Operation Three of a Kind

When the story broke, I said it out loud like a prayer that didn’t work: Say it ain’t so.

Chauncey Billups. Terry Rozier. Damon Jones. The names didn’t make sense together, not in the same headline, not next to words like FBI and indictment. But then again, innocence never goes quietly — it gets sold, comped, or traded for chips under fluorescent light.

I grew up with a grandmother we called the Public Defender. Grandma Teenie could rationalize anything short of genocide. She'd be at the dinner table, offering:

“How do you know he wasn’t stealing to feed his family?"

“Maybe he didn’t mean to run over that family while evading the police.”

“Maybe Todd went temporarily blind when he picked that outfit.”

She believed every sinner was just a misunderstood person who meant well. I inherited that reflex—this deep, stupid desire to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Then came Tim Donaghy.

When we first launched 120 Proof Ball, we wrote about him—the ref who turned games into profit centers, the man who peeled back the illusion of fairness we all pretended was real. Donaghy showed us the scoreboard could lie and the whistle could carry a point spread. He didn’t just bet on basketball; he bet against belief itself.

I thought we’d learned.

But every era gets the scandal it deserves. Ours doesn’t wear wiretaps and trench coats—it carries burner phones and crypto wallets. When the FBI drops an indictment with celebrity names attached, it isn’t guesswork; it’s the final act of a long-running play. By the time the headlines hit, the Bureau already has your texts alphabetized.

So here we are again, staring at a table full of familiar faces and unfamiliar odds. The grown-up, the spark plug, and the survivor—three archetypes of the game now shuffled into the same deck.

I can almost hear Teenie’s voice now, mounting her defense: Maybe they got roped in. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe. But she’s gone, and so is the benefit of the doubt.

This is what it feels like when belief finally breaks. No explosion, no scandalized press conference—just a slow leak of faith until the air’s gone.

Yet, somewhere, under flickering light, the next table’s being set.

Taking Charges

The FBI’s docket reads like sports gossip written by a funeral director. Two investigations, each as American as sin: Operation Royal Flush and Operation Nothing But Bet.

Royal Flush is the poker story — Vegas suites, private games, and high-tech cheating. It’s the one where former Finals MVP Chauncey Billups and ex-player–turned–shooting coach Damon Jones are named. Agents describe a ring stretching from Manhattan to Miami, allegedly run under the cooperation of three mafia families: Genovese, Gambino, and Bonanno. The setup sounds cartoonish until you read the evidence. Decks marked with ultraviolet ink. Tables with internal sensors. Contact lenses that could read invisible codes off the cards. The kind of thing you’d laugh off as urban legend until the indictments start quoting serial numbers.

Billups’s alleged role was credibility. The poker room’s face card. When you’re trying to fleece a hedge-fund guy in the Hamptons, a former Finals MVP across the table does wonders for confidence. Jones, meanwhile, allegedly helped operate the game — a liaison between the basketball world and the underworld, ferrying whales into the trap.

But Operation Nothing But Bet is the one that really bleeds. It’s the gambling-on-games case — prop bets, insider info, and deliberate manipulation of outcomes. Terry Rozier and Damon Jones are both named here. Federal filings claim Rozier supplied non-public injury information, then allegedly influenced his own stat lines to cash the bets. A missed free throw here, a pulled-up jumper there — nothing loud enough to draw a whistle, just quiet corruption.

And Jones again sits at the overlap. According to ESPN, one of the players whose medical information was leaked for betting advantage was none other than LeBron James. While coaching LeBron privately in Los Angeles, Jones allegedly fed details about rest days and health status to associates who placed wagers before the lines moved. It’s the dirtiest form of inside trading — turning a trainer’s trust into currency.

Billups, for now, is not named in Nothing But Bet. But his indictment relates a story from the poker table where he whispered a tip about a Blazers-Bulls rest night, and the informant bet against the Blazers before the rested players were public, for a tidy profit. I'm pretty sure my high school coach placed bets against me too — but track and field isn't a team sport.

It all sounds elaborate until you check the arithmetic.

Motive, or mafia motivation?

The FBI says Operation Royal Flush — the rigged-poker scheme that allegedly drew in Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones — netted about $7 million in winnings. That figure covers the whole enterprise, from Manhattan to Miami. Operation Nothing But Bet, the companion case about insider wagers and thrown games, has no dollar total yet. So for now, seven million is the ceiling.

Start slicing. Half goes straight to the Families — “protection,” “partnership,” whatever euphemism you prefer. That’s the tribute rate for keeping your kneecaps intact. Now you’re down to $3.5 million.

Next, the operational rake: the dealers, the card techs, the digital launderers, the armed security. Call it another twenty percent, minimum. That’s $2.8 million left in the pot.

Now split it between the two basketball names attached to the case. Billups and Jones, equal partners on paper if not in power. That’s $1.4 million each before lawyers, fines, or fear.

For Damon Jones, that’s at least a survival number. The journeyman guard who once made four million a season now makes social-media clips and coaches private clients, including LeBron. A man who used to stand next to the King but never owned a castle of his own.

But for Billups? That's six months of coaching — after taxes. That payout isn’t temptation — it's an insult. He’s a head coach making $5million a year, a Hall-of-Famer, a brand built on responsibility. No sane math turns that into motive. Which leaves the uncomfortable remainder: leverage.

Because the modern Mafia doesn’t recruit for greed; it hunts vulnerabilities. If they can find a seam in your integrity, they lean in. Maybe it started small for Chauncey. A bridge loan here, in exchange for a poker table appearance there. Boil the frog slowly enough and it just keeps swimming.

So the math collapses, and the motive dissolves. Seven million turns to one, one turns to none, and what’s left is the only currency that's ever really mattered: control.

Who's turning the thumbscrews? Same as it ever was.

Family Business

The headlines say “organized crime” like it’s nostalgia—something that belongs on VHS beside Goodfellas and Casino. But the FBI still has wiretaps humming, and the mob still has payrolls. The Genovese, Gambino, and Bonanno families didn’t vanish; they went quiet, digitized, and learned to invoice their extortion through Venmo.

Each still runs the same rackets they always have. The Genovese hold the gambling franchise. They’ve been raided half a dozen times in the past five years for running poker parlors out of barbershops and tire stores. The Gambinos provide muscle and infrastructure—construction unions, “security,” waste management. The Bonannos? They’re the boutique option. Small, violent, and occasionally entrepreneurial.

So when prosecutors say the poker ring crossed all three families, that’s not hyperbole—it’s cooperation at the top. The mob’s version of the All-Star Game. The Genovese supply the tech and dealers, the Gambinos the protection, the Bonannos the collection. A full-service operation with a house cut that would make Goldman Sachs blush.

And when the game ends, somebody still buries the evidence. In April, agents spent a week turning over dirt on two farms in upstate New York—properties linked to the Gambinos—searching for bodies. Bodies, plural. That’s not metaphor; that’s literal ground truth. They brought backhoes.

When I was a kid, my parents told me our family dog “went to live on a farm upstate.” I wonder if the FBI found Fluffy there too.

The same soil hiding decades-old vendettas is now a crime scene for the modern mob — proof that these families still settle debts the old fashioned way.

And that’s why the next act of this story isn’t about the money or the cards. It’s about the silence that follows. Because for every upstate New York farm with a graveyard, there's an informant who eventually gets planted there.

The Walls Have Ears

The FBI doesn’t knock on your door overnight. They marinate you. Wiretaps, subpoenas, sting operations — years of listening while you think you’re whispering. By the time the Bureau went public, they’d already recorded the jokes, the bragging, the phone calls where everyone forgot the walls have microphones now.

The press release makes it sound like they just stumbled on a poker ring, but insiders say this case has been cooking since 2021. The Bureau’s financial-crimes unit and organized-crime division teamed up — digital-forensics nerds and old-school mob hunters sharing the same coffee. They mapped cash flows through shell companies, crypto mixers, and the occasional “wellness consulting” LLC that never quite offered wellness.

The Feds reportedly have cooperating witnesses. Someone inside the ring is already singing — maybe to save a family, maybe to shave a decade off a sentence. The Bureau always flips one early, lets the paranoia do the rest. Every text message starts reading like evidence. Every phone buzz feels like judgment day.

Because here’s the thing: the FBI doesn’t leak rumors. When they name celebrities, the transcripts are already indexed, the bank accounts frozen, the warrants stamped. The investigation stage we’re seeing now is just the unveiling of what’s already in the vault.

So the question becomes — who talks next?

Because the mob doesn’t tolerate confession, and the Feds don’t tolerate silence. Between those two absolutes sit three athletes with families of their own, wondering whether loyalty still pays or just buries you deeper in the farm soil.

Settling the accounts

Every gambling scandal in sports starts with math and ends with mythology. The cash fades; the stain stays.

If you stack this case beside history, the pattern’s clear. Tim Donaghy, 2007: fifteen months for betting on games he officiated, reportedly pocketing less than $200,000 — a three-week paycheck for a rookie. Pete Rose, banned for life in ’89, lost more in dignity than in wagers. The Arizona State point-shaving scandal in the mid-’90s? Less than a million in profit, a decade in exile. Every generation repeats the same sin with new hardware and worse excuses.

Now the alleged Royal Flush and Nothing But Bet operations merge those ghosts: Donaghy’s greed, Rose’s hubris, the mob’s patience. But the scale has changed. These aren’t fringe figures — they’re fixtures. Coaches on payroll, players with endorsements, names on jerseys you can still buy at the team store.

And waiting for them on the other side is Adam Silver, a commissioner who reads punishment like scripture. He’s already bleeding from the Kawhi Leonard no-show contract investigation — another credibility wound he couldn’t cauterize. The man will have zero patience for this. Silver believes in deterrence the way Popovich believes in defense: the next guy doesn’t think twice; he doesn’t think at all. Expect lifetime bans, scorched-earth pressers, a public execution staged for every sponsor who needs reassurance that the league still runs on honor.

For Billups, the tragedy is arithmetic — one whispered tip, one friendly table, and thirty years of trust vanish. The Blazers have already placed him on leave.

For Rozier, it’s spiritual — the kind of fall where your highlight reels start feeling like evidence exhibits. Rozier has been placed on leave by Miami. A ban whether temporary or permanent would mean that the Heat can enter free agency with another $24million in cap space after terminating his contract for cause and placing a claim on their insurance. A shame though; I had the post-Jimmy Heat well above consensus on my Power Ranklings — I thought they had built a balanced attack with a chip on its shoulder.

For Jones, it’s existential — the journeyman’s curse: you can survive poverty or obscurity, but not both.

The league itself will live, of course. The NBA is built for scandal elasticity — a $100 billion organism that metabolizes shame into storylines. There’ll be integrity committees, new compliance officers, halftime PSAs about values. And the same week the sentences drop, you’ll still see courtside ads for FanDuel and DraftKings flicker under the league’s logo like the system laughing at itself.

What makes this different is scope. The last time sports and organized crime shared a headline, the mob still used rotary phones. Now it’s routers. The same technology that turned athletes into brands has turned vice into infrastructure. No more manila envelopes — just encrypted chats and burner accounts.

So, yes, this joins the canon: Donaghy, Rose, Arizona State. But it’s worse. Because the league no longer merely tolerates gambling; it monetizes it. When corruption lives inside the broadcast sponsorships, it stops being a scandal and becomes an ecosystem.

The punishment will be federal. The reckoning will be Silver’s.

And the damage, as always, will be ours.

So what do we do now?

The games will go on. The sponsors will keep buying airtime. But the quiet thing that made us love the game — the illusion that effort and outcome are the same currency — is what keeps dying.

Grandma Teenie would still make the case. She’d remind me that guilt is a legal term, not a moral one. She’d tell me forgiveness is the only thing that keeps faith alive. And maybe she’d even be right. But I don’t think I have it in me this time — not after watching the house win again.

So I’ll leave the mercy to her. The rest of us can settle for truth. The players will serve their time, the league will sell integrity by the quarter, and the rest of us will keep watching because we don’t know how not to.

Maybe that’s our own addiction: believing that somewhere out there, beneath the rigged decks and buried bodies, the game might still be clean.

Come to think of it, that naïve hope — I guess she's still alive in me after all.

Todd / 120 Proof Ball

If you liked this piece, you’re part of the problem.