rozier was a starting guard for the Charlotte Hornets, prosecutors pointed to instances when the individuals were said to have traded on such information to secure profits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In February 2023, Mr. Jones was acting as an unofficial assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers. Before one game on Feb. 9 between the Lakers and the Milwaukee Bucks, prosecutors said Mr. Jones sent a text message to a co-conspirator, writing, “Get a big bet on Milwaukee tonight before the information is out!” He then referred to an unnamed player who would be sitting out that game, information that was not yet publicly known.

The description of the player appears to match LeBron James, basketball’s biggest star, who plays for the Lakers and sat out the game because of a sore ankle. Mr. James, who has not been accused of wrongdoing, was a teammate of Mr. Jones on the Cleveland Cavaliers. Prosecutors said Mr. Jones used that relationship to gather private medical information.

Legalized gambling has intruded on every corner of the professional sports universe in the United States. Thursday’s indictment was the biggest scandal to emerge in the era of codified sports betting, embraced by the very leagues that once sought to distance themselves from any association with gambling.

Adam Silver, N.B.A. commissioner, was the first American sports commissioner to call for legalized sports betting, but recently has called for more stringent rules. On “The Pat McAfee Show” this week, Mr. Silver said he had asked the N.B.A.’s gambling partners to “pull back some of the prop bets.”

A spokesman for FanDuel, the largest sports betting operator in the United States, called Thursday’s indictments “deeply disturbing” and concerning for “fans, athletes, and everyone who loves sports and values integrity and fair play.”

Artie McConnell, a former federal prosecutor, said leaked information from teams “can impact a betting line within minutes.”

“It erodes public confidence in the game and the league,” Mr. McConnell said.

The Poker Games

The other illegal gambling was said to have happened far from the basketball court, hidden in residences in Greenwich Village and Kips Bay in Manhattan.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Billups and Mr. Jones played in rigged illegal poker games run by organized crime — the Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese and Genovese families — who would take cuts of the profits and use force to go after debtors.

Defendants in that case have nicknames like Albanian Bruce, the Wrestler and Flapper Poker. Eleven were leaders, members or associates of the Mafia families.

The poker games began as early as 2019, and also popped up in the Hamptons, Las Vegas and Miami, officials said. Along with Mr. Jones, Shane Hennen, a man who marketed himself as a successful sports gambler, and Eric Earnest were charged in both schemes.

Victims were lured by the presence of sports celebrities like Mr. Billups and Mr. Jones, who prosecutors said benefited from the cheating and were cut in on the proceeds. The team of cheaters used technology like shuffling machines altered to read the cards in the deck and predict which player had the best hand, said Christopher Raia, the assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York field office.

Mr. Nocella, the U.S. attorney, said the technology also included “specially designed contact lenses and sunglasses to read the backs of playing cards, which ensured that the victims would lose big.”

The machine, according to the indictment, would predict which player had the best hand and then relay that information to someone outside the room. That person would then send that information via mobile phone to someone sitting at the table, who would clue in other cheating players with subtle signals, like tapping certain chips.

Players unable to repay their debts were threatened, according to the indictment.

One victim lost $1.8 million in the rigged games, Commissioner Tisch said at the news conference.

One of the few links between the two indictments appears to be Mr. Billups. He is charged in the poker indictment, not the indictment involving basketball bets. But the latter indictment identifies someone who matches Mr. Billups’s description: Co-Conspirator 8 played in the N.B.A. from 1997 through 2014 and has coached since 2021, and was a resident of Portland.

On March 24, 2023, with 10 games left in the season, Mr. Billups’s Trail Blazers were out of the playoff picture. With a record of 32-40, they could improve their position in the coming N.B.A. draft lottery by losing more.

According to the indictment, Co-Conspirator 8 told Mr. Earnest that the Blazers would be tanking. The person also told Mr. Earnest that several of the team’s best players would not be playing in a coming game against the Chicago Bulls.

Information about the absent players was relayed to the gamblers before the players were publicly ruled out. The gamblers placed bets of more than $100,000 that Portland would lose, the indictment says. It was unclear why Co-Conspirator 8 was not charged.

The Trail Blazers lost that game, 124-96.

“Whoever is available, I’m going to coach them,” Mr. Billups told reporters afterward. “I’m going to do the best I can to help them, to help them to help us.”

Chelsia Rose Marcius, Jenny Vrentas, Victor Mather, Anna Griffin Nicole Hong and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

More than 30 people were arrested in what prosecutors said was a multiyear investigation. Here are the defendants named in the indictments:

Current and former N.B.A. players

Chauncey Billups: Portland Trail Blazers head coach. Accused of luring wealthy people to participate in poker games in return for a portion of the illegal profits, according to prosecutors.

Damon Jones: Former N.B.A. player and assistant coach. Accused of supplying inside information to allow a network of conspirators to place winning bets on games. Also accused of helping to lure wealthy people to participate in poker games in return for a portion of the illegal profits.

Terry Rozier: N.B.A. player who, as a member of the Charlotte Hornets, is accused of telling his co-conspirators that he was planning to leave a game in March 2023 early because of an injury, information that was unknown to team officials, the indictment said. Co-conspirators are accused of placing $200,000 on his “under” totals, and then splitting the proceeds with Mr. Rozier. He is a childhood friend of another defendant, Deniro Laster.

Accused members of organized crime families

Ernest Aiello: Accused member of the Bonanno crime family.

Louis Apicella: Accused associate of the Gambino crime family accused of participating in rigged poker games in East Hampton, N.Y.

Matthew Daddino: Accused member of the Genovese crime family.

Lee Fama: Accused member of the Gambino crime family.

John Gallo: Accused associate of the Gambino crime family accused of helping organize a poker game hosted primarily at 80 Washington Place, in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood. Also accused of organizing and participating in rigged games in East Hampton, N.Y., and at 147 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.

Ammar Awawdeh: Accused associate of the Gambino crime family who is accused of participated in rigged games in Manhattan and East Hampton, N.Y.

Thomas Gelardo: Accused associate of the Bonanno crime family and, later, an associate of the Genovese crime family.

Joseph Lanni: Accused member and captain in the Gambino crime family.

Nicholas Minucci: Accused associate of the Gambino crime family accused of being a participant in rigged games in East Hampton, N.Y.

Angelo Ruggiero Jr.: Accused member of the Gambino crime family.

Seth Trustman: Accused associate of the Lucchese crime family accused of participating in rigged games in Manhattan. He is also accused of organizing the 147 Lexington Avenue game, controlled by the Bonanno crime family, and organizing and participating in the Washington Place game.

Julius Ziliani: Accused member of the Bonanno crime family.

Accused organizers and participants of the rigged poker games

Nelson Alvarez: Accused of participating in rigged poker games in Miami.

Eric Earnest: Accused of organizing and participating in rigged games in Las Vegas, and of being involved in the scheme to defraud betting companies by using private information relating to N.B.A. games to place bets.

Marco Garzon: Accused of participating in rigged games in Manhattan.

Jamie Gilet: Accused of participating in rigged games in Las Vegas and Miami.

Kenny Han: Accused of participating in rigged games in East Hampton, N.Y., Manhattan and Miami.

Osman Hoti: Accused of participating in the rigged games at East Hampton, N.Y., of providing security at the Lexington Avenue game and committing a gunpoint robbery with Mr. Awawdeh and other defendants.

Horatio Hu: Accused of participating in rigged games in East Hampton, N.Y.

John Mazzola: Accused of participating in rigged games in East Hampton, N.Y., Manhattan and Miami.

Michael Renzulli: Accused of participating in rigged games in Miami.

Sophia Wei: Accused of participating in rigged games in Las Vegas.

Saul Becher: Accused of organizing the Lexington Avenue game and rigged games elsewhere.

Shane Hennen: Accused of organizing and participating in rigged games, and of providing cheating technology to other co-conspirators to use in rigged games in exchange for a portion of the criminal proceeds.

Zhen Hu: Accused of organizing the Lexington Avenue game and of also organizing and participating in the Washington Place game.

Robert Stroud: Accused of organizing and participating in rigged games in East Hampton, N.Y., Las Vegas, Manhattan and Miami. He is also accused of provided cheating technology to other participants to use in rigged games in exchange for a portion of the criminal proceeds.

Accused of providing cheating technology to co-conspirators

Tony Goodson: Accused of working with others to provide cheating technology to co-conspirators in the poker scheme, and of participating in rigged games at Lexington Avenue, among other places.

Curtis Meeks: Accused of working with others to provide cheating technology to participants in the poker scheme.

Accused of participating in the online sports betting scandal

Marves Fairley: Accused of using nonpublic information about N.B.A. athletes and teams to set up fraudulent bets from December 2022 through March 2024.

Shane Hennen: Accused of using nonpublic information about N.B.A. athletes and teams to set up fraudulent bets from December 2022 through March 2024.

Deniro Laster: Childhood friend of Mr. Rozier’s whom Mr. Rozier is accused of telling that he was going to pull himself out of a March 2023 game with an injury. Mr. Laster is accused of using that information to place bets, and of selling it to co-conspirators so they could place bets.

Others

Anthony Shnayderman: Accused of laundering criminal proceeds from the rigged poker scheme.

The defendants were named in separate indictments. One included charges of an illegal sports betting scheme involving N.B.A. players and teams, and the other alleged participation in illegal poker games.

Here are a few of the nicknames:

Ammar Awawdeh (Flapper Poker/Flappy)

Mr. Awawdeh, who lives in Brooklyn, is an associate of the Gambino crime family who, in June 2022, threatened to shoot an adversary in the “kneecaps,” prosecutors said.

Mr. Awawdeh organized weekly poker games near Washington Square Park in Manhattan. The games were approved by members of the Mafia, which provided protection for players, according to court papers.

The mob also collected debts from the games in exchange for gambling proceeds, prosecutors said, and used intimidation and threats to assure the debts were paid.

Robert Stroud (Black Rob)

Mr. Stroud, of Kentucky, provided “rigged shuffling machines” — devices altered to conceal advanced wireless technology that could read the cards in the deck, predict which player had the best hand and relay the information through interstate wires to an off-site operator, according to the indictment alleging participation in the poker games.

Eric Earnest (Spook)

Mr. Earnest, of Missouri, is accused of organizing illegal poker games and using the shuffling machines that Mr. Stroud provided

He also obtained private information about N.B.A. games to help himself and others place fraudulent sports bets, prosecutors said.

Osman Hoti (Albanian Bruce/Big Bruce)

Mr. Hoti, of New Jersey, is accused of providing security for illegal poker games on Lexington Avenue in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan; committing a gunpoint robbery with Mr. Awawdeh and other defendants; and participating in the rigged poker games in East Hampton, N.Y.

Matthew Daddino (The Wrestler)

Mr. Daddino, of Franklin Square, N.Y., on Long Island, is a member of the Genovese crime family, prosecutors said He is accused of receiving a portion of the earnings on its behalf but also on behalf of the Bonanno and Gambino families.

Thomas Gelardo (Juice)

Mr. Gelardo, of Scarsdale, N.Y., has been an associate of the Bonanno and Genovese crime families, prosecutors said. He also received money from the games and extorted debtors, they said.

In October 2023, Mr. Gelardo, wielding a baton, barged into a townhouse at 80 Washington Place in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan to disrupt a poker game run by Mr. Awawdeh, prosecutors said.

Mr. Gelardo, flanked by armed men, assaulted Mr. Awawdeh for holding a game in direct competition with another poker game held on the same night, they said.

A durable backcourt player who can toggle between the point guard and shooting guard positions, he played college basketball at the University of Louisville for two seasons before being chosen by the Boston Celtics in the first round of the 2015 draft.

Mr. Rozier, who earned the nickname Scary Terry while playing for the Celtics, made his N.B.A. debut on Nov. 4, 2015, playing six minutes in a loss to Indiana, and his first start on Jan. 31, 2018, racking up a triple-double in a win over the Knicks. But he spent most of his four years with the Celtics as a reserve before he was traded to Charlotte.

Over his career, he has averaged about 14 points, four assists and one steal per game, according to basketball-reference.com. He had his best season while with Charlotte in 2022-23, averaging 21.1 points a game.

According to the website Spotrac, which compiles financial and contract information for the N.B.A. and other major sports leagues, Mr. Rozier has earned a total of roughly $134 million during his N.B.A. career, and he was set to receive another $27 million this year under his current contract.

Mr. Rozier first came under scrutiny when a firm hired by the N.B.A. to monitor potential gambling-related anomalies noticed unusual betting connected to his play in 2023. The league investigated him, but could not confirm that he was engaged in wrongdoing and so did not punish him.

The N.B.A. placed him on immediate leave after his indictment on Thursday.

Mr. Billups made five straight All-Star appearances between 2006 and 2010. The biggest moment of his career came in 2004, when he helped lead the Pistons to an improbable N.B.A. championship over the Los Angeles Lakers, then a powerhouse led by Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. It was the Pistons’ first championship since 1990.

He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame last year, after a 17-year-career that also included stops in Minnesota, Denver and New York.

His career, however, started with controversy. During his rookie season in Boston, a woman accused Mr. Billups of sexually assaulting her at the home of a teammate, Antoine Walker. No criminal charges were filed and Mr. Billups reached an out-of-court settlement with the woman in 2000.

After Mr. Billups retired in 2014, he worked as an ESPN analyst before pivoting to a career as a coach. He spent one year as an assistant with the Los Angeles Clippers before being hired as the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers in 2021. At the time, Mr. Billups’s hiring was considered unconventional, given his minimal coaching experience. But Blazers executives said they believed his playing experience would be valuable in leading a roster filled young talent.

In his first four years as head coach, the Trail Blazers mostly languished near the bottom of the league. But last season was Mr. Billups’s high mark: The team finished with a record of 36-46 and briefly made a push for the playoffs.

This season, Mr. Billups’s fifth as coach, the Blazers were expected to make a playoff run under his leadership.

But after Mr. Billups was arrested on Thursday in connection with a gambling scheme, the N.B.A. said he had been placed on immediate leave.

While the mob’s outright stranglehold on a host of industries, from construction and trucking to control of the waterfront and garment center, is a thing of the past, organized crime remains alive and well, if less visible, according to current and former investigators. Its presence is perhaps most vibrant in the New York City metropolitan area.

This stubborn resilience continues, they said, despite more than four decades of aggressive investigations and prosecutions that have decimated the leadership of the five families and secured thousands of convictions — and the recruitment of an army of chatty informants.

Over the years, the mob’s savvier operators have learned that violence — not to mention the antics of strutting crime family peacocks like the Gambino boss John Gotti — attracts law enforcement attention, which can land them in prison, where moneymaking opportunities are decidedly fewer and farther between.

The Italian Mafia, known as La Cosa Nostra, “is still alive and well in the New York City area, they just changed some of their methods in the way they operate,” said F.B.I. supervisor Mike Mullahy, a veteran mob investigator who oversaw the agents who made the poker case.

“Being brazen and up front in how they operate has not always worked out well for them,” he added, “so they have changed their methods and modes of operation, and we have changed our method of investigating them.”

The poker indictment was unsealed on Thursday along with an unrelated case with no mob involvement that accused three current and former N.B.A. players and coaches and three other men of defrauding gamblers and online betting firms out of millions of dollars.

In the poker case, prosecutors charged 32 men, accusing 11 of them of being leaders, members or associates of the Genovese, Gambino, Bonanno and Lucchese families, including one Bonanno figure, Ernest Aiello, who was reputed to be the family’s acting street boss. The charges include wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, operating an illegal gambling enterprise and conspiracies to commit extortion and robbery.

Both indictments were brought by prosecutors from the office of the Brooklyn U.S. attorney, Joseph Nocella Jr., after separate investigations by his office and several other agencies. In the poker inquiry, they included the F.B.I., the Police Department and the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, which, like the U.S. attorney’s office, has long been among the agencies at the forefront of investigating the mob.

The two cases were not directly related. But three men — none of them accused mob figures — were charged in both indictments, so the inquiries were coordinated and conducted in parallel and the cases were announced together.

Illegal gambling has long been a lucrative mob staple, with its attendant crimes of loan-sharking and extortion, and it continues to be a big moneymaker for all five families, investigators said. But the scheme outlined in the poker indictment took it to another level, leaving nothing to chance.

High rollers were lured to the tables at the mob-sanctioned games in Manhattan, the Hamptons and elsewhere, where, unbeknown to them, the players were interspersed with members of what the indictment said defendants referred to as “cheating teams.” Shuffling machines were altered with chips that could read all the cards in the deck so each player’s hand could be determined in real time and communicated to one of the scheme’s participants at the table, referred to as the “quarterback” or “driver.”

While the indictment said the victims thought they were playing in a “straight” illegal card game “gambling against other participants on equal footing,” in reality, they were facing the cheating team, a lineup of the defendants and their co-conspirators.

At the end of the day, the sophistication of the scheme, and the involvement of four of New York’s five families, strongly indicate that the mob is still thriving. It has hummed along in the background as law enforcement’s priorities have shifted elsewhere — to terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks and, more recently, immigration enforcement under the Trump administration.

“Having worked these families firsthand for 15 years, I can tell you they never really disappear,” said Seamus McElearney, a retired F.B.I. agent who supervised cases against three crime families and has written a book about his time investigating the mob. “They adjust and find ways to cash in.”

The indictment says that Mr. Jones used his relationship with an unnamed “Player 3,” the Los Angeles Lakers and other personnel to give insider medical information to his co-conspirators.

The indictment says Mr. Jones was a former teammate and coach of the Player 3, who was described as a “prominent N.B.A. player.”

Mr. Jones played with Mr. James on the Cleveland Cavaliers from 2005 to 2008, during which time the two became close friends. Mr. Jones was an assistant coach for the Cavaliers from 2016 to 2018, during Mr. James’s second stint with the team, and was his personal shooting coach. Mr. James joined the Lakers before the 2018-19 season.

A spokesman for Mr. James declined to comment.

The indictment says on the morning of Feb. 9, 2023, Mr. Jones sent a text message to a co-conspirator informing him that Player 3 would not play for the Lakers against the Milwaukee Bucks that night.

“Get a big bet on Milwaukee tonight before the information is out!” Mr. Jones said in the message, according to the indictment.

The indictment notes that Player 3 did not play that night because of a lower-body injury. Official records show that Mr. James did not play against Milwaukee because of a sore left ankle. The game came two days after Mr. James set the N.B.A.’s regular-season career scoring record.

Famous people were paid to recruit wealthy players for the game.

Mafia members helped organize and provide security for the rigged poker games. But to lend credibility to the games, the mafia members needed former professional athletes like Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones, who were known as “face cards.”

The role of the “face cards” was to invite wealthy people to participate — in exchange for a portion of the illegal profits, according to prosecutors.

The players cheated with sophisticated technology.

Court documents detailed all the ways the games were rigged, reading like scenes from the movie “Ocean’s Thirteen.”

The machine that shuffled the cards was not just randomly mixing them up: It had technology hidden inside that could read the cards in the deck, predict which player had the best hand and then relay that information to somebody off site. That person would then use a cellphone to communicate the intel to someone at the table, who would steer the other cheating players with secret signals, like tapping certain chips or body parts.

In some of the rigged games, the poker chip trays had hidden cameras that could read the cards on the table. The cards also sometimes had markings that were visible only to people wearing specially designed contact lenses or sunglasses.

Losing players faced the threat of violence and extortion.

The rigged card shuffling machines were so important to the scheme that a group of the defendants robbed someone at gunpoint to steal a specific model of the machine from him. The indictment doesn’t name the victim.

When players failed to repay the debts they accrued from the poker games, the defendants used extortion and threats of violence to get their money, prosecutors said.

The case involved different mafia families operating illegal gambling dens.

One game, controlled by the Bonanno crime family, was hosted primarily at 147 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood, prosecutors said.

Another, controlled by the Gambino crime family, was hosted primarily at 80 Washington Place in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood, they said.

The games also took place in the Hamptons, Las Vegas and Miami, prosecutors said.

Eight players, including Joe Jackson — known by the nickname Shoeless Joe — were banned from baseball for life, though in May the M.L.B. commissioner, Rob Manfred, removed them from the permanently ineligible list.

The team became known as the Black Sox, and the scandal was the basis for the 1988 film “Eight Men Out.”

Pete Rose, one of baseball’s greatest players and the game’s career hits leader, was caught up in a gambling scandal when he was managing the Cincinnati Reds. He was accused of betting on baseball, which is strictly forbidden.

In 1989, he was banned for life and barred from consideration for the Hall of Fame, to which he would have been elected with ease. Mr. Manfred reinstated Mr. Rose in May, eight months after his death, making him eligible again for the Hall of Fame. Mr. Rose eventually confessed, but said he had never bet against his own team.

Basketball’s biggest betting scandals have mostly come in the college ranks, in part because until recently college players were not paid, and had more incentive than a well-paid professional to cheat to make money. Most scandals involved point shaving — winning a game, but making sure to do so by a smaller margin that the bookmakers predicted.

Among the colleges that were accused of point shaving over the years were the City College of New York, along with other schools (1951), Boston College (1979), Tulane (1985), Arizona State (1994), Northwestern (1995) and Toledo (2006).

The other most notable gambling scandal in the N.B.A. involved not a player or coach but a referee, Tim Donaghy. He admitted to betting on games he refereed from 2003 to 2007. His associates claimed that when Mr. Donaghy refereed one of these games, his influence assured that the team being bet on won almost 80 percent of the time.

The new N.B.A. scandal involves, in part, “spot fixing,” which takes advantage of the fact that gamblers can now bet on just about any aspect of a game. In spot fixing, players don’t fix a whole game, but they manipulate some smaller element, such as how many points a certain player scores.

One of the most prominent spot fixing scandals came in the oh-so-proper sport of cricket. Three members of the Pakistan national team arranged to record a “no ball,” in which the bowler steps over the line improperly, at predetermined moments, so that bettors could correctly predict them. The three were convicted and sent to jail and banned from cricket for five years.