![]() ![]() The whole thing had been merely insinuated, a matter of strong innuendo. "There wasn't no need to," Battista has told friends. But Battista never used the word "fix." Or "influence" or "manipulate" or in any way discussed the mechanics of fixing. You want to get paid, you gotta cover the spread, Battista had told Donaghy. In total, according to a person with knowledge of their operation, he hoped to get down about $1 million of his investors' money in each of Donaghy's games. Battista would spend the day betting heavily on Donaghy's selection. Battista and Donaghy were never to speak directly. Martino would then relay the pick to Battista. Using burner phones, Donaghy would call Martino and inform him of his pick for the game he was officiating. Close friends with the referee since they were kids, Martino had a day job as an IT guy at JPMorgan. In his endeavors, Battista had a sometime assistant, another high school chum, Tommy Martino, who acted as a liaison in the Donaghy scheme. "But they all had a piece of the pizza." The main problem now was keeping a lid on the thing. ![]() "Maybe the company never sat at a table together," he says. One member of the group called it "the ticket" and "the company." Several people from the sports-betting underworld had, in effect, staked Battista a bankroll - a fund he was now using to bet on games officiated by this one NBA referee. Battista was positioned well enough in that world that, without Donaghy's knowledge but based on Donaghy's picks, he'd helped set up a kind of loose, disorderly hedge fund. They're a species of broker that provides services to sports bettors, laying down wagers on their clients' behalf with bookmakers of various types around the world, legal and not. Strictly speaking, movers are neither gamblers nor bookmakers. They'd gone to the same parochial high school in the working-class Catholic neighborhoods of Delaware County, just outside Philadelphia - Delco, as it's sometimes called - where the sports bars are abundant, where a certain easy familiarity with all forms of gambling prevails, where guys have bookies like they've got dentists.īattista was a creature of that world. They were now entering the sixth week of the scheme - what you might call a sustained period of time.īattista had known the ref, Timmy Donaghy, for 25 years. His picks were winning at an 88 percent clip, totally unheard of in sports betting for any sustained period of time. If the pick missed, the ref owed nothing Battista would eat the loss. If the pick won, the ref got his two dimes. ![]() "Then you gotta cover the f-ing spread." The bribe was only two dimes, $2,000 per game - an outrageous bargain. "You wanna get paid?" Battista had said to the ref. Now he feared the scheme had become too obvious. A month or so back, not long before Christmas, he'd done something audacious: He'd sat down and cut a deal with an NBA referee. 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. July 9 is the anniversary of Donaghy's resignation from the NBA. You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browserįrom the archives: How former ref Tim Donaghy conspired to fix NBA gamesĮditor's note: This two-year investigation, which revealed how disgraced referee Tim Donaghy conspired to fix NBA games, whom he did it with and the millions of dollars that flowed from the conspiracy, was originally published on Feb. ![]()
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