The National Basketball Association was rocked Thursday when an active player, a head coach, and a former assistant coach were arrested by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of a probe into illegal gambling.
The player, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, and the former assistant coach, Damon Jones, were indicted in federal court on charges of wire fraud for providing gamblers on non-public information regarding the injury status of players, enabling the gamblers to bet on the player’s or team’s production with more certainty than the general public, thus defrauding the legal sports books who took their action. Current Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups was arrested and charged in connection with illegal poker games run by the New York City Mafia.
Speaking at a press conference Thursday morning in New York, FBI director Kash Patel likened Rozier and Jones’ alleged conduct to insider trading on the stock market, where an investor uses non-public information about a publicly-traded company to profit by investing in securities related to that company.
And while the NBA has faced this sort of allegation previously when Johntay Porter, a former player for the Toronto Raptors, was banned for life after deliberately underperforming and removing himself from two games in the 2024 season, allowing bettors with whom he conspired to make money on proposition bets based on how many points Porter would score. The bettors bet the “under” and won when Porter left each of the two games early, having scored fewer points than the “line,” or determining number of points as to whether “under” or “over” bet wins.
Similarly, Rozier and Jones allegedly tipped off bettors as to the injury status of players, in Rozier’s case, his own status, and in Jones’, that of players on the Los Angeles Lakers, allowing bettors to make proposition bets on the player’s production and win.
And as the NBA confronts the difficulty of maintaining the integrity of the game in an era where fans in 38 states can wager on games or make prop bets, so too has baseball, at both the college and professional levels.
Since sports gambling became legal in the U.S. following the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Murphy v. NCAA, Major League Baseball has banned one player for life for violating Major League Baseball’s Rule 21, which prohibits uniformed personnel from wagering on baseball, saw a team staffer sentenced to years in federal prison after stealing millions of dollars from the game’s biggest international star to pay off gambling debts, and placed two pitchers on the same team on unpaid administrative leave while an ongoing investigation probes their involvement with unusual activity on proposition bets made on individual pitches.
The player, Tucupita Marcano, became the first active player banned for life by the commissioner under Rule 21 since New York Giants shortstop Jimmy O’Connell was banned by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, along with Giants coach Cozy Dolan, for offering Philadelphia Phillies shortstop Heinie Sand $500 to lose a game between the two teams intentionally.
Marcano, a native of Tucupita, Venezuela who was playing for the San Diego Padres, was banned for life on June 4, 2024, for wagering over $150,000 on 25 games involving the Pittsburgh Pirates, for whom he played, during the 2023 season. The same day, four other players — Oakland A’s pitcher Michael Kelly, Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Andrew Saalfrank, San Diego Padres pitcher Jay Groome and Philadelphia Phillies infielder Jose Rodriguez — were all suspended for a year for betting on baseball games that didn’t involve their team.
Most prominently, while serving as interpreter to Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, Dodgers staffer Ippei Mizuhara pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of federal bank fraud and one count of subscribing a false tax return hours after MLB issued Marcano’s ban. He placed $183 million dollars in sports bets with an illegal bookmaking operation, as sports gambling is illegal in California, where he and Ohtani resided, and then transferred over $16 million out of Ohtani’s bank accounts to satisfy his own gambling debts.
Mizuhara’s malfeasance was uncovered into an investigation into an illegal sports bookmaking operation run by Mathew Bowyer in the Los Angeles area. On Aug. 29, Bowyer was sentenced to one year and one day in prison, two years of supervised release, and will have to attend counseling for his gambling addiction. He is serving his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution Lompoc II in Lompoc, Calif., a minimum security facility, and is scheduled to be released on Aug. 16, 2026.
Ohtani’s former interpreter Mizuhara was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison and required to pay $16,975,010 in restitution. He is currently incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution, Allenwood Low, a minimum security facility in Allenwood, Penn., with a release date of May 22, 2029.
This season, MLB placed Cleveland Guardians starter Jose Ortiz and closer Emmanuel Clase on paid administrative leave while the league investigated suspicious wagers relating to two pitches thrown by Ortiz, one in the second inning of a June 15 start against the Seattle Mariners and the third inning of a June 27 start against the St. Louis Cardinals, according to multiple media reports. In both instances, bettors wagered that Ortiz would throw the first pitch of the inning for a ball, and in both instances, Ortiz threw sliders that were well out of the strike zone.
The investigation into Clase and Ortiz remains open, and both pitchers have been barred from pitching for the Estrellas Orientales by Vitalio Mejia, the President of LIDOM, the Dominican Republic’s professional winter league, and Clase was barred from pitching for the Tiburones de La Guaira, a winter ball team in Venezuela, by the Guardians. Clase and Ortiz have filed suit against Mejia and LIDOM in a Santo Domingo, D.R. court, alleging that the league’s preemptive ban violates their rights.
College baseball hasn’t been immune, either, to problems springing from legalized sports gambling. In February 2024, the NCAA was drawn into the muck when University of Alabama head coach Brad Bohannon was fired for cause after providing a gambler with inside information about the Crimson Tide scratching ace starter Luke Holman from a April 28, 2024 game against LSU. Bohannon relayed that Holman wouldn’t pitch against LSU to a bettor seeking to wager on the Tigers to win the game at the BetMGM Sportsbook at Great American Ballpark, the home of MLB’s Cincinnati Reds.
When the bettor, Indiana businessman Bert Neff, attempted to wager $150,000 on LSU, it drew attention from the Ohio Casino Control Commission — the same body that raised the alarm regarding the two questionable wagers on pitches thrown by Ortiz. Neff was limited to wagering $15,000 by the BetMGM staff, according to a report by ESPN. He later pled guilty in federal court to obstruction charges and was sentenced to eight months in prison. He was released on April 28, 2025, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website.
Bohannon was fired by Alabama on May 2, 2024, and was hit with a 15-year “show cause penalty” by the NCAA, tied for the longest such penalty handed down by the governing body of college athletics in the United States, after being found to have violated NCAA rules regarding gambling and ethics and being uncooperative with investigations conducted by both Alabama and the NCAA.
Photo: Ippei Mizuhara, former interpreter for Los Angeles Dodgers baseball star Shohei Ohtani expected to be sentenced for bank and tax fraud arrives at federal court on Feb. 6, 2025, in Santa Ana, Calif. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)
