Posted on 02/10/2026 5:44:36 AM PST by Twotone
The news in October that stars and coaches from America’s National Basketball Association, the NBA, were allegedly involved in a $7 million illegal gambling operation — involving what prosecutors described as “x-ray poker tables” and “sunglasses to read the backs of playing cards” — was all the more alarming for who their co-conspirators were said to be.
More than 30 people were arrested in a sweeping FBI investigation, among them members of an organisation as infamous as the NBA is famous, and one that many believed had long faded from view: La Cosa Nostra, the Italian-American mafia.
“New York City’s Mob families are still in business” The New York Times observed. “HOOPFELLAS” the New York Post screamed.
The NBA pros had allegedly been recruited as “face cards”: celebrity lures to entice wealthy, unsuspecting victims into high-stakes poker games in locations including the Hamptons and Manhattan.
Prosecutors claim that the victims, starstruck by the presence of players such as Damon Jones, a former point and shooting guard with the Cleveland Cavaliers and Miami Heat, and Chauncey Billups, the Hall of Famer and Portland Trail Blazers coach, were “at the mercy of concealed technology”. There were rigged shuffling machines, hidden cameras in poker chip trays, even special contact lenses that enabled players to see marked cards, it is alleged.
According to court filings, members of the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese clans — three of the notorious “five families” of the New York mafia — had used assault, extortion and robbery to collect the gambling debts and take their cut.
(Excerpt) Read more at thetimes.com ...
They never left. They call themselves Democrats now.
What makes you say that?
Anybody know how that works?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb4G-ZFJuU0
Years ago I got a job at a small company. After I started I found out the owner had a business partner. This idiot was the son of a made man in the mob.
His old man was about as inbred and stupid as he was. It was a total clown show for the couple months I wasted my time working there.
Wouldn't that mean that the sunglass-wearing player is in cahoots with the dealer?
Given his new policies, Mamdani can’t or won’t do a thing about it either.
They also need to look at the Houston Rockets and Italian ambassador Tilman Fertitta (Wynn Resorts -> Genovese family), a good friend of Mark Kelly of Seditious Six fame.
DUH they never went away just low profile and underground
I think so.
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