"Tim was very, very secretive. The main problem now was keeping a lid on the thing. Larry Pedowitz Mendy Rudolph, Yogi Strom, Jake O'Donnell, Billy Oakes, Ed. 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. Tim sits down with Jimmy Battista and Tommy Martino hoping to find out new information about the relationship between referees Tim Donaghy and Scott Foster. The latest updates, reviews and . And those bets won -- won like Concannon had never won before. Battista and Donaghy were never to speak directly. How Much Did Tim Donaghy Earn From Each Bet? An old classmate, Jimmy Battista, had extorted him into making NBA betting picks for him by saying, "You don't want anyone 'from New York' coming to your house" (via ESPN). Its absurd. I cant say one nice thing about him. From here on out, Battista said, he and Donaghy would never communicate directly. And what more did you want? Griffin has never spoken with Donaghy. The data chronicle price fluctuations. Rush, as director of refs, took notice but didn't think much of it at the time. There have been hints and suggestions. Litvin then filled him in on the worst of it and told him there was an ongoing investigation, instructing him to say nothing about any of it to anyone. "Nobody picked winners . He thought he was having a heart attack. In October 2002, Donaghy and Concannon decided to pool their money and wager on Ruggieri's picks. I believe this guy was almost soulless.. It is normal, of course, for a referee to call more fouls against one team than the other. His income now reportedly comes from rental properties he owns. He documented a 78% Donaghy win rate and paying him $201,000 for his tips, just a cog in Battistas tentacles, which reached Asia, Europe and Vegas. "My life is ruined," Kulle recalled Donaghy saying. Netflix, to me, is the next iteration of that., Donaghy published a book in June 2010, nine months before Gaming.. [3] (When I asked if I could see the notes myself, he laughed. "I was warned," Weiss told me, "that if I stumbled, Stern would do anything he could to crush me. It's possible, through Don Best Sports, a betting information service, to pull the line-movement data for individual NBA games going back years. The scandal architect, Battista was addicted to various pills and cocaine, yet he was the straight-shooter, as reams of evidence and others corroborated his most-minute details. If there is a cradle of basketball refereeing, it is here. That clip has Donaghy saying "Tommy was one of those guys all the girls loved, athletic, funny, good-looking kid that everybody liked." It then has Battista saying "He had good street smarts,. Murray Weiss Accounts of the meeting differ. She said there was no extortion, no conspiracy and you were more culpable than the others. That never really flew with us." "I refuse to comment on him. According to Martino, if Donaghy mentioned out-of-state Johnny's name, the pick was for the visiting team. Freedom of Information Act requests were filed. They were also brothers-in-law; the women they'd married were sisters. ", To this day, what amounts to something like a self-imposed gag order on the subject of Donaghy persists, even among those refs who no longer work for the league. Kulle got up, crossed the room and closed the blinds. The office's windows looked out onto a basketball court, where children on youth teams were just then practicing. By most accounts, Tony "Tiger" Rufo is no longer a gambler. White-collar criminal defense attorney who led the NBA-commissioned outside investigation into the Donaghy affair. IT WOULD NOT be the only time Tim Donaghy would come clean. 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. "No way Battista kept this quiet from Tiger," another told me. People know I have documents and files, and they constantly ask me questions whose answers they dont like. "I called him the King - Elvis," Battista told HBO Real Sports in an interview aired last night. IN A STATEMENT to ESPN at the end of January, the NBA said: "To be clear, the Pedowitz team and the NBA performed substantial statistical and data-based analyses to determine whether Donaghy attempted to manipulate games he officiated. To help get his clients' bets down, Battista as a bet broker needed Joe Vito. They'd studied his wagers. He was thus sentenced to 15 months in a federal facility. (Through the NBA, Stern declined an interview request for this story.) The play claims that his strict, god-fearing family caused him to rebel when he was younger, but he wound up going out with the wrong crowd. One morning in early July 2007, Ronnie Nunn was asleep in a hotel room in Las Vegas when his cellphone buzzed him awake. Dust-ups with neighbors (one who called Donaghy a flaming maniac), an assault on a mail carrier and the West Chester, Pennsylvania, mayor noting Donaghys very aggressive personality also were filed. They were an organized crime squad, dealing with murder and mayhem. But no. It's possible, in effect, to buy and sell bets, to go long or go short, to hedge. Even if it made them strange bedfellows, then, Donaghy's denials of match-fixing guilt were, in the end, a gift. According to what we've observed after being released from Metropolitan Detention Center-Brooklyn, New York, James "Jimmy" Battista has returned home to the state of Pennsylvania and lives an extremely private life. Battista hiking Donaghy's fee to $5,000 for each correct pick -- minuscule compared to the amounts Battista was now wagering Battista bowing his head to his desk and snorting a line of coke to stay alert, to stay awake. Vercher asked him why. Donaghy was mentioned on those tapes. 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. The dubious mafia threat. The Celtics, favored by 2.5 points, went on to win in a blowout. I was just researching it. He even contacted Murray Weiss, the Post reporter who wrote the story, to uncover the source of the leak. The finest information Jimmy Battista received in his years as a full-time professional gambler, he says now, came from former NBA referee Tim Donaghy. Phil Scala had been investigating organized crime in New York City for almost 30 years when his squad received the tip. They were the gamblers and bookmakers closest to Battista. Agents monitoring organized crime figures in the Gambino family. So when Gaming appeared at No. All this occurred while Rush was director of officials, from 1998 to 2003. Tim Donaghy 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. Thats not the [b.s.] The FBI started trying . He had an unhappy marriage, four daughters and a $260,000 salary. That's what they were looking for. When Donaghy became an NBA ref, that continued, sometimes with hookers. Only this time, Rush viewed these calls with suspicion. 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. With a team of four young lawyers, Pedowitz took a little over a year to conduct the probe and write up the findings in a 133-page report. She struggled to recall exactly when, but she told me she probably started finding the cash in 2004, during the season. ", 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. James "Jimmy" "Bah-Bah" "The Sheep" Battista was a stressed-out, overweight, Oxy-addicted 41-year-old, in the hole to some underground gamblers for sums he'd sort of lost track of, when he settled in to watch an NBA game for which he believed he'd just put in the fix. Joe Vito cannot speak to that today; he was busted in 2012 at age 63 for illegal bookmaking in an unrelated federal case. The Feds' job, on this one, was done. Jimmy Battista, nickname "The Sheep," is a professional gambler. The NBA employees "examined every play and determined whether, in their view, Donaghy's calls (or absence of calls) were correct." Taylor "Popeye" Breton It came from above,' " Scala recalls. A high roller named Mike Rinnier, who'd made his fortune in Delaware County supermarkets, decided to bankroll a small sports-betting syndicate in the 1980s. Gambler, bookmaker and great-great grandson of the founder of Goldman Sachs, now deceased. Thats when Battista started calling Donaghy Elvis, The King of prognosticating NBA games including his own, Battista told Griffin. "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. THERE ARE MANY misconceptions about the Tim Donaghy scandal. It matters all the more now. And so their syndicate came to be known by some as the Animals. "I started thinking -- or should I say, rationalizing: S---, everyone on the staff bets," he wrote. Scala recalls that he and Donaghy went around and around on the issue. Battista had such a network. The big problem, Battista said, was that the betting markets appeared to be getting wise to the emergence of an astonishingly accurate NBA handicapper. I didn't find it.". Martino would then relay the pick to Battista. Then he hung up. Hundred-dollar bills in $10,000 packs, bound in rubber bands and delivered by trusted gofers. 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. He and the other Animals who'd been following the bets were not happy. So I didnt really have time to focus on it, let alone enjoy it., I dont want to say the NBA scandal was easy, he said, but once I got access to personnel in the U.S. attorneys offices and FBI agents, they were not only confirming what Battista said but were elaborating.. No one realizes its a scam. But Battista refused to squeal on Donaghy. Just money, just business. Battista told Griffin. Better to cooperate. There was golfing but also drinking and gambling. He was [expletive] shrewd and believed everyone owed him the world.. Donaghy has written that Rhino had a handicapping system for picking NFL and college football winners. To professional statisticians, any P value of less than 5 percent constitutes a signal that is "significant." At the Marriott, Battista thanked Donaghy for the gift. And they are. Battista arrived with a thick stack of $100 bills bound in a rubber band -- $2,000 for the agreed-upon fee and $3,000 as a sweetener. From what we can tell, since his release from the Metropolitan Detention Center-Brooklyn in New York, James Jimmy Battista has returned to his home state of Pennsylvania, where he leads a relatively private life. It opens in the morning and closes right before tip-off. Huge bets on Boston in the middle of the trading session, between 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., drove the spread from 2.5 to 3 to 4. These games would be mostly winners, so Popeye should feel free to move them -- and copy them too. Battista was a creature of that world. I'm thinking he's going to say: Oh s---! Litvin's tone was urgent. His body turned numb. Normally this guy was a $100 or $200 or maybe $500 bettor. But now, when Battista arrived at Martino's house, he dropped the bomb. But the longtime crime reporter says he did at one point talk to a person "involved with Stern and the NBA in that era." 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.
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