Tim referee nba betting

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One becomes an NBA referee, and the other two, well, they get involved with bookies and dealing and taking drugs. Rather than the usual path of having the referee character start out as a paragon of virtue who gets dragged down by bad people, in this case the ref himself is no prize, either. Donaghy is in cahoots with another gambler before his pals find out and kick off a conspiracy of their own. The same goes for NBA beat writers, as we had locker room and courtside access of our own in the 90 minutes before a game.

The movie makes me grateful that it was a referee and not a reporter who got caught up in such shenanigans. But a referee has an extra opportunity that a beat writer or a trainer would not: an opportunity to influence the outcome with calls made, or not made, on the court. There are common prepositions that probably got less audio time in Inside Game.

He did well. By Donaghy's own admission in his memoir, so much cash started rolling in that he had problems knowing physically where to stash it so his wife wouldn't start asking questions. Today, Kim Donaghy lives in Sarasota, Florida, where she and her then-husband and four daughters moved in Kim filed for divorce in late , a few months after the scandal became public. When I visited her in Sarasota not long ago, at the office where she works, she made it clear the divorce was a long time coming.

He was always locked in a room, on the phone. In it, she writes of the paradox of being both "lonely for him" and "truly afraid of him. With her thumbs and forefingers, she made an "O" the diameter of an orange. She struggled to recall exactly when, but she told me she probably started finding the cash in , during the season.

At the time, she told herself the money was from golf-course betting. But she would keep finding such rolls in his pockets as the years went on. When I asked, she said she never counted the money, never confronted him about its existence. How huge? With her thumbs and forefingers, she made an "O" with the diameter of an orange.

A high roller named Mike Rinnier, who'd made his fortune in Delaware County supermarkets, decided to bankroll a small sports-betting syndicate in the s. He staffed it with working-class Delco kids ambitious to earn. Battista, who'd drifted as a bartender, restaurant manager and small-time hustler after high school, was in his early 20s when, according to Gaming the Game, a book about the Donaghy scandal by former Philly police detective Sean Patrick Griffin, Rinnier recruited him to join the group.

By chance, over the years its members had all acquired animal nicknames: Tiger, Rooster, Rhino, Seal, Sheep. And so their syndicate came to be known by some as the Animals. In the early s, the sports-betting world was undergoing its own equivalent of a dot-com boom. Black-market street bookies from all over the U. It was situated in a house a block off the beach. And it was there, in fall -- between beers under palms at the Mambo Beach tiki bar, between rounds of golf and late-night poker sessions at the Holiday Beach hotel's casino -- that the Animals began to cash in on one brilliant discovery.

Rhino Ruggieri was booking bets made by an acquaintance from back home, a guy he knew from the golf course named Jack Concannon. Back in Philly, Ruggieri had noticed that Concannon's bet sizes were an order of magnitude higher on certain NBA games. And those bets won -- won like Concannon had never won before. And normally this guy lost. But suddenly this recreational dumb-money insurance salesman was putting five dimes each on select NBA games and beating the bookies? There had to be a pattern.

They'd studied his wagers. It hadn't taken long to deduce. Because he was a sometime member of the same golfing circle back home, Ruggieri knew that Concannon and NBA ref Tim Donaghy were friends. They checked the games. Who were the referees?

Sure enough, there he was. One of the three was always him. Fing Donaghy. Holy s! Donaghy and Concannon are betting on Donaghy's games -- and making a goddamn killing. So what do you do when you stumble upon a possible criminal conspiracy in progress? Large sums but, if handled deftly, not large enough to alert the broader market that something screwy might be going on. They had possibly just stumbled on the ultimate edge.

They now had one job: Do not lose the edge by letting the information leak. Whether Donaghy was using his whistle to fix games was beside the point. When Donaghy reffed and Concannon bet, the side he bet was covering the spread between 60 and 70 percent of the time. The Animals went so far as to study the box scores after each of Donaghy's outings. That was obvious. Yeah, I did. But I didn't give a s, because it was great information.

From to , we didn't miss a game. Any game that he reffed we had a wager on. Battista had since decided to set up shop on his own as a bet broker. Whatever his issue was, Battista said he couldn't talk about it over the phone. 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.

Battista, after discovering this, had been following those bets for the better part of the past four years. But now, when Battista arrived at Martino's house, he dropped the bomb. The big problem, Battista said, was that the betting markets appeared to be getting wise to the emergence of an astonishingly accurate NBA handicapper. Because this edge, this treasure, was in danger of evaporating, Battista had decided that he needed to assume direct control over the referee.

Martino was not a gambler, had hardly ever placed a bet in his life. But he'd remained close friends after high school with both Donaghy and Battista, who, in turn, were never that close with each other. Martino, in that way, was about to become the unlikely bridge upon which the conspiracy would travel.

To Martino, Battista seemed desperate, even frightened. And it was there, in the otherwise vacant dining area, seated around a table, that Battista and Donaghy, with Martino witnessing, consummated their deal. Much later on he would come to call this meeting "the marriage. According to statements Donaghy made to federal law enforcement, Battista's deal was effectively an act of extortion. You don't want anyone "from New York" coming to your house, Battista told him. According to Battista, though, it was Donaghy who reached out, asking for a meeting.

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. And then, twisting the knife, Battista told him how much Concannon was winning.

Donaghy rose from the table. He had to use the bathroom, he said, and motioned for Martino to please come along. It got out to Battista that I'm giving games to Jack! But no. You know what he says? He goes: 'Do you believe it?

They came out of the station bearing a packet of rolling papers, and right there inside the car, under the fluorescent gas station lights, in the rental-return sprawl adjacent to the Philadelphia International Airport runway, Martino rolled a joint. They passed it back and forth -- Battista, who'd snorted some coke earlier, demurred -- and as the car filled with smoke, they made, Martino told me, "a pact.

Because that's how you get in trouble. The Celtics played the 76ers the night after the Marriott meeting. Donaghy worked the game. It was his first pick for Battista. The Celtics, favored by 2. We had a big bet on every fing game. There's a defined trading session. It opens in the morning and closes right before tip-off. It's possible, in effect, to buy and sell bets, to go long or go short, to hedge.

The best movers spend years compiling vast networks of clients and "outs," or counterparties, with whom the movers can trade. Battista had such a network. It's possible, through Don Best Sports, a betting information service, to pull the line-movement data for individual NBA games going back years.