The brick row house sits just steps from Washington Square Park, in plain view of any passersby from New York University. In 2021, it was rented, the New York Post reported in its wall-to-wall coverage of an unmissable sports betting spectacle, to Travis Scott over the period when he was dating Kylie Jenner—a glancing connection that suggested no wrongdoing. It was not a New York landmark, exactly, but in its simultaneous accessibility and status, it brought out some essential, familiar character of its monied Greenwich Village vicinity.
As federal prosecutors claimed in an indictment unsealed on Thursday, the building was later where “Flappy,” “the Wrestler,” and “Juice,” among other evocatively nicknamed alleged members of the Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese, and Genovese New York mafia families, assembled to carry out a Hollywood-ready scheme that rigged poker games with card-reading contact lenses and X-ray tables and used the attendance of an active NBA coach, Chauncey Billups, as bait for their marks. In a separate but simultaneous indictment, prosecutors alleged that an active and a former player, Terry Rozier and Damon Jones, provided insider information on NBA games to bettors and, in Rozier’s case, manipulated his performance to the gambler’s benefit. (All the defendants in the two cases—which include Billups, Rozier, Jones, and alleged organized-crime affiliates—who have entered a plea thus far have pleaded not guilty on fraud, money laundering, extortion, and gambling charges.)
Perhaps, as alleged, the set-up was even stranger than fiction, a relic from a bygone era when Gottis in courthouses dominated the tabloid pages, or when betting scandals rocked professional baseball several times over.
And yet, in some sense, the alleged behavior was taking place right under our noses. Vanity Fair spoke with veterans of the gambling and mafia underworlds to help situate the relative absurdity—and predictability—of the scandal that has ricocheted across sports, business, and politics.
The new sports gambling landscape
“What did anyone think was going to happen?” New York sports radio host Craig Carton asked me on Friday.
Carton’s career as a leading local drive time personality was upended in 2017 when he was arrested for running a ticket reselling Ponzi-like scheme in order to cover millions of dollars in gambling debts. He was sentenced to 42 months of prison for fraud, ultimately serving about a year, at what was a fairly quaint time by the standards of today’s gambling industry.
