Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, and former NBA player and coach Damon Jones were all arrested on Thursday as part of a series of yearslong federal investigations into illegal gambling. The two probes in question came with rather on-the-nose monikers: “Operation Nothing but Net” for illegal sports betting, “Operation Royal Flush” for fraudulent high-stakes poker games backed by numerous mafia families.
The investigation’s tentacles are manifold: Billups was arrested on charges related to rigged poker games; Rozier was arrested on charges connected to illegal sports betting; Jones is one of three defendants charged in both indictments. There are almost assuredly more names to be implicated in the future, and there was a name already implicated in a past investigation. Jontay Porter, who was given a lifetime ban from the NBA in April 2024 for numerous bets placed against himself and his former team, was named as a coconspirator in the betting plot. During the news conference held by FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Joseph Nocella Jr., Nocella himself said that Porter was coerced into the arrangement after being threatened over prior gambling debts.
According to the contents of the sports-betting indictment, Rozier allegedly informed De’Niro Laster, a childhood friend, that he would remove himself from an NBA game by way of a supposed injury in the first quarter of the March 23, 2023, contest between the New Orleans Pelicans and Charlotte Hornets, which would allow Laster to win on any and all under bets placed on Rozier’s player props. (Rozier played less than 10 minutes in that game.) From there, according to the indictment, Laster parlayed the insider knowledge by selling it to a codefendant and coconspirator for roughly $100,000 of their estimated winnings. The knowledge further trickled down to a network of bettors. The verbiage in the document makes it sound like Rozier was just trying to help his good friend make an easy buck on some bets—definitely illegal, but it was Laster who compounded the issue by further disseminating the information. (This is likely the case to be made by Rozier’s lawyer, who stated that his client “is not a gambler” in a statement given to reporter Pablo Torre.) Still, there is gravity to this dishonor falling on Rozier, a 10-year veteran who has earned more than $100 million in his career, as opposed to Porter, who barely made more than $2 million in total. Porter’s low profile made him easy to banish and move on; that’s less tenable for someone who is supposed to make $24.9 million this season.
It looks exponentially worse for Billups and Jones, who, according to the indictment, appeared to be willing pawns (or “face cards” to use the defendants’ terminology) in a calculated effort to defraud poker players in games held across the country looking for an opportunity to play with a future Hall of Famer and, um, Alfred. There’s a layer of nefariousness that goes beyond the marginally better odds that come from insider information—plenty of the bets placed on the games listed in the document did not hit. But the 31 defendants charged in the rigged poker games created the conditions for unequivocal success in their favor.
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