Sports Gambling Apps Are the Main Culprit, Not the ‘Mob’
A scapegoat was needed and one was available. With plausible deniability on their side, Major League Baseball officials were able to hastily cease the gambling investigation into Shohei Ohtani and have his interpreter Ippei Mizuhara take all the heat and blame. Their global superstar was saved, but the sports world would soon be changed forever with multiple betting scandals.
The National Basketball Association has been the worst hit with a number of separate cases involving players and even a sitting head coach. Much of these have dealt with prop bets, the easiest type to rig/fix for gambling. It only takes one person – the player him or herself – to do what usually amounts to keeping their stats at the ‘under’ level. Having someone they know place bets on and even for them – legally and illegally – for a large profit has made pariahs out of the named individuals.
To begin breaking each of these cases down will make this redundant for those who are familiar with them, and those who are not can easily find the much-publicized information. Going on the assumption that the vast majority of readers are up to date with what has taken place, the more important factors lie with not what has occurred in the past, but rather moving forward and who the main participants are.
But before we head in that direction, there’s another aspect of this that is the favorite of the federal government – the alleged involvement of what they frequently classify as “Italian organized crime” and we will break down each of these recent cases showing the lack of this.
PROP TO BOTTOM
The sports betting apps have made it easier for these types of situations to occur. The prop bets (an aspect of sports gambling that was not common or even present in the days of illegal bookmaking) and the convenience of placing bets 24/7 on worldwide events on a cellphone are the two main reasons why. Let’s face it – people enjoy gambling on all different levels. If it’s a small office March Madness bracket pool or a high stakes card game, betting is a part of life. And professional athletes are no different. As a matter of fact, they are even more prone to gambling since they are involved in sports and wealthy. When you have ‘fuck you’ money to spend, much of the time it ends up being lost on gambling.
Take that information and add in the explosion of advertising of the apps everywhere, especially during actual sports broadcasts and inside stadiums. FanDuel and Draft Kings have become as commonplace as Budweiser and Pepsi. It’s impossible to ignore and is a multi-billion dollar industry that has many hands in the till. The government, corporations and leagues themselves all profit handsomely from the apps and the prop bets and parlays are easily the two most popular with the public.
In the gambling circles, parlays are known as ‘sucker bets’ because they rarely pay off. Props, for the most part, are placed as parlays, so lump them in that same category. They are immensely popular because the payoff is so large in comparison to the wager. But it’s hard enough to pick one or two winners in a full day, let alone four-of-four legs on one ticket. This in itself is where the evil lies. The lion’s share of the profits are from these types of bets and they are the ones where the temptations are greatest.
So the obvious and practical way to combat the problem would be to eliminate the prop bets to take away the higher chances for irregularity from the players/coaches. That is a proactive step which still allows for the betting apps to remain in business.
“They’re not going to do that,” said sports handicapper/podcast host and former Barstool Sports employee Jeff Nadu on a recent episode of MuscleSport Media Live on WGBB Radio. “At the end of the day, these are $10 to $20 billion dollar companies. If you eliminate the prop bets, now you become only a $500 million dollar company. Prop bets are extremely lucrative and what that would do is push all that action offshore where you cannot regulate it.
“Would they (possibly) take less money on those games? Yes,” continued Nadu. “The fact that they were taking so much money on rebound and assist props is pretty crazy to me.”
Prior to 2018 when the United States Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports gambling (PASPA), legal sports bets were allowed to be placed only in Nevada (with few exceptions that are not pertinent here). States now are able to make their own decision and at last count, 38 and Washington, DC have permitted online/mobile betting. As of January 2024, the app operators have taken in over $500 billion in wagers and generated $50 billion in lifetime gross revenue. State tax rates vary from 6.75 percent to an incredible 51 percent; the government is getting much more than the vig.
MLB DODGED FIRST BULLET, BUT NOT SECOND
One of the most glaring issues with the Ohtani-Mizuhara case was the obvious ‘sweeping it under the rug’ by Major League Baseball. The presence of doubt (Mizuhara throwing himself under the bus) gave this some merit, but there was no attempt to even do their due diligence to ascertain Ohtani’s involvement – or lack thereof, for that matter – to get proof either way.
“They (MLB investigators) never reached out to me at all; that’s a fact,” Mathew Bowyer, the central figure as a high end bookie in the gambling scandal involving Mizuhara, said on MuscleSport TV. “They did contact my attorney one time and she declined to even talk to them.”
In reference to the prosecutors’ investigation into Ohtani, the lack of time put into it was something not lost on Bowyer. “Let’s be real. Opening and closing… it was the fastest case in the history of the federal government. We all know why that (was) – they all wanted to have their golden child back on the field.”
So both the federal government and MLB – possibly working in tandem behind the scenes – focused on clearing Ohtani of anything other than being a nice friend and help pay off Mizuhara’s enormous gambling debt.
Although the federal government was the prosecuting body against Bowyer, he did make a deal with them and it could have been easy for MLB to have some involvement for information as part of that plea agreement. A good example is the steroid investigation in the late 1990s and early-to-mid-2000s. Kirk Radomski was one, if not the main, supplier of performance-enhancing drugs to baseball players. He was a major part of the Mitchell Report, which was released in 2007. Radomski, who is a contributing writer for MuscleSport Magazine and well known to us on a personal and business level, has stated that he still is contacted by the MLB investigators with questions about steroids and masking agents. This is two decades later and he is still leaned on by the very same entity (and to MLB’s credit, they have done a good job combating the use of PEDs) as a source of information, yet they made one feeble attempt attached to nothing to even debrief Bowyer.
Bowyer has publicly stated that his only dealing with any organized crime figures came down to one person and he never even ascertained for certain if he was or simply pretending to be. “Michael” was a person that Bowyer became familiar with through a mutual aqcuantance, who described him as “a powerful figure in the world of bookmaking, an honorable man who had connections to one of the well-known crime families in Boston,” as per Bowyer’s book “Recalibrate.”Bowyer asked other people he knew in the gambling circuit and they informed him that Michael was an associate and never could be a ‘made member’ because he wasn’t 100 percent Italian. While we can pick several holes with that on face value, it’s simpler for the time being to focus on the fact that Michael’s participation in any gambling with Bowyer did not include Mizuhara.
The other big gambling scandal in MLB involved two Cleveland Guardians pitchers – All-Star closer Emmanuel Clase and starter Luis Ortiz. Bother were indicted in November for tipping off gamblers in the Dominican Republic on prop bet pitches during the 2025 season. A ball and not a strike and a pitch under a certain MPH were facilitated for payoffs of $5,000 and $7,000 each in two different games in June.
These bets were placed without any connection to the ‘mafia,’ but rather unnamed person(s) in the DR likely done at one or more of the 3,500 registered legal gambling businesses (a number provided by the Dominican Association of Sports Betting Shops).
Even though Clase is a very good player (Ortiz is a back-of-the-rotation arm), he is not in Ohtani’s class at all and expendable. MLB has to at least give the appearance that they are doing their best to keep the game clean. Both pitchers were immediately placed on the ineligible list and will in all likelihood face a lifetime ban once their respective court cases have commenced.
Unless you carefully read the two separate indictments, the dog and pony show style press conference by multiple agencies in October announcing the arrests of 31 people involved in gambling cases gave the indication that a real life Tony Soprano and his cronies took advantage of not only high stakes poker players, but also professional athletes and coaches to attract the sad sack losers, as well as being involved in an advanced sports gambling game throwing/stat shaving scheme involving NBA personnel.
Names like Basketball Hall of Famer and current Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, current player Terry Rozier and former player and assistant coach Damon Jones were mentioned, as were the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese crime families. Millions of dollars, electronic cheating devices and blatant game fixing were all spoken about and from the layman’s standpoint, it certainly appeared that these were all related and part of some elaborate nationwide underworld crimewave.
Not so fast…
One indictment had nothing to do with the other and each spelled out different allegations involving two completely separate charges. Let’s just call them the Basketball Indictment and Poker Indictment. There is zero mention of any alleged mafia figures involved in the Basketball Indictment, and the only mention of an NBA figure on the Poker Indictment is Billups from a 2019 game in Las Vegas that involved a rigged shuffling machine and an invite as a “face card,” or a big name to attract potential players. The alleged mob figures were only mentioned as being involved in the games in New York.
But why let the facts get in the way of a juicy headline, right?
Head muckuty muck of the FBI Kash Patel took to the podium and stated, “With the alleged involvement of three La Cosa Nostra crime families, an NBA head coach and Hall of Famer, as well as other current and former professional athletes, the investigative work that culminated with this morning’s operation are reminiscent of a Hollywood movie.”
Yeah, a fiction feature film.
We have already explained Billups’s lack of involvement with anything allegedly committed by ‘La Cosa Nostra’ (a term used by law enforcement for decades to describe what they determine to be the mob or mafia and is completely incorrect grammatically, translating from Italian to English as ‘the this thing of ours’). Both Rozier and Jones have nothing to do with the poker games and none of these alleged ‘LCN figures’ are part of the game tanking/point shaving/unpublished injury information they are accused of.
But judging by Patel’s strong statement, it would seem that they were at the center of it. But just to make an exclamation point and completely blur the lines between the two indictments, FBI Assistant Director in Charge Christopher Raia exclaimed, “This alleged scheme wreaked havoc across the nation, exploiting the notoriety of some and the wallets of others to finance the Italian crime families. Our office maintains its aggressive pursuit of any Italian organized crime operating in our jurisdiction and will continue to stem all unlawful revenue streams fueling their illicit activity.”
“The mob wasn’t really involved in either case,” said Nadu. “They’ve always had a grip on illegal poker games, but they (the federal agencies at the press conference) made us believe that it involved NBA players and they were shaking hands with the mafia and that just wasn’t the case.”
EPILOGUE
Three recent huge sports gambling scandals and zero involvement from the “Italian crime families,” as those guys like to say. It would be foolish to assume that these things didn’t occur before sports betting apps (the 1877 Louisville Grays, 1919 Black Sox, NCAA basketball’s Manhattan College and Boston College, Pete Rose, NBA referee Tim Donaghy). But at last count, there has been 20 cases of suspensions in both college and professional sports since 2018. Factor in that each year, more states permit the legal gambling and that opens it up to even more young men facing temptation. It appears that things were better off in the old days before the government had their hands in this.
Almost like a bad movie…
