That way, Battista could begin to prepare the markets, to manipulate the prices in their favor. And what more did you want? White Sox win! Donaghy, Griffin said, distracts and diverts. And so, controlling for blowouts by removing those games from the ledger, what we ultimately found was this: Donaghy favored the side that attracted more betting dollars in 23 of those 30 competitive games, or 77 percent of the time. So what do you do when you stumble upon a possible criminal conspiracy in progress? She said there was no extortion, no conspiracy and you were more culpable than the others. An attorney for Athanas wrote to ESPN that Athanas never "received information that Tim Donaghy was making wagers on games in which he was the referee," and so never made any bets based on any knowledge of the scheme. These games would be mostly winners, so Popeye should feel free to move them -- and copy them too. The FBI had discovered that Donaghy had wagered on as many as 40 of his own games with Concannon during each of the three seasons between 2004 and 2006. He was a man who was, as they say, connected; a man from whose open hotel room window once dangled a person in debt to a Bonanno crime family member; a man whose clients included Hollywood celebrities; and a man who, back in June of 2006, had sat with Battista in a VIP box at Citizens Bank Park for an interleague Phillies-Yankees game. "The only concern I had," he wrote, "was saving my own selfish sorry ass." The Philly ref blood runs deep. It got out to Battista that I'm giving games to Jack! 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). 'Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul' clip shows Tim Donaghy's relationship Donaghy rose from the table. Now there's a Netflix documentary on the subject, . Who besides Donaghy, Battista and Martino was in on it? Through them, we deduced which side Donaghy had picked for Battista to bet on. That couldve helped me and absolutely would have hurt Timmy, [but] I wasnt a rat.. His brief was to audit the entire NBA referee program for corruption, but he also had a narrower goal: figuring out whether Donaghy had indeed fixed games. Normally this guy was a $100 or $200 or maybe $500 bettor. But Weiss, a veteran newsman, protected his source. 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. "They were intelligent guys who just couldn't have full-time day jobs," says a former gambler who knew them. "He can influence a game six points either way -- that's what he told me," Tommy Martino said as we sat in the break room of his family's hair salon, where he's worked since he got out of prison in August 2009 after serving 10 months. Ridiculous.. Perhaps the greatest is this: that Donaghy was the ref who colluded with gamblers on NBA games for one disgraceful season. Frequent excursions were made to the Borgata, a casino in Atlantic City. Just one game of potential funny business out of 17 wasn't nearly enough to accuse the referee of anything. Donaghy faced 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines. A decade later, in the break room of the hair salon he worked in, Martino told me how it had gone: Martino had already known that their mutual buddy Tim Donaghy had been betting on his own NBA games with Concannon, and winning those bets. When presented with that data, ESPN statisticians crunched the numbers and revealed: The odds that Tim Donaghy would have randomly made calls that produced that imbalance are 6,155-to-1. Because that's how you get in trouble. The gambler described the conversation with Donaghy to me on the condition that I not use his name in the story. If the score in a game widened too far beyond the betting line, Donaghy told Martino, Donaghy would be powerless to rein it back in. Phone records of gamblers said to have connections with the Gambino crime family were obtained and analyzed, phone numbers traced back to names. ", But Scala, the FBI agent who pursued the case, has doubts. After it hit the fan and the legal process dragged on, Battista hoped to expose Donaghys mountain of lies by testifying. A former gambler that was unquestionably tied to the biggest betting scandal in NBA history, is of the opinion that disgraced referee Tim Donaghy did not act alone and had help from other game officials. Because then "you gotta call a lot of fouls," Martino said. One member of the group called it "the ticket" and "the company.". Disgraced NBA Referee Tim Donaghy Revealed the Player He Almost Fought To the gambler's enduring surprise, Donaghy acknowledged that, yes, he deliberately called more fouls against the side he'd bet against. The referee's life has its contradictions. Donaghy then found another publisher: a small, independent, newly established outfit -- so new that Personal Foul would be its inaugural volume -- based in Tampa, Florida, and operated by a political consultant and publicist named Shawna Vercher. Tim Donaghy Worked In Pro Wrestling After His NBA Betting Scandal. 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. "When did he tell you this?" FAQ: How will legal gambling change the NBA and the way we watch it? For our new partnership. Battista told Donaghy. This was a clear violation of NBA rules, but Donaghy got over it. He started small. But Crank didn't stop there. Like many in their cohort, Concannon had a bookie, Peter Ruggieri, who also golfed frequently with Donaghy and Concannon's crew. 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. [But] nothings there.. Veteran NBA referee who wagered on his own games but was never charged with manipulating them. And indeed, the chart for the Boston-Philly game on Dec. 13, 2006, shows the price for Boston spiking and then shrinking back. That never really flew with us." The whole thing had been merely insinuated, a matter of strong innuendo. James "Bah-Bah" "Sheep" Battista Both Battista and Martino have said that there were no threats, that everyone was nervous but the situation seemed copacetic, and that what sold Donaghy on the deal was Battista saying to him: We know you're giving the games to Jack Concannon. Griffin documented how Donaghy admitted to getting into Villanova, in part, by having someone take his SAT for him. The Feds wanted to talk to me and go against him, but I wouldnt, Battista told Griffin. According to the league, the studies were based on "the entirety of the period during which Donaghy had admitted to gambling on games," including 194 games refereed by Donaghy himself, and entailed examinations of "officiating accuracy," "lopsided [foul] calling and the magnitude of lopsidedness," the timing of his calls during games, foul-call "streaks" and call volumes, along with an analysis of "all associated betting lines and movements. Hours later, he called up Donaghy to tell him. Do it right and you can drive down the price of Boston. You want to get paid, you gotta cover the spread, Battista had told Donaghy. Litvin's tone was urgent. He started a gambling group called "The Animals." Place fifty thousand dollar bets and get a massive returnif you won. For slipping him winning football picks, Donaghy had sent to Battista a Kobe Bryant-signed Lakers jersey. Operation Flagrant Foul: Where is Tim Donaghy now? | GoodTo Per an account in New York magazine in 2015, the NBA somehow persuaded Random House to kill the book. The best movers spend years compiling vast networks of clients and "outs," or counterparties, with whom the movers can trade. Unfortunately, it is replete with errors, beginning with its statement that the Pedowitz Report "concluded that Donaghy, in fact, did not fix games." Popeye, who died of heart disease in 2014 at age 61, was born in Manhattan and raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, but remained estranged from most of his family for most of the rest of his life. Martino late at night on the phone with Donaghy, the pair having developed a nightly before-bed ritual: If Donaghy's pick was a winner, if the spread had been covered, Martino calling the ref and whispering "Good boy," and Donaghy echoing "Good boy" and then hanging up Donaghy calling two fouls 50 seconds apart against the 76ers' leading scorer, Andre Iguodala, in the third quarter against Boston, with the score's margin right on the spread. And I said, 'What?' It stuns Griffin how media, especially sports-talk radio, has provided Donaghy with a platform for his sensational fodder. Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul is available to stream now exclusively on Netflix. July 9 is the anniversary of Donaghy's resignation from the NBA. Battista had such a network. It means you've found something. And: You don't want the NBA to find out about what you've been doing with Concannon. Blowouts would be included. Even if it made them strange bedfellows, then, Donaghy's denials of match-fixing guilt were, in the end, a gift.
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